Mike Hammer - Dig Two Graves E-Book

Mickey Spillane

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 239

Beschreibung

Mike Hammer, the iconic PI created by the master of noir Mickey Spillane, takes on the mob in the first of two gripping final novels for the deadly private eye. Winter 1964. After a hit-and-run accident nearly kills her mother, Mike Hammer's partner (both in life and the PI business), Velda Sterling, learns her father is not who she thought he is. Seeking to uncover her true, troubling heritage, Velda and Mike travel to Phoenix, Arizona—and sunny Dreamland Park, where retired law enforcement officers protect and corral notorious criminals held under Witness Protection. Mike and Velda find themselves swept up in escalating violence, fueled by the missing millions from an armored-car robbery, which leads them to a deadly midnight confrontation in a cemetery—where secrets are buried and open graves await.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

More Mike Hammer from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Co-Author’s Note

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

Tip of the Fedora

About the Authors

Mike Hammer Novels

Also Available from Titan Books

DIG TWO GRAVES

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

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.com,

Amazon.co.uk,

Goodreads,

Barnes & Noble,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

Dig Two Graves: A Mike Hammer Novel

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364612

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364629

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 2023

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.

© 2023 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.

Another one for

JIM TRAYLOR

for obvious reasons

“One thing about truth…

let it shine and you were all right.

It was the lies that could hurt you.”

Mickey Spillane

“Before you embark

on a journey of revenge,

dig two graves.”

Confucius

CO-AUTHOR’S NOTE

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

Dig Two Graves is the fourteenth 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. This one is a combination of two manuscripts we—my wife Barb, Mickey’s widow Jane Spillane and I—discovered in those files: one, a potential Hammer novella; another, an early, very different take on his non-Hammer novel Dead Street, completed in 2007 by me from a nearly finished Spillane draft and published by Hard Case Crime in that year.

As I’ve done a few times in the past—notably with The Big Bang (2010) and Kiss Her Goodbye(2011)—I have shuffled the deck and turned these similar continuities into one novel.

Continuity is always an issue in Spillane’s Hammer, because the writer (never “author”—he wanted nothing to do with such pretensions) had a tendency to play fast and loose with 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 series, for example, Hammer 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.

Dig TwoGraves— somewhat fittingly, since the previous novel (Kill Me If You Can) dealt with the aftermath of Mike’s secretary/partner Velda’s disappearance—takes place not long after Velda’s return in The Snake (1964). We can, then, place the time frame here as the very early ’60s. Like Mickey, I’ll be a little vague about exactly when…

Max Allan Collins

February 2023

CHAPTER ONE

The car came out of nowhere.

Later, no one remembered spotting the nondescript Chevy Nova as it rounded the corner, though it had to’ve been going at a considerable speed for midtown, traffic-clogged Manhattan. And nobody had noticed the vehicle pulling out of a parking place or from the mouth of a parking garage, either.

Yet there it was, bearing down, weaving around other cars, unseen until it was too late and not seen at all by the person in its path. Snow coming down, sidewalks slushy, the street icy, but somehow nothing deterred it.

Five minutes earlier, Velda and I had been waiting out front of the Blue Ribbon Restaurant. The restaurant, in business since 1914, occupied a building that was one of many stretching from the Hudson Theater to Times Square and from 44th to 45th Street. I found the dark-paneled place comforting, the food hearty and the German beer the best. Right now we were under the awning to one side of the entry, getting no guff from the doorman, who knew us well.

Or anyway he used to—though I never left the city, I’d been away for almost seven years. Time was when the name Mike Hammer regularly made the front pages of Manhattan newspapers, particularly tabloids like the News. I was the rogue private cop who preferred settling grudges to taking client money, or so the newshounds claimed. In reality, my reputation had attracted plenty of clients who liked having somebody working for them who was not inclined to be intimidated by rules.

And the news rags just loved running pictures of Velda Sterling, the other private eye in Michael Hammer Investigations, a tall curvy number who packed a .32 in her purse and thirty-eights elsewhere, with a raven-wing page boy on loan from Bettie Page. We were the hottest team in the private security game, my “secretary” and me, till one night when Velda didn’t return from a routine assignment I’d sent her out on.

Then Michael Hammer fell out of the headlines and into the gutter, and his best friend, Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide, suddenly became his worst enemy. How the hell was I to know Pat had carried a torch for Velda? And that he’d blame me for her disappearance and apparent death? Of course, I’d agreed with him, and swapped my office and livelihood for the hobby of puking into sawdust-covered barroom floors.

