The Big Bang

Chapter Fourteen


I FOUND MY THINGS. My hat, my coat, my wallet, my shoes, all piled in what had been Jay Wren's office. There was a couch in that office and I would have liked to stretch out and wait and ride this thing out. But at some point, employees would show up to open the Pigeon for business, and despite my unsteady grasp on reality, I somehow knew the club would open at 10:30 P.M., and realized I needed not to be there.

Apparently I remembered to go in the men's room and wash off the blood spatter, because when I got to Velda's, I didn't have any on my face and not even my clothes. She had just got home from the office and was surprised, and relieved, to see me. But she knew at once something was wrong.

"Mike—what...?"

"I came in a cartoon cab."

"You what?"

"I need a bed. You need to stay with me."

She did. Sometimes sitting like a visitor at a patient's hospital bedside, sometimes curled up next to me with all her clothes on. I would wake now and then, with a start, and see her there in the crack of light from the door she'd left ajar on the hall, and that would settle me.

I managed to sleep, and the dreams were colorful and had Woody Woodpecker and Hitler in them, but otherwise no more surreal than usual. I don't remember telling her I'd been slipped acid-laced sugar cubes, but I must have, because she already knew when I finally rolled myself out of the rack.

I figure it was about twelve hours since I'd been dosed, and felt pretty much my normal self, whatever the hell that was. Velda sat down with me in her breakfast nook, around eight A.M., and we had coffee and I was able to eat some scrambled eggs and toast.

After the meal, I told her what had happened.

"I'm not really sure what went down," I said. "I could have imagined most or all of it, after the LSD kicked in."

We were still at the table in the nook, on our second cups of coffee. She said, "Pretty sure Jesus and Pinky Lee weren't there."

"Don't bet on it."

She frowned. "Mike—what do we do about this? Do we bring Pat in?"

I shook my head. "I left no witnesses and if even half of what I remember really went down, I'd make a full-course meal for Assistant D.A. Traynor."

Her frown deepened. "You were using your .45, though. What about ballistics?"

I patted her hand. My kind of girl. "I changed barrels last month, doll, remember? That's not in the police files. Nothing to match. I'll toss this barrel down a sewer and let the rats ride it as a raft."

That got a laugh out of her, tiny, but a laugh. "With your way of looking at things, Mike, it's no wonder you took a bad trip."

"Not as bad a trip as the ones I left behind."

We decided to go in to the office, and make things look normal. We skipped the coffee and went right to work, and she brought me in some reports from Tiller and the other agencies who'd been covering for me of late, when I remembered to ask, "The Blue kid drop off an envelope for me?"

"Yes." She frowned. "He said you wanted it put in the safe, and I did. Is it important?"

"Yeah."

"That's all I get?"

"Yeah."

She shrugged and was going out when I said, "Bring it here, would you?"

She did, and I had the sealed thing in my hands as she stood there expectantly.

"Shoo," I said.

She smirked, shook her head, and the arcs of shining dark pageboy swung as she turned on her heels, muttering, "Come crying to somebody else, next time somebody slips you a mickey."

I opened the envelope and, when the phone rang, had been sitting there for maybe five minutes, staring at Dr. Harrin's handwritten words to me, which included today's date and the time and pier number for the big shipment's delivery in the form of apparently harmless ceramic molds.

"Michael Hammer," I said.

"The shit hit the fan, kid."

"Hello to you, too, Pat. What shit hit what fan?"

"Looks like Evello clipped the Snowbird's wings, big-time. It's the worst mob bloodbath since St. Valentine's Day."

"No kidding. Capone missed Bugs Moran, though—you saying Wren wasn't there?"

Pat chuckled harshly. "Oh, he was there, all right, Wren, four bodyguards, and that society girl who found out the hard way slumming with scum has its risks."

"When was this?"

"Yesterday afternoon, at that discotheque of Wren's, which was closed at the time. We've reconstructed the action, at least in a preliminary fashion."

"Yeah?"

"Looks like Wren was having a sit-down with Evello and his boys, and Evello turned the tables. Would've taken at least three or four men to do this kind of damage, and nasty customers, at that."

"Takes all kinds to make a world."

"Yeah, but what a world. Anyway, this may make your life easier—we traced those two freaks who tried to hit you and took out Doc Harrin instead, and they were in the Snowbird's flock, all right. So you can safely say that Wren was the source of the attempts on your life, and the Snowbird won't be giving anybody a hard time anymore, except maybe the devil."

Nope, I thought. The devil was on Wren's side—I saw him there, yesterday....

"I appreciate you sharing the lowdown, old buddy," I said. "Anything on the supposed big shipment?"

"There's thinking that the stuff is coming in this week, maybe even today. The T-men are blanketing the harbor."

"That would take a lot of T-men. That's a thousand miles of shoreline and maybe a dozen active ports."

"It's more narrowed down than that, Mike. Agents Radley and Dawson are checking every ship coming in from France—from passenger liners to container carriers. That's still a good number of vessels, but it can be done."

"Just because the Syndicate buys its product in France doesn't mean they shipped from there."

"No. But it's a start. Narrows down the needle hunt from the whole damn farm to a haystack."

I grunted. "Good luck to them."

He laughed in a world-weary way exclusive to longtime cops. "Why do we bother, Mike? So we find and stop the super shipment, what then? There'll be another, and another. You can't stop a vicious circle."

"If a snake is eating its tail, chum, you can still cut it in half."

"Yeah. You ought to sew that on a sampler and hang it in your office."

He didn't know how close he was.





