The Big Bang

Chapter Thirteen


I CAME AWAKE SLOWLY, the first sensation one of dizziness, then a grogginess quickly took over, only to be cut by a sudden headache—nothing blinding or pounding, just a dull steady ache.

I was in my shirt with my tie loosened, my shoulder holster empty of course, and they'd left me my pants but taken my shoes. I'd been plopped down in a comfortable chair, an overstuffed easy chair.

Across from me was Jay Wren, smiling amiably, seated in his own comfy but mismatching chair. We were in an area underneath a balcony at the Pigeon, his trendsetting discotheque, where low-slung square plastic-topped tables were surrounded by purposely dissimilar seating straight out of secondhand shops.

The shabbiness was supposed to be hip or clever or something, and maybe that worked in the dark. But the lights were up in the Pigeon, in off hours—this was presumably still the afternoon, I hadn't been out that long—and, like any nightclub, the reconverted warehouse looked pretty seedy, the Day-Glo paint spatters on the brick walls un-enhanced by black light and looking like kindergartners had done the decor.

The regular seating beyond, surrounding the dance floor, had its chairs up on tabletops, and the functional platform of the stage revealed itself as what you might see in a high school gymnasium set up for a concert. The smell of disinfectant mingled with the spilled beer and stale smoke common to any club, between closing and opening hours, and the thatch-hatted tiki-hut bar, designed for serving on all sides, looked pretty shabby by day.

Not that the illumination was intense. The house lights were meager, and the windows were high up and blacked out. The dimness preserved a fraction of the club's nighttime appeal, though the size of the chamber, with its two facing balconies and high ceiling, was the only aspect of the club that was more impressive after hours.

The Snowbird again wore a mod-cut suit, this one lime green, and a white shirt including the trademark lacy collar and cuffs. With his long blond hair and golden tan, he looked like a Breck Girl who'd had a hard life. By male standards, he was almost handsome, though like the club, better lighting did not improve him, his cheeks revealing pockmarks and stressing the artificiality of his hair color.

His sunglasses were the same lime green as the suit and his smile was, as before, generously wide and with more teeth than absolutely necessary. Maybe I could do something about that.

I moved my arms, my hands.

He waved a cigarillo like a magic wand, and the smile shifted sideways.

"No, Mr. Hammer," he said, in that light yet still phony British accent. "You are not bound. You are our guest, not our prisoner. But I do insist you maintain a certain ... decorum."

His eyes lifted to right and left, and I glanced behind me. I'd been too groggy to even sense their presence, but standing over my shoulders were two big boys, one a black guy with a shaved skull in a black muscle shirt and black chinos, the other a shovel-jawed hardcase with a Marine haircut, a pale yellow T-shirt, and camouflage trousers. Together they weighed maybe four hundred fifty pounds, ten of it fat.

I glanced at the gyrene-type hardcase and said, "Almost didn't see you there, pal. In those pantaloons, you damn near disappear."

He ignored that, like I was a tourist and he was a Buckingham Palace guard.

"I do apologize," Wren said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, "for the rude invitation."

"You mean the kidnapping?"

He fluttered a dismissive hand. "We needed to talk, and I had reason to believe you might harbor ill feelings toward me."

I shrugged, settled back in the comfy chair. "Why, because you sent Russell Frazer to stab me? Or hired those St. Louis clowns to ambush me at home, thinking I'd blame Evello if I squirmed out of it? Maybe you mean last night, when you sent those freaks around to splatter me, and got Doc Harrin instead."

The cigarillo slanted out of his thin lips, which when the teeth weren't showing formed a wide, never-healing cut in his tanned face. "I won't deny it. If we're going to have an honest conversation, Mr. Hammer, I have to be frank with you. Ah... here's someone you know."

Coming over from the tiki bar, with a tray, was a good-looking blonde in tight black slacks and a frilly white blouse that might have been the stuff Wren's cuffs and collars were cut from. She was halfway over before I realized it was Shirley Vought.

On the tray, she carried several coffee cups, a tiny pitcher of cream, a little dish of cubed sugar, and a gleaming silver coffee pot.

"Hi, Mike," she said.

"Hiya."

She was pouring coffee for Wren. "Not surprised to see me?"

"Nope."

She poured me some, smiled faintly. "Why not? What gave me away?"

"The surveillance photos of you going down on Jaybird here." I made a clicking sound in one cheek. "I'm a trained detective—give me something like that, and I can put two and two together."

That threw her a little. But she managed, "You take cream and sugar, don't you?"

"I'll doctor it myself, thanks."

