"They're limited views—I only have lobby elevators and one view per floor."
"Understood. But maybe you snagged something."
"Or somebody. I'll call you." He grinned up at me. "Man, are you ever gonna retire?"
"What, like you, Harry?"
About an hour later, I took the call at my desk. "Anything, Harry?"
"You mixing it up with them towelheads, Mike?"
"Why, is that who you see on the tape?"
"No, that's what I see in the papers. What I see on the tape is a little white weasel. I don't remember his real name, if I ever knew it, but they call him 'Pistol Pete.'"
"Sounds like a shooter."
"No way. Sharp as a pistol is where the moniker comes from. He's a lock expert. No office, cash in advance, guaranteed closed mouth. Not easy to locate unless you got a hand in the burglary business."
"He heavy money?"
"Maybe a grand for a job like this. He get something valuable off you? Evidence or something?"
"No. We don't have any big court cases coming up."
"You want me to follow up on this?"
"No thanks, Harry, I'll take it from here."
Harry could have got himself in trouble not reporting this, but he didn't say a word. It's great the way guys in the same game get along.
My next call was to Pat. "You ever hear of a character called Pistol Pete?"
A long pause followed that I knew meant I'd stepped in a hole. "You're kidding, right?"
"It was a question, Pat. Got an answer for me?"
"What I got is a report on my desk that one of the top freelance thieves in this town, a guy the Burglary Squad has had in its Top Ten for fifteen years, was found with his throat cut in a gutter in an alley by a bar in Bay Ridge."
"Named Pistol Pete?"
"Named Peter Pistelli, but that was what his friends called him, yeah."
Possibly also what people who weren't his friends called him. "Pat, the security in this building has Mr. Pistelli on its cameras last night, and in a wild coincidence, my office was broken into."
"Shit. Anything taken?"
I had kept Pat out of the loop about the bone clones, and now was not the time to bring him onboard. "Nope. He was just inquisitive, far as we can tell. Can't find anything missing."
"He might've shot photos of evidence in your files."
"Yeah, he might. We're doing an inventory. Listen, you mentioned something about having an Arabic speaker working undercover on the Burglary Squad? Possible source of intel on al-Qaeda types?"
"Right. Why?"
"That's my question, Pat—why the Burglary Squad?"
"Because some of these terror cells raise money doing burglaries and heists. Some of them are goddamn good at it. But if your break-in had something to do with the Goliath bone, they'd have done the job themselves, wouldn't they?"
"Maybe not. They know I've posted extra men on my building to keep an eye out with a specific racial profile in mind. Ask your undercover guy if these Arabian thieves of his have connections with other local heisters."
"You mean, would they hire some white asshole to get what they wanted, and let him take the rap for them?"
"And then cut his throat for him right after he'd passed off what he took? Yeah."
"But you said he didn't take anything, Mike."
"I was speaking hypothetically, Pat."
"My hypothetical ass. Bay Ridge has a large Arab-American community, Mike....What did they get? Christ, you weren't hiding that relic in your damn closet, were you?"
"We're getting back into that need-to-know area, Pat. And I need to know whether your undercover guy considers it credible, the local al-Qaeda branch hiring Pistol Pete."
He growled a little, but said, "All right. You'll hear from me."
"Where would I be without you, pal?"
"Out hiring half a dozen operatives to cover what I do for you for free. And, yes, I know you pay my salary—" He hung up.
Two weeks later, Pat was in a much better mood. He accompanied us to City Hall and stood up with me when I married Velda. Jenna Hurley was at Velda's side, and Matthew was a witness. We had a big wedding lunch at Le Cirque on East 58th that cost me just a little bit more than my first heap.
Matthew sat next to me, and I asked him how he was getting along with his stepmother.
"A lot better."
"But I bet you two haven't broken the news to her yet, that you'll be the next couple stepping up to the marriage plate."
Matthew grinned nervously and bobbed his head.
"Kid, I waited longer than you've been alive to nab this long-legged doll. Don't make my mistake."
