Crimes by Moonlight

Grave Matter – A Mike Hammer Story by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the early 1990s, Mickey Spillane and I created a science-fiction variation on his Mike Danger character for comic books. (The Danger character had been developed for comics by Mickey just before World War Two, and he attempted to market it after the war, as well, without success. In 1947, he decided to change “Danger” to “Hammer” and I, the Jury was the result.) At some point, the comic book company asked Mickey and me to develop a prose short story for a market that fell through. Mickey approved this story and gave me notes but did not do any of the writing, which explains the unusual byline above (with me getting top billing). Later, I recycled this idea for a third-person short story that used a different lead character, but this represents the first appearance of the story in its original, intended form… although for various reasons, I have changed “Danger” back to “Hammer.” The tale takes place in the early 1950s.

If I hadn’t been angry, I wouldn’t have been driving so damn fast, and if I hadn’t been driving so damn fast, in a lashing rain, on a night so dark closing your eyes made no difference, my high beams a pitiful pair of flashlights trying to guide the way in the vast cavern of the night, illuminating only slashes of storm, I would have had time to brake properly when I came down over the hill and saw, in a sudden white strobe of electricity, that the bridge was gone, or anyway out of sight, somewhere down there under the rush of rain-raised river. When the brakes didn’t take, I yanked the wheel around, and my heap was sideways in a flooded ditch, wheels spinning. Like my head.

I got out on the driver’s side, because otherwise I would have had to swim underwater. From my sideways-tipped car, I leapt to the slick highway as rain pelted me mercilessly, and did a fancy slip-slide dance, keeping my footing. Then I snugged the wings of the trench coat collar up around my face and began to walk back the way I’d come. If rain was God’s tears, the Old Boy sure was bawling about something tonight.

I knew how he felt. I’d spent the afternoon in the upstate burg of Hopeful, only there was nothing hopeful about the sorry little hamlet. All I’d wanted was a few answers to a few questions. Like how a guy who won a Silver Star charging up a beachhead could wind up a crushed corpse in a public park, a crumpled piece of discarded human refuse.

Bill Reynolds had had his problems. Before the war he’d been an auto mechanic in Hopeful. A good-looking, dark-haired bruiser who’d have landed a football scholarship if the war hadn’t gotten in the way, Bill married his high school sweetheart before he shipped out, only when he came back missing an arm and a leg, he found his girl wasn’t interested in what was left of him. Even though he was good with his prosthetic arm and leg, he couldn’t get his job back at the garage, either.

But the last time I’d spoken to Bill, when he came in to New York to catch Marciano and Jersey Joe at Madison Square Garden, he’d said things were looking up. He said he had a handyman job lined up, and that it was going to pay better than his old job at the garage.

“Besides which,” he said, between rounds, “you oughta see my boss. You’d do overtime yourself.”

“You mean you’re working for a woman?”

“And what a woman. She’s got more curves than the Mohonk Mountain road.”

“Easy you don’t drive off a cliff.”

That’s all we’d said about the subject, because Marciano had come out swinging at that point, and the next I heard from Bill-well not from him, about him-he was dead.

The only family he had left in Hopeful was a maiden aunt; she called me collect and told me tearfully that Bill’s body had been found in the city park. His spine had been snapped.

“HOW does a thing like that happen, Chief?”

Chief Thadeous Dolbert was one of Hopeful’s four full-time cops. Despite his high office, he wore a blue uniform indistinguishable from his underlings, and his desk was out in the open of the little bullpen in Hopeful City Hall. A two-cell lockup was against one wall, and spring sunshine streaming in the windows through the bars sent slanting stripes of shadow across his desk and his fat, florid face. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, eyes hooded; he looked like a fat iguana-I expected his tongue to flick out and capture a fly any second now.

Dolbert said, “We figure he got hit by a car.”

“Body was found in the city park, wasn’t it?”

“Way he was banged up, figure he must’ve got whopped a good one, really sent him flyin’.”

“Was that the finding at the inquest?”

Dolbert fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, right behind his tarnished badge, lighted himself up a smoke. Soon it was dangling from a thick, slobber-flecked lower lip. “We don’t stand much on ceremony around here, mister. County coroner called it accidental death at the scene.”

“That’s all the investigation Bill’s death got?”

