Baby, It’s Murder

Chapter One

They were backed up against a fence at the dead-end of a Greenwich Village brick alley, three over-age hippies, one Black and the other two White, in thrift-store garb that would have been perfect if this were Halloween, their breaths visible clouds of fear in the gray chill of this late March afternoon.

With a back-up team coming in on the other side of the fence, the stupid ofay bastard in a fringed buckskin jacket and a Gabby Hayes beard carried the paper bag in one fist like it was a dog-shit surprise he was lugging to a porch, while in his other hand he clutched a big revolver. He turned and so did the buckskin fringe, like a dog’s hackles rising, and he triggered off two shots that went right between me and Captain Pat Chambers of the NYPD Homicide Bureau, coming up on the trio at a run. The reporter from the News, who’d been with us from the start, yiped like he’d been hit — though he hadn’t been. But I bet he peed a little.

I kept coming and squeezed off the .45 automatic’s trigger, a gentle action that created a thunderous echo in the alley accompanying the slug, catching the grocery-bag idiot right in the chest, tearing on through to hit the remaining white boy in the head and splashing the fence with red and green and gray matter that dripped like wet paint. The soul brother was reaching down for the first faux-hippie’s fallen rod when I had to drop him, too. I tried for a leg shot but he had bent down too damn low and he caught it from right to left through the lungs.

Pat and I came to a stop.

“Shit,” I said.

Two bullets and five seconds were all it took for them to die.

“Please don’t tell me you’re sorry,” Pat said, trotting over to the corpses littering the alley and/or bumping up against a fence they’d never get over. Boys in blue were peeking over that fence like kids at a ballpark.

“I was hoping one would survive,” I said. My attitude was clinical. “Might get us a rung up the connection ladder.”

Reporters who carry cameras like something precious they won are all lunatics and the automated Nikon that Ray Giles carried, no matter how scared shitless he was, lit up the scene a dozen times, getting it all down in glorious black and white — if his city editor would go for so much gore on the hoof.

The three-man back-up team in blue clambered up and over the fence. The first man to drop skidded in the blood smear and damn near fell on his ass on the alley’s brick.

I chuckled and Captain Chambers — my oldest living friend on the planet, helming a joint Narcotics and Homicide Squad task force — pushed his out-of-date fedora back on his blond head and said, “Some sick damn sense of humor you got, Mike.”

I pushed my porkpie hat back in solidarity. “Aw, lighten up, Pat. These three are no great loss to humanity.”

We were both in trench coats, looking like twins only he was a much better-looking slob. Sort of Alan Ladd if the actor had been taller.

He was giving me that grave look I knew so well. “You’re not official here, my friend. You may have got yourself in a world of hurt this time. There’s a new D.A. in town, you know.”

“There’s always a new D.A. in town. I’m here as a duly licensed bodyguard for a News reporter, and I’m an officer of the court to boot. And I have a witness named Chambers who can verify one of those dead pricks shot first.”

He could find no argument with any of that.

Giles was done strobing the scene with his Nikon; he was shaking so bad, it was a miracle he’d held the camera steady. He was prematurely bald, a baby bird with a mustache and thinning hair; his suit had a whipped look like he just made it alive out of a twister. “Did you have to kill ’em all, Mike?”

I shrugged. “So I missed. Anyway, did I have a choice?”

Giles must have still had some of the sound of those slugs whistling past his head, ears ringing from the reverberation blast of my big automatic. “Not this time, Mike.”

The press and the cops had some ideas about the figurative notches on my .45. Robin Hood had a bow and arrow; Mike Hammer packed a Colt 1911.

The uniform boys were holding back the gathering crowd, white eyes in faces of various color lighting up the descending night. From the surf-like collective murmur came an occasional, “That’s Mike Hammer!” “No, can’t be. Isn’t he dead?” “No, I tell you it’s Mike Hammer!” At least one of them was right.

