Survival Zero by Mickey Spillane

Author:Mickey Spillane
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780552960021
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 1970-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

The bar at Finero’s Steak House was packed three deep with a noisy crowd fighting the martini-Manhattan war, the combatants armed with stemmed glasses and resonant junior-executive voices. A scattering of women held down the barstools, deliberately spaced out to give the stags room to operate, knowing they were the objects of attention and the possible prizes. The one on the end was nearly obscured by the cluster of trim young men jockeying for position, but for some reason the back of her head and the way her hair tumbled around her shoulders was strangely familiar to me. She swung around to say something and laugh at the one behind her who was holding out a lighter to fire up her cigarette when her eyes reached out between the covey of shoulders and touched mine.

And Heidi Anders smiled and I smiled back.

The two young men turned and they didn’t smile because they were Woody Ballinger’s two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant there was something in their faces that didn’t belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know.

Could.

From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.

So I made a little wave with my forefinger and Heidi Anders said something to her entourage, put her glass down on the bar and came to me through the path they opened for her and when she reached me said, “Thank you, Mike.”

“For what?”

“Yelling at me. I looked in the mirror. It’s worse than the camera. It tells you the truth without benefit of soft lighting, makeup men and development techniques.”

“Sugar,” I asked her, “when did you last pop one?”

“You were there.”

“And it was cold turkey all the way? Kid, you sure don’t look like you’re in withdrawal.”

A flash of annoyance tugged at her eyes and that beautiful mouth tightened slightly. “I had help, big man. I went for it right after you left. Dr. Vance Allen. You’ve heard of him?”

I nodded and studied her. Vance Allen wasn’t new to me. He was a longtimer in the field of narcotic rehabilitation. Some of his measures were extreme and some not yet accepted into general practice, but his results had been extremely significant.

“Hurt any?”

“At first. You’re looking at an experiment with a new medication. In a way I’m lucky. I wasn’t hooked as badly as you thought.”

“Who put you on it?”

“That’s one of those things I’d rather not talk about. In time it will be taken care of. Meanwhile, I’m working at being unhooked.”

I shook my head and looked past her. “Not yet.

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