“Thank you.”
“I do have another theory I’d like to run past you, before we get to the fun-and-games portion of our program. I don’t think you developed a stable of killers at all. Maybe Clark, but no one else. I think they may have thought that was what you were up to — but it wasn’t. They were strictly here as game pieces in our little competition. You looked for people in your line of work who had done well. You brought them in and sicced them on me, one at a time. It would, as you said once, demonstrate whether or not I was worthy of your regard. And if one succeeded in killing me, perhaps you’d have found a successor. Someone you could turn your business over to. Just a thought.”
He said nothing.
“One last question — when you shot at Billy that night, you had a perfect opportunity to take me out, too. Why didn’t you?”
He lifted the nine mil and said, “Stand up.”
I stood, slowly, arms at my side.
He placed the nine mil on the desk, within easy reach.
I grinned at him. “Just like the Old West, huh?”
“Just like that. Let’s see how fast you really are, Hammer.”
Traffic sounds outside my window were a reminder of a world that didn’t know and didn’t care what was happening here.
I said, “There’s another possibility, Shack. It’s possible that all you want from me is to kill you. That you’ll be slower than me, intentionally, now that you’re convinced I’m a worthy executioner. That’s why you didn’t kill me when you went after Billy — I’m your chosen suicide method. I’m your rope. Your razor. Your gun.”
He reached for the nine mil and my .45 flew into my hand and thundered and the bullet carved a deep notch in my desk, missing his fingers by a fraction of an inch, as it sent the nine millimeter flying. The gun clunked to the floor somewhere, out of sight.
The man who wasn’t really called Shack stood there shaking. The cordite in the air couldn’t be helping that smell symptom of his.
“Do it,” he said. “Goddamn you, Hammer. Do it.”
“You shouldn’t have killed that girl in the Village, Shack. I couldn’t care less about Leif Borensen. But Martin Foster was a good man. Only the last straw, my friend, the last goddamn straw, was Marcy Bloom. She just didn’t deserve it.”
I moved slowly toward him, 45 trained on him. His eyes were filling with the tears he’d been incapable of shedding for others. He was shaking like a leaf. Or maybe a Leif. He didn’t want to die, not really. But he knew it was his best option.
Then I was right on him, inches from him. “If I were to shoot you, Shack — and I’m not going to — I’d give it to you low and in the belly, where a .45 slug goes in small and comes out big, and it takes a long, long time to bleed out and die. It’s what you’re going to suffer when Phasger’s kicks in, but in miniature. Only even that is too good for you.”
I shoved the gun in his gut, its nose pressed deep.
“No, Shack, you get to take the full ride. You’re going to prison, to some dismal ward, where nobody will give two shits that you are suffering. You’ll get it all, the whole attack of your nervous system on itself — constant pain, the loss of comprehensible speech, bleeding from the eyes and God knows where else, feeding through an I.V., teeth falling out, blindness, and pain, so much pain, that even morphine will bring no mercy.”
His hands flew between us and he clutched my Colt in both, its nose still deep in his belly, and he grinned at me maniacally as a thumb forced my finger on the trigger and the .45’s explosion was muffled by his body as the slug thrust into and through him and took him down in a sudden well-dressed pile.
“You lose, Hammer. You l-lose.”
I backed away, holstered the .45, and lighted up a cigarette. Then I reached for the letter from Dr. Beech. “Here’s something interesting I got in the mail today.”
I took out and unfolded the sheet and held it before the eyes of a man whose grotesque expression of a pain both physical and emotional was so exquisite, no words could do it justice. The veins of his neck bulged out in pale blue relief and the crazy wrenching that was tearing at his torn guts was eating at his mind, too, making his eyes bug out as if they might burst like balloons.
I said, “Maybe you can’t see so well right now, so I’ll summarize. You know, Dr. Beech has been on the verge of a breakthrough in Phasger’s Syndrome for some time. Thanks largely to generous donors like yourself. And now there’s a cure. And you lived to see it! Think of that.”
He lay there with his hands bloody as he gripped his punctured belly and he tried to scream, but it hurt too much.
I leaned back against the desk and had two smokes while I watched him sob, whimper, and finally die.
But just before his lights went out, I bid him goodbye, my way.
“No, sucker,” I said, “I win.”
A Tip of the Porkpie
Because my approach to completing Mickey Spillane’s unfinished novels is to set them in the period during which he began them, I find myself working from materials that were contemporary to my famous co-author but which require me to forge a novel that is a period piece bordering on an historical novel.
In that spirit, I wish to acknowledge Peppermint Twist (2012) by John Johnson, Jr. and Joel Selvin with Dick Cami, for information about the legendary Peppermint Lounge. Although the Genovese crime family’s involvement in the club is well-known, the treatment of the mob’s role here is fictional.
I also wish to thank and acknowledge my wife Barb Collins, with whom I write a very un-Spillane-like mystery series about antiquing, who gave me two extremely important suggestions that improved this book a great deal. Thanks also to my partner Jane Spillane, Titan editor Miranda Jewess, my lost brother Nick Landau, and my friend and agent, Dominick Abel.