Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

She knew she shouldn’t have been there. It was a time for men alone, yet in a way she was like a catalyst whose action could temper or instigate a cataclysm. Inside each of them was a locked secret and they probed each other to bring it out... not overtly, but just a single word or expression that would satisfy their own conclusions.

For a second she felt a flash of hatred for the whole world, the entire stinking system that could turn men into animals and the earth into a laboratory of destruction to benefit a few warped minds.

She looked at her watch. It was a quarter to nine.

Bill Long put down his coffee cup and took the cigarette Gill offered him. “If you’re right it makes the entire department look like it’s pretty damn stupid or on the take.”

“Not necessarily.”

“No?” Long leaned into the match and blew a thin stream of smoke across the table. “You realize how many men we had working that deal?”

“Sure.”

“Top guys, not rookies. Guys all pulling for you, yet the kind of guys who would lay the evidence on the line no matter what they found.”

“They found plenty of it, didn’t they?”

“Nothing you could refute.”

“Oh, I refuted it,” Burke told him. “I just couldn’t prove it.”

“Why didn’t you stick around and sweat it out?”

“Who needed the aggravation. Things kept piling up against me and there was no way out. There was enough basis of truth so that the whole package looked good. All I could do was make matters worse and you damn well knew it. There wasn’t a chance in the world when it became a public issue the politicals could capitalize on and I’ll be damned if I was going to take any more of a beating from those pricks. The committee at Compat knew the score better than you did and offered me the job. I didn’t have to think twice then. I made more in a month than I did in a year on the force without having to face a rule book that worked against me or a crowd of cop haters and superior officers running scared to protect their pensions.”

“Don’t hand me that, Gill.”

“What could you have done, buddy?”

“Kept your case open until we got the break, that’s what.”

“That sounds good, but I don’t like starving or having to eat the shit I was having thrown at me.” He stopped, took a drag on the butt and shook his head. “The other side was just a little too good for your boys. They didn’t have any rule book to fight against. They could pull out all the stops. They yanked my teeth very effectively and saw to it that when I was gone, everything settled back to normal.”

“But it didn’t, did it?”

The smile Burke gave him was almost frightening to Helen. There was something about his eyes over the hard slash of his mouth that sent a shudder down her spine.

“No,” Burke said, “it didn’t.”

“In fact, it got worse.”

“For some people, perhaps.” Burke had stopped smiling and was watching Long.

The cop nodded. “When you look back at it, the whole thing seems to have been a well-engineered deal.”

Burke’s shrug was enigmatic. “Who knows? In this business, anything can set off a chain reaction.”

This time it was Bill Long’s face that had a peculiarly strained expression. “True. If ... and only if ... you know where, when and how to touch off the original action.”

“It could be accidental.”

“Accidents,” Long said, “are like coincidences. In this business they don’t happen. They’re planned.”

“A lot of things are planned, kid. Then suddenly they get unplanned and the shit hits the fan.” He looked at his watch and tossed a bill on the table to cover the coffees. “And right now we’re about to plug in the fan.”

The captain’s face got tight again, his words sounding clipped. “Suppose you brief me on this bit, Gill.”

“Suppose I just let you see it happen and explain as I go along. You haven’t got much choice anyway.”

Helen saw the tendons in Long’s hand stand out against the flesh. Finally he said, “Okay, it’s your show, Burke.”

She reached out and laid her hand on top of Gill’s. “If you’d rather...”

He didn’t let her finish. “You’ve been there before, doll. We’re simply going to make an inquiry, that’s all. Maybe an intimidating-type inquiry, but no rough stuff. You see... it’s partially because of you that I began to understand how it was done.”

Whenever Mark Shelby recovered from the effects of an orgasm he was a hollow shell forced to look inward upon himself and disgusted at what he saw. What he thought was manhood expended itself in a fiery gush leaving nothing at all to disguise the self-contempt, the loathing and the bitterness of having been a gutless, wanton puppet whose prowess lay, not in his own ability, but in the hands of those who owned him and twitched the leash to make him respond to their demands. There was nothing brave or daring about the way he had killed. Anyone could shoot or knife from ambush, or in the back, or under the guise of being a friend. He always knew what he would do if faced with an adversary who didn’t fear him at all and came at him with a death weapon in his hand. He’d run. He’d hide. He’d wait until somebody else destroyed the enemy before he would reappear with a logical explanation and claim credit for the victory.

Alone, Mark Shelby was a weak thing who could hate himself to death.

Fortunately, he was never alone. The power was still with him, outside there in the other room, a cylindrical waxen tower of power.

He wiped the bitter taste from his mouth, got out of bed, showered and dressed. Outside in the living room she’d be waiting for him, all vibrant, active sex ready to relieve herself in a dozen more climaxes, ready to bring him into the heady rapture of a gut-wrenching spasm... and again, like almost all the other times, he was going to have to make some excuse so he would not have to participate in an act that would expose his incapabilities. Maybe he never did fool her, but he couldn’t be sure. At least she understood and gave him the benefit of the doubt.

That was why he was so damn crazy about her. She was all his, from the top to the bottom with all those good parts in between. He was strictly one hell of a big man to her and nobody could come near him for sheer physical magnetism. She let him know it, too. He grinned and sucked in his stomach a little. When he had the operation in the palm of his hand, he’d let her know just who he was, take her right in with him and tell the old lady to fuck off. Then he and Helga would really swing.

But it wasn’t at all like it should have been. She wasn’t bare-assed naked at all. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch with her dress hiked up around her thighs and she was smiling, but there was something forced in the way she did it and the drink in her hand was heavy with scotch and half empty. There was enough animal in him to smell the nervousness in her.

He was about to yank the glass out of her hand when the phone rang and she almost dropped it. Then his fingers beat hers to the receiver and he said in a soft, deadly voice, “I’ll get it,” and watched her eyes go wide and scared for a brief instant. Shelby said, “Yes?” then grunted and handed the phone to Helga. “Some broad for you.”

There was no doubting the relief in her eyes at all. Her voice had the quick, staccato tone of relief as she went into a vivid description of the dress she wanted altered and she didn’t look at him at all while she was talking. She hung up almost reluctantly and was staring at him when he came back from the bar with a drink in his hand.

He was just about to accost her when he saw the hands of the wall clock standing at ten and without taking his eyes from hers at all, he dialed Papa Menes’ private number, waited until he heard the old man’s voice and said, “It’s ten o’clock, Papa.”