Lady, Go Die! by Mickey Spillane Page A

out to Sharron’s, because they knew just what to expect there. According to the leads I got, the entire political regime of Sidon had their fingers in that pie.”
    Pat was nodding. “And they couldn’t go out to that casino to investigate without risking exposure of a racket they were into up to their own necks. I get the picture.”
    “Yeah, well, you’re a little slow, Pat, but I knew you’d catch up.”
    That made him laugh, and he was still grinning as he said, “Okay, Mike, I’ll get some men to work on this end. Suppose I call you tomorrow and let you know what I find out.”
    “Fine,” I said, getting up to go. “You can reach me at the Sidon Arms. If I’m not there give the message to Velda. But don’t leave anything pertinent—just say I should call you back.”
    “Got it. The walls have ears and eyes.”
    “Yeah, and one of these days I’ll give those walls a nice new paint job. Guess what color.”
    “You do know I’m a cop, right?”
    We grinned at each other, shook hands, and I walked out.
    * * *
    I left the heap in the usual garage and walked the half block to the Hackard Building. Getting in the building required a key thatonly long-time tenants possessed. There was nobody manning the visitor’s book on Sunday and the lobby was so dead, I was almost surprised tumbleweed wasn’t blowing through.
    I took the elevator up to the eighth floor where we kept a two-room suite of offices, and I was fishing out my keys when I noticed the lights on and shadows moving behind the pebbled glass that said HAMMER INVESTIGATING AGENCY.
    My keys wouldn’t be needed—the door was a little ajar already. I put them back in my pocket and got the .45 in my mitt and thumbed the safety off and went in fast and low.
    But there were two of them, one going through the filing cabinets to the right, and that gave him the chance to hammer me on the back with clenched hands, sending me face down, hitting the wood floor hard with the rod spilling from my fingers and skittering under Velda’s desk, spinning like a deadly top. Somebody clicked off the overhead lights, and with no windows in the reception area, shadows draped everything and all I could make out as I rolled onto my back were two shapes in baggy suits and hats, one at my right, coming at me with clawed fingers, and the other at the left, going through Velda’s personal filing cabinet, pausing to reach under his arm and that meant a gun would soon be belching flame, and in the wrong direction. I spun to my right and with an underhanded swing jammed four stiff fingers into the belly of the guy who’d slugged me, and he folded up like a card table, only card tables don’t vomit all over the floor when they go down.
    The other visitor’s rod was halfway out now, a revolver, and I threw myself at him, in a wild tackle that took him down, bone-jostlinghard. The fingers of both my hands found his throat and his face was just a shadowy, reddening, tongue-bulging blur as I strangled him and battered his skull into the floor in fury-fueled overkill and before I could kill the bastard, I got clouted on the back of the head, maybe with a gun butt, and fell with limp, lazy, painless ease, floating down headlong into the temporary death that was unconsciousness.
    * * *
    When I came around, my first thought was to keep my head down, because the Japs were out there, maybe twenty yards away, just waiting for the right target to pop up like at an arcade. I would wait till somebody laid down some covering fire and then and only then I would make a break for it, fleeing from the fox hole into the jungle with a grenade ready to toss back in their goddamn laps and let those evil assholes laugh that off.
    But I wasn’t in the jungle. I was on the floor of my office, the reception area. The place had been given a thorough, professional shakedown—only the two drawers they’d been rifling when I’d come in were still sticking out.
    Velda would make an inventory that would