We walked up to the mess at alley’s end and, in the glare of a couple of flashlights two of the uniformed guys were wielding now that dark was settling in, I watched while Pat knelt over the paper bag and snugged his hands into latex gloves, then opened up on contents that were not groceries. He let Giles take a shot of the piles of glassine packets the bag held, then Ray grabbed another of Pat tasting the stuff with the tip of his tongue.

“Worth dying over?” I asked cheerfully.

Pat, on his feet again, said, “Pure heroin, I’d say. Purest stuff I’ve seen in a long time. Not cut with quinine at all.”

“Street value?”

“Cut for the buying class, I’d say you’re looking at a grocery bag worth, oh... a cool million.”

Giles lowered his camera for once. His baby face cinched up like he was just learning to think. He’d hired me after I shot two others in a tenement buy I’d stumbled onto a few weeks ago, chasing down a deadbeat dad. I always did have a lucky streak.

“That’s five men you killed,” Giles said, half appalled, utterly impressed, “in less than a month. How does that make you feel?”

I knew anything I said would go right into the News, which was jake with me.

“I feel just fine.”

The reporter goggled at me. “Really?”

“All of us get high one way or another,” I said. “Mine is taking out scum. How do you feel, Ray, now that you finally made the bullet-alley scene?”

His lips were dry under the mustache and he looked pale as milk but not near as healthy. Slugs whizzing past you can do that. “Lucky, Mike. Lucky to be alive.”

Sirens were splitting the night. On their hurry here, though I didn’t see the rush.

“That’s great, kid,” I said. “Just don’t make this kind of thing your drug of choice.”

This time the inquiry was fast and to the point. After all, they had a reliable witness in Ray Giles whose photos were nicely specific and his knowledge of what had gone down too intimate to turn me into the gun-happy fanatic the media liked to make of me. For a change the press got off my back and didn’t harp on the other times the ultimate pay-off had happened to drug pushers who got into my line of sight. In Giles they had one of their own who had damn near tasted a few grains of hot lead.

In the hallway after the inquiry, Giles said, “You saved my life, Mike. I do appreciate that.”

“No extra charge. Anyway, that asshole couldn’t shoot worth a damn.”

“I don’t know how my editor’s going to feel about it.”

I put a hand on the diminutive reporter’s shoulder. “He wasn’t there, was he?”

“She.”

I shrugged. “She wasn’t there, either.”

Not that in the aftermath I got any hero treatment from the News, much less respect, or any other sheet for that matter — just a general wait-and-see attitude with some put-down from the more liberal rags, commentators wondering whether that notorious self-appointed arbiter of rough justice had come out of his semi-retirement to start making bloody headlines again. Hell, anybody who ever had a kid hyped up on the big H or floating off on acid wouldn’t bother paying any attention to the naysayers at all.

At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d helped Pat generate the kind of hysteria down on the streets that would follow those three dealers going down.

Of course, those three buying it was just the icing on the cake. Wednesday, nine kilos had been confiscated at Kennedy; Thursday, Union County coppers in Jersey had lopped off a major consignment being run into Teterboro Airport; and Friday, the feds hit a ship that had held sixty-seven-and-a-half pounds of pure uncut stuff in a barrel at a Brooklyn pier.

A week later, I was sitting across from the captain of Homicide in his Centre Street office, an ancient space as cluttered as Pat’s mind was not. The room looked smaller than it was, thanks to the supplemental materials stacked here and there, plus we were crowded by a whiteboard that listed the various confiscations and arrests the task force had made happen since its inception.

“A key shipment,” he said, between draws on his pipe, in his shirt sleeves and loosened tie, “is a day overdue for delivery. The junkies are going green, looking for connections.”

I snorted a laugh as I lit up a smoke. “Well, isn’t that just too fucking bad.”

“Haven’t you heard, Mike? Addiction is a disease.”

If there was any sarcasm in that, I wasn’t a good enough detective to find it.