Dolbert shrugged, blew a smoke circle. “All that was warranted.”

I sat forward. “All that was warranted. A local boy, who gave an arm and a leg to his country, wins a damn Silver Star doin’ it, and you figure him getting his spine snapped like a twig and damn near every bone in his body broken, well, that’s just pretty much business as usual here in Hopeful.”

Under the heavy lids, fire flared in the fat chief’s eyes. “You think you knew Bill Reynolds? You knew the old Bill. You didn’t know the drunken stumblebum he turned into. Prime candidate for stepping out in front of a car.”

“I never knew Bill to drink to excess-”

“How much time did you spend with him lately?”

A hot rush of shame crawled up my neck. I’d seen Bill from time to time, in the city, when he came in to see me, but I’d never come up to Hopeful. Never really gone out of my way for him, since the war…

Till now.

“You make any effort to find the hit-and-run driver that did this?”

The chief shrugged. “Nobody saw it happen.”

“You don’t even know for sure a car did it.”

“How the hell else could it have happened?”

I stood up, pushed back, the legs of my wooden chair scraping the hard floor like fingernails on a blackboard. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

A finger as thick as a pool cue waggled at me. “You got no business stickin’ your damn nose in around here, Hammer-”

“I’m a licensed investigator in the state of New York, pops. And I’m working for Bill Reynolds’s aunt.”

He snorted a laugh. “Working for that senile old biddy? She’s out at the county hospital. She’s broke! Couldn’t even afford a damn funeral… we had to bury the boy in potter’s field…”

That was one of Hopeful’s claims to fame: the state buried its unknown, unclaimed, impoverished dead in the potter’s field here.

“Why didn’t you tell Uncle Sam?” I demanded. “Bill was a war hero-they’d’ve put him in Arlington…”

Dolbert shrugged. “Not my job.”

“What the hell is your job?”

“Watch your mouth, city boy.” He nodded toward the holding cells, and the cigarette quivered as the fat mouth sneered. “Don’t forget you’re in my world…”

Maybe Bill Reynolds didn’t get a funeral or a gravestone, but he was going to get a memorial by way of an investigation.

ONLY nobody in Hopeful wanted to talk to me. The supposed “accident” had occurred in the middle of the night, and my only chance for a possible witness was in the all-night diner across from the Civil War cannon in the park.

The diner’s manager, a skinny character with a horsey face darkened by perpetual five o’clock shadow, wore a grease-stained apron over his grease-stained T-shirt. Like the chief, he had a cigarette drooping from slack lips. The ash narrowly missed falling into the cup of coffee he’d served me as I sat at the counter with half a dozen locals.

“We got a jukebox, mister,” the manager said. “Lots of kids end up here, tail end of a Saturday night. That was a Saturday night, when Bill got it, ya know? That loud music, joint jumpin‘, there coulda been a train wreck out there, and nobody’da heard it.”

“Nobody would have seen an accident out your windows?”

The manager shrugged. “Maybe ol’ Bill got hit on the other side of the park.”

But it was just a little square of grass and benches and such; the “other side of the park” was easily visible from the windows lining the diner booths-even factoring in the grease and lettering.

I talked to a couple of waitresses who claimed not to have been working that night. One of them, Gladys her name tag said, a heavyset bleached blonde who must have been pretty cute twenty years ago, served me a slice of apple pie and cheese and a piece of information.

“Bill said he was going to work as a handyman,” I said, “for some good-lookin’ gal. You know who that would’ve been?”

“Sure,” Gladys said. She had sky-blue eyes and nicotine-yellow teeth. “He was working out at the mansion.”

“The what?”

“The mansion. The old Riddle place. You must’ve passed it on the highway, comin’ into town.”

“I saw a gate and a drive, and got a glimpse of a big old gothic brick barn…”

She nodded, refilled my coffee. “That’s the one. The Riddles, they owned this town forever. Ain’t a building downtown that the Riddles ain’t owned since the dawn of time. But Mr. Riddle, he was the last of the line, and he and his wife died in that plane crash, oh, ten years ago. The only one left now is the daughter, Victoria.”

“What was Bill doing out at the Riddle place?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? Maybe Miz Riddle just wanted some company. Bill was still a handsome so-and-so, even minus a limb or two. He coulda put his shoe under my bed anytime.”

