One Lonely Night (26 page)

Tonight was my night and I was going to play it all the way to the hilt. I yanked out the wallet I had taken from that overturned car the other night, plucked the FBI card from the pocket and fitted it into mine. The cop was coming out into the rain to tell me I couldn’t park there when I stepped out and shoved the wallet under his nose.

I didn’t let him have more than a peek at it, but it was enough. I said, “Stay here and watch that car. I don’t want it gone when I come back.”

He drew himself all the way up with a look that only public servants old in the service can get and passed me a snappy salute. With the headlines blaring from all the papers he didn’t have to ask questions to know what was up. “I’ll take care of it,” he shot back.

I ran down the stairs and slipped a dime in the turnstile. I had fifteen minutes to find the right booth, fifteen short minutes. I made a tour of the place poking my head into the empties hoping the one I was looking for wouldn’t be occupied.

It wasn’t. I found it over near the steps that led to the BMT line, the last one on the end of five booths. I stepped into one and shut the door. The light above my head was too damn bright, but one crack with the nose of the .45 took care of that. I lifted the receiver off the hook without dropping a nickel in and started conversation with an imaginary person on an imaginary phone.

At five minutes to nine he walked up to the end booth, obviously ignoring the others, and closed the door. I let the minutes tick off until the hands of my watch were at right angles to each other, then shoved a nickel in the slot and dialed LO 3-8099.

It rang just once. “Yes?”

I forced a bluff into my voice, keeping it low. “This is Mike Hammer. Who the hell are you and what’s this business with the card?”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Hammer. You got our card. That is very fortunate indeed. Need I tell you who is speaking?”

“You damn well better, friend.”

“No, certainly not a friend. Just the opposite, I would think. I’m calling about a matter of documents you have, Mr. Hammer. They’re very important documents, you know. We have taken a hostage to insure their safe delivery to us.”

“What. ... ”

“Please, Mr. Hammer. I’m speaking about your very lovely secretary. A very obstinate woman. I think we can force her to talk if you refuse, you know.”

“You bastard!”

“Well?”

My voice changed pitch and stuttered into the mouthpiece. “What can I say? I know when I’m licked. You ... can have them.”

“I was sure you’d see the light, Mr. Hammer. You will take those documents to the Pennsylvania Station on Thirty-fourth Street and deposit them in one of the pay lockers at the end of the waiting room. You will then take the key and walk about on the streets outside until someone says, ‘Wonderful night, friend,’ and give that person the key. Keep your hands in plain sight and be absolutely alone. I don’t think I have to warn you that you will be under constant observation by certain people who will be armed.”

“And the girl ... Velda?” I asked.

“Provided you do as you are told, and we receive the documents, the girl shall be released, of course.”

“Okay. What time do I do all this?”

“Midnight, Mr. Hammer. A fitting hour, don’t you think?”

He hung up without waiting for an answer. I grinned and watched him squirm out of the booth, a guy who fitted his voice to perfection. Short, soft and fat, wearing clothes that tried without success to make him look tall, hard and slim.

I grinned again and gave him a good lead, then climbed out of the booth and stayed on his tail. He hesitated at the passages, settled on the route that led up the northwest comer of the block and started up the stairs. My grin like to have split my face open. The famous Hammer luck was riding high, wide and handsome. I could call his shots before he made them and I knew it.

When he reached the street I brushed by him and gave him the elbow for luck. He was so intent upon waving to a cab that he never gave me a tumble. I waited for him to get in then started my car. The cop waved me off with his night stick and I was on my way.

Three hours before the deadline.

How much time was that? Not much, yet plenty when it counted. The cab in front of me weaved around the traffic and I stayed right with it. I could see the back of his head in the rear window and I didn’t give a hoot whether or not he turned around.

He didn’t. He was so sure that I was on the end of the stick that it never occurred to him that he was being tailed. He was going to get that stick up the tail himself when the time came.

