Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

The Frenchman came out with a hard-on like he always did after playing with himself with the soap, and feeling better, never saw the knife slash through his enlarged genital member at all. All he could do was stare before he sucked in his breath to scream. He saw the face without being able to pronounce the name behind it and the next slash of the knife took his throat completely out from beneath his chin.

He even had the terrifying experience of living through the excruciation of dying, looking up at a complete improbability and knowing no majestic reason for it at all, wondering why the hell one little worm could eat through stone walls and make them crumble like sand. He was still alive when the knife went through his certain parts with the wildest impact any mind could conjure, and all the fear blended with the pure knowledge of what he had done to those other people and he tried to scream.

But it wasn’t any good at all.

What came out of that gaping slash in his throat was a big sigh and he started to die knowing, but not being able to tell.

For a long time Shatzi stared at the pool of blood that bathed the naked body, his face warped with some deep inner thoughts. In life, Frank Verdun had been a terrifying person to be obeyed or avoided, and after what the Frenchman had had done to him all those years ago, Shatzi had remained truly loyal to every whim and demand of the top enforcer. Not because of respect or devotion, but plain, unmitigated, unreasoning fear.

Now he was enjoying what he saw and a dry cackle that passed for a laugh rasped from his mouth. “You didn’t have to set the soldiers on me, Frank,” he said. “Verdun, you dirty bastard, Verdun, you shithead, you’re finally gonna get it.”

He thought he detected a slight movement of the eyelids, but he couldn’t be sure. Too bad, he thought. He’d never done it when anybody had been alive before. He took his knife and carefully scooped out Frank Verdun’s navel from his stomach, holding it up on the point to study it. When he looked down at the Frenchman’s face his shoulders gave an involuntary twitch. Verdun’s eyes were open, all the way open for one horrified second as he saw his tie to life being raised on the blade of death and his eyes filmed over as the feeble heartbeat stopped altogether.

Shatzi grinned when he saw it, pulled a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped the grisly souvenir in it. “This one I’ll keep, Frankie boy,” he said. “This one is special.”

Gill picked up the phone on the fourth ring and barked a short hello. Bill Long said, “Thought you might like to know, we got a line on Shatzi Heinkle and it looks like it’s going to pan out.”

“Where is he?”

“Running, buddy. He’s in one hell of a big hurry too. He cleared out of the place he was staying and right afterwards some guys came looking for him. The description we got on them matches a couple of hard cases from Brooklyn.”

“Uh-huh. They got him marked. If he was the guy in the cab with Bingo they’ll want him out of the way. Right now they can’t afford any kinky characters going loose.”

“Would Verdun let out a contract on him?”

“It sure as hell sounds reasonable.”

“That’s the way I figured. They should be getting there just about now to see what the Frenchman says about it.”

Burke felt himself frowning. “That guy can move in a hurry too.”

“Hell, we’ve had his place staked out all night by one of the detectives. You want in on it?”

“Not tonight, old buddy.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“I’ll believe.”

Gill nodded to himself. “I’m spending the weekend with Helen Scanlon. If you want me I’ll be at the Clipper Inn over in Jersey.”

“Oh, brother,” Long said quietly as he hung up.

Burke picked up his overnight bag and went downstairs to grab a cab to pick up Helen.

Papa Menes woke up thinking of how he had penetrated the blonde from Miami. A nice willing victim, that one, fleshy and limber and hard to hold onto it that position. He knew she had loved it and he figured she was putting on an act with all that yelling and twisting, but she really didn’t try too hard to get away and the few times he had given her a belt across the tanned flesh of her buttocks she had whimpered properly and had held fast while he accommodated himself.

The girl was a real pro and knew how to adjust to the customer’s demands. When she realized his preference she adapted to them and performed in a proper manner, but the old fart was a real bat with a half-limp cock that couldn’t go in all the way and she wasn’t getting half the pleasure out of it she thought she would. Too bad, if she was like her friend who was in there with Artie Meeker getting laid in the missionary position or doing her simple oral bit, it would be much simpler. One shot and Artie was finished for a few hours, but this old fart kept plowing and plowing and he’d never get that row hoed if he didn’t get his rocks off and right now she was beginning to get sore. At least he could have used the baby oil.

So to distract herself she raised her head and looked over toward the dresser. She saw the gun, but that was nothing new with these Yankee pricks. What she saw that really bothered her was the crumpled telegram on the floor below her eyes and the one word that made her anus contract so hard that Papa Menes reached his orgasm was VERDUN.

Her grandfather had been killed in a battle of that name. Then she remembered a guy with the same name who had almost killed her.

She was young then, much too young to have left home, but the group had convinced her she was square and above all things she didn’t want to be a square so she had climbed aboard the battered Volkswagen van and handed her sixty dollars to Glen to put in the communal fund and they had taken off from Decatur to go to the lush riches of California. But somehow they had gotten pointed in the wrong direction and went southeast instead until the van broke down. They had sent her back to a garage a mile away, but the garage had been abandoned a year before and when she got back the van was still there. Not the little family, though. They were gone and they had taken her things with them too.

For an hour, she cried, then she started to walk. That was when the convertible stopped and the suave man in the sharkskin suit invited her in. She was feeling too miserable to refuse. The nearest town was twenty miles away, and the remote asphalt county road she was on didn’t show any signs at all of carrying traffic. For a few miles she sniffled in self-pity and told her story.

She screamed in pain not long afterward, but the barn was a long way from anything and its walls were thick. She lay there naked, the ropes biting into her flesh, forced to do whatever pleased him, escaping the pain only by being totally submissive to his wishes, then writhing in agony as he reverted to the painful things again.

When he cut her loose she tried to crawl away, but there was no place to go and she cowered against the side of the stall where he had hung his clothes. He had dressed quickly, not paying any attention to her at all. The only thing that happened was the letter dropping from his pocket and before he retrieved it she saw the name on the envelope and that name had been VERDUN. She remembered being told how her grandfather had died in that place.

Until now, she had never remembered the name again.

This time she knew she’d never be able to forget it again.

Driving across the bridge to Jersey, Gill was quiet, enjoying the sensation of breaking free from the incessant noise and frantic activity of the big city behind him. In a way, it was like walking through a door and he felt himself wishing he didn’t have to go back again. Luckily, he could adapt. There were a lot who couldn’t. The city was their lifeblood, their 118 entire being. To him it was a place he had to be until he decided he didn’t want it any longer. He had been born and raised there, worked there until New York was more than just a city, it was an intimate, animated mountain of masonry with every canyon, arroyo and wash etched into his mind. The people who lived there he catalogued, cross-indexed and filed in those hidden recesses of his brain and sometimes he felt the weight of their numbers laying there like a cancer. The ones in his file were the cancers. The others were simply the reluctant hosts that fed and nourished them, only to be consumed in the end while the cancers kept growing.