“Victoria Riddle isn’t married? She lives alone?”

“Alone except for that hairless ape.”

“What?”

“She’s got a sort of butler, you know, a servant? He was her father’s chauffeur. Big guy. Mute. Comes into town, does the grocery shopping and such. We hardly ever see Miz Riddle, less she’s meeting with her lawyer, or going to the bank to visit all her money.”

“What does she do out there?”

“Who knows? She’s not interested in business. Her daddy, he had his finger in every pie around here. Miz Riddle, she lets her lawyer run things, and I guess the family money, uh, under-what’s-it? Underwrites, is that the word?”

“I guess.”

“Underwrites her research.”

“Research?”

“Oh, yeah. Miz Riddle’s a doctor.”

“Medical doctor.”

“Yes, but not the kind that hangs out a shingle. She’s some kind of scientific genius.”

“So she’s doing medical research out there?”

“I guess.” She shook her head. “Pity about Bill. Such a nice fella.”

“Had he been drinking heavy?”

“Bill? Naw. Oh, he liked a drink. I suppose he shut his share of bars down on a Saturday night, but he wasn’t no alcoholic. Not like that other guy.”

“What other guy?”

Her expression turned distant. “Funny.”

“What’s funny? What other guy?”

“Not funny ha-ha. Funny weird. That other guy, don’t remember his name, just some tramp who come through, he was a crip, too.”

“A crip?”

“Yeah. He had one arm. Guess he lost his in the war, too. He was working out at the Riddle mansion as a handyman-one-handed handyman. That guy, he really was a drunk.”

“What became of him?”

“That’s what’s funny weird. Three, four months ago, he wound up like Bill. They found him in the gutter on Main Street, all banged up, deader than a bad battery. Hit-and-run victim-just like Bill.”

THE wrought-iron gate in the gray-brick wall stood open, and I tooled the heap up a winding red-brick drive across a gentle, treeless slope where the sprawling gabled tan-brick gothic mansion crouched like a lion about to pounce. The golf course of a lawn had its own rough behind the house, a virtual forest preserve that seemed at once to shelter and encroach upon the stark lines of the house.

Steps led to an open cement pedestal of a porch with a massive slab of a wooden door where I had a choice between an ornate iron knocker and a simple doorbell. I rang the bell.

I stood there, listening to birds chirping and enjoying the cool breeze that seemed to whisper rain was on its way, despite the golden sunshine reflecting off the lawn. I rang the bell again.

I was about to go around back, to see if there was another door I could try, when that massive slab of wood creaked open like the start of the Inner Sanctum radio program; the 350-pound apparition who stood suddenly before me would have been at home on a spook show himself.

He was six four, easy, towering over my six one; he wore the black uniform of a chauffeur, but no cap, his tie a loose black string thing. He looked like an upended Buick with a person painted on it. His head was the shape of a grape and just as hairless though considerably larger; he had no eyebrows, either; wide, bugling eyes; a lump of a nose; and an open mouth.

“Unnggh,” he said.

“I’d like to see Miss Riddle,” I said.

“Unnggh,” he said.

“It’s about Bill Reynolds. I represent his family. I’m here to ask some questions.”

His brow furrowed in something approaching thought.

Then he slammed the door in my face.

Normally, I don’t put up with crap like that. I’d been polite. He’d been rude. Kicking the door in, and his teeth, seemed called for. Only this boy was a walking side of beef that gave even Mike Hammer pause.

And I was, in fact, pausing, wondering whether to ring the bell again, go around back, or just climb in my heap and drive the hell away, when the door opened again, and the human Buick was replaced by a human goddess.

She was tall, standing eye-to-eye with me, and though she wore a loose-fitting white lab jacket that hung low over a simple black skirt, nylons, and flat shoes, those mountain-road curves Bill had mentioned were not easily hidden. Her dark blonde hair was tied back, and severe black-framed glasses rode the perfect little nose; she wore almost no makeup, perhaps just a hint of lipstick, or was that the natural color of those full lips? Whatever effort she’d made to conceal her beauty behind a mask of scientific sterility was futile; the big green eyes, the long lashes, the high cheekbones, the creamy complexion, that full, high-breasted, wasp-waisted, long-limbed figure, all conspired to make her as stunning a female creature as God had ever created.

