Mickey Spillane - The Body Lovers

I heard the screams through the thin mist of night and kicked the car to a stop at the curb. It wasn't that screams were new to the city, but they were out of place in this part of New York that was being gutted to make room for a new skyline. There was nothing but almost totally disemboweled buildings and piles of rubble for three blocks, every scrap of value long since carted away and only the junk wanted by nobody left remaining.

And there was a quality to the screams that was out of place too. There was total hysteria that only complete terror can induce and it was made by a child.

I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out, picked a path through the mounds of refuse and ran into the shadows, getting closer to frenzied shrieks, not knowing what to expect. Anything could have happened there. A kid playing in those decayed and ruptured ruins could be trapped without having to do more than nudge a board or jar an already weakened wall. Aside from the occasional street lamps, there wasn't a light for blocks, and even the traffic detoured the section that handled the heavy equipment of the demolition crews.

But there wasn't any accident. He was just sitting there, a kid about eight in baggy jeans and a sweater, holding two hands clawlike against his face while his body wracked with his screaming. I reached him, shook him to get his attention, but it didn't do any good. I had seen the signs before. The kid was hysterical and in a state of shock, his entire body rigid with fear, his eyes like two great white marbles rolling in hiss head.

Then I saw what he was screaming about.

They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sheetrock over it to hide it from casual view. But there's nothing casual about a little kid who liked to play in junk and found himself stumbling over the mutilated body of what had been a redheaded woman. At one time she would have been beautiful, but death had erased all that.

I bundled the kid in my arms and got him back to the car. Along the way the breath had run out of him and the screaming became muffled in long, hard sobs. His hands clutched my arms like small talons and very slowly the knowledge that he was safe came into his eyes.

There was no use trying to question him. At this stage he was too likely to be incoherent. I started the car, made a U-turn and headed back toward the small trailer the construction company used for a watchman's shack.

From outside I could hear a radio playing and I shoved the door open. A stocky, balding guy was bending over a coffeepot on the portable stove and turned around startled. "Hey..."

"You got a phone here?"

"Listen, mister..."

"Can it, buddy." I flipped my wallet out so he could see my New York State P.I. license and when he did he got a quick look at the .45 automatic in the shoulder sling. "You got trouble here. Where's the phone?"

He put the pot down shakily and pointed to a box built against the wall. "What's the beef? Look, if there's trouble..."

I waved him down and dialed Pat's office number downtown. When the desk sergeant answered I said, "This is Mike Hammer. Captain Chambers there?"

"Just a second, please."

Pat came on with, "Homicide, Captain Chambers."

"Mike, pal. I'm on the Leighton Construction site in the watchman's shack. You'd better get a crew and the M.E. down here in a hurry."

Almost seriously, Pat said, "Okay, who'd you kill now?"

"Quit being a comedian. There's a body all right. And get an ambulance here. I have a sick kid on my hands."

"Okay, you stay put. I'll get this put on the air and be there myself. Don't touch anything. Just let it be."

"Forget it. You tell the guys in the squad cars to look for my light. Somebody might still be there...and there may have been more than one kid involved. I'll leave this one with the watchman. Maybe a doctor can get something out of him."

I hung up, went outside and brought the kid in and put him down on the cot the watchman used. The guy wanted to know what it was all about, but I cut him off, covered the kid up and told him to stay there until the police arrived. He didn't like it, but there wasn't anything else he could do. Then I got back in the car, drove up the road to where I had found the kid, parked up on the remains of the sidewalk so my headlights could probe the darkness of the buildings and hopped out.

Rather than silhouette myself against their glare, I skirted the beams, picking my way with the flash, the .45 in my hand on full cock. It was doubtful that anybody would stay around a body he had disposed of, but I didn't want to take the chance.

When I reached the sheetrock I stood still and listened. Across town the thin wail of sirens reached me, coming closer each second. But from the interior of the buildings there was nothing. Even a rat crossing the loose litter in there would have made a sound, but the silence had an eerie, dead essence to it.

I pointed the flash down and looked at the body beneath the hunk of sheetrock. She had been in her late twenties, but now time had ended for her. She lay there on her back, naked except for the remnants of a brilliant green negligee that was still belted around her waist. Her breasts were poised in some weird, rigid defiance, her long tapered legs coiled serpentine-like in the throes of death.

She hadn't died easily. The stark horror etched into the tight lines of her face showed that. Half-opened eyes had looked into some nameless terror before sight left them and her mouth was still frozen in a silent scream of pain.

I didn't have to move the body to know how it had happened. The snake-tail red welts that curled up around her rib cage and overlapped all the way down her thighs showed that. Dried clots of blood mottled the nylon of her negligee, stiffening it to boardlike hardness, some of it making the edges of her long hair like an old paintbrush. Tendrils of her life streaked her calves and the back of her neck, but the entire naked front of her was oddly untouched.

Somebody had strung her up and whipped her to death.

The flat of my hand touched the cold flesh of her stomach. Whoever it was had had plenty of time to get away. She had been there a good twenty-four hours.

Behind me the sirens screamed to a stop and the bright fingers of their spotlights swung in arcs, focused on me and held there. A voice yelled for me to stand still and a half-dozen shadowed figures began clambering over the rubble in my direction.

Pat was the second one to reach me and he told the uniformed cop holding his service .38 on me to put it away. Then I stepped back and watched the mopup operation go into action.

The Medical Examiner had come and gone, the morgue attendants had carted the body away to the autopsy room, the reporters and photogs had left the area strewn with burned-out flash bulbs that winked like dead eyes in the floodlights the search team had set up and the kid had been taken to the hospital. Pat finished his instructions and nodded for me to follow him back to the car.

Not too far away was an all-night diner and we picked out an empty booth in the back corner and ordered coffee. Then Pat said, "Okay, Mike, let's have it."

"I gave it to you."

"Friend, I don't like that coincidence angle. I've found you on top of kills before."

I shrugged and took a sip of the coffee. "I'm not protecting a client, kid. Since noon I was out checking an accident report for Krauss-Tillman on the new Capeheart Building. That's five blocks north of the spot where I found the kid."

"I know where it is."