Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

“Why?”

“Because I love you, Gill. In that street language you enjoy I’m so fucking much in love with you it comes out my ears and that’s all that counts.”

“Knock off that talk. You’re a lady.”

“Not around you, wild man.”

“You know what’s going to happen to you in another minute, don’t you?”

Helen smiled up at him, her tongue wetting her lips. She put her drink down and reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. In one smooth motion she let everything drop to the floor and with the second she threw away the remaining pieces of sheer nylon and stood there in shimmering, naked beauty and said, “I hope so.”

And while the darkness enveloped the city outside, shutting off the ugliness, leaving only the bright shining lights in the window they exploded together in a welter of spilled cushions and knocked-over ashtrays and the two drinks that drenched them in a refreshing bath that made the whole crazy orgasm better than it had a right to be.

They lay on the floor tracing wet lines on each other’s bodies with ice cubes that seemed to give out more heat than they drew and as the last one melted into eternity Helen looked up at him and asked, “What’s Shinola?”

“What a time to talk of shoe polish.”

“No, really.”

“It’s a standard brand shoe polish. Why?”

“It just occurred to me.”

“You’re nuts, Helen. I love you and I’m going to marry you anyway. I’m just glad I found out that you’re nuts first. I’m going to have you treated. What brought that on?”

“One day Mr. Verdun was mad and I heard him shouting. He said he couldn’t get hold of the old fart because he was probably out at Shinola doing the aye aitch bit again.”

She felt him go tight beside her and looked at his face. He wasn’t Gill Burke any longer. He was a machine, a human, thinking machine that had an advantage over any computer an engineer could build because it could initiate its own program and handle the variables any way it wanted. She didn’t know it, but he was reaching back into the recesses of a million cells, trying to resurrect a word he had come across in some obscure item a mechanical computer would never have processed into its tapes. She watched him search it out, locate it, then push himself erect until he found the phone and dialed a number. She couldn’t hear what he said, but saw him nod once, thank the person on the other end and hang up.

He started to get dressed.

“Where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She waited until he buckled on the gun, then got up and slipped back into her clothes. “You’re wrong, Gill. It does matter. What did I tell you?”

He looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her. Finally he said, “Where Papa Menes is.”

“I’m going with you. You know that, don’t you?”

He kept looking at her until he decided, then nodded. “If you do, you might get answers to the question you haven’t asked yet.”

“Do I deserve it?”

“You deserve it.”

The ice in his eyes was far colder than the ice they had just made love with.

Downstairs they were about to get in the car when Bill Long came out of the shadows and said, “Looking for company?”

Gill Burke held the door open for him so he could slide in beside Helen. “Not especially, but as long as you’re here you’d might as well enjoy the sleigh ride.”

When they pulled out into traffic, Long asked, “Any special destination?”

“Yeah,” Burke told him. “Shinola.”

The word stirred something in the captain’s memory, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Burke said, “A nutty, extravagant mansion out on Long Island built by a former shoeshine boy who won and lost his shirt in the stock market. His enemies called his attempt at pretentiousness Shinola.”

Long remembered then and threw Burke an odd look. “What’s out there?”

“Papa Menes,” Burke said.

“How do you know?”

“I told him,” Helen said.

He was going crazy. The damn dame was making him go crazy and if he didn’t come in another minute he was going to kill the bitch for teasing him this way and tear her cunt inside out. She had his nuts hard as pebbles and he was hurting in every fucking tube and gland in his withered body and she wouldn’t let it blow out of him. She was stronger than he was now, depleting him with what started out to be gentle ministrations and wound up with him a quivering mass of old flesh and even though he knew she was absolutely wild about the way he had brought her on, indulging her in the perversions he absolutely loved, she was killing him with the very things he had taught her and he was loving every minute of it. He shook and trembled violently when her mouth touched him and when her fingers located the right spot and squeezed just right, his mouth opened and he gasped like a fish out of water. All he could think of was DO IT, DO IT, DO IT, but she wouldn’t let him alone. She loved him so much she was tearing him apart and he couldn’t fight back any longer. He was all hers and anything she wanted to do was all right, but just for the fucking relief of it all, DO IT, DO IT, and she still kept on with those awful things he wished that fat Jew broad he had married could have done and he knew she hadn’t even hardly begun. She was talking to him while her hands and her mouth and her legs worked against him. He could taste and feel every part of her, not because he wanted it, but because she put it there and she was telling him about how lovely it was when he was the first one to tumble her over in the attitude of abject humiliation and stick it up her ass and how wonderful it felt after the initial pain was over and the sensuality of it all began and how slippery it was and how it filled her up until she thought she would burst with pleasure and how each time it got better and better and reached the time when there was no pain at all and only pleasure that was better than anything she had ever experienced in her whole life and how it was a shame only a woman could enjoy it, but if she tried, how a man could enjoy it too and when she asked him if he wouldn’t like it the old man screamed out YES, YES, YES and she rolled him over on his stomach again and propped him on his knees with his head down between his arms.

Louise Belhander said, “This is for what Frank Verdun did to me,” and shoved four inches of the barrel of a .38 revolver up his ass and pulled the trigger.

The guard stationed outside the door heard the strangely muted sound, the horrible scream, looked inside and shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t care less. He had been paid in advance. He told the others, they shrugged too, picked up whatever they thought could be useful to them and left to go back to where they came from.

It wasn’t their jurisdiction and it wasn’t their right, but it was a different time, a new era, and circumstances had changed all the rules. They went past the place somebody had nicknamed Shinola after that long forgotten Wall Street genius, cruised it twice, looking at the lights in the windows, the open gates and the total absence of sound or motion. The only thing alive was the young blond girl getting on the interstate bus three blocks away and the guy in his pajamas walking his dog. The estate was there, waiting, looking vitally awake, yet having all the signs of death.

Burke drove up in front of the ornate, columned porch and cut the engine. For a few minutes they sat there, guns in their hands, then Bill Long and Burke got up, looked around and went up the steps.

They had been in places like this too many times before and nobody had to tell them it was all over, whatever they expected to happen had already happened. Out of force of habit they obeyed all the rules of entry, covering each other while protecting themselves, absorbing the details of what had gone on, cataloging them for future reference, correlating them for immediate use. Later the experts from the lab could come in and add their findings to the computers and the files.