“I’m sorry,” she said, in a silky contralto. “This is a private residence and a research center. We see no one without an appointment.”

“The gate was open.”

“We’re expecting the delivery of certain supplies this evening,” she said, “and I leave the gate standing open on such occasions. You see, I’m shorthanded. But why am I boring you with this? Good afternoon…”

And the door began to close.

I held it open with the flat of my hand. “My name is Michael Hammer.”

The green eyes narrowed. “The detective?”

I grinned. “You must get the New York papers up here.”

“We do. Hopeful isn’t the end of the world.”

“It was for Bill Reynolds.”

Her expression softened, and she cracked the door open, wider. “Poor Bill. Were you a friend?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve come to ask about his death.”

“That’s right.” I shrugged. “I’m a detective.”

“Of course,” she said, opening the door. “And you’re looking into the circumstances. A natural way for you to deal with such a loss…”

She gestured for me to enter, and I followed her through a highceilinged entryway. The hairless ape appeared like an apparition and took my trench coat; I kept my porkpie hat but took it off in deference to my hostess.

In front of me, a staircase led to a landing, then to a second floor; gilt-framed family portraits lined the way. On one side was a library with more leather in bindings and chairs than your average cattle herd; on the other was a formal sitting room where elegant furnishings that had been around long enough to become antiques were overseen by a glittering chandelier.

She led me to a rear room and it was as if, startlingly, we’d entered a penthouse apartment-the paintings on the wall were abstract and modern, and the furnishings were, too, with a television/hi-fi console set-up and a zebra wet bar with matching stools; but the room was original with the house, or at least the fireplace and mantel indicated as much. Over the fireplace was the only artwork in the room that wasn’t abstract: a full-length portrait of my hostess in a low-cut evening gown, a painting that was impossibly lovely with no exaggeration by the artist.

She slipped out of her lab coat, tossing it on a boomerang of a canvas chair, revealing a short-sleeved white blouse providing an understated envelope for an overstated bosom. Undoing her hair, she allowed its length to shimmer to her shoulders. The severe black-framed glasses, however, she left in place.

Her walk was as liquid as mercury in a vial as she got behind the bar and poured herself a martini. “Fix you a drink?”

“Got any beer back there?”

“Light or dark?”

“Dark.”

We sat on a metal-legged couch that shouldn’t have been comfortable but was; she sipped her martini, her dark nyloned legs crossed, displaying well-developed calves. For a scientist, she made a hell of a specimen.

I sipped my beer-it was a bottle of German imported stuff, a little bitter for my taste, but very cold.

“That’s an interesting butler you got,” I said.

“I have to apologize for Bolo,” she said, stirring the cocktail with her speared olive. “His tongue was cut out by natives in the Amazon. My father was on an exploratory trip, somehow incurred the wrath of the natives, and Bolo interceded on his behalf. By offering himself, in the native custom, Bolo bought my father’s life-but paid with his tongue.”

With a kisslike bite, she plucked the olive from its spear and chewed.

“He doesn’t look much like a South American native,” I said.

“He isn’t. He was a Swedish missionary. My father never told me Bolo’s real name… but that was what the natives called him.”

“And I don’t suppose Bolo’s told you, either.”

“No. But he can communicate. He can write. In English. His mental capacity seems somewhat diminished, but he understands what’s said to him.”

“Very kind of you to keep somebody like that around.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “Handicapped.”

“Mr. Hammer…”

“Make it Mike-and I’ll call you Victoria. Or do you prefer Vicki?”

“How do you know I don’t prefer ‘Doctor’?”

“Hey, it’s okay with me. I’ve played doctor before.”

“Are you flirting with me, Mike?”

“I might be.”

“Or you might be trying to get me to let my guard down.”

“Why-is it up?”

She glanced at my lap. “You tell me.”

Now I crossed my legs. “Where’s your research lab?”

“In back.”

“Sorry if I’m interrupting…”

“No. I’m due for a break. I’d like to help you. You see, I thought a lot of Bill. He worked hard. He may not have been the brightest guy around, but he made up for it with enthusiasm and energy. Some people let physical limitations get in their way. Not Bill.”

