Микки Спиллейн - Killer Mine

The knuckles of his fingers were tight around the arm of the chair, biting deep into the padding. His one secret that he guarded so well was no secret at all and he was coming apart right before my eyes.

“Damn you,” he said.

“So it’s over, Larry. Let’s go easy, okay?”

“You... my brother... you’re gonna try and...”

“Larry,” I said, “you tried to kill me earlier. You didn’t care if I was your brother or not.”

His voice was cold, toneless. It sounded to me the way it must have sounded to René, Stuccio and the others. I wondered if he yelled that wild Indian yell with them like he did with Doug Kitchen that Paula Lees heard and told me about. That was the little thing that had bugged me. That yell. He used to do it when he was playing his Indian games. I should have known then.

He said, “You should have minded your own business.”

“I was, Larry,” I said softly.

He didn’t look like me then. It wasn’t my face for a second. It was somebody else, a person I had never known and would never know. It was the face the dead men had seen, the face that had tortured Paula Lees into submission and now it was looking at me.

“I’m going, Joe.”

“With me,” I said.

“Not with you. Alone. I’ve always been alone.”

Before the words were out I knew what would happen. It was the one thing I had forgotten about. “Chief Crazy Horse,” I said. “You really are crazy.”

His hand was a blur of motion as he dug for the gun, the professional killer going into the act he knew best. But he forgot the old axiom of not being able to outdraw a man who already has a gun in his hand.

My own training and instincts reacted with his own and I felt the .38 buck once in my fist and a small, bluish dot suddenly centered in the middle of his forehead, snapping his head back with a jerk. Very slowly my twin sighed and sat down in the chair again.

And very slowly the face of the man I didn’t know turned into the face of one I knew all too well as it relaxed in the deep black of death.

Outside the rain would be a cleansing thing. There was a woman waiting for me to come back. There were people to be told that the terror was over. But it was going to take a lot of rain to wash everything away and a lot of woman to make me forget the memory of the night

It would come, though.

I went back to where I started from, turned my back to it and walked to where the future was waiting for me.