The Mike Hammer Collection

The cop with the deep voice chuckled, patted me down and came up with my wallet. “Empty,” he said.

Hell, there had been two bills in it when I started out. It must have been a pretty good night. Two hundred bucks’ worth of night.

I heard the cop whistle between his teeth. “We got ourselves a real fish.”

“Society boy? He don’t look so good for a society boy. Not with his face. He’s been splashed.”

“Uh-uh. Michael Hammer, it says here on the card. He’s a private jingle who gets around.”

“So he gets tossed in the can and he won’t get around so much.”

The arm under mine hoisted me a little straighter and steered me toward the car. My feet moved; lumps on the end of a string that swung like pendulums.

“You’re only joking,” the cop said. “There are certain people who wouldn’t like you to make such noises with your mouth.”

“Like who?”

“Captain Chambers.”

It was the other cop’s turn to whistle.

“I told you this jingle was a fish,” my pal said. “Go buzz the station. Ask what we should do with him. And use a phone—we don’t want this on the air.”

The cop grunted something and left. I felt hands easing me into the squad car, then shoving me upright against the seat. The hands went down and dragged my feet in, propping them against the floorboard. The door shut and the one on the other side opened. A heavy body climbed in under the wheel and a tendril of smoke drifted across my face. It made me feel a little sick.

The other cop came back and got in beside me. “The captain wants us to take him up to his house,” he said. “He told me thanks.”

“Good enough. A favor to a captain is like money in the bank, I always say.”

“Then how come you ain’t wearing plainclothes then?”

“Maybe I’m not the type, son. I’ll leave it to you young guys.”

The car started up. I tried to open my eyes but it took too much effort and I let them stay closed.

You can stay dead only so long. Where first there was nothing, the pieces all come drifting back together like a movie of an exploding shell run in reverse. The fragments come back slowly, grating together as they seek a matching part and painfully jar into place. You’re whole again, finally, but the scars and the worn places are all there to remind you that once you were dead. There’s life once more and, with it, a dull pain that pulsates at regular intervals, a light that’s too bright to look into and sound that’s more than you can stand. The flesh is weak and crawly, slack from the disuse that is the death, sensitive with the agonizing fire that is life. There’s memory that makes you want to crawl back into the void but the life is too vital to let you go.

The terrible shattered feeling was inside me, the pieces having a hard time trying to come together. My throat was still raw and cottony; constricted, somehow, from the tensed-up muscles at the back of my neck.

When I looked up Pat was holding out his cigarettes to me. “Smoke?”

I shook my head.

His voice had a callous edge to it when he said, “You quit?”

“Yeah.”

I felt his shrug. “When?”

“When I ran out of loot. Now knock it off.”

“You had loot enough to drink with.” His voice had a real dirty tone now.

There are times when you can’t take anything at all, no jokes, no rubs—nothing. Like the man said, you want nothing from nobody never. I propped my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed myself to my feet. The inside of my thighs quivered with the effort.

“Pat—I don’t know what the hell you’re pulling. I don’t give a damn either. Whatever it is, I don’t appreciate it. Just keep off my back, old buddy.”

A flat expression drifted across his face before the hardness came back. “We stopped being buddies a long time ago, Mike.”

“Good. Let’s keep it like that. Now where the hell’s my clothes?”

He spit a stream of smoke at my face and if I didn’t have to hold the back of the chair to stand up I would have belted him one. “In the garbage,” he said. “It’s where you belong too but this time you’re lucky.”

“You son of a bitch.”

I got another faceful of smoke and choked on it.

“You used to look a lot bigger to me, Mike. Once I couldn’t have taken you. But now you call me things like that and I’ll belt you silly.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

I saw it coming but couldn’t move, a blurred white open-handed smash that took me right off my feet into the chair that turned over and left me in a sprawled lump against the wall. There was no pain to it, just a taut sickness in the belly that turned into a wrenching dry heave that tasted of blood from the cut inside my mouth. I could feel myself twitching spasmodically with every contraction of my stomach and when it was over I lay there with relief so great I thought I was dead.

He let me get up by myself and half fall into the chair. When I could focus again, I said, “Thanks, buddy. I’ll keep it in mind.”

Pat shrugged noncommittally and held out a glass. “Water. It’ll settle your stomach.”

“Drop dead.”

He put the glass down on an end table as the bell rang. When he came back he threw a box down on the sofa and pointed to it. “New clothes. Get dressed.”

“I don’t have any new clothes.”

“You have now. You can pay me later.”

“I’ll pay you up the guzukus later.”

He walked over, seemingly balancing on the balls of his feet. Very quietly he said, “You can get yourself another belt in the kisser without trying hard, mister.”

I couldn’t let it go. I tried to swing coming up out of the chair and like the last time I could see it coming but couldn’t get out of the way. All I heard was a meaty smash that had a familiar sound to it and my stomach tried to heave again but it was too late. The beautiful black had come again.

My jaws hurt. My neck hurt. My whole side felt like it was coming out. But most of all my jaws hurt. Each tooth was an independent source of silent agony while the pain in my head seemed to center just behind each ear. My tongue was too thick to talk and when I got my eyes open I had to squint them shut again to make out the checkerboard pattern of the ceiling.

When the fuzziness went away I sat up, trying to remember what happened. I was on the couch this time, dressed in a navy blue suit. The shirt was clean and white, the top button open and the black knitted tie hanging down loose. Even the shoes were new and in the open part of my mind it was like the simple wonder of a child discovering the new and strange world of the ants when he turns over a rock.

“You awake?”

I looked up and Pat was standing in the archway, another guy behind him carrying a small black bag.

When I didn’t answer Pat said, “Take a look at him, Larry.”

The one he spoke to pulled a stethoscope from his pocket and hung it around his neck. Then everything started coming back again. I said, “I’m all right. You don’t hit that hard.”

“I wasn’t half trying, wise guy.”

“Then why the medic?”

“General principles. This is Larry Snyder. He’s a friend of mine.”

“So what?” The doc had the stethoscope against my chest but I couldn’t stop him even if I had wanted to. The examination was quick, but pretty thorough. When he finished he stood up and pulled out a prescription pad.

Pat asked, “Well?”

“He’s been around. Fairly well marked out. Fist fights, couple of bullet scars—”