“You must have a thing for taking in strays.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… like Bolo. Like Bill. I understand you took in another handicapped veteran, not so long ago.”

“That’s right. George Wilson.” She shook her head sadly. “Such a shame. He was a hard worker, too-”

“He died the same way as Bill.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as… a little odd? Overly coincidental?”

“Mike, George was a heavy drinker, and Bill was known to tie one on himself. It may be coincidental, but I’m sure they aren’t the first barroom patrons to wobble into the street after closing and get hit by a car.”

“Nobody saw either one of them get hit by a car.”

“Middle of the night. These things happen.”

“Not twice.”

The green eyes narrowed with interest and concern. “What do you think happened, Mike?”

“I have no idea-yet. But I’ll say this-everybody seemed to like Bill. I talked to a lot of people today, and nobody, except maybe the police chief, had an unkind word to say about him. So I’m inclined to think the common factors between Bill and this George Wilson hold the answer. You’re one of those common factors.”

“But surely not the only one.”

“Hardly. They were both war veterans, down on their luck.”

“No shortage of those.”

“And they were both handicapped.”

She nodded, apparently considering these facts, scientist that she was. “Are you staying in Hopeful tonight?”

“No. I got a court appearance in the city tomorrow. I’ll be back on the weekend. Poke around some more.”

She put a hand on my thigh. “If I think of anything, how can I find you?”

I patted the hand, removed it, stood. “Keep your gate open,” I said, putting on my porkpie, “and I’ll find you.”

She licked her lips; they glistened. “I’ll make sure I leave my gate wide open on Saturday.”

I’D gone back into Hopeful to talk to the night shift at the diner, got nowhere, and headed home in the downpour, pissed off at how little I’d learned. Now, with my car in the ditch and rain lashing down relentlessly, I found myself back at the Riddle mansion well before Saturday. The gate was still open, though-she must not have received that delivery she’d talked about, yet.

Splashing through puddles on the winding drive, I kept my trench coat collar snugged around me as I headed toward the towering brick house. In the daytime, the mansion had seemed striking, a bit unusual; on this black night, illuminated momentarily in occasional flashes of lightning, its gothic angles were eerily abstract, the planes of the building a stark, ghostly white.

This time I used the knocker, hammering with it. It wasn’t all that late-maybe nine o’clock or a little after. But it felt like midnight, and instinctively I felt the need to wake the dead.

Bolo answered the door. The lights in the entryway were out, and he was just a big black blot, distinguishable only by that upended Buick shape of his; then the world turned white, him along with it, and when the thunder caught up with the lightning, I damn near jumped.

“Tell your mistress Mr. Hammer’s back,” I said. “My car’s in a ditch and I need-”

That’s when the SOB slammed the door in my face. Second time today. A red heat of anger started to rise up around my collar, but it wasn’t drying me off, even if the shelter of the awning over the slab of porch was keeping me from getting wetter. Only I wasn’t sure a human being could be any wetter than this.

When the door opened again, it was Victoria. She wore a red silk robe, belted tight around her tiny waist. The sheen of the robe and the folds of the silk conspired with her curves to create a dizzying display of pulchritude.

“Mr. Hammer… Mike! Come in, come in.”

I did. The light in the entryway was on now, and Bolo was there again, taking my drenched hat and coat. I quickly explained to her what had happened.

“With this storm,” she said, “and the bridge out, you’ll need to stay the night.”

“Love to,” I said. Mother Hammer didn’t raise any fools.

“But you’ll have to get out of those wet things,” she said. “I think I have an old nightshirt of my father’s…”

She took me back to that modern sitting room, and I was soon in her pop’s nightshirt, swathed in blankets as I sat before the fireplace’s glow, its magical flickering soothingly restful, and making her portrait above the fire seem alive, smiling seductively, the bosom in the low-cut gown heaving with passion. Shaking my head, wondering if I’d completely lost my sanity, I tucked my.45 in its speed rig behind a pillow-hardware like that can be distressing to the gentle sensibilities of some females.

When she cracked the door to ask if I was decent, I said, “That’s one thing I’ve never been accused of, but come on in.”

Then she was sitting next to me, the red silk gown playing delightful reflective games with the firelight.

“Can I tell you something terrible?” she asked, like a child with an awful secret.

“I hope you will.”