She put the stuff on the table, then pulled up her own comfy chair and joined us. Wren was already drinking from his cup, so the java wasn't spiked.

I took a couple sugars and poured in some cream and said, "Ain't we a cozy bunch? So, Mr. Wren—why isn't one of us dead by now? What do we have to talk about?"

He sipped coffee, then set his cup down on the plastic tabletop, where an ashtray held his cigarillo, its smoke swirling upward in almost a question mark. "This entire affair, Mr. Hammer, is unfortunate. A study in false assumptions on my part and yours. Strictly a comedy of errors."

"You might want to get more specific than that."

He shrugged and his long blond hair bounced off his shoulders—that hair looked better on Veronica Lake. "When you took an interest in the little incident, involving that messenger boy—including getting next to Dr. Harrin—well, I jumped to some ... unfortunate conclusions."

"I didn't get next to Harrin. I just talked to him one afternoon."

He sighed cigarillo smoke. "Yes, well, you have a rather notorious reputation, Mr. Hammer. And you have a history with the Evello Family, with whom I've frequently done business. I thought you had taken it upon yourself to cause me problems. So I took preventative measures."

"You had Frazer try to shiv me."

He raised both hands in surrender. "As I say, I jumped to conclusions, and I overreacted. And things began to spiral out of control."

"You mean, you kept trying to have me killed."

His smile was embarrassed. "I know ... I know. It does call my judgment into question."

What the hell could I say to that?

He leaned forward, his expression laughably earnest. "Mr. Hammer, you stumbled into my business at a most inopportune moment, and I reacted badly. What I am trying to do is see if we can negotiate a truce, and perhaps a peace. I believe we may have mutual interests."

"This I gotta hear."

"As I said, you have long been a thorn in the side of the Evello Family, and they have caused you a certain amount of grief over the years, themselves. Weren't you until recently in Florida, recuperating from one such attack?"

"Yeah. We must have been down there at the same time." I grinned at Shirley, whose big brown eyes couldn't seem to meet mine. "Too bad we couldn't have got together, and started our friendship sooner."

Forcing herself, Shirley looked at me. "Mike, you don't understand—this situation is a delicate one, and very dangerous."

"I kind of think I do understand." I grinned some more, but nastier. "It's delicate, because you're the Snowbird here's girlfriend, and you work for Mr. Elmain, who is in Evello's pocket. That makes you a kind of spy, right? And as for dangerous, I'm going to cite the corpses piling up, as evidence."

She was avoiding my gaze again, pouring herself some coffee. She stirred cream in.

"Mr. Hammer," Wren said, "we are at the birth of a new era, a new golden age of entertainment. My club here is a harbinger of things to come. The pharmaceuticals I dispense, without a prescription I grant you, are merely one wing of that entertainment."

I gaped at him. "Heroin is entertainment?"

He winced, as if I shouldn't bring up such unpleasantness. "That's at the far extreme of things, and I engage in that business only because there's a market, a market well established before I came onto the scene. But the world of drugs is changing—marijuana is already commonplace among the young, and cocaine is a favorite among well-moneyed grownups."

I turned to Shirley. "That's where you fit in, isn't it, baby? You didn't get your inheritance, did you? But you still have friends among the jet set, and you became Evello's connection to that market, and now the Snowbird's. Right?"

She gave Wren a nervous glance, but he only smiled and raised a palm in stop fashion. "As I've gathered, Mr. Hammer, you are very astute. You understand. As a small businessman yourself, and man of unconventional tastes, you grasp that I am merely another capitalist, serving willing, even eager customers. After all, one cannot legislate morality."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He frowned, waved as if to a departing child. "I'm not talking thievery or murder. I'm talking about adultery, and sex acts considered perverse by some, and obviously recreational drugs—hallucinogens are already the rage on college campuses—and such old standbys as gambling and prostitution."

"You're saying gambling and prostitution aren't illegal? What planet do you live on?"

"I'm a neighborhood boy, Mr. Hammer, raised in and around the Village—and my earliest memories are of whores, junkies, and queers ... don't misunderstand, many of my best friends and certainly business associates fall into one or more of those unflattering categories ... and among those early memories are the tourists and New Yorkers from beyond the neighborhood, who came to the Village for some naughty good fun."

I suppose I could have asked how a neighborhood kid got the British accent, but I just didn't give a shit.

"No, Mr. Hammer, I'm saying making things illegal that people want and crave does no one any good, not individuals or society at large. It doesn't stop a single customer from wanting to buy, and in fact creates a nicely wicked atmosphere in which customers are not only willing to buy forbidden goods, but to pay premium prices."

"Yeah, all right. I get that."

