Mickey Spillane - The Deep

“Your half brother.”

She put the seal on it herself. “No... he was my father’s stepson, thanks to an earlier marriage. He really wasn’t my brother at all.”

The last seal. It was done.

I said, “He was always in love with you.”

“Oh, no.” Her face buried itself against my chest and I knew I had to tell her then.

“It was Roscoe, kitten. It was bad enough he hated all of us, but long ago I had you and he knew it. He wanted you himself and because I had you it warped his whole life. He didn’t stay here for any reason other than to direct his hate at the things that took you away from him.

“Me, I was long gone. Psychos learn to redirect their hatred and you even helped. He could take almost anybody, but never me or Bennett. When Bennett proposed to you he flipped. He really flipped. It was like having me there again. It was the old days. He went all the way back to the crazy hatred of the old days.”

She still couldn’t understand. It was too big for her.

“He went nuts, sugar. Roscoe went absolutely nuts. All he could do was think of how he could kill Bennett and he reverted to those old days himself. He had no gun but knew where we used to keep them. He got down here and opened the arsenal and found a zip.

“You know, if the gun hadn’t been there he might have come back to normal. He might have realized what he was about to do, but there was still a couple of pieces and some ammo in the old spot behind the shelves and he pulled one out and loaded up.

“Bennett was killed at night. Early. Not a normal hour for a kill at all. It was before ten when most pros haven’t started out yet. Roscoe went up there, popped Bennett who was waiting for Dixie, ran for it and passed the alley where Bennett had run. See... he hadn’t killed Bennett. When he knew Bennett followed him he had been running toward his own sanctuary... Hymie’s deli, which was still open. The thought that anybody would connect them scared him and in that frenzy all psychos get, did the impossible... carried Bennett back to his apartment and dropped him.”

I nodded.

“That’s what happened. He was out of his mind. He was a full-fledged madman. He was something else, too. He was a catalyst. He did something terrible to the world he lived in. He ousted Bennett but reintroduced me. He started things happening, instituted forces he never thought existed, and in his madness, never gave a true thought to what he had done.”

Somebody opened up with a Thompson upstairs. There was another scream. They were firing from the full perimeter of the building now and the sound of guns and cars and voices was a cacophony of sound that made music perfectly suited to the city. It was a moment of moments.

“He was a madman at the first kill,” I said. “Not the second.”

“What?” Her voice sounded small.

“Roscoe killed Tally, Irish.”

“He... no!”

But she knew I was right. “He wasn’t mad the second time around. He knew what he was doing then. I scared him when I told him that Tally spat on his corpse. I scared hell out of him when he heard about Pedro bone-picking. All he thought was that they had seen him run by, or perhaps pack the body back. He got to Tally with the only weapon he had at hand — a bottle. He nearly killed me with the same thing.

“That’s what I overlooked. It was a simple kill to begin with. An amateur kill. Only the prize involved was so big I gave other people credit for smoking up the trail. It would have been worth the try.”

She said, “But Tally...”

“He wasn’t a madman then, kid. He was covering his tracks. I’ll give you odds that before long a small Mexican named Pedro will turn up dead someplace with his head squashed in or his throat cut. Roscoe knows the turf. He could run anybody down he wanted to. He’s as worldly-wise as I am and playing it just as cute and now his back is to the wall.”

From the darkness of the coal pit Roscoe said, “Not all that far, Deep.”

We couldn’t quite see him, but we could hear the madness in his voice. Out of the shadows his hand protruded and in it was a gun if you could call it that, and that you had to because it had already killed two people. Long ago Bennett had killed Spanish John with it and not too long ago Roscoe had killed Bennett with it and now there was another bullet left and it was going to be in me. I had to come first because when I was done it would be an easy job to handle Helen and not too hard to explain away the kill, especially when you were a madman and knew the ropes too.

He stayed right there, the gun leveled at my head with a strange, deadly precision that most amateurs don’t ever attain but a madman might.

There was death all around us now. Upstairs the hammering had slowed, become intermittent, then suddenly stopped. There were feet pounding up the stairs... voices shouting back and forth, counting the dead.

It had to come.

It came very close by too.

Somebody had found the door that led to the old cellar club.

The K.O.’s.

Us.

Remember us? We were the big ones.

Time again, the one factor that enveloped us all. There was so much of it. He could shoot me and club her to death. No trouble. It would stick. He was smart. He could do it, explain it off and get a story out of it afterwards. I thought of all the ways he could do it and knew how easy it would be.

She said, “No matter. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

Back there in the darkness I knew he was ready. The gun was small, but the tube of it was something I could look into. I could even imagine the deadly little .22 nestling there ready to puncture my skull the way Bennett had designed it to, knew the chances of a misfire were as remote as missing your head with a hat. The little man was crazy cool and had already thought out the answers and I was his only obstacle left.

There were only seconds more and we all knew it and Helen squeezed my forearm not really knowing what to do, the pure love she felt wanting to throw herself in the line of fire, but holding back because I pushed her back and let Roscoe play it all the way out.

“You’re dead, Deep.”

His voice sounded strained when he said, “The end of the trolley ride, Deep.”

“Is it?”

“You’re like all the rest. You paid your nickel, you get the ride.”

“I guess you heard what I said.”

“I heard it all.”

“You’re nuts, Roscoe.”

“Let’s say I was. As you stated, now I’m protecting myself.”

“You’re still nuts.”

“No more.”

“Sure you are, small man. You forgot the big point.”

He paused, then. “Go on.”

“The trolley ride.”

“So.”

“It’s my nickel. I can get off wherever I please. Remember your simile of the trolley?”

And he did. Like the amateur he was he came screaming through the door with the same gun he had killed Bennett with only this time it was for me and while Helen was screaming with a partial realization of what was happening I drew and fired and shot Roscoe Tate through the right eye and his brains spattered all over the clubhouse walls.

He seemed terribly shrunken in death, a little guy who had nursed a big hatred for those for whom he’d held a big envy too long. It wasn’t the bullet that killed him. It was The Street. He had been killed a long time ago and never knew it.

Roscoe Tate had died when he tasted fear, and instead of spitting it out like the rest of us, forced himself to swallow it. He was killed when he let a revengeful satisfaction chain him to The Street and twist his guts until the explosion came.

Helen’s hands were pressed against her mouth, near hysteria making the cords in her neck stand out like wires, pressing her face out of shape until her face had an animal look. Blood squirted suddenly from her lips, staining her teeth a bright crimson.