I waved the match out, tossed it in an ashtray on the edge of some piled files. “My heart bleeds. Let them hurt right down to their squishy little balls.”

He winced, as if the pipe had gone sour. “Come on, Mike — it’s the suppliers who—”

I held up a stop palm. “Don’t blame the suppliers, Pat, because they wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t have a market to feed and, as far as I’m concerned, anybody who wants to load their guts up with that shit can die in their own runny shit. Nobody forced them to stick that foul stuff in their veins — it was their own stupid choice. Tomorrow the street cleaners’ll be scraping them off the sidewalks with the rest of the dog crap.”

His sigh was as long-suffering as they come. “Listen, Mike. Your bodyguard duties for the News team digging into the narcotics scene have gotten entirely out of hand. Let me and the narco task force handle it. Your involvement ends here, or—”

“Else?” I blew a smoke ring. “Don’t worry about it, Pat.”

His smirk spoke volumes. “When Mike Hammer’s your best friend, a guy tends to worry pretty much all the damn time.”

“Well, you can stop. The News fired me.”

His eyes widened. “Oh?”

I shrugged. “Or I should say thanked me for my services and gave me a cool, brief handshake. Yeah, and a check, so all’s right with the world.”

“Why fire you?” What came next was an admission: “If you hadn’t been in that alley, Ray Giles might be dead now.”

For all his bitching, Pat wouldn’t have wanted to be running down an alley after armed men with anybody else but yours truly.

“That’s just it,” I said. “Giles has been on the crime beat long enough to’ve seen his share of DBs. But he isn’t used to seeing guys die right in front of him. Cold stiffs is one thing — warm corpses is another.”

Pat actually smiled a little. “And Giles isn’t used to having bullets fly around his journalistic brow. Yeah, I get that. Winning a Pulitzer doesn’t mean much when you’re nailed into a box.”

I shrugged, sighed. Got to my feet. “Afraid I’m back investigating insurance claims and looking for runaways for parents who should’ve paid more attention when their offspring were growing up. Little jobs for little people. What the hell? That’s Hammer Investigations, all right. Friend to the little guy.”

He stood; apparently I was being seen out. “That’s rich, coming from a misanthrope like you.”

“No, you underestimate my vocabulary. I like people just fine. At a distance.”

He held the pipe in his palm by the bowl in that paternal way of his. “I know what your problem is.”

“Yeah? Enlighten me.”

“Without Velda around, you’re one cranky son of a bitch.”

Some things you can’t argue with. “Her at my side does take the edge off,” I admitted. “Spend enough time with that doll and I’m damn near human.”

We were moving along the edge of the bullpen now; things were hopping, as usual.

At the elevator, Pat asked, “So how long is that lovely secretary of yours gonna be on this leave of absence?”

Now I was the one letting out a long-suffering sigh. “However long she needs. Rest of her sister’s school year, maybe. Maybe all summer after that. With her mom in that nursing home, recovering, and her high-schooler sis Mikki at home... who knows?”

“Why don’t you take a leave of absence from your shitty attitude and go help Vel out? You got money in the bank. You’re the most successful small agency in Manhattan, thanks to all the gory press you used to get.”

“And now I’m just a has-been, huh?”

He shrugged. “You made a comeback lately, like in that alley. Tell your mean-ass boss, that Hammer character, you need a break. You have a bad case of missing Velda.”

No question about that — Velda was much more than just my secretary. Love of my excuse for a life, was more like it. And Pat knew whereof he spoke — he had a yen for that female himself. It caused a rift in our friendship, once upon a time, in a violent fairy tale long ago. Healed up now. Scarred over maybe, but healed up.

The elevator dinged its arrival.

“I don’t think so, Pat,” I said. “Who’s going to keep Manhattan safe if I’m not on the job?”

I tipped my porkpie and got on the elevator, the doors closing on his smiling, shaking head.

“You are still a pisser, Mike Hammer.”

“I try,” I said.