"You do, but the Evellos of the world do not. They are locked in Old World ways, antiquated thinking. It will take a visionary to take full advantage of the opportunities of the new freedom."

"And you're the guy. You're the visionary."

"With no false modesty, I would have to say yes." He sat forward. "I am making alliances that the old Mafia families, with their inbreeding and prejudice, could never conceive, much less execute. I have business associations overseas that will transform conventional drug trafficking—forget France, Mr. Hammer. How about South America? What about Vietnam? New sources, rich sources, new alliances, lasting alliances."

"I don't know. I never was much of a United Nations guy myself."

"Diplomacy has its place." He gestured with an open hand, a fey gesture considering the lacy cuff. "If you and I can sit down, as representatives of our warring nations, and come to terms of peace ... we can do business together."

"What can I do for you?"

"I need a chief of security. I need a man who understands law enforcement but who has no hesitation to do whatever is necessary to make a point, or gain an advantage. I need someone terrible. Someone ruthless. I need you, Mr. Hammer."

While all this talk was going on, I'd been thinking about how I was going to make my exit. The coffee pot was both metal and filled with steaming liquid, so that alone could incapacitate the muscle-bound Frick and Frack behind me. Shirley wasn't armed, except for her natural thirty-eights, and they'd already done all the damage to me they were going to. And I didn't think Wren was even armed, certainly the tight cut of his suit didn't allow for it, and that was when Shirley's face started melting.

I tried to blink it away, and looked toward Wren and he was melting, too, like one of those Dali clocks, and not just his face but all of him, mod suit, lace cuffs and all, and the plastic table between us was pulsing, as if taking breaths. I tried to stand, but the floor was rubbery, and before I could flop back down in the chair, hands were gripping me, and pulling me away from there, dragging me bodily, and my feet and legs were as long as a stilt-walking man's, but useless. The guys who were hauling me were tall and then short and then tall again, as they towed me through those tables with the chairs on top, the silver legs wiggling like Busby Berkeley gals on their backs, and for the big finish, the inside of my head exploded, splintering into a thousand multicolored fragments.

Someone said, "Hit the lights. Sound system, too. And get the projector started."

I was shoved into a hard chair and it, at least, felt solid under me. The hands on my arms turned into tentacles, tight, clutching, only they weren't tentacles but ropes, clothesline I think, and for a while the room, the world, settled down, and I knew who I was and where I was—roped into a chair on the dance floor of the discotheque.

"Settle down, Mr. Hammer," Wren said. His coat was open now and I could see my .45 stuffed in his waistband. Had it been there all along? Was it there at all?

"What the hell..."

The black muscle man and the maybe Marine came from behind me and fell in on either side of Wren—they both had guns stuck in their waistbands, too, the black guy a .38 revolver, the one in camouflage trousers a nine millimeter. From somewhere on the sidelines, two more bodyguard types fell in with Wren, one on either side—a big Oriental guy with a Fu Manchu beard and a red shirt and brown chinos, sporting an automatic of some kind in a shoulder rig; and a short, stocky character with shoulder-length brown hair, a yellow and orange and green geometric shirt and green bell-bottoms, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.

"It's called LSD," Wren was saying. "Lysergic acid diethylamide. Maybe you've heard of it? Very big on campus."

"You... you drank the coffee, too.... And the bitch had the cream. ..."

"But you dropped the sugar cubes, Mr. Hammer. Miss Vought told me when you took her to dinner how the big tough guy took sugar with his coffee."

"You're dead."

"No, Mr. Hammer. That's just another hallucination of yours. Now, we need to get to work. The cocktail I gave you is unpredictable."

"Cock ... tail?"

"I'm not Dr. Harrin. I don't resort to simple sodium pentothal, although that's in the mix, along with horse tranquilizer and of course the dose of acid. I know a good deal more than Harrin did about narcotics—he was only a doctor, but I'm an artist, although ironically not one who partakes of my own art."

"You're dead."

"You're repeating yourself, but that's to be expected. We don't have a lot of time before you go-go-go on your trip ... that's what they call it, Mr. Hammer, a trip, which you'll take inside your mind, and from which you will probably recover, despite the strength of the dose."

"What ... what was all that bullshit...?"

"Over there, at the table? Not bullshit. It's quite a sincere offer. I think you're a man of considerable talent, and as close to a violent psychopath as one can be and still make recruiting worthwhile—I feel you're socialized to a workable degree."

"F*ck you!"

"Well, there are rough edges we'll have to polish off. But for now, as the drugs begin their magic, you should feel compelled to answer my questions."

He wasn't melting. The walls weren't pulsing, and I was getting centered. Maybe I had hold of it.

