Микки Спиллейн - Together We Kill

The scarf was on the skimpy side but I made it do. She leaned against the back of a lounge chair and went on pointing the gun at me. “And now back to business, Mr. Terris. I came here for that machine you brought back from Africa.”

“You’re not strong enough to lift it.”

“Are you?”

“Just barely.”

“That’s fine. My car is waiting. You can carry it out and put it in the trunk.”

I shook my head. “No dice, Blondie.”

“You’d rather have a bullet through your leg?”

“Any day,” I said. “Because some day the leg would heal, the bone would mend. And then I’d find you and I’d kill you. Nice and slow, then use your guts for shoe laces and your spine for a necktie rack.”

She smiled. “Tough guy. We know all about you. I don’t scare, Mr. Terris, but neither do you, unfortunately. Threatening you with personal injury is a waste of time. I told them that, but they wanted me to try it anyway. Well, I tried.”

Without taking her eyes off me, she raised her voice. “Stephan. Gregory. Come here.”

Two men, one large and bullnecked and with a face like a dropped melon, the other slim and white-faced and black-eyed, appeared in the doorway behind her. Both held guns in their right hands.

“Mr. Terris refuses to frighten, gentlemen,” the girl said. “Go up and get Mrs. Terris. Tie and gag her and put her in the car. Let me know when you’re ready to leave.”

They turned silently and started out. I said, “Hold it.” They kept on going. I said, “Call off your dogs, Sadie.”

Her quiet voice stopped them as though they’d run into a wall. Her confident smile revealed flawless teeth. “Yes, Mr. Terris?”

“There is no machine. There never was.”

Her smile now was almost sad. “Lies won’t help. In fact, I’m surprised you even bother to try them on me.”

“I mean it, Sadie. The first time I heard about my having a machine was ten days ago. Two men broke into my apartment in New York and demanded I hand ‘the machine’ over to them. You may have read about it in the papers.”

The gun in her hand stayed as steady as Mount Hood. “Yes. You killed them both. With your bare hands, I believe — or was that just tabloid talk?”

“No.”

“They were bunglers, Mr. Terris. I am not. Do you give us what we came for, or do we take your wife instead?”

My muscles began to ache from the strain of not jumping straight into the muzzle of her gun. “I’m telling you, Sadie: there is no machine. Somebody’s given you a bum steer.”

Her sigh was small but unmistakable. “Fifty-three days ago,” she said, “you arrived in New York aboard a small steamer which you chartered at Dakar. This was almost exactly two years after your small plane crashed somewhere in the interior of French Equatorial Africa while you were searching for a uranium deposit in that section of the continent. Your government combed the area for weeks without finding any trace of your plane, and you were given up for lost. Am I correct so far?”

“The newspapers carried the story,” I said.

“Your arrival in New York,” she went on in the same even, unhurried voice, “created a major sensation. The country’s richest, handsomest, most eligible bachelor had returned from the dead! Only the bachelor part no longer applied: you had brought back as your bride the world’s most beautiful woman. I believe that’s how she was described- although no one has been able to see her face clearly through the heavy veil she constantly wears. In fact, no one but you knows what your wife looks like. True, Mr. Terris?”

I shrugged and said nothing.

“You then placed your bride in the penthouse suite of a building you owned in Manhattan. You engaged no servants; you had no callers. No one — I repeat, no one — was permitted to enter your apartment. You were called to Washington to report on the success of your search tor the uranium deposit. You stated that your mission was a failure. As a loyal and patriotic citizen as well as one of the wealthiest your statement was accepted and the matter closed.”

She paused to raise an eyebrow at me meaningly. “Closed, that is, until two weeks ago. For it was about that time that a man and his wife were found dead in a small hotel in Nice. The cause of death was so startling that an immediate investigation was made. Do you know what killed those two people, Mr. Terris?”

“Measles?” I hazarded.

Her jaw hardened. “Radiation, Mr. Terris. A kind of radiation sickness not known before. Those two people died of cosmic radiation!”

“Do tell!”

She took a slow breath and her eyes bored into me. “Further investigation established that the dead couple had been exposed to the radiation roughly five weeks earlier. At that time they were occupying a cabin on a small steamer en route to Sweden. By a strange coincidence, Mr. Terris, it was the same steamer that brought you and your wife to America a few days before. By an even stranger coincidence, they had occupied the same cabin used by you and your wife. But the ultimate in coincidences, Mr. Terris, is that you had been in Africa in search of a fissionable material!”

“As you’ve pointed out,” I said, “a matter of coincidence.”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The inescapable conclusion is that, while in Africa, you discovered some method of trapping and converting the power of cosmic radiation. Either you found some natural substance that would do this, or — more likely you were able to construct a machine that would do so. The residue from some leakage in the machine’s operation was picked up by the unfortunate couple who next engaged that cabin, causing their deaths.”

“No machine,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go ahead. Search the house. But tell your goons to keep their hands off my wife. I mean it.”

She wasn’t listening. “Any country, Mr. Terris, who controls the secret you’ve learned will own the earth. As usual, your own government has only just learned the facts as I have given them to you. I happen to know that within a few days you’ll be summoned to Washington and asked for the secret you hold. My government wants it instead — and we mean to have it!”

“If I had anything like what you’re talking about,” I said, “why wouldn’t I have turned it over to Washington before this?”

She smiled. “I think I can answer that. It’s well known that you are against war — that you narrowly escape being called a pacifist. To turn this secret over to the military of your government might very well lead to war.”

“And in the hands of your government?”

“Peace, Mr. Terris. Peace because no other country or coalition of countries could prevail against us. Universal adherence to the principles of true democracy — the people’s democracy.”

“You mean communism, Sadie?”

“Exactly.”

“Love that people’s democracy,” I said. “Slave labor, purges, secret police, rigged trials, mass executions. Goodbye, Sadie. Sorry, no machines today.”

“You prefer that we take your wife?”

“A word of advice,” I said. “Keep your nail polish off my wife. Otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my life and forty million dollars, if it lakes that long and that much, finding you and your stooges. And when I do, I’ll be judge, jury and executioner. You’ll die like no one ever died before.”

My words were just words, but my tone and my expression were something else again. The color faded in her checks and the gun barrel wavered slightly. But her smile was steady enough and faintly mocking.

“I think you mean that,” she said quietly. Her tree hand moved up and settled the mink jacket closer about her flaw less shoulders. “But I’ve learned long since to pay no attention to threats... Last opportunity. Do you hand over what we came for?”