Lady, Go Die! by Mickey Spillane Page B

say whether anything had been taken, but I felt I knew what this was about.
    I sat on the couch. It stunk in there. A modern art masterpiece on the floor was where the one guy had puked. My hand found the knot on the back of my skull, but my fingers carried back no blood. They could have killed me, easy, but hadn’t. Absent-mindedly, I got up, knelt down like a kid looking under his bed for his missing dog and retrieved my .45.
    Gun holstered, I sat back down. My head hurt but it wasn’t pounding. I was lucky. And I was almost glad it had happened.
    Because now I knew this led back to the city. Now I knew somebody had been called, and that somebody had sent that pair around to check up on my office and see if I left anything of interest lying around.
    After I mopped up the vomit, I went into the inner office, opened some windows, and did what I’d come for originally. I called four stoolies around town and asked them what they knew about the gambling operation out on Long Island, outside little Sidon.
    Nobody knew anything, but they’d poke around for me.
    The headache was getting worse and I washed down half a dozen aspirin with some bourbon. Then I did what any brave, two-fisted detective would do in this situation.
    I took a nap on the couch.
    * * *
    I woke around nine and fifteen minutes later I was down on the street, heading for the garage. But a cab cruised by and I impulsively hailed it.
    I gave the driver an uptown address and settled back in the cushions. The neon-draped city certainly looked good to me. Why the hell anyone wanted to go to the sticks for a vacation was more than I could figure. Right here in Manhattan was the works—shows, bars, dancing. In Sidon, you hibernated.
    Or maybe ran down a murderer.
    My cab pulled up in front of a cellar bar that was stuck in thefront of a boarded-up three-story building that looked ready to fall apart. The ramshackle appearance was merely a front. Behind that deteriorated stone-and-brick veneer lurked one of the city’s top gambling dumps.
    Louie Marone ran it. In that shady racket, he was as on the up-and-up as they came. The house took its percentage and nothing more. When you sat in a game at Louie’s, you could be sure the cards weren’t fixed and no wires were attached to the wheels.
    Instead of steps, a ridged gangplank led to the bar and I mostly slid down it and plodded through the sawdust to the counter and parked on a stool at the end. The place wasn’t hopping. Well, it was Sunday.
    The bartender, a whiskered Greek right out of the Gay Nineties, quit polishing glasses long enough to set a beer up in front of me, then went back to his wiping. Besides myself, the only other occupants of the joint were a pair of rough-looking gents knocking off boiler-makers as fast as the bartender could pour. Then I noticed a pair of luscious-looking legs extending from a booth.
    The legs made me curious. And I was ready to bet that the package they were part of would be just as nice as they were. This seemed to me a bet worth making, and after all, Louie was the most honest gambling joint in the city, so my odds were good.
    I didn’t have to reflect on my potential bet very long. A tousled head of blonde hair poked around the backrest and a very lovely body uncoiled itself from the seat and walked itself toward me. There was a lot of animal in her stride. Under the close-fitting jersey of her dress, each little muscle in her stomach and legsrippled coaxingly. If she had anything on under that thing, you could stuff it in a thimble.
    She parked a glorious fanny on the stool next to me and flashed a smile in my direction.
    “Why, hello, Mike,” she said. She poured it out like melted butter.
    Now what? I couldn’t place her at all. Maybe I had taken one to the head harder than I thought...
    “What do you say, kid?” I said, faking it.
    “Remember me?”
    I don’t usually forget pretty faces, even after getting clobbered. This one belonged to a fabulous piece of