Don't Look Behind You Read Free Page A

but—”
    “I told you. Jump in. The water’s fine—maybe a little cold this time of year. Anyway, it promises to be interesting. Do I have to tell you how I feel about this kind of thing?”
    “No. I know how you think.” Pat looked at me a long moment, then added, “And I know something else.”
    “Yeah?”
    “That you can be just as bad as the bad guys yourself sometimes.”
    “Sometimes somebody has to,” I said softly. “Sometimes you have to be worse.”
    He was shaking his head again. “You and that damn .45 of yours.”
    “It
has
been a big help, from time to time.”
    I started for the door. Pat’s voice stopped me when my hand was on the knob. “Mike…”
    “Yeah?”
    “High-priced killers don’t usually make mistakes.”
    “So I hear.”
    “Well, our friend Woodcock—what was his mistake?”
    I grinned at him and opened the door. “He was a secret admirer of mine.”
    Pat goggled at me. “An
admirer
?”
    “Yeah… on a professional basis. A real fan.”
    “So then what was his damn mistake, Mike?”
    I shrugged. “He talked too much.”
    And I left him there to chew on that.

CHAPTER TWO
    Hell, when
was
the war?
    How many years ago?
    You lay in the mud waiting to shoot and get shot at, and you wind up shooting a lot of people you never saw or knew and when you did a really good job of killing, you got a medal or two that you could stick in your desk drawer and look at, whenever the scarred tissue in your body told you it was going to rain. They didn’t always get the little shrapnel pieces out in those field hospitals and you never really had time to deal with it after you got home. So when it rained, you remembered, and if you were me, you wondered why it was they didn’t give you medals any more for killing guys who needed it.
    The closest thing, over the years, had been the headlines, but that was a mixed bag. Good for business in its way, but turning you into some kind of cockeyed celebrity. To this paper you were a hero, to that one a villain or maybe even “a psychopathic menace to society.” That one popped into my mind a lot, sometimes making me grin and sometimes not.
    Of course, the power that was the press had been chopped down by the demands of supposedly honestly elected crooks who seemed curiously inspired to curtail the news and events from the biggest city of them all and divert them into preselected channels that didn’t need direction to be cautiously liberal to the point of fear, or consciously radical enough to be dangerous.
    The
World Telegram
was dead, the
Journal-American
gone and the
Herald Tribune
buried, and with them the reporters and columnists, like my pal Hy Gardner, who could have laid on a rebuttal to the two papers that chewed me up without having all the facts. Somebody at the
News
had gotten the word, though, and the story was minimized and presented as an attempted murder and my action as justifiable homicide. Nobody played it up really big. Luckily, the Mid-Eastern thing was still a hot issue in the UN, so there wasn’t enough space to bear down really hard.
    I tossed the papers in the receptacle outside the elevator, then walked down the corridor of the old Hackard Building to my office, and opened the door.
    No day can be all bad. This one blossomed like a rose in sunlight because Velda was bent over filing papers in the lower drawer of a file cabinet with her back toward me, standing with that stiff-kneed dancer’s stance, feet together, and no woman in the world has legs like she has. Those calves and thighs, and the lush globes they led to, came from an era when women were fully-fleshed and the posture she was maintaining would be damn near obscene if it weren’t unintentional. And what this big luscious brunette could do to a simple white silk blouse, a black pencil skirt and nylons was sheer sexual alchemy.
    She heard me, glanced around and stood up quickly, almost having the decency to blush. Almost.
    I said, “Didn’t anybody ever