[Mike Hammer 03] - Vengeance Is Mine Read Free Page B

body of Chester Wheeler. When he was alive he was a pretty nice guy, a regular family man. All the grisly details are in the paper there and you can start from that. Meanwhile, I’ll be around breaking ground for you and you’ll spot my tracks here and there. You’ll find some signed blank checks in the drawer for your expense account.”
    I filled the sherry glass up again and drained it in one gulp. It was a beautiful day, a real dilly. My face cracked into a smile that was followed by a short rumble of pleasure.
    Once more Velda said, “It isn’t funny, Mike.”
    I lit another cigarette and pushed my hat back on my head. “You’ll never know how real funny it actually is, kid. You see, only one bullet killed Chester Wheeler. I always carry six in the clip and when Pat emptied it out there were only four of them.”
    Velda was watching me with the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. There wasn’t any kitten-softness about her now. She was big and she was lovely, with the kind of curves that made you want to turn around and have another look. The lush fullness of her lips had tightened into the faintest kind of snarl and her eyes were the carnivorous eyes you could expect to see in the jungle watching you from behind a clump of bushes.
    I said it slowly. “If you had that gun in your hand pointed at somebody’s belly, could you pull the trigger and stand ready to pull it again if you had to?”
    She pulled her tongue back and let her teeth close together. “I wouldn’t have to pull it twice. Not now I wouldn’t.”
    She was watching me as I walked across the office. I looked over my shoulder and waved so-long, then closed the door fast. She still hadn’t bothered to pull her dress back down, and like I said, I wasn’t taking any chances.
    Someday she wasn’t going to get so smart with me.
    Or maybe she would.

Chapter 2
    THE PAPERS WERE FULL of it that night. The tabloids had me splashed all over the front pages and part of the middle section. The same guys that hung on my tail when they had wanted a story took me apart at the seams in their columns. Only one bothered to be sentimental about it. He wrote me an epitaph. In rhyme. The D.A. was probably laughing his head off.
    In another hour he’d be crying in his beer, the jerk.
    I finished off an early supper and stacked the dishes in the sink. They could wait. For fifteen minutes I steamed under a shower until my skin turned pink, then suffered under a cold spray for a few seconds before I stepped out and let a puddle spread around my feet. When I finished shaving I climbed into a freshly pressed suit and transferred a few hundred bucks from the top drawer to my wallet.
    I took a look in the mirror and snorted. I could have been a man of distinction except for my face and the loose space in my jacket that was supposed to fit around a rod. That at least I could fix. I strapped on a mighty empty holster to fill out the space under my arm and felt better about it. I looked in the mirror again and grimaced. It was a hell of a shame that I wasn’t handsome.
    Last night was a vague shadow with only a few bright spots, but before I started to backtrack there was something I wanted to do. It was just past seven o’clock when I found a parking place near the hotel that had caused all the trouble. It was one of those old-fashioned places that catered to even older-fashioned people and no fooling around. Single girls couldn’t even register there unless there were over eighty. Before I went in I snapped the back off my watch, pushed out the works and dropped it in my shirt pocket.
    The desk clerk wasn’t glad to see me. His hand started for the telephone, stopped, then descended on the desk bell three times, loud and clear. When a burly-shouldered individual who kept the lobby free of loiterers appeared the clerk looked a little better. At least his shaking stopped.
    There wasn’t any need to identify myself. “I lost the works out of my watch last