Read Online Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 13] by Black Alley - Free Book Online Page A

us.”
    Velda tapped the desk phone in front of her. “This one.”
    “Nice,” Pat said. “Who’d do that?”
    I told him, “We know when, we know why, but we don’t know who.”
    “Great. Now explain.” He took another bite of his hard roll.
    “That press conference was a pretty public affair. We only made a few calls and let them spread the word. Let’s face it, me coming back all of a sudden was an interesting news item. Somebody who was at ease thinking I had been knocked off suddenly got the jumps to find out it hadn’t happened. That one had an employee in the bunch that showed up here. Planting a bug would have been a snap during the interview when all eyes were focused on me.”
    “So?”
    “So let me feel important, will you?”
    Pat finished his roll and nodded. “Be my guest.”
    “By the way, how big a bundle would a million bucks in hundreds make?”
    He looked at me like I was kidding, but my eyes said I wasn’t.
    “A big cardboard carton full. Clothes dryer size.”
    “Then a billion would take a thousand cartons like that.”
    Pat seemed puzzled now. “Yeah, why?”
    I chose a smaller number for easier figuring. “Then how big a place would you need to store eighty thousand cartons that size?”
    “Mike,” he said, “getting shot has plain screwed up your mind.”
    “That’s no answer.”
    “How about a great big warehouse, then?”
    “That’s what I figured.” I grinned at him and said, “What would you do with a bundle that big, Pat?”
    “Buy a new car,” he growled, wondering what brought all this on.
    “That is what I thought,” I said, grinning at his answer.
    Velda didn’t get the exchange either and shook her head at us. “What do we do with the bug, Mike?”
    “Can you put it back?”
    “I took it off, didn’t I? Only let’s not use the same phone. This gadget is a miniature transmitter so it will work off any unit, except that it will transmit only what we want somebody to hear.”
    “Good,” I said. “Do it.”
    While she inserted the bug into the phone on the other desk, Pat and I finished the goodies, had a last half cup of coffee and checked the time.
    Downstairs we caught a cab over to Richmond’s funeral parlor, saw DOOLEY neatly lettered in on a mahogany sign with an arrow pointing to the chapel on the left. The quietness that sat on these moneyed morgues was dank. Like a fog. Faces would go by dripping with grief or rigid with stoicism, determined to fight a terrible sorrow. Only the attendants seemed human. They were good at pretending grief or consolation, even when their shorts were too tight. But that was not out of place because somebody had to hold the pieces together.
    I was expecting to find the place empty, but that wasn’t the way it was at all. There must have been two dozen people there. Two were women. They were in a corner together talking softly and one was crying. Not much, but the grief showed. Most of the others were ordinary guys. They could have been workers who came out during their lunch hour or maybe neighbors of old Dooley. Four of them were gathered around a chest-high display table that held a graciously carved urn.
    I knew what that was. Marcos Dooley was in there.
    And the guy looking at me was wishing it was me instead. He was almost as tall as I was and from the way his six-hundred-dollar suit fit you knew he worked out on all the Nautilus equipment and most likely jogged fifty miles a week. He had the good looks of a Sicilian dandy and the composure of a Harvard graduate, but under that high-priced facade he was a street punk named Ponti. The younger .
    I walked over to him. We had never met, but we didn’t need an introduction. I said, “Hello. Come to pay your respects?”
    Under his coat his muscles tightened and his eyes measured me. There was a wary tautness in the way he stood, ready for anything and hoping it would happen, and the sooner the better. He was like an animal, the young male in the prime of life