So the judge was right all the while. I could feel the madness in my brain eating its way through my veins, chewing the edges of my nerves raw, leaving me something that resembled a man and that was all.
The judge had been right!
There
had
been too many of those dusks and dawns; there
had
been pleasure in all that killing, an obscene pleasure that froze your face in a grin even when you were charged with fear. Like when I cut down that Jap with his own machete and laughed like hell while I made slices of his scrawny body, then went on to do the same thing again because it got to be fun. The little bastards wanted my hide and I gave them a hard time when they tried to take it. Sure, my mind was going rotten even then. I remember the ways the guys used to look at me. You’d think I had fangs.
And it hung on and rotted even further!
How long had it been since I had taken my face out of the ground? How long had it been since they handed me the paper that said it was over and we could go back to being normal people again? And since ... how many had died while I backed up the gun? Now who was I trying to fool—me? I enjoyed that killing, every bit of it. I killed because I had to and I killed things that needed killing. But that wasn’t the point.
I enjoyed killing those things and I knew the judge was right!
I was rotten right through and I knew that at that moment my face was twisted out of shape into a grin that was half sneer and my heart beat fast because it was nice sitting back there with a rod under my arm and somebody was going to hurt pretty quick now, then die. And it might even be me and I didn’t give a good damn one way or another.

I tried to figure out where the hell we were. We had passed over a viaduct and a few other things that were vague outlines, but I couldn’t tell where we were. If I didn’t see the name on the movie house I would have been screwed up, but I caught it in time along with the smell of the river and knew we were some place in Astoria heading down toward the water where the people gave way to the rats and the trash that littered the shore.

There wasn’t much more to the block. I cut my lights and drifted in to the curb, snatching the keys out of the ignition as I opened the door. Ahead of me the tail light of the cab was a red dot getting smaller and for one second I thought I had been too soon.

The red dot stopped moving away from me.

Of all the fates who were out for my skin, only one backed me up. It was a lovely fate that turned over a heap and spilled the pair of studious-looking boys out, the ones who had the FBI cards and that gorgeous black tommy gun that was still in the trunk of my car. I held the lid open and yanked it out, shucking the case on the pavement. It nestled in my hands like a woman, loaded and cocked, with two spare clips that made a pleasant weight in my pocket.

I got in close to the buildings and took off at a half-trot. A drunk watched me go by, then scurried back into his doorway. The dot up front disappeared, turned into two headlights on dim and came back and past me.

I ran faster. I ran like a guy with three feet and reached the corner in time to see the guy angling up the rutted street that paralleled the river.

How nice it is when it gets dark. It’s all around you, a black coat that hides the good and the bad, and lets you stay shouting distance behind somebody else and never gives you away. My little man stepped right along as if he knew where he was going.

There weren’t any houses now. There was a smell of decay, noises that didn’t belong to a city. Far away the lights of cars snaked along a bridge happily unaware of this other part of New York.

Then the rain began again. The glorious rain of purity was nothing but light tears ... the sky protesting because I was walking and thinking when I should be dead. Long dead. I spit on the ground to show what I thought of it.

My little man was gone. The constant, even grinding of his shoes in the gravel had stopped and now there was a silence that shut out all other noises, even the rain.

I was alone in the darkness and my time had come. It had to come, there was only an hour left and never time to undo it if it had all been a mistake! For about ten seconds I stood still, watching those cars in the distance. They wormed ahead, they disappeared as if going into a tunnel, emerging again many seconds later. I knew where my little man was now.

Not far off was a building. That was what stopped those lights. There was a building and I saw it when I took a dozen more steps. It was the remains of a building, anyway. Three floors staggered up from the ground in uneven rows of bricks. Only the windows on the top floors showed a few panes whole and unbroken, most likely because they were beyond stone’s throw. The rest were plastered with boards that seemed to be there to keep things in rather than out.

I was back in the jungle again. I had that feeling. There was a guy at my shoulder in deeper black than the night and he carried a scythe and a map to point out the long road. I didn’t walk, I stalked and the guy stalked with me, waiting patiently for that one fatal misstep.

