Read Online Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane - Free Book Online

In some ways they seem to look alike sometimes. They work in the same areas in the same profession with the same people, and it gets to them so they adopt common mannerisms and expressions and deep in the back of their eyes is buried a mutual hatred for each other.
    But we had the advantage. We could read them. They could never quite read us. They were the ones who were mixed up, not us.
    I said, “Talk or walk, Rose.”
    “Look, mister…”
    The badge lay in my hand, nicely palmed. “Talk here, walk downtown. Take your pick.”
    She said something under her breath and glanced around her. “Screw you, copper. Not in public.”
    “You name it then.”
    “I got a room at 4430. It’s where I live, not work.”
    “Go ahead. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
    “Second floor in the back.” She swore under her breath, draped her clothes over her arm, picked up her change and walked out, her face still full of disgust.
    I gave her the ten minutes and picked my way down to her brownstone, cut in quickly and shoved the door open. The odor of burned grease and cabbage was heavy on the air, cutting through the mustiness of dirt and decay. The steps were hollowed by the tread of thousands of feet traversing them, creaky with age and littered with odds and ends of callous living. I found her door, knocked once and turned the knob without being asked to come in.
    Rose Shaw sat with her feet up on a table, a beer in her hand, deliberately posed so I could see up her dress past the muscular smoothness of her thighs. I said, “Forget the peep show, Rose,” and swung a chair around and sat down with my arms lying across its back.
    “Swing me, copper. I’m waiting to hear the pitch.”
    “Let’s start with René Mills.”
    She shrugged elaborately and took a pull from the can of beer. “He’s dead. What else?”
    “Why, Rose?”
    “I can think of a hundred reasons. Somebody beat me to it. Kitty too. Hell, she pulled out before René was knocked off. I thought she was dumber’n me, but she saw the signs, she did. She knew what was coming and cut out before she was told to.”
    “Where is she?”
    “Jersey City. She left yesterday. Her old man let her go back to work for him in a factory. She won’t like it.”
    “And how about you?”
    “What the hell do you care?”
    “I don’t”
    “So why the action?” she asked.
    “René Mills,” I repeated.
    “You seem to know the score. Where do I come in? So I’m puttin’ out for cash, man. It ain’t the best, but it’ll do until something better shows.” She lost her hate for a second and stared at the ceiling. “Would you believe it, I used to be big time. Miami, then, and that was only four years ago. I was seventeen and rolling in the long green. Man, what days.”
    “What happened?”
    “I got clapped up and handed it out, and like that I was out. Two trips to the medic and I was okay, but the curse was there, man. So what’s new?”
    “Get back to René Mills.”
    She made a face and finished the beer. “He took me on. Me and Kitty. We was broke, willing and able. The trade was lousy compared to the other, but that’s the breaks. He set up the scene, we split fifty-fifty only we paid all the bills.” She gave another of those resigned shrugs and said, “We made out”
    “Why’d he drop you then?”
    “Went big time… like ha ha. He always had ideas and they got him dead. So this time he tells us to get lost, lays on a hundred bucks apiece when he’s all grins and new shoes with that watch back on his wrist he stole from some guy in a bar and hocked… got eighty bucks for it from Norman at the hockshop, so it was worth plenty.”
    “How, Rose?”
    “Who knows, copper? You think he’d spill? Hell, he booted Noisy Stuccio out of his pad a week before, and you know how close they were. Sure, old René had somethin’ going for him all the way.”
    “And what would you say it was?”
    She reached back over her shoulder, opened the small refrigerator