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

answer him. The dark figure leaning over the banister upstairs yelled down in his softly accented voice, “What’s going on down there?”
    Once again I beat the pair to the punch. “It’s Mike Hammer,” I called back. “If you don’t want to talk to me, I’ll beat it. If you want trouble I’ll shoot the hell out of your guys here and the cops can mop up the mess.”
    I think the dialogue came out of that TV movie too.
    “He’s got a gun on him, Mr. Ponti,” Patterson yelled.
    “In his hand?”
    “No. It’s under his coat.”
    Ponti was like a cat. His curiosity was as tight as a stretched rubber band. He didn’t even wait a second before he said, “He’s always got that gun. Let him come on up, unless you want to shoot it out down there.”
    Ponti was a player, all right. Two old school kids were meeting on the dirty playground to duke it out and the rest of the gang could go kiss their tails. When I got to the top of the stairs Ponti just nodded for me to follow him and he walked in front of me as if it were all one big tea party. He could have been showing off or he could have men hidden waiting for me to jump him, but there was no fear in his movements at all. He pushed through a door to an office, but I didn’t go through. I made sure the door flattened against the wall so nobody was behind it, visually scanned the area, then stepped in and edged along the wall to a chair in front of Ponti’s desk.
    His expression seemed to appreciate my cautiousness. “Are you nervous, Mr. Hammer?”
    “Just careful.”
    “You take big chances.”
    “Not really.”
    “Oh?”
    “I could have blown those goons you have downstairs right out of their socks if they tried to play guns.”
    “You could lose. There were a lot of them.”
    “I’ve been there before,” I reminded him.
    A hardness flushed his face. “Yes. I know.”
    For thirty seconds I just stood there staring at him, then moved around the chair and sat down. “Go ahead and ask it,” I said.
    The don played his role magnificently. He pulled his leather padded desk chair back on its rollers, sat down easily and folded his hands in his lap. It was taking an effort, but he was keeping his face in repose. When he was ready his eyes met mine and he said, “Did you kill my son, Mr. Hammer?”
    There was no waiting this time either. “I shot him right in the head, Don Ponti. He had put two into me and was about to give me one right in the face when I squeezed a .45 into his head. You’re damn right I shot him and if you have any more like him who want to try that action on me I’ll do the same thing again.”
    I didn’t know what to expect, certainly not the look of calm acceptance he wore. He seemed to be mentally reviewing the details of that night and when all the pieces fit into the puzzle he seemed oddly satisfied. “I do not blame you, Mr. Hammer,” he told me quietly. “Of course, the public does not know what really happened, do they?”
    “I wasn’t around for any discussion.”
    “No, to them it was a gang war. The police were quite willing to let it go at that.”
    “What was it, Mr. Ponti?” I asked.
    “A gang war,” he told me amicably. “They happen, you know.”
    “Not like that. Not when the businesses are going along smoothly and the boss of bosses can take a vacation. Not when some of them who were shot up during the battle didn’t belong there to start with. There was no street talk about a rumble about to happen and if you hadn’t taken the normal precautions you would have been a total casualty when it was over.”
    “Taking precautions has kept me alive,” he said, “but tell me, why were you there at all?”
    “Because I had been tipped off that it was going down. The tip wasn’t from any organization. It came from a drunk who overheard a couple of guys talking. I got it very casually, but it didn’t take long to figure out it was damn real and if you didn’t get hit, you could put a finger right on me for