Now, I’d known Velda was a tough cookie, as hardboiled as those soft curves of hers were not. She’d been a vice cop before I hired her on. What I hadn’t known was the extent of her youthful wartime service with the OSS—and could not have guessed that when I sent her out on that milk run, she would get pulled back in for a long impromptu tour of dangerous duty behind the Iron Curtain.

That duty did not include explaining to me what had become of her. Nor had she informed her mother in Brooklyn. Mildred Sterling, somewhere in her early seventies now, was your Standard Issue little old lady, the widow of a police officer killed in the line of duty whose pension kept her going while she did sewing jobs at home. She was about as sophisticated as a bottle of milk and had been crushed by her daughter’s disappearance.

Oh, Mrs. Sterling didn’t tumble into the gutter, but it hit her hard, and when my secretary/partner showed up alive and in Manhattan a month ago, after I got rid of the Russian team chasing her, Velda had not received a warm welcome from Mom. In fact, this rounded replica of her daughter, a homebody but one with as much spine as her offspring, was furious.

How could Velda have put her through such hell? Yes, the old gal was glad Vel was alive, but now claimed to want nothing to do with her. Her daughter’s behavior had been unforgivable! What did Mrs. Sterling know from Iron Curtains and KGB hit teams and state secrets being smuggled out by hand?

“Mike,” Velda said, her arm in mine, snow drifting across our vision, “I don’t know what to expect. My mother may look sweet as sugar, but she has a temper that doesn’t quit.”

“It’s gonna be fine, doll. You gotta trust me on this one.”

You would not expect it of me, but I have certain diplomatic talents. You have to be able to talk clients out of stupid tasks they want you to perform, particularly if you are a P.I. with the rep of Mike Hammer. I didn’t kill for hire—that was more a sideline with me, no fee attached. So I had to learn to handle people. Convince them, say, that me finding a bunch of dirt on a cheating business partner and sending them to stir would be enough to scratch the get-even itch.

That’s how I ended up making several phone calls and finally a trip to the little bungalow in Brooklyn to convince Mrs. Sterling that her daughter had no choice—Uncle Sam had wanted her, and the young woman’s wartime training and experience got her called back to service.

“When they draft you,” I told her (over tea and cookies), “you go.”

Mrs. Sterling had a soft spot for me, anyway, so we set up this Summit Meeting at the Blue Ribbon for mother and daughter to smoke the peace pipe. Or anyway eat some knockwurst.

Velda and I had done a little Christmas shopping and planned to watch them light the Rockefeller Tree this evening and maybe take in the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. We set our high-level talk for four p.m., when things would be slow at the restaurant and most pedestrians were either where they were going or hadn’t left to go elsewhere yet. We spotted her right across the street, at the mouth of the crosswalk, Mrs. Sterling, wrapped up in a cloth coat and out-of-date chapeau, lugging an armful of packages. She managed to wave a little gloved hand and her Velda-ish features worked up a slightly embarrassed smile.

Of course I already knew we’d be able to get these two girls back together. Velda wanted nothing more than to return to her mother’s good graces, and what mom doesn’t want her daughter back in her life?

Mrs. Sterling crossed with the light. She was halfway to us when the Chevy hit her. Her packages flew high, like squared-off giant snowflakes, and the nose of the vehicle had caught her in the hip and sent her flying toward us.

Now she was where not long ago I’d been: the gutter.

A sad shapeless shape, unconscious, her face a stunned, slack thing, a silly flowered hat crunched under the front tire of the speeding Chevy, no blood on the cloth coat, just a human being discarded like a crushed paper cup.

“See to her,” I said, but Velda was already on her way to her mother in that cement cradle between curb and street, just a few steps to our left.

Me, I had the .45 automatic out from under my left arm and was on the run, heading after that vehicle with my trench coat flapping and my porkpie fedora flying, charging like a ball carrier with the whole damn opposing team on his tail. I knew it was hopeless, trying to catch a speeding car on foot, but I tried it anyway. At least I could get close enough to read the damn license plate number before he sped out of sight.

But Kismet or God or, shit, maybe just the laws of physics had their way with the son of a bitch. Because he was only half a block away when his ride hit that patch of ice and spun him just enough for his front grille to kiss that lamppost goodbye and he made a pretty good argument for seat belts when he went crashing through his windshield and flying out onto the street so fast he skidded on his face.

