Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

It rang for two minutes before Verdun gave up.

He could have let it ring for an hour without doing any good at all. Slick Kevin was lying on the floor not five feet from his desk where the phone was, but Kevin was dead with a single hole between his eyes, an unfired automatic in his hand and a huge section of skull like an obscene ash tray propped up against the wall near him. Stuff still dripped from it.

The move came from a strange quarter. It was premature and stupidly overt because the insurgents didn’t recognize the time, money and effort that had gone into establishing the fairly new Arando family. All they saw were the openings because the Big Board had called in the button men from Sal Roma’s territory and they filled in the vacuum with what they thought was pure, ripe power and muscled the lucrative businesses outside the pale of legality into their own sphere of influence.

They were tough, kill-happy and working in their own backyard, the kind of punks Capone used in the beginning, who didn’t know how to be afraid. They were the new Gallos toppling the established thrones that had been ruled too long by age and outmoded experience. They wanted their share and they wanted it big... and now .

So they made their move and they were able to hold because the flux of Miami jelled under their hands in its newness, and they couldn’t care less if Pasi Arando had been given the territory because his cousin Steve was ruling over the northwest sector or his Uncle Vitale was on the Big Board itself.

Herman Shanke, the big-muscled, wide-shouldered punk who hated himself because he was only five feet seven, ran the revolution with a brace of nine-millimeter Lugers, a hatred of the world and a burning ambition to revenge a paperhanger who had been dead a long time.

He liked to be called Herman the German.

Luckily for the public, the winter crowd was moving out and there were fewer bystanders around.

Uncle Vitale got a call from the Big Board and phoned his son Steve to tell his cousin Pasi that if he didn’t put the insurrection down he’d be in trouble. By trouble he meant that he would be dead, and in this case, family connections didn’t count.

Now that the Big Board knew where the trouble was stemming from, they were able to put things in their proper perspective. A month ago Herman the German’s best friend had left for New York, the killer who had taken those independents from Cuba and eliminated the witness in the Lindstrom Company case. He had a private collection of guns, the natural instincts of a hunter and the physical abilities of a chameleon to adapt to the environment for protective coloration.

His name was Moe Piel.

When the various families heard of Slick Kevin’s death they put the word through the right channel and every police department was alerted to look for Moe. A fifty thousand dollar contract was let out on Herman the German who laughed when he heard about it and tightened the reins on the Miami operation. Bevo Carmody came in with a cardboard carton of money he had lifted from the garage where the Cuban refugees had been collecting it for another assault on Castro and after giving Bevo five grand, he parceled out the rest to his few associates to begin a reconnaissance in the area of Manhattan he knew so well. Ever since that old son of a bitch Papa Menes had had his head beaten bloody and tossed for dead in that Newark garbage dump, he had been figuring out how he was going to get even.

Now he knew.

And it was going to be easy.

They all thought he was behind the big trouble. He wished he were.

The district attorney had taken charge himself. The pressure had blown the lid off and he was passing it on down the line. The commissioners were feeling the heat the press and TV commentators were laying on and wore an edge that was ready to slice into anybody. Robert Lederer was acting as spokesman, since his boss had run out of expletives and was sitting there glowering at the assembly of police brass and the sardonic face of Gill Burke.

“We’ve had two informers in Chicago for seven years,” he told the group. “They were holding for something like this and nothing else. The one who passed the information on about the Miami uprising made the mistake of calling from a windowed booth where a deaf mute lip reader we suspect of being connected with the mob could see him. He was dead an hour later. So far, they don’t know about the other one, but he isn’t connected high enough yet to get inside things.”

The tall inspector from uptown said, “Who else has this information, Bob?”

“At this moment it’s confined to this room.”

“How about Miami?”

“We’re assuming they’re taking the same security precautions. Right now they have special detachments out covering all areas. They can’t move in on Herman Shanke because they haven’t anything definite to go on and they don’t want to provoke a shooting spree.”

One of the other inspectors asked, “Any outsiders moving in yet?”

“That’s the trouble, right there. The airports and other terminals are covered, but nobody’s showed. If they go in, they’ll probably go by private transportation and that won’t be easy to spot. It’s between seasons and there’s enough travel activity to conceal anything. With all the living quarters available it’s going to be one hell of a job to check everything, especially if they have their own safe places to stay in.”

“Chicago and St. Louis called,” Bill Long told him. “They’re missing some top soldiers they thought they had under surveillance. Evidently they saw this coming and had things set up.”

“Miami’s going to blow,” Lederer said solemnly.

Gill Burke’s voice was flat and quiet. “Miami isn’t the place.”

All the eyes swung toward him, waiting for the rest. “Miami’s just the teaser,” he said. “A smart vulture waits for the beast to die before going in for the remains. The young stupid ones make an early try and get their feathers full of claws, then get eaten themselves.”

“This isn’t exactly the place for analogies, Burke,” commented Lederer.

“Look at it this way. The action is where the money is and the money is in New York.”

“The facts don’t...”

“Frank Verdun is in New York too.”

“Burke, I think...”

“Mark Shelby is in New York too.”

Irritation drew Lederer’s face into a flushed scowl. “This is not a personal affair, Burke. Damn it all, so far you haven’t...”

Gill didn’t let him finish. “How about the belly-button man, Mr. Lederer?”

Captain Long had been waiting for that and smiled. He opened the folder on his lap and said, “Denver gave us the lead and the F.B.I. confirmed it. They had three other mutilations with the navels torn out and we have an APB out for a white male caucasian, age forty-five, medium build, slightly balding, with a slightly crossed left eye. The only name we have is a probable alias of Shatzi. A definite identifying mark is a large scar where his navel formerly was. That last bit of information came from a woman he cohabited with.”

“I suppose you’ll have spotters in the turkish baths to look for the scar,” Lederer said sourly.

“Sure,” Long told him. “We’re checking all the whores, too.”

“When you find him, there’ll be an easy way to make him talk,” Burke said.

“Oh? And how is that?”

“Tell him you’re going to sew his belly button back on.”

The laugh that went around the room broke the tension, except for the boiling anger inside the assistant district attorney. He let it ride with a grim smile and went back to the briefing. They finished an hour later and when it was over everybody agreed they were still up in the air.

Everybody except Gill Burke, and when he had Bill Long across the table in the coffee shop he said, “One, there’s a leak in the department. Two, we have a lead with this Shatzi character. Why not concentrate on those angles?”