Bucky Mohler owned the building, or at least co-owned it.”
His lips were peeled back over his teeth. “I don’t even follow this. What kind of medication are you on, Jack?”
“Nothing. I’m in fine shape. The only health scare I’ve had lately is a Glock in the hand of a bent cop — a cop whose electronic surveillance only this evening, not long ago at all, overheard the discovery of those missing floppy discs.
And now he stopped denying it. He didn’t admit anything, but his expression changed. Hardened. Still, the eyes had a sadness. I’ll give him that much — some humanity was still in there.
And, of course, the Glock swung up and aimed itself at me. And Bettie. We were standing so close, we were one damn target.
“One other question, Joe, the eternal one —
Pender sighed. Then he shrugged. “Not that easy, Jack. I’ve done business with those guys for a long, long time. And I had tastes and habits, when I was younger, that needed underwriting. Gambling. Coke. Pretty young things like your Bettie —
“I understand, Joe. I understand greed and drugs and sex — hell, those are three biggies in our game, right? The big motives? But let me ask you this — how are you going to explain this to Darris, and he’ll be here soon — how are you going to explain killing Bettie and me?”
He shrugged and smiled. A sad little smile, but a smile.
“Because I didn’t do it. One of those assholes downstairs did — see, this is one of
And he extended his arm, pointing the weapon right at me. And Bettie.
“Back, Tacos!” I said, and the dog, with blood on its face and head — some his own, some Pender’s — looked at me with chagrin. Had he been a bad doggie?
“Good boy,” I said. “Bettie, take him downstairs. And call Kinder right now — I don’t think Joe really did, though with the noise, Darris probably is already on his way.”
I went over to where Pender lay in a sprawl, his legs and arms going in directions that had no point, and his eyes were huge and his mouth was bubbling blood and so was his neck, from the jagged open gash, the red streaming.
“Shoo... shoo...” he was saying.
He might have been calling me “Shooter,” but I didn’t think so.
A trembling finger pointed to the Glock he’d dropped.
When he spoke, it took effort, and you had to give it to him for that, anyway. Of course it was more gurgling than anything else, but I understood.
“Shoo... shoot me,” he said.
“Why? You’ll be dead in a couple of minutes, Joe. Bleeding out from a wound like that, shouldn’t take... oh. I get it. You want me to shoot you with the Glock, and blame it on one of these bastards?”
He managed to nod, the eyes even wider, wilder. With that gash in his neck, you’d think his damn head would’ve rolled off.
“That way,” I said, “your family won’t have to suffer. You won’t die in disgrace. You went out a good guy, a hero who tried to save Bettie and me.”
One more nod and something like hope flickered in the wide eyes.
I stood. “I see where you’re coming from, Joe. Trouble is, what about all the
Hell.
He wasn’t listening anymore.
So Bettie and I shared the big rocker on my front porch and we watched — or I watched, and she heard — as Captain Darris Kinder and various other real good guys did their cop thing. And a quiet street in a retirement village was suddenly littered with death, as body bags emerged from the house, black cocoons no butterflies would ever exit.
Kinder had finally been contacted by the federal boys. They informed him that a major operation was going down at Garrison Properties. Warrants had been issued, based on info provided by NYPD sources (including a certain retired captain) and a dozen arrests would be made in the early morning hours. Later, we learned these included several high-ranking “retired” Mafiosi, and I was told, off the record, that the long missing “materiel” had at long last been recovered, too.
I pressed, and was told the atomic cube was intercepted when it was being off-loaded from a lead-lined ice cream truck onto a small cruiser at the Garrison Properties dock.
But that was later. Right now Darris Kinder was dealing with a crime scene and all I had to do was cuddle with a beautiful brunette in my lap on a rocker on the front porch.
She fell asleep for a while, after all that excitement. We weren’t going to bed, because we had to run Tacos over to the vet as soon as they opened, though right now the greyhound was sleeping peacefully at our feet, tail thumping in a dream as he chased a rabbit, metal or otherwise.
The vehicles had just rolled away when she woke up, snuggled against me even closer, and asked, “Jack — is that the sun coming up?”
“Yes. You want me to describe it?”
“No. I can see it. Not well, but I can see it — colors, shapes. I’m alive, Jack. I’m coming alive.”
Soon, so was the street, a boy on a bike hitting porches with papers, retirees in robes collecting them, lights coming on in houses, the sound of radio and TV and even the laughter of children, or anyway grandchildren.
The Street back in the big city might be dead, but this one wasn’t. All those years without Bettie, I’d been as dead as that ancient patch of pavement. They say retirees go to Florida to die.
But I felt like I was finally starting to live.
Preparing this novel for publication was a bittersweet task, a thrill, an honor, an obligation, a privilege. My only regret is that the task needing doing.
Back around 1961, I was a thirteen-year-old in Iowa who fell in love with Mickey Spillane’s fiction, and was inspired by his work (and that of such peers of his as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain) to pursue crime and mystery writing.
As a teenager, I was surprised to learn that the writer I admired so much had been controversial, that in fact he’d been vilified and attacked. When I read about Hammett, Chandler and Cain, I encountered glowing praise for the most part; when I read about Spillane, I heard ridiculous nonsense about pornographic sado-masochism, fascist tendencies and the fostering of juvenile delinquency.
Over the years I became a champion of Mickey’s, and I remain so. During the ’50s, ’60s and into the mid-’70s, Spillane was the world’s bestselling author (not mystery writer —
