Mike Hammer - Baby, It's Murder E-Book

Mickey Spillane

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Mike Hammer's deadly final adventure challenges everything we knew about the enduring noir detective in this gripping finale with a shocking twist. The concluding Hammer novel begins with a 21st-century funeral before flashing back to summer, 1973. Nine years after the events of Dig Two Graves, Hammer takes another unlikely vacation - this time on Long Island to help look after his partner Velda Sterling's seventeen-year-old sibling, Mikki. Mikki must deal with the attention of two boys vying for her affection – Hammer preferring the good kid from a wealthy family over the long-haired doper with an Easy Rider vibe. When Mikki gets hooked on heroin, Hammer – filled with contempt for dope dealers – goes on a rampage. He will find those behind the drug racket and teach them what shooting up is all about. But a final resolution awaits him in the future at that funeral...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

More Mike Hammer From Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Co-Author’s Introduction

Prologue

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

Epilogue

Tip of the Fedora

Mickey Spillane

Max Allan Collins

Mike Hammer Novels

BABY, IT’S MURDER

A MIKE HAMMER NOVEL

MORE MIKE HAMMER FROM TITAN BOOKS

Lady, Go Die!

Complex 90

King of the Weeds

Kill Me, Darling

Murder Never Knocks

The Will to Kill

Killing Town

The Goliath Bone

Murder, My Love

The Big Bang

Kiss Her Goodbye

Masquerade for Murder

Dig Two Graves

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Baby, It’s Murder: A Mike Hammer Novel

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364599

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364605

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2025 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For

MICKEY and JANE —

thanks for believing in me.

“Nobody reads a mystery

to get to the middle.”

Mickey Spillane

“I think there are certain crimes

which the law cannot touch,

and which therefore

justify private revenge.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

CO-AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey Spillane gave me an assignment – develop decades’ worth of various uncompleted manuscripts and synopses of his into completed form for publication.

Several reasons are behind the surprising number of manuscripts the bestselling mystery writer of his day left unfinished. One is his struggle with balancing his new-found (circa 1953) religious beliefs with the sex-and-violence reputation his fiction engendered. The major reason, perhaps – revealed in my biography Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction (co-written with James L. Traylor) – is Mickey’s contract with director/producer Victor Saville granting the filmmaker screen rights to any yet unwritten Hammer (and other) crime novels.

Mike Hammer’s creator disliked the Spillane-derived films Saville made, although Mickey came to appreciate the enduring importance of director Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), that fascinating film in which a critique of Mike Hammer somehow perfectly captures the feel of the initial six Hammer novels.

At the time, however, Mickey simply waited out the duration of the Saville contract before returning to his famous detective with the novel The Girl Hunters (1962), which led to Spillane portraying Hammer himself in the 1963 film version, which he co-produced.

Baby, It’s Murder is the fifteenth Mike Hammer novel I’ve developed from unfinished, previously unpublished Spillane material found in the files of his three offices at his South Carolina home after an extensive search by his wife Jane, my wife Barb and myself. These ranged from substantial manuscripts – running to a hundred or more type-written pages, sometimes with plot notes and occasionally roughed-out endings – to one-page synopses for proposed Stacy Keach TV movies, and many stops between. This concluding Hammer novel was developed from several opening chapters and some plot notes.

Continuity is always an issue in Spillane’s Hammer, because the writer (never “author”) had a tendency to pay only lip service to it. On the other hand – unusual for a detective series – the impact of events from previous novels is often felt in subsequent ones. Deep into Spillane’s Hammer series, for example, the detective still feels guilt and loss over the femme fatale he dispatches at the end of I, the Jury (1947). So, in that sense, continuity was important to Spillane.

The bulk of the action in Baby, It’s Murder takes place in the early 1970s; but the framing sequences occur in the early 2000s, chronologically after what had previously been the final Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone: the first posthumous Hammer novel (and the first with a shared Spillane/Collins byline).

Completing the unfinished Hammer books has been both a challenge and a delight. Along the way I have also completed the long-anticipated second Morgan the Raider novel (The Consummata, a sequel to The Delta Factor); Mickey’s nearly finished last crime novel, Dead Street; and edited his final completed work, The Last Stand, all for Hard Case Crime. Additionally, two novels were developed from unproduced Spillane screenplays (The Menace and The Saga of Caleb York, the latter leading to a six-novel western series). And enough Hammer short stories were completed from shorter fragments to fill A Long Time Dead: A Mike Hammer Casebook.

