Mickey Spillane - The Killing Man

While I was telling her, I had jammed more paper under the logs. The matches were in a small cast-iron box on the mantel. I lit one and touched the papers off and we watched the fire take hold.

"Funny," I said. "In a way it didn't matter at all. That super ego trip he went on in leaving the Penta note got him right back in the business again. He was the only expert on Penta that State had and he was here, on the spot. Now he knew me. Now he wouldn't be careless again."

"What Bradley didn't realize was that his bosses overseas had a different way of thinking. They're fanatically nationalistic and had paid him for a political hit and instead he had opened himself up to a possible capture and interrogation which would disclose their scheme, and they wanted him dead."

She picked up the poker and stirred the fire. It was starting to catch, the dry logs beginning to crackle.

"There's no love lost in this crime business. Fells and Bern were old contemporaries of his. He had probably used them on his jobs, so they had a close-knit deal going for them for years. They were bound to know a lot about each other during those years. Now suddenly Bern and Fells get a contract offered them to hit Bradley for not going after his primary target."

"How would they know where to find him?"

"All they knew was what the newspapers mentioned about the note, but that was enough. I was their lead to Penta. They thought I would have to know something about him, thus the snatch."

"They could have killed you."

"No. They had too much professional in them. That would bring too much heat down anyway."

"They killed Smiley," she reminded me.

"Honey, those two were real jellybeans. They were in a hurry and used their old contacts on the job. When they got done with Smiley, they didn't want to leave any witness around so they snuffed him. Stupidly, they used an old place that was a safe house once without realizing Penta . . . or Bradley, knew about it too. Even Bradley's timing was great. He was always presumed to be doing something else."

"Scratch Fells and Bern," she mused.

"Two quick, accurate shots and gone. Too bad he didn't have time to shake the place down. Maybe he tried, but that house was set up by experts and those two had a clever hiding place." I let out a laugh. "I wonder if it's still owned by the government."

"Mike . . . when I was in the hospital . . ."

"That first orderly in your room was him. He wanted you dead, kitten."

"That's crazy!"

"Look . . . you might have had a quick look at him in our office."

"But I didn't."

"But you did have a tape of his voice. Someplace around there would be other tapes he made and a voice-print from yours would be another point of proof that could nail him. One thing. He wasn't dumb. He knew he'd made that call and wanted to double-check on it."

"Making that tape was almost accidental. I never thought . . ."

"He couldn't take the chance. Secondly, he wanted me to make myself vulnerable. He knew damn well I'd go ape if you got knocked off and come right out in the open. Luckily, Pat kept the cops on your door and stymied anything from him in that direction. Hell, he was getting plenty of openings on me anyway. He was there when I said I was going to the office and had plenty of time while I was there to get in position and damn near nail me from the car."

I stopped, looked at the fire and thought back to the way I'd kept sloughing off the motive. It was as though there had been none at all.

"You know what the pitiful thing is?" I said. "I was the one who couldn't see it. I got going on the DiCica bit and everything I did was a cover for Bradley. He was on top of the whole deal like the lid on a jar and everything was going his way in spades. If he could assist in nailing that drug cache, there would be no demotion . . . he'd go up another notch and be even more important to his employers than ever. He'd be able to pull off political assassinations almost at will."

"Look how he put himself into the middle of it. He didn't want any suspicion thrown on him now at all. He volunteers for the scout car with Candace, gives his report to our guys, but someplace he's stopped long enough to alert both federal agencies and get them in a political scuffle. He's supposedly off somewhere smoothing ruffled feathers while the bust is going on, and do you know where he is?"

"Where?" she asked. I could feel the tension in her voice.

"He's on the way back here," I said. "He can make his hit on us and still get back in the play in the city. Nobody will have missed him in all the excitement, or have bothered to look for him, since he would have already planted an alibi."

The fire was blazing away by now, but Velda shivered and I was getting that feeling again. I was computing hours and minutes and knew that what I had just said was true.

I gave Velda a yank away from the brightness of the fire, and we darted in the shadows where the phone was. I picked it up, listened and tapped the bar twice, then put it down.

"The line's cut, isn't it?" Velda asked.

"It would have to be at the main road. There are no poles around here so the wires must go underground out to Route Twenty-eight."

"You can tell the guards-"

"No. He'd have a two-way on this frequency with him. If the guard are on their toes, they might pick him up with those night scopes."

"Might?" There was an odd note of finality in her voice.

Time was going by fast. I had to get in the game and Velda wasn't going to be able to move with me. I said, "Come here," and pulled her into the hallway. I got the chair over, stood up and shoved the hatch cover back. "You're going up there."

She pulled back, her eyes on the black hole in the ceiling. "I can't."

"Nuts. You have to. I had to force her onto the chair, then lift her up into the darkness. When her feet were inside, I handed her the flashlight. At least she had something to hold on to. I told her to stay quiet and don't move, then felt for the hatch and put it back in place.

There was no way I could douse the fire, so I pushed a couple of chairs together in front of the TV, propped enough pillows from the sofa in them to make it look like they were occupied and went to the back bedroom and slid the window open. I crawled out, closed the window and stood there, trying to catch any sound while my eyes adjusted to the night.

When we first got there, I had imprinted the area on my mind and now I was bringing it all back into focus. If Bradley was out there, he could have night-vision glasses on him that could pick up any movement on the terrain.

I went down on my belly, crawling and stopping, trying to bury myself in the grass. Bradley wouldn't have had time for a ground survey like I had, so any small contour I might make could just be a hillock to him. The arc I made took me away from the rock outcropping, circled around it, then I came in from the other end.

Now I could see where the guard was. It was Eddie's station, and I could see him, a vague silhouette against the light. I didn't want him to make any sudden turn and blow me away so I didn't say anything until I was there, right on top of him, and reached out my hand and grabbed his arm.

The damn gun toppled out of his fingers and he fell over on me, the blood wet and sticky from where it was seeping out of his head. I picked up the rifle and sighted it at the other rock hill. What was night became a greenish-tinted dusk where everything was dim, but discernible. I turned the night scope on the other pile of rocks and saw a pair of legs sticking out where they shouldn't be and threw the rifle down.

The bastard was here! Damn it, I should have stayed in the house instead of trying to contact the guard posts. He'd had all the time he needed to nullify their positions and now he'd be inside. He'd take his time. He'd make sure he held the high ground and wanted to take me by surprise. If he found the place empty, he'd have to revise his thinking. But first he'd make sure. He would have found the car in the back, so we weren't far off. He'd realize that I couldn't move fast with Velda and that I sure wouldn't leave her.