Also by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
The Legend of Caleb York
The Big Showdown
The Bloody Spur
Last Stage to Hell Junction
Hot Lead, Cold Justice
Masquerade for Murder
Murder, My Love
Killing Town
The Will to Kill
A Long Time Dead
Murder Never Knocks
Kill Me, Darling
King of the Weeds
Complex 90
Lady, Go Die!
The Consummata
Kiss Her Goodbye
The Big Bang
The Goliath Bone
Dead Street
MICKEY SPILLANE AND MAX ALLAN COLLINS
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Spillane and Wayne
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A TIP OF THE STETSON
About the Authors
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2021 by Mickey Spillane Publishing LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952336
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3012-1
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: May 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-3013-8 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-3013-5 (ebook)
For Stuart Rosebrook,
my True Western pal
who also rides the Iowa range
“They deal in life and sudden death
and primitive struggle,
and with the basic emotions—love, hate,
and anger—thrown in.”
—John Wayne, on Westerns
Spillane and Wayne
I remember vividly the lovely warm, sunny South Carolina afternoon when, as we sat sipping Miller beer in his outdoor tiki bar, Mickey Spillane told me that his famous private eye, Mike Hammer, was designed to be a modern-day equivalent of the mythic Western hero.
“He wears the black hat,” he said, “but he does the right thing.”
Like most of the great Western heroes of fiction and film, Hammer used the methods of the villains he’d pursued to get his man . . . and sometimes woman.
This led Mickey to say on that afternoon, somewhat surprisingly, “I wrote a Western once, you know.”
Well, I didn’t know.
He went on to tell me about a screenplay, “The Saga of Calli York,” that he’d written for his old friend John Wayne. He and Wayne had been thick in Mickey’s early 1950s heyday, and the Mick had even starred in a circus mystery the Duke produced, Ring of Fear (1954). You can find it on DVD—color and CinemaScope, with Mickey playing himself but channeling Mike Hammer.
If you’re a Spillane fan, you may know that Wayne gave Mickey a white Jaguar convertible by way of payment for Mike Hammer’s papa rewriting the script of that troubled film. Less than a decade later, Mickey would star in the Hammer movie The Girl Hunters, produced by longtime Wayne associate Robert Fellows. Of course, Mickey’s most famous acting role was as a pitchman for Miller Lite, sporting a porkpie hat and trenchcoat, a doll (well, The Doll) on his arm. That series of commercials only lasted eighteen years.
“You wanna see it?” Mickey asked, getting back to the Western movie script he’d announced having written.
Of course I did. He sent it home with me (he once called me his “human wastebasket”).
Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey asked me to complete the final Mike Hammer, then in progress (The Goliath Bone), if need be. I, of course, said yes. And then (without telling me) he instructed his wife, Jane, to turn over all of the rest of his unpublished materials to me. I would know what to do, he said.
That has led to thirteen Mike Hammer books—all expanded from unfinished Spillane manuscripts or outlines—and two non-Hammer novels. More are on the way—Mickey’s files were extensive, to say the least. But only when I mentioned to my editor at Kensington—where, in addition to mysteries, Westerns are a specialty—that I had an unproduced screenplay written by Spillane for Wayne, well . . .
Now we have arrived at the sixth Caleb York novel (“Calli” is a nickname I dropped), developed from various drafts of that script. I hope Mickey would be pleased. I think he would. I like to think both he and the Duke would get a kick out of them.
But the readers—his “customers,” as Mickey put it—are what counts. I hope you will be a satisfied one, reading this new Caleb York yarn.
Max Allan Collins
CHAPTER ONE
In the flickering yellow light of a brass oil lamp, Caleb York, seated at his big beat-up wooden desk, filed through wanted posters like a card player checking the deadwood discards for an ace that had eluded him.
Closing in on forty, but not too fast, York was a big man yet lean, his jaw firm, his reddish brown hair gray at the temples. His pleasant features softened their rawboned, clean-shaven setting, his eyes the color of well-worn denim and fixed in an all but permanent squint.
His gray shirt with pearl buttons and black string tie, and the black cotton pants tucked in hand-tooled black boots, said city—as did the black frock coat hung on a nearby wall peg, a calvary-pinched black hat on another peg next to it. But the gun belt with Colt Single Action Army .44—coiled on his desk like a rattler waiting to be roused—said something else.
He was the county sheriff—and de facto marshal—of Trinidad, New Mexico (population three hundred or so but growing), alone in a plank-floored jailhouse office whose two barred street windows were letting in only darkness. The