That Mickey himself, shortly before his passing, asked me to undertake this mission is the biggest compliment I have ever received. That so many readers have accepted these collaborations as genuine Spillane novels is the best review I could ever hope for.

I am grateful to Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, and Andrew Sumner, as well as Laura Price and the rest of the Titan Books staff, for their belief and support in the Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Legacy Project. Mysterious Press editor/publisher Otto Penzler played a key role as well. All of you stayed the distance, understanding the importance to mystery fiction of sharing with readers these additional, final works from one of the genre’s key creators.

Max Allan Collins

July 2024

PROLOGUE

An NYPD chaplain officiated at the graveside ceremony, as per Velda’s wishes. She had, after all, been a policewoman once, before she became the other licensed investigator in the Hammer agency. She could also have asked for, and received, a military send-off, because her remarkable heroic life had included service with the Central Intelligence Agency.

A heroine’s send-off was what she rated, after living a lifetime with me. We’d only married a few years ago, but we’d been together for decades prior, sharing a business, living in the same apartment building, then the same apartment, and finally retiring to beachfront Florida, an old married couple. But she’d made it clear, when the finality of the doctor’s diagnosis made the inevitable sooner than later, that she would lay to rest in Manhattan, where she had only occasionally rested in a lifetime of activity.

A heroine’s life.

About an equivalent of a third of the living population of Manhattan already rested here. It was a popular place, Green-Wood Cemetery. And why not? Trees everywhere, half-a-million or so acres of rolling hills and dales, an occasional pond, a chapel. I’d been herevisiting dead friends – Jack Williams was here – back when you could hardly move left or right without running into gravediggers, and nothing spoils a cemetery visit like running into one of those.

But now the diggers seemed almost rare – not much space left for burials. Dying is costly these days. They’d taken to stacking family members like pancakes in some plots, presumably minus syrup. Of course, Velda had planned ahead. She’d reserved a space for me, as well. My name was next to hers on the gravestone, with a place waiting for the eventual death date to be carved in.

Don’t be impatient, doll, I thought. I’ll be there soon enough.

For such a beautiful burying place, the day had insisted on a melancholy mien, as if the sky was sorry to see her go, too. The gray was gentle, though, not threatening rain, just respecting and protecting the sorrow of the day with a balmy breeze, an umbrella courtesy of God, a final kiss courtesy of Velda.

Looking like a movie star who’d aged well, Pat Chambers, the longtime captain of Homicide who’d finally made inspector before they retired him out, had made the trip from Florida, too. He and the ex-policewoman wife he’d finally found – his love for Velda paying off only in friendship – were a couple with whom we’d often socialized; they were in Key West and we weren’t far from there. We’d play cards and reminisce, and our wives would try (rarely successfully) to curtail how much Miller beer we imbibed.

Pat’s wife hadn’t made the trip. She knew something very personal bound Pat, Velda and me, and she paid her respects by keeping her distance.

The funeral had been held at the Green-Wood chapel, and the place had been packed. That had surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. I’dfigured a couple of dinosaurs like Mike and Velda Hammer, however well-preserved the former Miss Sterling had been, would be very old news in the town with so much vice they named it twice.

But people with whom our lives had intersected, people she had touched and their children and their children’s children, surprised us with their sorrow and support, and many accompanied us to the graveside, an army of appreciation.

Pat really had loved Vel, and his eyes were brimming with tears that never quite made their escape. I was less manly about it. I held up through the service just fine, and even laughed at some of the anecdotes that got told by friends invited up to share their memories. Velda and I knew professional comedians and showbiz columnists who could work a crowd, particularly a sentimental one like this. And they scored big. People needed to laugh.

Then when that fucking dark hole yawned at me, and slowly swallowed the simple bronze casket she’d insisted upon, and after I tossed in the requisite handful of dirt, the rains came – not the sky’s, but mine. It took blowing my nose to return to my reputation as the hard-ass who Mike Hammer was supposed to be.

We were walking away, Pat and me, when he spotted her. I’d noticed Mikki at the chapel. We’d nodded at each other. We were close but not that close.

