Free Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 13] by Black Alley Page A

listen to me one more time. If you want to get married to me, you’re going to do it the old-fashioned way. We can hold hands and kiss and hug all you want, but we keep our clothes on and stay out of bed. Got it?”
    “Did that doctor . . . do anything to you, Mike?”
    “Yeah. He kept me alive so that soon enough I can do anything . One round with you under the sheets and I’ll be on a slab.”
    With a tiny smile she said, “What a prude. He can brace two tough guys with no gun and one bullet and can’t make love to his fiancée.”
    “Just following doctor’s orders, sweetie.”
    “Mike,” she said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
     
     
    The building was simple, wasting no space. It was concrete, boxlike, with a minimum of ornamentation, a cemetery supermarket where urns could be placed to be seen in delicately formed mini-caves pressed into the cement or hidden behind inch-thick facades with histories worked into their surfaces.
    Marshall Brotorrio toured me through the lower recesses of the modern crypt knowing that would be all the inspection I would need. Since Dooley would not be getting many visitors he suggested the last niche on the row. I went along with that, opted to keep the urn in view, then went back to his office to complete the paperwork.
    Dooley was still sitting on his desk, but somebody had cleaned and polished the metal container while we were away, slipping a plastic shield over it to keep fingertips from spotting its beauty.
    “Would you like to see the urn placed in its resting place?”
    The words didn’t seem right coming from a big guy like Brotorrio. I shook my head. “I’m not much on ceremony.”
    “I understand,” he said. And he did. An old pal burying his buddy after carrying his remains from one borough to another wasn’t going to go all teary-eyed at this stage. I made out the check, signed the papers, shook hands with Marshall Brotorrio and went back to flag down a cab.
    Now I had to find Dooley’s son and pass over the papers to him, then find the slob who had iced Dooley.
    I looked out the window and watched the skyline of New York coming up. From three miles out it looked clean and angular, but the closer you got the grayer the color was and the duller the angles seemed to be. At one point I got a momentary glimpse of the prettiest building in the city, the old Woolworth Building. It used to be the tallest in the world, but now it was dwarfed by the steel and glass structures that entombed the mighty organizations that breathed life in and out of great populations. I had only a brief peek, but it was nice to know the old lady was still there.
    Velda got back to the office a few minutes after me. She watched while I downed two capsules Dr. Morgan had given to me. I had to flip them into an already-chewed cracker to get them down, but taking pills had never been one of my strong points. When I put the cap back on the plastic bottle I asked, “Well?”
    She flipped open a small notebook and scanned it. “Our fat man is a Treasury agent, all right. Just where he stands in the pecking order, my friend couldn’t tell me, but he’s way up there. She called him a funny money sniffer . Whenever the government suspects a person or organization of holding back big tax funds, Homer Watson is called in.”
    “Homer Watson?”
    “I know,” she said, “sounds like a country boy, but he broke the Fintel scandal and nailed those Wall Street insiders who almost took a billion dollars home to mama.” Velda was watching me closely now. “That story you gave to Pat was real, wasn’t it?”
    After a few seconds I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing’s been proven. It’s only what I’ve been told.”
    “But you believe it,” she stated flatly.
    “Yes,” I said. “I believe it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I went through a war with the guy who told me.”
    “A real man thing, I suppose.”
    “You suppose right, kitten. Why the interrogation?”
    “I want to