Things had settled down even though the Goliath bone was still big news. Harold Cooke's press conference announcing his imminent Broadway revival of David and Goliath, including "a public showing of the recently discovered giant femur believed by experts to be that of the Biblical Goliath himself," had sparked a media frenzy. This was one of those rare stories that straddled the entertainment world and the international scene. The one-week engagement sold out in five hours, mostly over the Internet, with ticket prices twice the already-outrageous going Broadway rate. Velda, the kids and I would be comped, of course.
A whole second wave of PR followed the announcement of the animatronic Goliath, with TV puff pieces and in-depth newspaper articles (in science-and-technology newspaper sections) about the Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Japanese inventors working together on "a ten-foot robot operating with thirty-two air pumps."
The excitement was only fueled by an al-Qaeda claim to have "retrieved the femur of the great hero, Jalut of Gath (his Arabic alias), from the hands of infidels." That Bin Laden himself delivered the message, in his first videotaped appearance in six months, racked up enormous free publicity for Harold Cooke on the twenty-four—hour cable news channels.
The al-Qaeda party line was that the bone was a religious artifact and would not go on public display. A statement from the Israeli government disputed that the artifact was in Arab hands, and reminded the world that authenticating the femur as having been that of the Biblical Goliath was impossible. Many nuances were explored by the media—interviews with reps of major Jewish-American organizations called the artifact a symbol of triumph over the enemies of Israel, while spokespersons for Arab-American groups were, like the Arab states themselves, divided between viewing the artifact as a symbol of Islamic heroism or an embarrassment to be denied and/or destroyed.
And Harold Cooke basked in it.
Matthew, Jenna and Charlene Hurley gave no interviews. I did a few shows and simply said Cooke had bought the authentic bone from my clients, and didn't offer up anything that wasn't already in the public record. Most of the interviews degenerated into replays of my more notorious cases, and I had plenty of canned answers ready about them.
But the heat was finally off the kids and they moved back in with the girl's mother, who called me the day after Velda and I got hitched, to offer her congratulations.
"Mike, I'm sorry about that night you came to my office ... I was way out of line, but I hope you'll understand that I was an emotional wreck."
"You better now?"
" With the kids back, and all of us in the apartment together, we're great. But I do apologize."
"Not another word. It was as close to a bachelor party as I got."
She did me the courtesy of laughing at that.
I caught up with Pat at a little deli restaurant we liked down the block and around the corner from police headquarters.
"My undercover contact on the Burglary Squad," Pat said, "confirms the possibility that Pistol Pete could've been hired by those al-Qaeda boys. Apparently Pete was a real pro, with a deft touch, kept up on all the changes, every safe and lock that got redesigned, every old security system that got revised, and every new one that came out."
"They'd used him before."
Pat nodded. "On the other hand, the talk about that open contract on you seems
to have faded. Nothing lately on the assassin, the other Goliath, either."
"Just talk. Big talk. Bullies from the dawn of time have been all mouth."
"So what now, Mike? Is that it for you and the Goliath bone?"
"There's a shoe or two left to drop, Pat. But for the most part, yeah, I think so."
"You don't mind me tying up some loose ends? Like putting away these assholes who cut Pistol Pete's throat, if I can find them."
"Never let it be said that Michael Hammer ever stood in the way of a law-enforcement official fulfilling his sworn duty to serve and protect the public."
Pat gave half a wry grin. "As long as I remember that Michael Hammer is a big part of that public."
I grinned back at him, and saluted him with my sandwich.
He sipped his coffee. "Why did you wait so long, Mike?"
I was about to take a bite of corned beef on rye. "What?"
"To marry her. To marry Velda."
I shrugged. "Pat, you'll never believe this, but it was Velda, all these years, who wanted to wait."
"Gimme a break!"
"I know, I know, all that kidding back and forth about me putting it off ... but really, it was her."
