Mickey Spillane - Kiss Her Goodbye

Wracked by a hurt that threatened my consciousness, I wriggled in the dark as rain clawed at the windows and got out of my shirt and the bulletproof vest, kicked out of my shoes, and stepped out of my drenched trousers, just dropping things in damp clumps wherever they chose to fall. Then I stumbled in my T-shirt and shorts, which were moist not wet, to the supply closet where on a high shelf I'd seen an old folded-up blanket. I dragged that behind me like a squaw's papoose over to the leather couch. The .45 I moved to the floor where I could reach it—the wood-and-pebbled-glass door was to the right of the file cabinets, and I had a decent enough view of it.

The blinds behind Cummings's desk, a vague blobby shape over to my far right, were shut, but there was no daylight out there to get in. On my walk here, I'd seen the afternoon give way to night, hours early, thanks to the thunderstorm and black clouds that rolled and roiled like a black tidal wave in the sky, shot through with crackling veins of white.

After reclining in slow motion, I settled on the couch, on my right side, the plump armrest my pillow. Soon I got to like the driving sound of the storm. The thunder had let up, mostly, its roar reduced to an occasional halfhearted murmur. Now there was just downpour, cleansing the gray collection of steel and glass and concrete that New York had become, or giving it a good goddamn try.

I didn't dare go back to the Commodore, not right now. Too many people knew I was staying there. And too much temptation for me to return to those pill bottles, the magic vials that quelled the hurt and beat my subconscious into submission and mellowed me out when that was the last damn thing I needed.

But the temptation remained, as the pains in my side and my midsection throbbed and burned and traded spasms like they were in competition for my attention. They had it, all right.

The saving grace was how tired I was, the energy I'd burned in the jungle of that three-story brownstone, followed by a wind-whipped, rain-lashed twelve-block walk, had left me spent, empty, and it didn't take long for sleep to roll in like fog and fill me up.

***

The sound of the key in the door lock was small and scratchy and subtle, and if the rain hadn't reduced itself to drizzle that merely pattered at the windows, I might not have heard it.

I came awake at once, but moved not at all. The dream I'd been lost in had been intense and dramatic and was gone now, a tiny vivid life snuffed out by the reality of someone entering the office.

A woman.

Framed there in the doorway, enough light making its way from the street to the little landing two floors up to give me the shape of her, tall, with a shoulder-length helmet of hair, blonde, a raincoat, the hand holding the key going into a purse and coming back with something small and flat.

A gun.

A little automatic.

I held my breath. She hadn't gone for the light switch, either. She was moving toward Cummings's desk, and my hand was snaking silently through the darkness to the floor by the couch where the .45 lay.

The shape of her against the windows was indistinct but again I knew she was tall, and well built, and it might have been Angela Marshall.

Had she come looking for me?

Her head was lowered when she clicked on the little desk lamp and all I could see was the top of her head, the blonde hair.

Was it Chrome? How had she known to come here?

As she went through papers on the desk, the file folders I'd been going through still there, the little automatic remained clutched in her right hand. Meantime, my fingers touched the cold oily metal of the .45, and then found the familiar walnut grips, and the weapon was in my hand when I said, "You want to lay that little automatic down gently, doll. Nice and easy."

The blonde looked up at me, startled, but the hand with the gun neither released nor pointed it. The ash blonde hair curled around a lovely face whose deep brown eyes searched through the darkness, a lush, red, moist mouth open in surprise but not dismay.

"Mike...?"

"... Velda? "

She let the nasty little hammerless .32 drop to the desk and came around quickly, and I was off the couch, the .45 plopping on a sofa cushion as she rushed over and I took her in my arms, every aching muscle and bone in my body not giving a damn about discomfort, because the wonder and joy and delight of seeing her again, of having her in my arms once more, overrode all else.

She was a woman in a sopping raincoat and I was a mess in damp underwear with a mouth full of thick sleep and neither of us cared, the kiss of hello making up for the goodbye kiss that never happened, any recriminations, any frustrations, any irritations gone in one fast embrace.

Her face was buried in my neck, where she murmured my name again and again.

"Velda," I said. I felt like a man who'd been crawling across a desert and had seen an oasis and crawled and crawled some more and thank you God it was no mirage, it was real, so very real. "Velda."

"Oh Mike ... oh Mike ...coming in from the airport, I heard about that slaughter at the social club." She brought her eyes around to meet mine. "Was that you, Mike? Did you do that?"

"What do you think?"

"The cops are speculating it was two mob factions mixing it up. The only survivor is a bartender who said he didn't see anything. They say twenty-four are dead."

"Sounds about right, kitten." My legs went rubbery, and I groaned.

Alarm colored her voice: "Were you wounded?"

"I had a vest on. I took a couple in the midsection."

She was shaking her head, the ash blonde arcs swinging like scythes. "Jesus, Mike, you can die, getting shot up in a vest. You might have internal bleeding."

"I'm ... I'm all right, baby. Now that I see you, I'm all right."

But she wasn't hearing any of it. She put me back on the couch, switched on a standing lamp nearby, and headed for the little john in the rear corner. She came back with a cool cloth and sat beside me and soothed my brow and cleaned my face. And my hands.

"Blood all over you, Mike."

"But not mine."

"You need something for the pain?"

"I'm off the meds."

"Aspirin at least. I have some in my purse."

She fed me half a dozen that I washed down with a Miller from Cummings's little fridge. Then I was stretched out on my back again. She perched beside me and looked down at me with so much love I could hardly take it.

"I'm sorry, baby," I said. I felt my eyes fill up. Goddamn sissy.

She shook her head. "We were both fools. That's all the discussion we need."

"Okay. So..." I gave her my slyest grin. "...You been in Colombia, huh?"

Her eyes widened, like a pinup girl whose skirt blew up in a convenient gust of wind. "How much do you know?"

"I know that Doolan didn't kill himself."

She frowned, shook her head. "He would never do that. Never. I wanted to come back right away, as soon as I heard, but I had things to do first. You made it for the funeral?"

I nodded. "Saw to it that that gun he gave Pat got buried with him."

"Good." She swallowed. "That's good."

"You were the mystery woman everybody thought was Doolan's girl."

"Is that what they thought? Well, I guess we wanted them to. All he ever talked about was how I should stop being so goddamn stubborn and go find you and get back with you. He said without me in your life, you would be lost. And without you in my life, I'd never be whole again."

"Doolan wasn't wrong. What was your relationship?"

She sighed, smiled a little. Hard to get used to her as a blonde. "He came to me for help, Mike. You weren't around, and I had a P.I. ticket. And anyway, I could go undercover better than somebody as well known as you."