Read Online The Consummata by Max Allan Collins, Mickey Spillane - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Max Allan Collins, Mickey Spillane
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me?”
“Not much. You have it all going for you, sugar. But you need to know something...”
“You don’t pay.”
“Bingo.”
The living wet dream squirmed, looking at Gaita. “The man has confidence,” she remarked casually.
“Didn’t mean to hit a nerve,” I said.
“Oh, you didn’t.”
Gaita snapped her fingers abruptly at both of us. “Please! Now is not the time for such nonsense.” To the blonde, she asked, “You are sure about what you must do?”
Tami nodded. “Mr. Boyer is drunk again, and I’m little Tessie, come to drag him out of the house of ill repute.”
“Always liked that phrase,” I said with a half a smile.
The lovely whore, dressed to pass as a rich man’s wife, continued: “The chauffeur downstairs will see it all, discreetly turn away, and have something to talk about at the next card game among Mr. Boyer’s male staff.”
Gaita, doggedly serious, said to the girl, “And then?”
“And then delivery to the Amherst Hotel, where our friend gives Mr. Boyer’s clothes back to me, while I return to home base in time to get the real Boyer back into his clothes, and smuggle the old boy out...and hope nobody notices the time discrepancy.”
I said, “Suppose we get stopped along the way?”
“Our tough luck,” Tami told me. “You’ll have to deal with it.”
“I will,” I said.
Gaita checked her watch. “It is eleven o’clock. You leave now.”
Time had worked in my favor.
The local police had long since vanished back to their regular assignments, and Walter Crowley’s men had thinned down to a few spot checkers who were still working areas where they thought I might be hiding.
I grinned to myself when I thought of Crowley sitting someplace, fuming. He’d have that receipt for my body, dead or alive, tucked away in his wallet, and every minute I was on the loose increased my chances of being taken back dead. Much as he might relish delivering me without a pulse, he would surely much prefer to deliver me breathing, and with the possibility of finding that forty mil.
Hell, if I had any sense of humor at all, I would sendCrowley a letter telling him just where that pile of dough was, or anyway where the guy who put it there said it was. According to the raider who had framed this Morgan, the forty mil was right where my namesake, Sir Henry Morgan the Pirate, put his treasure.
Well, buddy , I told Crowley in my head, lots of luck—just try and find it.
Everybody else had, and failed. Old Morgan operated out of Cuban waters with a preference for the island of Santa Catalina, and all the reference works were easily accessible in the public library, or in certain archives for more rarified researchers, with plenty of folklore and rumors to keep treasure hunters hopping every year.
But on the Nuevo Cadiz mission, Morgan the Raider had been raided. One of the five men who had made up my crew in the war—when we took down those two armored cars and created the template for the money-truck heist—had been “vacationing” on that island, trying to make a deal with the government for laundering the loot. And I had turned up unexpectedly in his midst.
He was dead now, my old friend, his head blasted apart like a melon by my .45 slug, and any further details about exactly where the forty mil was stashed had gone away in a spray of gore.
Maybe my old friend had found one of Morgan’s places of safekeeping. One thing, that hiding place—whether in a cave or some old building or the remnants thereof—had most certainly been found after all these years, considering how many treasure hunters had gone looking. Surely it had beenempty when my pal found it. Somebody would have been there long before him....
And once my pal stowed the forty mil there, anybody searching for the first Morgan’s treasure might have already have stumbled onto Morgan the Raider’s treasure—the treasure that could clear my name.
Meaning that place of safekeeping might be empty again.
“Not much. You have it all going for you, sugar. But you need to know something...”
“You don’t pay.”
“Bingo.”
The living wet dream squirmed, looking at Gaita. “The man has confidence,” she remarked casually.
“Didn’t mean to hit a nerve,” I said.
“Oh, you didn’t.”
Gaita snapped her fingers abruptly at both of us. “Please! Now is not the time for such nonsense.” To the blonde, she asked, “You are sure about what you must do?”
Tami nodded. “Mr. Boyer is drunk again, and I’m little Tessie, come to drag him out of the house of ill repute.”
“Always liked that phrase,” I said with a half a smile.
The lovely whore, dressed to pass as a rich man’s wife, continued: “The chauffeur downstairs will see it all, discreetly turn away, and have something to talk about at the next card game among Mr. Boyer’s male staff.”
Gaita, doggedly serious, said to the girl, “And then?”
“And then delivery to the Amherst Hotel, where our friend gives Mr. Boyer’s clothes back to me, while I return to home base in time to get the real Boyer back into his clothes, and smuggle the old boy out...and hope nobody notices the time discrepancy.”
I said, “Suppose we get stopped along the way?”
“Our tough luck,” Tami told me. “You’ll have to deal with it.”
“I will,” I said.
Gaita checked her watch. “It is eleven o’clock. You leave now.”
Time had worked in my favor.
The local police had long since vanished back to their regular assignments, and Walter Crowley’s men had thinned down to a few spot checkers who were still working areas where they thought I might be hiding.
I grinned to myself when I thought of Crowley sitting someplace, fuming. He’d have that receipt for my body, dead or alive, tucked away in his wallet, and every minute I was on the loose increased my chances of being taken back dead. Much as he might relish delivering me without a pulse, he would surely much prefer to deliver me breathing, and with the possibility of finding that forty mil.
Hell, if I had any sense of humor at all, I would sendCrowley a letter telling him just where that pile of dough was, or anyway where the guy who put it there said it was. According to the raider who had framed this Morgan, the forty mil was right where my namesake, Sir Henry Morgan the Pirate, put his treasure.
Well, buddy , I told Crowley in my head, lots of luck—just try and find it.
Everybody else had, and failed. Old Morgan operated out of Cuban waters with a preference for the island of Santa Catalina, and all the reference works were easily accessible in the public library, or in certain archives for more rarified researchers, with plenty of folklore and rumors to keep treasure hunters hopping every year.
But on the Nuevo Cadiz mission, Morgan the Raider had been raided. One of the five men who had made up my crew in the war—when we took down those two armored cars and created the template for the money-truck heist—had been “vacationing” on that island, trying to make a deal with the government for laundering the loot. And I had turned up unexpectedly in his midst.
He was dead now, my old friend, his head blasted apart like a melon by my .45 slug, and any further details about exactly where the forty mil was stashed had gone away in a spray of gore.
Maybe my old friend had found one of Morgan’s places of safekeeping. One thing, that hiding place—whether in a cave or some old building or the remnants thereof—had most certainly been found after all these years, considering how many treasure hunters had gone looking. Surely it had beenempty when my pal found it. Somebody would have been there long before him....
And once my pal stowed the forty mil there, anybody searching for the first Morgan’s treasure might have already have stumbled onto Morgan the Raider’s treasure—the treasure that could clear my name.
Meaning that place of safekeeping might be empty again.
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