Lady, Go Die! by Mickey Spillane

Author:Mickey Spillane [Spillane, Mickey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Max Alan Collins, Mike Hammer
ISBN: 1470808331
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2012-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The two naked bodies were strung by their heels from a rafter in the barn, their fingertips almost brushing the warped planked flooring. Dried blood in frightful trails from countless wounds made vertical stripes down twin flesh in horrible design. The smears of blood beneath had clotted, merging into each other like an obscene Rorschach test ink-blot pattern peppered with blow flies trying to feast there.

The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.

Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.

I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.

“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”

Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms—seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.

“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”

“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”

“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”

One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.

But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.

Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.

“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and...”

I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”

Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”

“Where was this?”

“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.

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