The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [145]
It was a deed made out to one Carl Sullivan for a piece of property in Ulster County, New York, and the location was accurately described. Beneath it, apparently copied from the original notation, were the initials, B.C. Blackie Conley!
CHAPTER 11
I had to borrow fifty bucks from George over at the Blue Ribbon to get on my way, but he came up with the dough and no questions. Down the street I rented a Ford and Velda got in it for the drive upstate. Instead of taking the Thruway I got on old Route 17 and stopped at Central Valley to see a real estate dealer I knew. It wasn’t easy to keep the glad-handing and old-times talk to a minimum, but we managed. I gave him my property location and he pulled down a wall map and started locating it on the grid.
He found it quickly enough. Then he looked at me strangely and said, “You own this?”
“No, but I’m interested in it.”
“Well, if you’re thinking of buying it, forget it. This is in the area they located those gas wells on and several big companies have been going nuts trying to find the owner. It’s practically jungle up there and they want to take exploration teams in and can’t do it without permission. The taxes have been paid in advance so there’s no squawk from the state and nobody can move an inch until the owner shows up.”
“Tough.”
His face got a little bit hungry. “Mike . . . do you know the owner?”
“I know him.”
“Think we can swing a deal?”
“I doubt it.”
His face fell at the thought of the money he was losing. “Well, if he wants to sell, put in a word for me, okay?”
“I’ll mention it to him.”
That seemed to satisfy him. We shook hands back at the car and took off. An hour and ten minutes later we were at the turnoff that led to the property. The first road was a shale and dirt one that we took for a mile, looking for a stream. We found that too, and the barely visible indentation that showed where another road had been a long time back.
I drove down the road and backed the Ford into the bushes, hiding it from casual observation, then came back to Velda and looked at the jungle we were going into.
The trees were thick and high, pines intermingled with oaks and maples, almost hopelessly tangled at their bases with heavy brush and thorny creepers. Towering overhead was the uneven roll of the mountain range.
It was getting late and we wouldn’t have too much sun left.
“It’s someplace in there,” I said. “I don’t know how he did it, but it was done. He’s in there.”
Animals had made their way in ahead of us. The trail was barely visible and some of the brush was fuzzed with the hair of deer, the earth, where it was soft in spots, showing the print of their hoofs. We made it crawling sometimes, fighting the undergrowth constantly. But little by little we got inside.
The ground slope ranged upward, leveled off, then slanted down again. We saw the remains of a shack and headed toward it, but that was all it was, a vermin-infested building that had long ago fallen into ruin. At one side there was a carton of rusted tins that had spilled over and rotted out, and another wooden crate of cooking utensils, still nested inside each other. The remains of a mattress had been scattered over the floor making permanent nests for thousands of mice.
It didn’t make sense.
We started down the slope and burst through the brush into a clearing that was shaped like a bowl. Nature had somehow started something growing there, a peculiar soft grass that refused to allow anything else to intrude on its domain.
Velda said, “Mike . . .”
I stopped and looked back.
“I’m tired, Mike. Can’t we rest a minute?”
“Sure, honey. This is a good place.”
She sank to the ground with a long sigh and stretched out languidly looking at the sky. The clouds were tinged with a deep red and the shadows were beginning to creep down the mountainside. “This is lovely, Mike.”
“Not much like the city, is it?”
She laughed, said,