The Mike Hammer Collection

Pat sucked in his breath and a grin pulled at his mouth. “That’s all I need is a problem.” He waved a thumb at me. “Like him.”

Larry looked down at me like he would at any specimen. “He doesn’t look like a problem type. He probably plain likes the sauce.”

“No, he’s got a problem, right?”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Tell the man what your problem is, Mikey boy.”

Larry said, “Pat—”

He shoved his hand away from his arm. “No, go ahead and tell him, Mike. I’d like to hear it again myself.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

He smiled then. His teeth were shiny and white under tight lips and the two steps he took toward me were stiff-kneed. “I told you what I’d do if you got big-mouthed again.”

For once I was ready. I wasn’t able to get up, so I kicked him right smack in the crotch and once in the mouth when he started to fold up and I would have gotten one more in if the damn doctor hadn’t laid me out with a single swipe of his bag that almost took my head off.

It was an hour before either one of us was any good, but from now on I wasn’t going to get another chance to lay Pat up with a sucker trick. He was waiting for me to try it and if I did he’d have my guts all over the floor.

The doctor had gone and come, getting his own prescriptions filled. I got two pills and a shot. Pat had a fistful of aspirins, but he needed a couple of leeches along the side of his face where he was all black and blue.

But yet he sat there with the disgust and sarcasm still on his face whenever he looked at me and once more he said, “You didn’t tell the doctor your problem, Mike.”

I just looked at him.

Larry waved his hand for him to cut it out and finished repacking his kit.

Pat wasn’t going to let it alone, though. He said, “Mike lost his girl. A real nice kid. They were going to get married.”

That great big place in my chest started to open up again, a huge hole that could grow until there was nothing left of me, only that huge hole. “Shut up, Pat.”

“He likes to think she ran off, but he knows all the time she’s dead. He sent her out on too hot a job and she never came back, right, Mikey boy? She’s dead.”

“Maybe you’d better forget it, Pat,” Larry told him softly.

“Why forget it? She was my friend too. She had no business playing guns with hoods. But no, wise guy here sends her out. His secretary. She has a P.I. ticket and a gun, but she’s nothing but a girl and she never comes back. You know where she probably is, Doc? At the bottom of the river someplace, that’s where.”

And now the hole was all I had left. I was all nothing, a hole that could twist and scorch my mind with such incredible pain that even relief was inconceivable because there was no room for anything except that pain. Out of it all I could feel some movement. I knew I was watching Pat and I could hear his voice but nothing made sense at all.

His voice was far away saying, “Look at him, Larry. His eyes are all gone. And look at his hand. You know what he’s doing. He’s trying to kill me. He’s going after a gun that isn’t there anymore because he hasn’t got a license to carry one. He lost that and his business and everything else when he shot up the people he thought got Velda. Oh, he knocked off some goodies and got away with it because they were all hoods caught in the middle of an armed robbery. But that was it for our tough boy there. Then what does he do? He cries his soul out into a whiskey bottle. Damn—look at his hand. He’s pointing a gun at me he doesn’t even have anymore and his finger’s pulling the trigger. Damn, he’d kill me right where I sit.”

Then I lost sight of Pat entirely because my head was going from side to side and the hole was being filled in again from the doctor’s wide-fingered slaps until once more I could see and feel as much as I could in the half life that was left in me.

This time the doctor had lost his disdainful smirk. He pulled the skin down under my eyes, stared at my pupils, felt my pulse and did things to my earlobe with his fingernail that I could barely feel. He stopped, stood up and turned his back to me. “This guy is shot down, Pat.”

“It couldn’t’ve happened to a better guy.”

“I’m not kidding. He’s a case. What do you expect to get out of him?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“Because I’d say he couldn’t stay rational. That little exhibition was a beauty. I’d hate to see it if he was pressed further.”

“Then stick around. I’ll press him good, the punk.”

“You’re asking for trouble. Somebody like him can go off the deep end anytime. For a minute there I thought he’d flipped. When it happens they don’t come back very easily. What is it you wanted him to do?”

I was listening now. Not because I wanted to, but because it was something buried too far in my nature to ignore. It was something from way back like a hunger that can’t be ignored.

Pat said, “I want him to interrogate a prisoner.”

For a moment there was silence, then: “You can’t be serious.”

“The hell I’m not. The guy won’t talk to anybody else but him.”

“Come off it, Pat. You have ways to make a person talk.”