The Last Cop Out by Mickey Spillane Page B

Schneider took Burke back to the files and found the packet he requested. He spread the contents out on the table and said, “There it is. Not much, but we didn’t need much.” He pulled out photos of three bullets that had taken a life and pointed out the configurations on the enlargements that showed they all came from the same gun, then moved over another verifying the groove marks from the murder weapon. “I wish they were all that easy,” he said.
    Burke picked up the composite showing the prints lifted from the murder weapon. They clearly matched those taken from the body of Proctor. Schneider pointed out the similarities with expert ease.
    “We were lucky here,” he said. “The usual crosshatched walnut stock had been replaced with a clear plastic that picked up those three beautiful prints. The rest were smudged, but even then it didn’t matter. The gun was lying right under him where he fell.”
    Burke jammed his cigarette out in an ash tray, his finger flicking against the photo. “What’s wrong with this, Al?”
    Schneider took it out of his fingers, studied it and gave it back to him. “Nothing. It’s beautiful.”
    “There’s something wrong.”
    “Like hell.”
    “Maybe we’re just stupid.”
    “You don’t make sergeant being stupid,” Schneider told him. “What more do you want?”
    “Be damned if I know.”
    “Why don’t you just leave it alone, Gill?”
    “Because I don’t like to think of myself as being stupid,” he said. He looked at his watch and it was closing in on two o’clock.
    Just then Trent came in with an eight-by-ten color print and held it out for Schneider to file along with the typed report. “Want to see a beauty? It’s the guy they found in Prospect Park.”
    Sergeant Schneider didn’t mind the black-and-whites, but those damned color photographs they were sending down these days made him sick, especially when they were of entrails, mutilated glands and torn flesh. He gagged, and when Burke said, “Let me see that,” he was glad to give it to him.
    “Who’s handling this?” Burke asked Trent after a minute’s scrutiny.
    “Peterson.”
    He pointed to an area in the picture where a gaping wound had been gouged into the corpse’s belly. “Tell him to check the Minneapolis and Denver files for an M.O. Go back about ten years. Two of the Caprini clowns from the Chicago family were rubbed out by a hit man who liked to tear out belly buttons.”
    “Why the hell would he do that?” Trent asked.
    “Maybe he ate them,” Gill said.
    Schneider gagged again. Gill laughed and left.
     
    The answering service told him he had had a call from a Mr. Willie Armstrong who didn’t leave a number, and after he thanked the operator he fished another dime out of his pocket and dialed the apartment on Lenox Avenue.
    When he heard the rumbling hello, he said, “Gill here, Junior, I got your message.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Phone booth. What’s up?”
    “If you want Henry Campbell hell talk to you but it’ll cost.”
    “No sweat.”
    “I promised him no heat.”
    “Deal.”
    “He ain’t no boy, bossman, and you can bet he’s covered. If there’s any kickback I’ll be the sucker.”
    “Junior,” Gill told him, “right now I’d like to kick your black ass for that remark.”
    He heard his friend chuckle on the other end of the line. “Sorry, buddy. It’s been a long time since we lived in the same foxhole.”
    “Forget it, ape. Where do we meet?”
    “You remember where Perry Chops met his just reward?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Right there at ten P.M.” Junior Armstrong chuckled again. “And see heah, boy. Don’t play the big white hunter. Yo in Black Panther territority theah.”
    “Yo bigoted, man,” Gill laughed back.
     
    Perry Chops was a long-dead narcotics pusher who bought it in a five-floor fall from a rooftop assisted by the fist of an irate father who caught him about to introduce his two teenage kids into the screaming glories of heroin.