Then the lights went down and the flashing orange and purple lights kicked in, and above me the mirrored ballroom ball was spinning and catching those lights and sending them everywhere, like that splintering multicolored effect inside my head. Music blared from the sound system, a raucous soul number with few words that could be discerned, but "Shotgun!" was one of them. That crazy stitched-together film was flickering on the brick wall over the stage, just above and in back of Wren and his men, those weird images of flowers and rotting carcasses and Buster Keaton and Guadalcanal and Woody Woodpecker and Lana Turner and Adolf Hitler and fashion models and Venus de Milo and Shirley moved in front of me, blocking Wren, and she leaned down and her voice was kind.

"Tell him what he wants to know, Mike. He won't hurt you if you cooperate. Tell him what he wants to know, and we can be together in this. You and I can be together again. The Snowbird has a lot of girls, and boys, too, and he won't mind ... he won't mind...."

It was a nice little speech but the jarring thing was that halfway through she seemed to turn into Velda, when the orange light hit her, and then back to herself on the purple, and then Velda, then Shirley, but the voice for both was slow and slurry like a 45 rpm record on 33⅓

She moved away and Wren stepped forward. If my hands had been free, I could have grabbed his throat, or that .45 from his waistband. But my hands weren't free, they were roped behind me.

"Mr. Hammer, I have reason to believe Dr. Harrin was the middleman on the super shipment, and I suspect he was planning to hijack it, perhaps even turn it over to the feds. His son Davy was one of my people, and died of an overdose, as maybe you know ... and I became suspicious of Harrin's solicitude, although he seems to have fooled that idiot Evello entirely."

I heard every word, but this time speeded up, the 33⅓ on 45, and his face seemed distorted, like putty that was stretching itself. And the gunmen behind him, two on either side, had disappeared to be replaced by Jesus and Satan on the one side, and Milton Berle and Pinky Lee on the other. But they all still had guns....

"Did Dr. Harrin tell you anything about the shipment, Mr. Hammer?"

He had made a mistake telling me about the LSD, because I knew, for now I knew anyway, that these distorted sights and sounds were hallucinations, they were not real, I did not need to be frightened, though the reality behind them remained deadly. Jesus and Satan and Uncle Miltie and Yoo-Hoo It's Me My Name Is Pinky Lee all had guns and would kill my ass and it would not be a TV channel I could change or a dream I would wake up from.

So I told him what he wanted to hear: "Yes. He told me. The doctor told me."

The bizarre sights and sounds could be closed out by shutting my eyes, though I saw intense colors in strange patterns, like an abstract painting that moved and wiggled and slithered across the inside of my eyelids, but even so I could still hold on to some sense of sanity, some sense of me, and I knew something that Wren did not.

I knew that I always carried a safety-razor blade inserted in a slit in my belt for just such occasions. I'd been tied with my hands behind my back before, and more than once, but after the first time, I said never again, and ever since carried that tiny blade. But I had to hold on to my marbles long enough to get that blade out and start working on the ropes....

"What do you know about the shipment?" Wren spoke softly and yet his voice seemed to echo throughout the old warehouse.

I hoped there was nobody I didn't know about behind me, no one who could see what I was up to. It was a delicate process cold sober, getting the blade out of its little hiding place, but I managed it, though I was hammered on a hallucinatory cocktail and the world was going crazy all around me and if I dropped that blade, I was finished, because I probably would spill what I knew and this f*cker would kill me, that bullshit about working for or with him was bullshit, and thank God my hands were steady and I could somehow focus and I did not drop the blade and the rope was nice and soft.

"I know the date," I said.

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

"What time?"

"One o'clock."

"What pier?"

My hands were loose and I brought that safety blade around in a vicious swing that sliced the air and then sliced Wren, too, across the cheek, opening a long red gleaming cut, and he backpedaled, screaming, fingers on his face, but he was close enough for me to grab my .45 from his belt, though the action toppled me down on my side, onto the dance floor, chair and all, because my ankles were still tied to its legs.

I fired blindly toward Satan who became the black guy again and he had his rod halfway out of his pants when the .45 slug angled through his open yelling mouth and up through the roof of his bald head, bursting it in bloody chunks like a target-range melon. Pinky Lee turned back into the stocky guy, who was pointing that sawed-off at me, his geometric shirt shifting and changing. Shirley wasn't Velda at the moment, just Shirley, standing frozen in terror, and from my fallen, chair-bound position, I managed to spin on the slick dance floor in such a way that my legs came around and caught her and she fell into the shotgun blast, which took her head off her shoulders and some of her shoulders, too. What was left of her flopped onto the floor and twitched like a dancer who'd slipped but just kept frugging, even as the soul singer's voice shouted, " Shot-guuun!" from high speakers.

