have undergone.”
Something was happening to Ruston York even as he was speaking. The little-boy look was gone from his face, replaced by some strange metamorphosis that gave him the facial demeanor I had seen during the wild mouthings of dictators. Every muscle was tense, veins and tendons danced under the delicate texture of his skin and his eyes shone with the inward fury that was gnawing at his heart.
He paused momentarily, staring at me, yet somehow I knew he wasn’t really seeing me at all. “You were right, Mr. Hammer,” he said, a new, distant note in his voice now. “I was in love with my nurse. Or better . . . I am in love with . . . Miss Malcom. From the moment she arrived here I have been in love with her.”
The hard, tight expression seemed to diminish at the thought and a smile tugged faintly at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, Mr. Hammer, love. Not the love a child would give a woman, but a man’s love. The kind of love you can give a woman . . . or any other normal man.”
Suddenly the half smile vanished and the vacant look came back again. “That’s what that man did to me. He made an error in his calculations, or never expected his experiment to reach such a conclusion, but that man did more than make me a mental giant. He not only increased my intellectual capacity to the point of genius . . . but in the process he developed my emotional status until I was no longer a boy.
“I am a man, Mr. Hammer. In every respect except this outer shell, and my chronological age, I am a man. And I am a man in love, trapped inside the body of a child. Can you imagine it? Can you think of me presenting my love to a woman like Roxy Malcom? Oh, she might understand, but never could she return that love. All I would get would be pity. Think of that . . . pity. That’s what that bastard did to me!”
He was spitting the words out now, his face back in the contours of frustration and hatred, his eyes blankly looking at me, yet through me. It had to be like this, I thought, when he was on the brink of the deep end. It was the only chance I had. Slowly, I tucked my feet under me, the movement subtle so as not to distract him. I’d probably take a slug or two, but I’d lived through them before and if I managed it right I might be able to get my hands on his gun before he could squeeze off a fatal one. It was the only chance I had. My fingers were tight on the arms of the chair, the muscles in my shoulders bunched to throw myself forward . . . and all the time my guts were churning because I knew what I could expect before I could get all the way across that room to where he was sitting.
“I have to live in a world of my own, Mr. Hammer. No other world would accept me. As great a thing, a twisted thing that I am, I have no world to live in.”
The blankness suddenly left his eyes. He was seeing me now, seeing what I was doing and knowing what I was thinking. His thumb pulled back the hammer on the .32 to make it that much easier to trigger off. Behind the now almost colorless pupils of his eyes some crazy thought was etching itself into his mind.
Ruston York looked at me, suddenly with his boy face again. He even smiled a tired little smile and the gun moved in his hand. “Yes,” he repeated, “as great as I am, I am useless.”
Even while he had talked, he had done something he had never done before. He exposed himself to himself and for the first time saw the futility that was Ruston York. Once again he smiled, the gun still on me.
There was no time left at all. It had to be now,
He saw me and smiled, knowing I was going to do it. “Sir Lancelot,” he said wistfully.
Then, before I could even get out of the chair, Ruston York turned the gun around in his hand, jammed the muzzle of it into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
About the Author
A bartender’s son, Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1918. An only child who swam and played football as a youth, Spillane got a taste for storytelling by scaring other kids around the campfire. After a truncated college career, Spillane—already selling stories to pulps and slicks under pseudonyms—became a writer in the burgeoning comic-book field, a career cut short by World War II. Spillane, who had learned to fly at airstrips as a boy, became an instructor of fighter pilots.
After the war, Spillane converted an unsold comic-book project—“Mike Danger, Private Eye”—into a hard- hitting, sexy novel. The thousand-dollar advance was just what the writer needed to buy materials for a house he wanted to build for himself and his young wife on a patch of land in New Jersey.
The 1948 Signet reprint of his 1947 E. P. Dutton hardcover novel
Mike Hammer’s creator claimed to write only when he needed the money, and in periods of little or no publishing, Spillane occupied himselft with other pursuits: flying, traveling with the circus, appearing in motion pictures, and nearly twenty years spoofing himself and Hammer in a lucrative series of Miller Lite beer commercials.
The controversial Hammer has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous gritty movies, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir
Spillane was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the Grand Master Award, and with the Private Eye Writers of America “Eye” Lifetime Achievement Award; he was also a Shamus Award winner. The creator of Mike Hammer died in 2006. His wife, Jane, and his friend and collaborator Max Allan Collins are working together to bring Mickey Spillane’s unpublished (and at times unfinished) fiction to fruition.