He was studying me like crucial evidence in a case he'd been trying to crack for years. When his voice finally came, it was soft: "You really mean it, Mike?"
"Yeah. Someday maybe I'll tell you the whole story. But bad things happened to her, years ago, when she was with the CIA, behind that Iron fucking Curtain."
"Like what?"
"I can't really say anything else, Pat. If she wanted you to know, she'd have told you by now."
"Mike ... are you pulling my chain?"
"No."
"Well, what's it about?"
"All I can say, Pat, is she came back from that terrible time, in that terrible place ... not able to have children."
"My God ... what did they—"
"Buddy, don't ask me to say more. For a lot of years, she loved me and I loved her, but she had this crazy idea that she wasn't complete because she couldn't have kids. Hell of an irony, huh? The most beautiful woman in the world, the kind of creature God put here to make sure men get the right idea and keep the planet populated ... and she wasn't in the game."
"Mike. That's awful. My God, it's terrible. Here all these years, I thought you were just—"
"A jerk who didn't appreciate her? Naw. I was a jerk who appre ciated the hell out of her, Pat. Well, we're finally past where having kids means anything. Having each other means everything. So we're married now, and you were my best man, buddy—not a big ceremony maybe, but nobody ever had a better best man than Captain Patrick Chambers."
I held my hand out and he took it and we shook.
"Mike ... was this your last job?"
"Maybe. Hell, man—they don't come any bigger than Goliath."
The little one-story white clapboard beach house with the baby blue tile roof was perched on its own private peninsula fronting on the Gulf. A thirty-foot channel ran along one side, the aftermath of the state dredging it for coquina to lay a roadbed to Key West. We were a little south of Marathon, with its ten thousand or so year-rounders, and we had plenty of privacy.
The accommodations were courtesy of a doctor who felt I'd saved his life by letting him save mine. A long time ago, I'd recuperated here after a bloody shoot-out that should have left me dead. A washed-up doc had hauled me off the killing field and saved my ass, but he felt the debt was his, because I gave him back his self-worth. I'd recuperated in a glorified shack on the same tiny peninsula, a concrete-block shed that the doc had replaced with this beach house after he got back on his feet and his practice started flourishing again.
If I ever wanted to borrow his beach house for a little getaway from the Manhattan madhouse, he said, all I had to do was ask.
Finally I'd asked. I'd called him to talk about it, and we'd quickly lined up a couple weeks' worth of honeymoon time for Velda and me.
She loved the place at once—it wasn't big or fancy, but it was nice and new, with an understated seaside cottage decor, big brown tiles on the floor and white walls with rattan furnishings and framed seascape prints. The doc's pad wasn't big—the living room was good-size, looking onto a modest deck with two squat white wooden chairs; a counter separated the living room from a modest kitchen that somehow squeezed in a round dining-room table. A hallway off the kitchen led to two bedrooms and one bath and a little laundry room.
Velda immediately picked up on the unusual lamp near one of two recliners angled to face a flat-screen TV. "I like that," she said. "But it's not your style."
"Why isn't it?"
She touched the shaft of the modernistic lamp, which widened dramatically into a rounded base with a hand-painted black-and-white design of willowy 1920s beauties walking their wolfhounds. "This is art deco. You hate art deco."
"I like the Empire State Building."
"That's only because you like the original King Kong. Looks a little pricey, compared to the rest of this stuff, which is nice, but this... "
"That's because it's yours."
"What do you mean, it's mine?"
"That lamp. It's a wedding present. That's no antique—Artie Berns in Brooklyn made it for us."
"Oh, I love his stuff!" She was caressing the shaft of the thing in a way a honeymooning wife shouldn't, unless she's serious.
"Of course, it's all yours," I said casually.
She turned to me, the big brown eyes growing even bigger. "What do you mean?"
I shrugged. "We had a good payday from Cooke. I invested in some real estate."
"You did?"
"Doc Morgan gave me a deal on this place. It's worth two or three times what he asked, but he thinks he owes me. He doesn't anymore, I can tell you."