“I’m glad your car went in the ditch.”

“And here I thought you liked me.”

“I do,” she said, and she edged closer. “That’s why I’m glad.”

She seemed to want me to kiss her, so I did, and it was a long, deep kiss, hotter than the fire, wetter than the night, and then my hands were on top of the smoothness of the silk gown. And then they were on the smoothness underneath it…

LATER, when she offered me a guest bedroom upstairs, I declined.

“This is fine,” I said, as she made herself a drink behind the bar, and got me another German beer. “I’ll just couch it. Anyway, I like the fire.”

She handed me the bottle of beer, its cold wetness in my palm contrasting with the warmth of the room and the moment. Sitting next to me, close to me, she sipped her drink.

“First thing tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll call in to town for a tow truck and get your car pulled out of that ditch.”

“No hurry.”

“Don’t you have a court appearance tomorrow?”

“Acts of God are a good excuse,” I said and rested the beer on an amoeba-shaped coffee table nearby, then leaned in and kissed her again. Just a friendly peck.

“Aren’t you thirsty?” she asked, nodding toward the beer.

Why was she so eager for me to drink that brew?

I said, “Dry as a bone,” and reached for the bottle, lifted it to my lips, and seemed to take a drink.

Seemed to.

Now she gave me a friendly kiss, said, “See you at breakfast,” and rose, sashaying out as she cinched the silk robe back up. If you could bottle that walk, you’d really have something worth researching.

Alone, I sniffed the beer. My unscientific brain couldn’t detect anything, but I knew damn well it contained a mickey. She wanted me to sleep through this night. I didn’t know why, but something was going to happen here that a houseguest like me-even one who’d been lulled into a false sense of security by a very giving hostess-shouldn’t see.

So I poured the beer down the drain and quickly went to the couch, got myself under the blankets, and pretended to be asleep.

But I couldn’t have been more alert if I’d been in a foxhole on the front line. My eyes only seemed shut; they were slitted open and saw her when she peeked in to see if I was sleeping. I even saw her mouth and eyes tighten in smug satisfaction before the door closed, followed by the click of me being locked in…

The rain was still sheeting down when, wearing only her daddy’s nightshirt, I went out a window and,.45 in hand, found my way to the back of the building where a new section had been added, institutional-looking brick with no windows at all. The thin cotton cloth of the nightshirt was a transparent second skin by the time I found my way around the building and discovered an open double garage, also back behind, following an extension of the original driveway. The garage doors stood open and a single vehicle-a panel truck bearing the Hopeful Police Department insignia-was within, dripping with water, as if it were sweating.

Cautiously, I slipped inside, grateful to be out of the rain. Along the walls of the garage were various boxes and crates with medical-supply-house markings. I heard approaching footsteps and ducked behind a stack of crates.

Peeking out, I could see Chief Dolbert in a rain slicker and matching hat, leading the way for Bolo, still in his chauffeur-type uniform. Dolbert opened up the side of the van, and Bolo leaned in.

And when Bolo leaned back out, he had his arms filled with a person, a woman in fact, a naked one; then Bolo walked away from the panel truck, toward the door back into the building, held open for him by the thoughtful police chief. It was as if Bolo were carrying a bride across the threshold.

Only this bride was dead.

For ten minutes I watched as Bolo made trips from the building to the panel truck where, with the chief’s assistance, he conveyed naked dead bodies into the house. My mind was reeling with the unadorned horror of it. I was shivering, and not just from my water-soaked nightshirt. Somehow, being in that nightshirt, naked under it, made me feel a kinship to those poor dead bastards, many of them desiccated-looking souls, with unkempt hair and bony, ill-fed bodies, and finally it came to me.

I knew who these poor dead wretches were. And I knew why, at least roughly why, Chief Dolbert was delivering them.

When at last the doors on the panel truck were shut, the chief and Bolo headed back into the building. That pleased me-I was afraid the chief would take off into the rainy, thunderous night, and I didn’t want him to.

I wanted him around.

Not long after they had disappeared into the building, I went in after them.

And into hell.

It was a blindingly well-illuminated hell, a white and silver hell, resembling a hospital operating room but much larger, a hell dominated by the silver of surgical instruments, a hell where the walls were lined with knobs and dials and meters and gizmos, a hell dominated by naked corpses on metal autopsy-type tables, their empty eyes staring at the bright overhead lighting.