The Port of New York's piers have one thing in common: they stink. All that salt air gets swamped in grease and oil and dead fish and the heady bouquet of workingman body odor. Add to that the cacophony of man over nature, squawking of seagulls and lazy lapping tide drowned out by grinding machinery and cargo pallets slamming to the cement, while the toots of tugboats vainly fight the throaty whistles of steamships. Anybody confusing the New York waterfront for a beach has never seen sand.

The S.S. Paloma out of Marseilles docked at 1:04 P.M. on a chilly afternoon that made its nasty point that summer was over and fall was here, and live with it. Even with the canopy, women held down their skirts and men clamped their hats on, rattling down the gangplank, eight-hundred-some passengers disembarking into the waiting arms of U.S. Customs.

The Customs officers looked a little like porters only with badges on their caps and, in some cases, guns on their hips. This all took place dockside in a big brick open-sided shed, where the officers inspected every bag, looking for all the smuggler's tricks, and they knew a few.

After the passengers, the cargo—fairly limited, as this was a luxury liner not a container carrier—began its unloading process, stevedores swinging down nets of boxed and crated material and dropping them with impressive precision onto the dock. A number of trucks and vans were waiting, but so were the Customs officers, who did not turn anything over until crates had been opened and checked and weighed on a big ungainly scale that looked a little like a medieval torture rig.

This was standard procedure, but what wasn't standard procedure was the assembly off to one side within the brick shed of about a dozen officers in the same caps with badges, only otherwise in denim, the backs of their jackets emblazoned U.S. CUSTOMS SEARCHERS. The denim, I supposed, was for the rough, dirty work of actually having to search ships, including holds and engine rooms. But right now these guys, roughneck-looking for feds, were just milling in smoke-'em-if-you-got-'em mode.

I was milling myself, on the fringes, having moved in close to that shed and the offloading ship, after watching from behind the picket fence where people meeting passengers gathered. Despite all the T-men of various stripes—with something big obviously in the wind, beside the usual dock smells—security was nothing special, as far as getting onto the dock itself was concerned.

That was when I saw him—looking as innocuous as a ceramics mold, Mr. Elmain, the plump little guy whose gray hair had a monk's spot of baldness, wearing an off-white jumpsuit whose back said VILLAGE CERAMICS SHOPPE. Three other guys were with him, in similar jumpsuits, and they didn't look so innocuous—they might have been hoods. Or they might have been teamsters. A rose by any other thorn.

"Mr. Hammer?"

I turned and saw Agent Radley, slender, flint-eyed, and typically impeccable in yet another gray suit, with his dark blue tie flapping like a flag in the breeze. Dawson wasn't with him—probably covering another pier.

"Agent Radley. Kind of a chilly one."

He nodded, skipping the small talk. "What are you doing here?"

"Thought I might find you. Captain Chambers said you fellas were checking every ship in from Marseilles this week. Kind of tedious work."

"We're used to it. How can I help you?"

From where I stood, I could see a Customs officer walking Mr. Elmain toward the open-walled brick shed, glancing at the bill of lading, and affixing it to a clipboard.

Radley was frowning at me. "Mr. Hammer? Why are you here?"

I cleared my throat. "I wanted you to know I got a package from Dr. Harrin."

His eyes and nostrils flared. "What kind of package, Mr. Hammer?"

Now the Customs officer was prying open the lid of a wooden crate while Mr. Elmain looked on with serene innocence. The officer stared in at the carefully stacked and excelsior-packed ceramic molds, each of which was two facing pieces strapped or rubber-banded together, varying in size and shape from as big as a medium pizza to as small as a transistor radio. The officer slipped the rubber band off one about the size of a football, only square, and I was pretty sure that mold was of a standing Santa with a bag of goodies over his shoulder.

Christmas underwrites the rest of our year, Shirley Vought had said.

"Mr. Hammer—what kind of package?"

"Oh, the doc sent me a framed saying—maybe you're aware, he had a bunch of those on his office walls, over at Dorchester Medical College?"

"Actually, no. Why? Is it significant?"

"I don't know. You tell me. It says, 'At the darkest moment comes the light.'"

He shrugged, shook his head. "No. That has no special significance, as far as I can tell."

The Customs officer was having Elmain sign some papers on the clipboard.

Radley sighed, and he looked ten years older than when I'd met him, just days ago.

"I can't tell you how frustrating this case has been, Mr. Hammer. I really hoped that perhaps Dr. Harrin had shared something with you that could have made a difference here. This could be the biggest quantity of heroin ever to hit the streets of this city."

I was watching Elmain as he supervised his three burly assistants while they loaded eight wooden crates about the size of squat coffins, into the back of the Village Ceramics Shoppe van. I wondered if this was the vehicle my pal Russell Frazer used to make his deliveries.

Radley was saying in extreme frustration, "And if this is, as our intelligence indicates, pure, uncut stuff, in the hundreds of pounds? Well, it will hit with incredible impact, the biggest bang we've ever heard or seen. We'll have seen nothing of this magnitude before—it will fund and fuel the Syndicate's expansion into worldwide narcotics trafficking."

If the friends and families of the thousands who died are so consumed by rage for those who sold their loved ones this poisoned poison, they will rise up as one, and they will take down the Mafia.

"Mr. Hammer, do you have any conception of the death, the despair, the destruction that all of this venom would bring upon our streets?"

Elmain was at the wheel as the van rolled away from the pier.

"I can imagine," I said.


* * *





ABOUT THE AUTHORS


Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.

Spillane (1918—2006) was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, and two television series; numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich's seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), with Spillane himself playing Hammer.

Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America "Shamus" nominations, winning twice. His graphic novel Road to Perdition became the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. An independent filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced. Other credits include the New York Times bestsellers Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster.

Both Spillane and Collins are recipients of the Eye, the Private Eye Writers life achievement award.