When I got to him, I used the toe of my shoe to turn him over. That ride on the cement, puss-down, had turned his features into a shredded scarlet dripping mask with two wide hysterical eyes in it, golf-balling in pain.

I already knew the only accident that had taken place here was him hitting the ice and making an art sculpture out of that lamppost and his vehicle. That car had been aimed at Mrs. Sterling like an arrow.

The shattered glass around him might have been ice if it hadn’t been the bastard’s blood decorating it like Christmas.

I kicked him in the side and he felt it, all right, crying out for the first time, a banshee wail of pain that maybe morphine might’ve cut—but none was handy.

“Who hired this?”

Another kick.

More screaming.

A discordant near harmony of banshee wail from an approaching siren added to the grotesque chorus. Somebody at the Blue Ribbon had called it in immediately, owner George himself probably, and a squad had been close enough to make the call quick.

I kicked the prick again. “Are you Russian, comrade?”

White teeth in the red mask pulled back from damaged lips. “Fuck you!”

Not Russian, then.

I leaned down and shook him by the lapels. “Who sent you, slob? Who the hell sent you?”

But the eyes closed. Funny—only the lids were free from the skidding wounds, pale little pink flesh window shades, but blood from his forehead dripping down soon made the coloration complete.

I checked his neck and his wrist. No pulse. I wiped his blood off my hands onto his shirt—it had been a festive blue and was now more in the holiday spirit with streaks of red—and hurried over to check on Velda and her mom.

Velda was holding back any emotion. She was a pro. The time for tears could come later. Right now this was a situation that needed assessing.

“She’s breathing, Mike. No blood to speak of. But she’s got to have severe internal injuries.”

She had her mom’s head in her lap but otherwise wasn’t touching her. She knew not to—this old gal, alive or dead, was evidence of a crime. The forensics lads would have work to do with her clothes. Not that identifying the murder weapon would be at all tricky—she’d have paint fragments from that twisted wreck of a Chevy down the street.

I collected Mrs. Sterling’s packages from the street and piled them on the sidewalk. Nice to be of some damn use.

The cop car came and the usual older officer and younger companion arrived. The older one knew me and I filled him in.

“Call Captain Chambers,” I said. “This was no accident.”

The seasoned cop merely nodded and went to his dash radio to do that. Meanwhile, an ambulance rolled up and two attendants quickly got Mrs. Sterling onto a gurney and into the back of their vehicle. Then the two started trotting down to the other victim, sprawled in the street.

I ran after them.

They were having a look at him.

I said, “What’s the idea?”

“We have room for him, too,” the attendant said. He was young, younger even than the harness bull’s backup.

“Let him get his own ride,” I said.

“But, Mister…”

I took the kid by the arm and headed him toward his ambulance. His partner gave me a look that had a question in it, going from me to the corpse and back again.

“He’s in no hurry,” I said.

***

At Bellevue, they allowed Velda in her mother’s room in Intensive Care despite the older woman’s condition. Velda sat close at the bedside and had her mother’s hand in hers—the hand without the IV needle taped to it. A monitor did the beeping bit and Mrs. Sterling was drifting in and out of consciousness while the low-key fluorescent lighting made everything and everybody look sick.

When the old gal was awake, though, she was shockingly alert. She had to be, the world of pain she was in, stridently insisting on assuring her daughter that everything was fine between them, that she loved her little girl, loved her to death.

Loved her to death was an uncomfortable phrase in this instance.

At least Mrs. Sterling had a good physician—I knew Dr. Lawrence Snyder from earlier this year. He’d supervised my recovery not long ago, when I went from a shambling alky to an upright biped in record time. News of Velda being alive—and pursued by a KGB team on U.S. soil—had been shock therapy enough to shake me back to life. But Larry Snyder had helped knock the acute alcoholism diagnosis.

In the corridor outside Mrs. Sterling’s room, the compact medic in the white coat and black-rimmed glasses had a concerned, somewhat confused look.

“Velda’s mother is not cooperating,” he said, clearly frustrated. “She refuses to be sedated or indeed put on any kind of painkiller. The discomfort she’s enduring is almost unimaginable. We have a battery of tests she needs to be undergoing, and medication will necessarily accompany them… and she’s facing imminent surgery. But she’s refusing anything we attempt to administer.”

“She took a hell of a hit.”

You don’t see a veteran surgeon shudder very often, but he did.

He said solemnly, “Her left hip shattered like window glass. She needs a hip replacement, like now.”

“What are you telling me for? You’re the doctor.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. We’d been through quite a lot together. “She insists on you and Velda being left alone with her. Not me, no nurse, and nothing traveling through that IV. She has something to tell Velda… and you.”

