Mickey Spillane - Kiss Her Goodbye

"I get by."

"You cannot deny you enjoyed me, Mike. I was on my knees before you—remember?" A graceful hand with tapering fingers gestured toward the lovely body. "All of us, Mike, even you, we have our female side, and our male. Men like Tony ... like Sal ... you killed Sal, did you not, Mike?"

"I killed him."

Something nasty flashed through her dark eyes. "Chrome, she was one woman they could accept. And I could accept their love like a man ... you understand?"

"Spare me the diagrams."

She prowled toward me, one hand still casually behind her, and with the other she undid the rope at her waist and the dressing gown dropped in a silken puddle at her red-nailed feet and exposed her golden goddess form with thrusting breasts and narrow waist and flaring hips that flowed into the long, long legs, as muscular as a man's. But nothing else about her suggested anything but woman, as beautiful a specimen of the sex as I had ever seen.

The mouth was as wet and red and lush as ever, the dark eyes hooded, chin up, a red-nailed hand cupping a perfect breast—too perfect.

"Mike ... Mike. I am a sexual being—you said it yourself."

She was almost in my arms and that hand was coming ever so surreptitiously from behind her back to blow me a .38-caliber kiss....

"No, Mike, I am all woman. I was born a woman."

My .45 came up and the tongue of flame from its muzzle licked her belly where the bullet had punched a new hole.

As she staggered on those magnificent legs, Chrome's eyes were wide and wild, and before they filmed over, and she could go down in an ungainly pile to stain that soft, thick white carpet scarlet, I got one last shot in, not from the .45.

"Die any way you like," I said.

MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, two films, and the Mike Danger comic-book series.

Spillane was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and two television series; numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich's seminal film noir, Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his famous hero.

Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award—winning film. A filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry series.

Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.