Blood-spattered, still tied to the damn chair, I got onto my back and spread my feet apart as far as the ropes would allow, making them taut, and shot the ropes apart with the .45. Uncle Miltie, Pinky Lee, and Jesus had gone scrambling back toward the tables under a balcony overhang, and Wren had disappeared, I didn't know to where, but I somehow got the ropes and the now-broken chair off me without anybody killing me, and I stayed low as I hustled for the tiki bar. With no shoes on, I sort of skated over the dance floor, but picked up speed on the carpet under the tables with the stacked chairs, whose legs weren't dancing right now, then I dove over the counter and landed on the floor back there, breathing hard.

You're doing fine, I told myself. You're doing fine. But who are you? What was my name? What was my f*cking name?

But then the floor began to move—it was rippling, it was breathing, and I looked up and saw a thatched roof and I was in that island village again, hiding in that hut with the steaming jungle and Christ knew how many Japs out there, and I could hear the mocking cries of the birds up in those trees with their bladelike leaves and the rough bark and Christ it was hot, steaming hot, and when the Jap leaned through the window, I screamed at him, a scream as shrill as any jungle bird, but he was a cartoon Jap, you're a sap Mr. Jap in the Popeye cartoons, and I stopped screaming and started laughing as I put a .45 slug in his eye, and when he flopped over the counter, he was the Oriental guy with the Fu Manchu mustache, but he still had his goddamn eye shot out.

Mike Hammer. I'm Mike Hammer.

I got to my feet but stayed in a crouch, and went out through the bartender access and moved under the balcony, opposite where I'd sat for that friendly cup of coffee with the Snowbird. Music was blaring, the Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction," even an old Stan Kenton man like me knew that song, and I was going to get me some satisfaction, all right. I was going to hold on to my marbles and stay focused, even as the Day-Glo colors on the wall pulsed, even as my own movement made rainbow trails, like I was writing my own name in the air with my every motion.

I knew where I was headed. Unless there had been reinforcements, there were three of them left: Wren, Jesus the Marine, and Pinky Lee the stocky shit with the shotgun. I ignored the throbbing wall I moved along, and I stayed very low when I came out at the edge of the dance floor near the steps up onto the platform stage. That weird movie was still flickering and I tried to resist the images, rotting dog, Vogue cover girl, and stormed up those steps and hopped up into the suspended Plexiglas Go-Go Girl booth.

"There he is!" somebody shouted.

Wren was out there in the middle of the dance floor, pointing with a gun in his lacy-cuffed hand, only he was a white bird now except for that hand, a snowbird or a pigeon, but an armed one. He fired at me, but the slug whanged off the Plexiglas. Out from under the balcony at stage right came the Marine, on the run, shooting, and I reached around the side of my three-sided Plexiglas shield and fired at his head but caught him in the throat instead, but that did it, sent him down in a gurgling dance to join the sprawled headless girl who no longer heard the beat.

The guy with the shotgun had made it onto the stage, without my seeing it, and he was getting in close, because with that sawed-off he needed to get in close, and I used all my momentum to swing the cage, and it caught him in the chest and sharply swung up the shotgun, which went off, sheering off the front of his face and leaving him a ghastly wet mask and still alive enough to scream until I leaned out and shattered his skull with a .45 slug and put him out of his misery.

But I lost my balance taking that shot, and dumped myself onto the stage floor, a slug slamming into the bass drum just behind me.

Wren was still out there, in the middle of the dance floor, not a bird but a man now, having taken aim and missed. A railing across the front of the stage blocked my shot at him, and I couldn't risk standing and presenting an easy target, so I fired twice, up at where the mirrored ball was attached to the ceiling, and fired again and finally the thing came down, fast as gravity, and shatter-slammed into the dance floor, not right on top of him, but close and sending shards of glass flying.

I had only one slug left and no clip, so I was counting on that to be the distraction I needed to give me my shot. Then I was on my feet, with the .45 poised to shoot, when I saw him standing with arms outstretched, the revolver limp in his right hand. Then he let the gun slip to the floor and he staggered a step and raised his hand to his neck where the jagged shard of glass was embedded, catching the flashing lights to wink at him and me and no one else, because the rest of them were dead.

When he jerked it from his throat, the blood geysered in a perfect arc that painted a distant tabletop a colorful shimmering red that made a startling psychedelic effect when the pulsing orange and purple lights hit it.

Unless I was just seeing things.