I shrugged. “Probably just wants to make sure she and her daughter are back on track.”

He shook his head. “They’re already past that. This is… something else.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the closed hospital-room door. “Mike, get your ass in there and let that old girl get whatever it is off her chest. Then maybe we can go to work.”

“Okay, Doc. If that’s your prescription, I’ll fill it.”

He gripped my suitcoat sleeve. “Get her to allow us to pump some painkiller in. Assure her it won’t knock her out. But with no help from us, she can’t take this level of discomfort much longer before going down for a very long count.”

I did that. I got Mrs. Sterling to settle down long enough to allow some drugs into that IV of hers, and pulled up a chair next to Velda.

“Now,” I said. “What’s this about? Haven’t you heard? These doctors are the latest thing.”

“I know I’m hurt pretty bad,” Velda’s mom said. Her voice was soft but firm. “They’ll put me under and the Lord knows if I’ll ever come back.”

“Now, Mrs. Sterling,” I began, “I’m sure—”

“You just be quiet, young man. This is my show.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling a little. I don’t get called “young man” every day. “Spotlight’s yours.”

Her eyes landed on her daughter’s face. They were a reflection of each other—where one had been in her younger days, where the other would go when the years had gone.

“Darling girl,” she said. She was gripping her daughter’s hand hard. You could see Velda’s flesh whitening around the grip. “We’ve lived a lie, you and I. My fault. My doing, entirely. But it’s time… time you knew.”

“Knew what, Mother?”

Velda sounded so young. So defenseless. Not at all the strong woman I knew so well. But then each of us has a child that lives deep within us, don’t we? That other person we once were?

Mrs. Sterling continued: “You never knew your father.”

Velda shook her head, the dark arcs of it swinging. “No, Mama. I remember him… I was very small, but—”

“No.” A mother saying don’t touch that burner on the stove. “Roger Sterling was a wonderful man. But he wasn’t… wasn’t your father.”

“I… I don’t understand…”

Now a smile traced itself on the elderly face. “Roger Sterling was a heroic officer of the law. That much is true. But he stepped up to save me, and to save you, when your real father abandoned us.”

“My… real father?”

Her eyes looked past Velda now, into yesterday. No, yesteryear.

“I grew up in New Jersey… you know that. What you don’t know is… is how wild I was. You look at me and see a woman of seventy-some and you can’t imagine I was young, much less… a bad girl.” A tiny embarrassed smile. “Oh, not evil. Just wild. Dance. Drink. One boy after another. Your real father was handsome, like George Raft come down off the screen. He was a dancer, too, like George Raft. Only he was a big man. One of those big men who are oddly graceful. Heavy, some would say fat, particularly as time passed… but powerful.”

I was looking at this beat-up old gal and if she had been on a morphine drip, I’d have figured this was an hallucination—an old movie she saw on the tube that she dreamed herself into. But something very real was in her eyes. You don’t experience regret from something you’re imagining.

And that was regret, all right. “I didn’t know Rhinegold Massey was a mobster. I just thought he was a smooth, suave mister with a flashy car and a bankroll that… well, it just never seemed to get smaller. Of course, neither did he. And he married me, too. I held out for that. I told you I was bad but not evil.”

Velda leaned in. I could tell she was worried that this confession might turn into a death-bed one, not just shared info about her mother’s distant past that might otherwise never be known to her.

“So you were married before Daddy,” Velda said gently. “That’s okay, Mama. Nobody cares. I don’t care.”

The old woman sat up a little. How the hell she managed that I will never know. “Velda… RhinoMassey was your father. It’s his evil blood in your veins, not Roger Sterling’s. When I told him I was expecting, he ran out on me, Rhino did, with a showgirl who, unbeknownst to me, had been his mistress.”

That old-time usage told the tale, in a way, didn’t it? Unbeknownst …

Her smile was back, just another wrinkle in her face. “The ‘father’ who raised you, he and I grew up in the same patch. He always had a yen for me, Roger did. And when I turned up crying on his doorstep, pregnant, abandoned, he took me in. I never divorced Rhino, of course.” Bitterness edged her voice now. “Not a good Catholic girl like me… But we lived together, Roger and I, and we gave you his name, and raised you till that terrible night when he was shot on the job.”

Velda sat forward. “Rhino’s doing?”