Her jaw dropped. "Mike..."
"If you don't like it, we can put it right back on the market. We'll probably double our money, though that wasn't the—"
I didn't finish that, because she was in my arms, and taking her revenge by punching me in the mouth with her lips. She started unbuttoning my sport shirt and I worked on getting her shorts un-snapped, and we inaugurated the living floor before she'd even seen the bedroom.
We sat at the kitchen table and she sipped a bottled water and I took periodic gulps from a can of Miller.
"I should be mad, Mike."
"Why?"
"You don't buy a girl a house the way you do a diamond ... thanks for the diamond, by the way."
It was a full two-carat job. A guy in the Jewelry District had owed me, too.
"It's not a big place," I said, "but there's only two of us. We've got a spare bedroom if Pat or the Hurley kids or anybody wants to come calling. Thought we could make an office of that, too—a corner of it, anyway."
"Is this a...getaway place, Mike? How much of the year do you want to spend here?"
"How much do you?"
"We've discussed closing up the office...."
"I talked to Pat about that."
"Pat?"
"Yeah, he retires in three months. He's going to throw in with Michael Hammer Investigations. He can carry the whole load, or we can spend however many months a year up there we feel like...if we feel like it."
"Or ... just stay down here in the sun?"
I grinned at her. "It's why old people go to Florida, doll."
She smirked at me. "What would you do with yourself, Mike Hammer?"
"I dunno. I still have four or five big cases I haven't written up yet. That'll probably take me till I keel over, particularly since I don't feel real ambitious."
She reached out for my hand. "Manhattan without Mike Hammer? Can that town survive?"
"Who gives a hoot?"
That made her laugh. And I had one of those warm fuzzy moments Mike Hammer shouldn't have, thinking about how great it would be hearing that sexy, throaty laugh every day—not in an office, but in a place of our own where I could haul her lovely fanny into the bedroom an
d do something about it whenever I felt like it. If she let me.
We had no plans except to enjoy the white beach, the blue green water and each other. Velda sunned in the kind of little white bikini that only a husband should see, and I sat in a beach chair in a T-shirt and a pair of white shorts and sandals and drank Miller beer. I would start out in the sun and then, for exercise, move to the shade of a palm. For a complete change of pace, I'd take one of the chairs on the deck. Sometimes I'd read a paperback. Mostly I watched my beautiful wife. At sunset, we sat on the deck together and watched gold and purple fight for control of the sea and the sky. Purple won. So did we.
This was where serious sport fishermen came, but we were the tourist trade, not catching fish but eating them at joints with names like the Cracked Conch CafÉ and the Fishbones Restaurant; nights Velda dug the classic rock at the Brass Monkey—I'm a classical guy myself and I don't mean rock, but what the wife wants, the wife gets. No charter fishing for us, and I sure as hell didn't care to catch a Goliath grouper, one of the possibilities offered.
We did get out on the water—the doctor gave us use of his boat, a twenty-two-foot Carolina day boat, so called because of its open cockpit. The boat had no name, just the number 819, which held some military significance for the doc, I guess.
Velda was startled by my confidence with the craft, but I'd stayed with the doc down here for a long time and had got the hang of it. It maneuvered well, the kind of craft you could steer with one hand and have a hand free for a can of beer. The two Evinrudes at the tail gave it some punch, too. This beat hell out of trying to drive your car in midtown traffic.
Again, fishing wasn't the idea—just feeling the wind and spray and letting the sun wash over us, and feeling beautifully small surrounded by an infinity of glimmering water. If we stayed down here, and I was thinking we just might, I would learn about the sport. Catch and release would be my preference. I was winding down where killing things were concerned.
I had only one job: breakfast. Eggs and bacon and refrigerator biscuits were my specialty, and all I knew how to make. But I could baste her eggs just like she liked them, cooking them in the square of four bacon strips sizzling in the pan. She used to say I'd make somebody a great wife, and now I was proving it.
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 20
