Микки Спиллейн - The Erection Set

I shrugged.

But everybody has to fight for their lives. When you know there’s only that last minute left you have to try whether you erupt into the violent exhaustion of death or try to think it through quietly, you try, and Chet elected to think.

“Can you stop him?” he asked Sharon.

“Everybody else has tried. Can you?”

He didn’t cower and he didn’t beg. He just got dressed and went ahead of us into his own living room and sat in his own chair so he could be comfortable when the boat-man called for him to cross the river and wondered who the hell could be coming around at this time of night when the doorbell rang and I told Sharon to answer it.

The big guy came in alone like I had told him to do, saw me standing there with the .45 in my hand and never bothered making a play for his own piece that was hanging at the ready on his hip. He was all pro of the big team and didn’t give a shit for anything at all, except he liked those pretty little explanations you could set down and study later and maybe qualify in the light of experience, wondering how the living hell you could make it all go when they turned the heat lamps on and turned the screws.

I said, “Outside,” and took them to the truck. I let the big guy take a look at all the prospective bodies in the shiny walnut coffin, then made him let Chet take a look too.

The big guy said, “What are you asking, Dog?”

“Only the keys to your car,” I said.

The big guy handed me his keys. I looked at Chet and then back to the big guy. “He’ll tell you one hell of a story,” I said.

His calm, impassive Italian face looked at me with dark, faked-innocuous eyes. “I’d rather hear it from you.”

“The ending is not yet, pal.” I said. “It’s never any good until you get to the ending.”

“I know the one Dick Lagen is going to write. That newspaper syndicate had enough money to buy all the facts since the war ended and you began. They cleared everything through channels and there’s no way out of the noose for you at all.”

“Maybe you’d better talk to him,” I said.

“He won’t listen to me.”

“But he’ll sure as hell listen to me.” I eased the hammer down on the .45 but kept my thumb on the hammer. “Or my GI tool here.”

Until now I had never seen him really smile and I wished I hadn’t. He looked at the blackness inside the truck, his teeth flashing white in the early dawn, “Should I save the coffin, Dog? My mother used to say ‘waste not, want not.’ ”

“You do that, Vince,” I told him. “Only don’t save it for me.”

The fucking rain never seemed to stop. It beat against the windshield and the one lazy wiper on my side barely brushed it away. Across the highway the early traffic was already crawling, tied up by a station wagon with a flat a mile back, impatient and angry, building up to a whole day mad.

Sharon didn’t look at me at all, gazing idly out the window at the rows of cars, her hands limp with hopeless regret in her lap. When I took the cutoff to Linton, she glanced at me thoughtfully for a moment, as if she had made some kind of decision, then sucked in her breath, shook her head and turned away again.

But she couldn’t keep it bottled up inside her, she had seen too much and the sense of it wasn’t getting through. I knew by the way she was sitting there that she was trying to formulate her own answers, but they were coming out all wrong.

When it finally got to be too much it was like the words were being wrung out of her. “What is Dick Lagen going to write about you, Dog?”

“Does it matter?”

“Before... when you told me about... those other things, it didn’t at all. Then when I saw the casket... was it really heroin?”

“Absolutely pure and totally uncut. Probably the biggest shipment that’s gotten through in a long, long time.” I kept my voice low and nice and even.

“And all yours. It was shipped to you?”

“That’s right, but now it’s been reconsigned.”

“I won’t let it happen, Dog.”

“Let what happen?”

“That... policeman. He and that evil little man. The dirty bastards who push that stuff would never exist if they weren’t protected somehow. I was a witness and I can identify them. I think Dick Lagen will be ready to listen to me.”

Hell, let her think what she wanted. It was better for her this way.

“You’d need the evidence, baby. I don’t think anybody’s going to see that casket again. Lagen wouldn’t try making unfounded accusations and nobody else is going to be offering the information.”

Sharon let it settle in her mind, the gentle smile toying with the corners of her mouth saying it wasn’t going to be like that at all. “What was your price, Dog?”

“You’d never believe me,” I said.

“Yes... I really would.” Her eyes were cold and direct again. “Was it in the millions?”

“More than that, kitten. Much more. Money couldn’t even buy what I got for that hand-carved body box.”

“What’s worth more than money?”

“If you don’t know now, you never will,” I told her.

She still wouldn’t take her eyes from me. They were like tiny drills augering into my flesh. “To you, Dog. What’s worth more than money to you?”

“To come home. To be free.” I was going to tell her something else, but caught it in time and just let it end there. I watched the road unwinding through the rain and suddenly felt the needlepoints of her eyes stop stabbing me. I looked at her quickly and her expression had changed, a small frown reflecting some annoying perplexity that tugged at her mind. She wet her mouth, clenching her lower lip between her teeth and I saw the tears rise in the corners of her eyes.

When I turned down the street where I had left my car in front of the house Ferris had used I saw the jam of cars up ahead, two with their blue lights winking in the morning light and a pair of fire engines standing in the middle of the road. A pall of dark haze was hanging over something by the curb, but the knot of curious people blocked it from view. They didn’t block the shattered windows and crumpled porch on the houses opposite the area though.

I rolled down the window and called a couple of kids over to see what had happened. One had his school books bunched under his arm and looked kind of sick.

“Car blew up,” he said. “That nutty little Jansen kid what’s always stealing rides in cars saw the keys in that one and was gonna ride to school. It blew all apart when he started it. Gee, we tried to tell him and everything...”

Then I felt a little sick too.

The other kid said abstractedly, “He just got outa reform school for the same thing.”

I rolled the window up and sat there a moment.

“Dog...?”

“It was supposed to have been me,” I said.

Her sob was a futile cry that caught in her throat.

“He’s the last one out there. After him there won’t be anymore.”

“Who?” Sharon whispered.

“The worst one of all.” I was all tight again. “Damn, there’s so much more to do, too.”

I dropped Sharon off outside the Barrin plant. She gave me a wistful little smile, pulled the collar up on her coat and walked through the rain toward the building. The S. C. Cable Productions trucks were still lined up on the west side, but all the activity had moved indoors and the canvas canopies were down except for the one over the area where a few of the crew were surrounding the coffee urns. I circled the complex twice before I spotted Hobis sitting in a parked car, stopped opposite him and waved him in beside me.

“Any action?” I asked.

“Just a little accident with a car downtown.” He grinned at me, his lips tight over clenched teeth. “I sent The Chopper over to check it out. Either you’re on the ball or your luck’s running strong.”