“No, no. I think Rhino Massey was dead by then. No, it was a liquor store robbery by some lowlife drug addict. I raised you to admire thatfather… and it took root. You became a policewoman, and then a… a patriot, and finally a detective with Mike here. You help people. You put bad ones away… and down. I’m proud of you. You… you had a right to know the truth. But I have to ask you something, dear…”

Velda, whose dark eyes told me she was reeling, nonetheless said, “Of course, Mama.”

“Can you forgive me?”

Velda came out of the chair and leaned over the woman. “Of course, Mama!”

Mrs. Sterling’s eyes closed and she was under, no sedative needed. I rushed out and found Dr. Larry Snyder waiting.

“All yours, buddy,” I told him.

We were sent to a waiting room while various tests were undergone, surgery imminent.

“This Rhino Massey revelation,” Velda said, “is it somehow the ‘why’ of this? Could something from some… some long-ago yesterday be the reason for running Mama down today?”

“We’ve seen it before,” I said, “the past coming back to bite the present.”

The Sonny Motley case was a fresh memory—a crime that took thirty years to resolve.

Her words came brittle but unbreakable. “We have to look into it.”

“Goes without saying, baby. But right now the focus is on getting your mom the best care.”

While we were there, Pat Chambers came in, topcoat brushed with snow, hat in hand, blond hair tousled and those gray-blue eyes troubled. He had the expression of the concerned, disappointed suitor that he was. He sat on the other side of Velda.

“How are you holding up, kid?” he asked her.

“Okay,” she said with a nod. “My mother’s alive and getting the help she needs.”

“We’ve already identified the late driver. Eddie ‘Carboy’ Carbo. Suspected in several vehicular homicides—apparently a hitman whose specialty was turning two tons of steel and a steering wheel into a murder weapon. Pulled in several times for questioning but never charged, much less convicted.”

I frowned. “No record at all?”

“He was a getaway driver on a couple of robberies and did time on both. Hasn’t been out long. Not tied to any specific crew—appears to have been freelance.”

Velda’s frown had helplessness in it. “Why would anyone hire this?”

“We’ll find out,” Pat said.

I’ll find out, I thought.

Velda mulled Pat’s comment for a moment, then said, “Mike, why don’t you go down to the cafeteria and grab me a cup of coffee and yourself a bite. It’s not the Blue Ribbon, but…”

Her expression told me, somehow, I had permission to share the Rhino Massey revelation with Pat. I gave her a look that said I understood.

I gave her nearest shoulder a squeeze, kissed her cheek, and went off with Pat.

CHAPTER TWO

The stolen van had been hoisted from the waters of the Hudson River on May 12, 1950, the impaled body of getaway driver Leon Basker detached from the steering column and the severed right arm of strongarm thug Norman Shore recovered from under the seat. The rest of Shore’s body was never found, identification made from the fingerprints of the remaining hand. Both Shore’s and Basker’s prints were on file in several states and Washington, D.C.

Nor was the body of the mastermind of the armored car robbery ever found, but upon removal from the wrecked vehicle and after drying out, a blood-soaked coat in the back was identified through papers in a pocket as that of Rhinegold Tyrone Massey, as well as a blood match made through Massey’s doctor, one Ira Isaac of Manhattan, New York.

On that same day in 1950, NYPD Detective Anthony Bell was called to an East Side apartment by a suspicious neighbor who heard strange noises including what might be a gunshot. The neighbor had heard right—the living room of the apartment was a bloody mess and a nine-millimeter bullet, mashed from body penetration, was retrieved. Tissue remains on the slug, as well as blood recovered at the scene, matched the blood samples in the van. The death of Judy Sullivan, the tenant, was considered a fait accompli.

The Hudson’s murky waters never gave up the body of the former showgirl, as was the case with Massey. In his Fifth Avenue quarters, Francisco Banco, a new generation mob boss, could rest easy. There was no one who could testify against him now. Judy Sullivan alone had witnessed him knifing her roommate to death a month earlier, though despite death threats and two attempts on her life, she had been determined to point the finger at Banco.

But now she was dead… wasn’t she? In March 1952, on various charges including the murder of the Sullivan woman’s roommate, Banco was sent on an extended vacation to Sing Sing, from which he never returned, dying of heart disease in 1960. The anonymous witnesses who testified against Banco, behind opaque screens and through voice-changing microphones, were safe from Banco’s retribution… though of course Banco’s mob cronies had long memories.

“And that’s the official story of whatever-happened-to-Rhino-Massey,” Pat said, between sips of black coffee.

I preferred mine with milk and sugar—I’ve always been a softie.