“My God,” Pat breathed, “that gave me a start.”

“Remarkable, isn’t it?”

He might have seen a ghost. “I thought it was her for a moment. I thought it was Velda.”

“No. Her sister. Mikki. Named for her grandfather, Michael Sterling. Mike. Like me. He was a longshoreman, not a sissy P.I.”

“What a lovely woman.”

And she was, all in form-fitting black, but no veil of affectation – the same sleek black style-defying page boy, the dark, slightly Asian eyes, the full lips, the figure that could stop traffic, even a funeral procession.

I said, “I’ll introduce you.”

He raised a traffic-cop palm. “No need – I remember meeting her when she was young. Would like to say hello.” He shook his head. “I’d damn near forgotten all of that. That business on Long Island.”

“Long time ago, Pat.”

“Everything was. A long time ago.”

CHAPTER ONE

They were backed up against a fence at the dead-end of a Greenwich Village brick alley, three over-age hippies, one Black and the other two White, in thrift-store garb that would have been perfect if this were Halloween, their breaths visible clouds of fear in the gray chill of this late March afternoon.

With a back-up team coming in on the other side of the fence, the stupid ofay bastard in a fringed buckskin jacket and a Gabby Hayes beard carried the paper bag in one fist like it was a dog-shit surprise he was lugging to a porch, while in his other hand he clutched a big revolver. He turned and so did the buckskin fringe, like a dog’s hackles rising, and he triggered off two shots that went right between me and Captain Pat Chambers of the NYPD Homicide Bureau, coming up on the trio at a run. The reporter from the News, who’d been with us from the start, yiped like he’d been hit – though he hadn’t been. But I bet he peed a little.

I kept coming and squeezed off the .45 automatic’s trigger, a gentle action that created a thunderous echo in the alley accompanying the slug, catching the grocery-bag idiot right in the chest, tearing on through to hit the remaining white boy in the head and splashing the fence with red and green and gray matter that dripped like wet paint. The soul brother was reaching down for the first faux-hippie’s fallen rod when I had to drop him, too. I tried for a leg shot but he had bent down too damn low and he caught it from right to left through the lungs.

Pat and I came to a stop.

“Shit,” I said.

Two bullets and five seconds were all it took for them to die.

“Please don’t tell me you’re sorry,” Pat said, trotting over to the corpses littering the alley and/or bumping up against a fence they’d never get over. Boys in blue were peeking over that fence like kids at a ballpark.

“I was hoping one would survive,” I said. My attitude was clinical. “Might get us a rung up the connection ladder.”

Reporters who carry cameras like something precious they won are all lunatics and the automated Nikon that Ray Giles carried, no matter how scared shitless he was, lit up the scene a dozen times, getting it all down in glorious black and white – if his city editor would go for so much gore on the hoof.

The three-man back-up team in blue clambered up and over the fence. The first man to drop skidded in the blood smear and damn near fell on his ass on the alley’s brick.

I chuckled and Captain Chambers – my oldest living friend on the planet, helming a joint Narcotics and Homicide Squad task force – pushed his out-of-date fedora back on his blond head and said, “Some sick damn sense of humor you got, Mike.”

I pushed my porkpie hat back in solidarity. “Aw, lighten up, Pat. These three are no great loss to humanity.”

We were both in trench coats, looking like twins only he was a much better-looking slob. Sort of Alan Ladd if the actor had been taller.

He was giving me that grave look I knew so well. “You’re not official here, my friend. You may have got yourself in a world of hurt this time. There’s a new D.A. in town, you know.”

“There’s always a new D.A. in town. I’m here as a duly licensed bodyguard for a News reporter, and I’m an officer of the court to boot. And I have a witness named Chambers who can verify one of those dead pricks shot first.”

He could find no argument with any of that.

Giles was done strobing the scene with his Nikon; he was shaking so bad, it was a miracle he’d held the camera steady. He was prematurely bald, a baby bird with a mustache and thinning hair; his suit had a whipped look like he just made it alive out of a twister. “Did you have to kill ’em all, Mike?”

I shrugged. “So I missed. Anyway, did I have a choice?”

Giles must have still had some of the sound of those slugs whistling past his head, ears ringing from the reverberation blast of my big automatic. “Not this time, Mike.”

