The Mike Hammer Collection

She came up on bare feet and I didn’t hear her until her breath hissed with the horror of what she saw. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth to stop the scream that started to come, her eyes wide open for long moments.

“Mike . . . who . . .?”

“Our killer, Velda. The Target. The one we were after. That’s Blackie Conley in the backseat there. He almost made it. How close can a guy come?”

“Pretty close, Mr. Hammer. Some of us come all the way.”

I didn’t hear him either! He had come up the side of the hill on sneakered feet and stood there with a gun on us and I felt like the biggest fool in the world! My .45 was back there in the love nest and now we were about to be as dead as the others. It was like being right back at the beginning again.

I said, “Hello, Sonny.”

The Snake. The real snake, as deadly as they come. The only one that had real fangs and knew how to use them. His face had lost the tired look and his eyes were bright with the desirous things he saw in his future. There was nothing stooped about him now, nothing of the old man there. Old, yes, but he wasn’t the type who grew old easily. It had all been a pose, a cute game, and he was the winner.

“You scared me, Mr. Hammer. When you got as far as Malek you really scared me. I was taking my time about coming here because I wasn’t ready yet and then I knew it was time to move. You damn near ruined everything.” What I used to call a cackle was a pose too. He did have a laugh. He thought it was funny.

Velda reached for my arm and I knew she was scared. It was too much too fast all over again and she could only take so much.

“Smart,” he said to me. “You’re a clever bastard. If all I had was the cops to worry about it would have been no trouble, but I had to draw you.” His mouth pulled into a semblance of a grin. “Those nice talks we had. You kept me right up to date. Tell me, did you think I had a nice face?”

“I thought you had more sense, Sonny.”

He dropped the grin then. “Get off it, guy. More sense? For what? You think I was going to spend all my life in the cooler without getting some satisfaction? Mister, that’s where you made your mistake. You should have gone a little further into my case history. I always was a mean one because it paid off. If I had to play pretty-face to make it pay off I could do that too.”

“You won’t make it, Sonny.”

“No? Well, just lose that idea. For thirty years I worked this one out. I had all the time in the world to do it too. With the contacts I had in the can I got enough on the big boys to make them jump my way when I was ready. I put together a mob and now I’ll have to move to get it rolling. You think I won’t live big for what little time I have left? Well, you’re making a mistake when you think that. A lot of planning went into this dodge, kid.”

“You still hate, don’t you?”

Sonny Motley nodded slowly, a smile of pure pleasure forming. “You’re goddamn right. I hated that bastard Torrence and tried to get at him through his kid. Mistake there . . . I thought he loved the kid. I would’ve been doin’ him a favor to rub her out, right?”

“He was trying for her too.”

“I got the picture fast enough. When I knocked him off in his house I thought I’d get the kid just for the fun of it. She fooled me. Where was she, mister?”

I shrugged.

“Hell, it don’t matter none now.” He lifted the gun so I could see down the barrel. “I thought sure you’d get on to me sooner. I pulled a boner, you know that, don’t you?”

I knew it now, all right. When Marv Kania tried to nail me with the cab it was because Sonny had called him from the back room when he faked getting me old clippings of his crime and told him where I was going. When Marv almost got me in my apartment it was because Sonny told him my new address and that I’d be there. I made it easy because I told Sonny both times.

I said, “Marv Kania was holed up in your place, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right, dying every minute, and all he wanted was to get that last crack at you. It was the one thing that kept him alive.”

“It was the thing that killed him too, Sonny.”

“Nobody’ll miss him but me. The kid had guts. He knew nobody could help him, but he stuck the job out.”

“You got the guts too, Sonny?”