And the sensual satan who ruled over this hell, Victoria Riddle, who was back in her lab coat now, hair tucked in a bun, was filling Chief Dolbert’s open palm with greenbacks.

But where was Bolo?

I glanced behind me, and there he was, tucked behind the door, standing like a cigar-store Indian awaiting his mistress’s next command, only she didn’t have to give this command: Bolo knew enough to reach out for this intruder, his hands clawed, his eyes bulging to where the whites showed all around, his mouth open in a soundless snarl.

“Stop!” I told the looming figure, as he threw his shadow over me like a blue blanket.

But he didn’t stop.

And when I blew the top of his bald head off, splashing the white wall behind him with the colors of the inside of his head, red and gray and white, making another abstract painting only without a frame, that didn’t stop him, either, didn’t stop him from falling on top of me, and by the time I had pushed his massive dead weight off of me, his fat corpse emptying ooze out the top of his bald, blown-off skull, I had another fat bastard to deal with, a live one: the chief of the Hopeful Police Department, his revolver pointed down at me.

“Drop it,” he said.

He should have just shot me, because I took advantage of his taking time to say that and shot him in the head, and the gun in his hand was useless now, since his brain could no longer send it signals, and he toppled back on top of one of the corpses, sharing its silver tray, staring up at the ceiling, the red hole in his forehead like an extra expressionless eye.

“You fool,” she said, the lovely face lengthening into a contorted, ugly mask, green eyes wild behind the glasses.

“I decided I wasn’t thirsty after all,” I said, as I weaved my way between the corpses on their metal slabs.

“You don’t understand! This is serious research! This will benefit humanity…”

“I understand you were paying the chief for fresh cadavers,” I said. “With him in charge of the state’s potter’s field, you had no shortage of dead guinea pigs. But what I don’t understand is, why kill Bill and George Wilson, when you had access to all these riches?”

And I gestured to the deceased indigents around us.

Her face eased back into beauty; her scientific mind had told her, apparently, that her best bet now was to try to reason with me. Calmly. Coolly.

I was close enough to her to kiss her, only I didn’t feel much like kissing her and, anyway, the.45 I was aiming at her belly would have been in the way of an embrace.

“George Wilson tried to blackmail me,” she said. “Bill… Bill just wouldn’t cooperate. He said he was going to the authorities.”

“About your ghoulish arrangement with the chief, you mean?”

She nodded. Then earnestness coated her voice: “Mike, I was only trying to help Bill and George-and mankind. Don’t you see? I wanted to make them whole again!”

“Oh my God,” I said, getting it. “Bill was a live guinea pig, wasn’t he? Wilson, too…”

“That’s not how I’d express it, exactly, but yes…”

“You wanted to make them living Frankenstein monsters… you wanted to sew the limbs of the dead on ’em…”

Her eyes lit up with enthusiasm and hope. And madness. “Yes! Yes! I learned in South America of voodoo techniques that reanimated the dead into so-called ‘zombies.’ The scientific community was sure to reject such mumbo jumbo and deny the world this wonder, and I have been forced to seek the truth with my mixture of the so-called supernatural and renegade science. With the correct tissue matches and my own research into electrochemical transplant techniques-”

That was when the lights went out.

God’s electricity had killed man’s electricity, and the cannon roar aftermath of the thunderbolt wasn’t enough to hide the sound of her scurrying in the dark among the trays of the dead, trying to escape, heading for that door onto the garage.

I went after her, but she had knowledge of the layout of the place, and I didn’t, I kept bumping into bodies, and then she screamed.

Just for a split second.

A hard whump had interrupted the scream, and before I even had time to wonder what the hell had happened, the lights came back on, and there she was.

On her back, on the floor, her head resting against the metal under-bar of one of the dead-body trays, only resting wasn’t really the word, since she’d hit hard enough to crack open her skull and a widening puddle of red was forming below her head as she, too, stared up at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, just another corpse in a roomful of corpses. Bolo’s dead body, where I’d pushed his dead weight off of me, was-as was fitting-at his mistress’s feet.

I had to smile.

Bolo may not have had many brains in that chrome dome of his, but he’d had enough to slip her up.