The press and the cops had some ideas about the figurative notches on my .45. Robin Hood had a bow and arrow; Mike Hammer packed a Colt 1911.

The uniform boys were holding back the gathering crowd, white eyes in faces of various color lighting up the descending night. From the surf-like collective murmur came an occasional, “That’s Mike Hammer!” “No, can’t be. Isn’t he dead?” “No, I tell you it’s Mike Hammer!” At least one of them was right.

We walked up to the mess at alley’s end and, in the glare of a couple of flashlights two of the uniformed guys were wielding now that dark was settling in, I watched while Pat knelt over the paper bag and snugged his hands into latex gloves, then opened up on contents that were not groceries. He let Giles take a shot of the piles of glassine packets the bag held, then Ray grabbed another of Pat tasting the stuff with the tip of his tongue.

“Worth dying over?” I asked cheerfully.

Pat, on his feet again, said, “Pure heroin, I’d say. Purest stuff I’ve seen in a long time. Not cut with quinine at all.”

“Street value?”

“Cut for the buying class, I’d say you’re looking at a grocery bag worth, oh… a cool million.”

Giles lowered his camera for once. His baby face cinched up like he was just learning to think. He’d hired me after I shot two others in a tenement buy I’d stumbled onto a few weeks ago, chasing down a deadbeat dad. I always did have a lucky streak.

“That’s five men you killed,” Giles said, half appalled, utterly impressed, “in less than a month. How does that make you feel?”

I knew anything I said would go right into the News, which was jake with me.

“I feel just fine.”

The reporter goggled at me. “Really?”

“All of us get high one way or another,” I said. “Mine is taking out scum. How do you feel, Ray, now that you finally made the bullet-alley scene?”

His lips were dry under the mustache and he looked pale as milk but not near as healthy. Slugs whizzing past you can do that. “Lucky, Mike. Lucky to be alive.”

Sirens were splitting the night. On their hurry here, though I didn’t see the rush.

“That’s great, kid,” I said. “Just don’t make this kind of thing your drug of choice.”

* * *

This time the inquiry was fast and to the point. After all, they had a reliable witness in Ray Giles whose photos were nicely specific and his knowledge of what had gone down too intimate to turn me into the gun-happy fanatic the media liked to make of me. For a change the press got off my back and didn’t harp on the other times the ultimate pay-off had happened to drug pushers who got into my line of sight. In Giles they had one of their own who had damn near tasted a few grains of hot lead.

In the hallway after the inquiry, Giles said, “You saved my life, Mike. I do appreciate that.”

“No extra charge. Anyway, that asshole couldn’t shoot worth a damn.”

“I don’t know how my editor’s going to feel about it.”

I put a hand on the diminutive reporter’s shoulder. “He wasn’t there, was he?”

“She.”

I shrugged. “She wasn’t there, either.”

Not that in the aftermath I got any hero treatment from the News, much less respect, or any other sheet for that matter – just a general wait-and-see attitude with some put-down from the more liberal rags, commentators wondering whether that notorious self-appointed arbiter of rough justice had come out of his semi-retirement to start making bloody headlines again. Hell, anybody who ever had a kid hyped up on the big H or floating off on acid wouldn’t bother paying any attention to the naysayers at all.

At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d helped Pat generate the kind of hysteria down on the streets that would follow those three dealers going down.

Of course, those three buying it was just the icing on the cake. Wednesday, nine kilos had been confiscated at Kennedy; Thursday, Union County coppers in Jersey had lopped off a major consignment being run into Teterboro Airport; and Friday, the feds hit a ship that had held sixty-seven-and-a-half pounds of pure uncut stuff in a barrel at a Brooklyn pier.

A week later, I was sitting across from the captain of Homicide in his Centre Street office, an ancient space as cluttered as Pat’s mind was not. The room looked smaller than it was, thanks to the supplemental materials stacked here and there, plus we were crowded by a whiteboard that listed the various confiscations and arrests the task force had made happen since its inception.

“A key shipment,” he said, between draws on his pipe, in his shirt sleeves and loosened tie, “is a day overdue for delivery. The junkies are going green, looking for connections.”

I snorted a laugh as I lit up a smoke. “Well, isn’t that just too fucking bad.”

“Haven’t you heard, Mike? Addiction is a disease.”

If there was any sarcasm in that, I wasn’t a good enough detective to find it.

