The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [170]
I sat bolt upright in bed. No wonder Miss Grange did things that bothered me. It wasn’t the woman I recognized in her apartment, it was her motions. Even to striking a match toward her the way a man would. Sure, she’d be a man-hater, why not? She was a lesbian.
“Damn!”
I hopped out of bed and climbed into my pants. I picked out York’s room from the diagram and tiptoed to the other side of the house. His door was partly opened. I tapped gently. No answer.
I went in and felt for the switch. Light flooded the room, but it didn’t do me any good. York’s bed had never been slept in. One drawer of his desk was half open and the contents pushed aside. I looked at the oil blot on the bottom of the drawer. I didn’t need a second look at the hastily opened box of .32 cartridges to tell me what had been in there. York was out to do murder.
Time, time, there wasn’t enough of it. I finished dressing on the way out. If anyone heard the door slam after me or the motor start up they didn’t care much. No lights came on at all. I slowed up by the gates, but they were gaping open. From inside the house I could hear a steady snore. Henry was a fine gatekeeper.
I didn’t know how much of a lead he had. Sometime hours ago my watch had stopped and I didn’t reset it. It could have been too long ago. The night was fast fading away. I don’t think I had been in bed a full hour.
On that race to town I didn’t pass a car. The lights of the kid’s filling station showed briefly and swept by. The unlit headlamps of parked cars glared in the reflection of my own brights and went back to sleep.
I pulled in behind a line of cars outside the Glenwood Apartments, switched off the engine and climbed out. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere. When this town went to bed it did a good job.
It was one time I couldn’t ring doorbells to get in. If Ruston had been with me it wouldn’t have taken so long; the set of skeleton keys I had didn’t come up with the right answer until I tried two dozen of them.
The .45 was in my fist. I flicked the safety off as I ran up the stairs. Miss Grange’s door was closed, but it wasn’t locked; it gave when I turned the knob.
No light flared out the door when I kicked it open. No sound broke the funeral quiet of the hall. I stepped in and eased the door shut behind me.
Very slowly I bent down and unlaced my shoes, then put them beside the wall. There was no sense sending in an invitation. With my hand I felt along the wall until I came to the end of the hall. A switch was to the right. Cautiously, I reached around and threw it up, ready for anything.
I needn’t have been so quiet. Nobody would have yelled. I found York, all right. He sat there grinning at me like a blooming idiot with the top of his head holding up a meat cleaver.
CHAPTER 4
Now it was murder. First it was kidnapping, then murder. There seems to be no end to crime. It starts off as a little thing, then gets bigger and bigger like an overinflated tire until it busts all to hell and gone.
I looked at him, the blood running red on his face, seeping out under the clots, dripping from the back of his head to the floor. It was only a guess, but I figured I had been about ten minutes too late.
The room was a mess, a topsy-turvy cell of ripped-up furniture and emptied drawers. The carpet was littered with trash and stuffing from the pillows. York still clutched a handful of papers, sitting there on the floor where he had fallen, staring blankly at the wall. If he had found what he was searching for it wasn’t here now. The papers in his hand were only old receipted electric bills made out to Myra Grange.
First I went back and got my shoes, then I picked up the phone. “Give me the