He was death and I knew him well. I had seen him plenty of times before and I laughed in his face because I was me, see? I was Mike Hammer and I could laugh because what did I give a damn about death? He could laugh back at me with his grisly, bony laugh, and even if we didn’t make any sound at all my laugh was louder than his. Stick with me, man in black. Stick close because some customers are going to be made that should have been made a long time ago. You thought I was bad when there was a jungle around me for cover and I learned how to kill and kill and kill and walk away and remind myself that killing was nice. Yeah, you thought I was a wise guy. Stick around, old man, maybe you’ll see me for the first time doing something I really enjoy. Maybe some day I’ll pick on you and we’ll have it out, a hot .45 against that blade of yours.

All the instincts came back. The chatter gun was slung just right for easy carrying and quick action. Without me telling it to, my hand had scooped up gobs of mud and daubed my face and hands, even blanking out the luminous dial of my watch.

The pleasure of the hunt, the wonderful knowledge that you’re hot and right! The timing was there, that sense of alertness that gets bred into you when there’s blood in the air. I liked it!

I stood in the shadow of the building, melting into the wall with the rain, watching the two men. One was there at the doorway, an invisible figure I sensed rather than saw. The other was coming toward me just as I planned it. It had taken a long while just to get this far. I knew without looking that the hands of my watch would be overlapping. Somewhere back in Manhattan a guy would be looking for me to call me friend. Somewhere inside Velda would be sitting, a hostage who would never talk.

The guy came nearer and I knew he had a gun in his hand. I let him come.

Now I could see him plainly. He stopped three feet away and looked back uncertainly. I had the tommy gun in one hand and the nose of the .45 in the other. I let him look back again and this time I let him see me.

No, it wasn’t me he saw, it was the other guy, the one with the cowl and the scythe. I swung that gun butt so hard it made a wet smack and almost twisted out of my hand. The guy didn’t have any forehead left. There was nothing but a black hole from his eyes to his hair and I was grinning. I eased him down without a sound and picked up the tommy gun. Then I started around the building.

It goes that way. One guy makes one lousy error and everybody falls into the trap. The guy at the door thought it was the other one when I walked out of the murk. He grunted the last sound he ever made because I wrapped my arm under his neck and started bending him over backwards. I had my knee in his spine, pulling him into a living bow that clawed at my hands to release the scream that sudden fear had driven into his throat.

The goddamn grin wouldn’t come off my face even when I heard his spine snap and felt that sickening lurch that comes when the bow is bent too far. Two of them. A pair of bastards who had wanted to play in the Big Game. Slimy, squirmy worms who had visions of being on top where they could rule with the whip.

I went into the building with death at my shoulder and he was mad because I was giving the orders. He was waiting for the mistake he knew I’d have to make sooner or later.

My breath wasn’t coming easy now. It was hot and coarse in my throat, rasping into my lungs. I stood inside the door, listening, waiting, letting my eyes use precious seconds to orient themselves to this new gloom. My watch made a mad ticking to remind me that now it had to be quick. Time, it had gone. There was nothing left!

I saw the empty packing boxes that had been smashed and left to rot. I saw the welter of machinery, glazed with rust, lying in heaps under the high, vaulted roof. Long ago it had been a factory of some sort. I wondered incongruously what had been made here. Then the smell of turpentine gave it to me. Paint. There was three hundred feet of length to it, almost that in width. I could make out the partitions of wood and brick separating it into compartments.

But I didn’t have time to look through it all, not all three floors of it!

The sons-of-bitches had picked the best spot on earth, not a sound would penetrate these walls! In that maze of partitions and cubicles even the brightest beam of light that could escape would be dulled and unseen. I wanted to pull the trigger of the gun and blast the whole dump to bits and wade into the wreckage with my bare hands. I wanted to scream just like the guys outside wanted to scream and I couldn’t.