I waved the match out, tossed it in an ashtray on the edge of some piled files. “My heart bleeds. Let them hurt right down to their squishy little balls.”

He winced, as if the pipe had gone sour. “Come on, Mike – it’s the suppliers who—”

I held up a stop palm. “Don’t blame the suppliers, Pat, because they wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t have a market to feed and, as far as I’m concerned, anybody who wants to load their guts up with that shit can die in their own runny shit. Nobody forced them to stick that foul stuff in their veins – it was their own stupid choice. Tomorrow the street cleaners’ll be scraping them off the sidewalks with the rest of the dog crap.”

His sigh was as long-suffering as they come. “Listen, Mike. Your bodyguard duties for the News team digging into the narcotics scene have gotten entirely out of hand. Let me and the narco task force handle it. Your involvement ends here, or—”

“Else?” I blew a smoke ring. “Don’t worry about it, Pat.”

His smirk spoke volumes. “When Mike Hammer’s your best friend, a guy tends to worry pretty much all the damn time.”

“Well, you can stop. The News fired me.”

His eyes widened. “Oh?”

I shrugged. “Or I should say thanked me for my services and gave me a cool, brief handshake. Yeah, and a check, so all’s right with the world.”

“Why fire you?” What came next was an admission: “If you hadn’t been in that alley, Ray Giles might be dead now.”

For all his bitching, Pat wouldn’t have wanted to be running down an alley after armed men with anybody else but yours truly.

“That’s just it,” I said. “Giles has been on the crime beat long enough to’ve seen his share of DBs. But he isn’t used to seeing guys die right in front of him. Cold stiffs is one thing – warm corpses is another.”

Pat actually smiled a little. “And Giles isn’t used to having bullets fly around his journalistic brow. Yeah, I get that. Winning a Pulitzer doesn’t mean much when you’re nailed into a box.”

I shrugged, sighed. Got to my feet. “Afraid I’m back investigating insurance claims and looking for runaways for parents who should’ve paid more attention when their offspring were growing up. Little jobs for little people. What the hell? That’s Hammer Investigations, all right. Friend to the little guy.”

He stood; apparently I was being seen out. “That’s rich, coming from a misanthrope like you.”

“No, you underestimate my vocabulary. I like people just fine. At a distance.”

He held the pipe in his palm by the bowl in that paternal way of his. “I know what your problem is.”

“Yeah? Enlighten me.”

“Without Velda around, you’re one cranky son of a bitch.”

Some things you can’t argue with. “Her at my side does take the edge off,” I admitted. “Spend enough time with that doll and I’m damn near human.”

We were moving along the edge of the bullpen now; things were hopping, as usual.

At the elevator, Pat asked, “So how long is that lovely secretary of yours gonna be on this leave of absence?”

Now I was the one letting out a long-suffering sigh. “However long she needs. Rest of her sister’s school year, maybe. Maybe all summer after that. With her mom in that nursing home, recovering, and her high-schooler sis Mikki at home… who knows?”

“Why don’t you take a leave of absence from your shitty attitude and go help Vel out? You got money in the bank. You’re the most successful small agency in Manhattan, thanks to all the gory press you used to get.”

“And now I’m just a has-been, huh?”

He shrugged. “You made a comeback lately, like in that alley. Tell your mean-ass boss, that Hammer character, you need a break. You have a bad case of missing Velda.”

No question about that – Velda was much more than just my secretary. Love of my excuse for a life, was more like it. And Pat knew whereof he spoke – he had a yen for that female himself. It caused a rift in our friendship, once upon a time, in a violent fairy tale long ago. Healed up now. Scarred over maybe, but healed up.

The elevator dinged its arrival.

“I don’t think so, Pat,” I said. “Who’s going to keep Manhattan safe if I’m not on the job?”

I tipped my porkpie and got on the elevator, the doors closing on his smiling, shaking head.

“You are still a pisser, Mike Hammer.”

“I try,” I said.

CHAPTER TWO

Eight-oh-eight, the two-office suite on the eighth floor of the Hackard Building in Manhattan, had never been anything fancy, not even after the old structure had been remodeled from head to toe. A dame that old never looks any better after the surgeon’s knife, but at least MICHAEL HAMMER INVESTIGATIONS didn’t look any older than your random Gabor sister.