The Tough Guys

by Mickey Spillane

  Mickey Spillane

  The Tough Guys

  “Kick It or Kill!”

  An old switcher engine pulled the two-car train from the junction at Richfield over the 12-mile spur into Lake Rappaho. At the right time the ride could have been fun because the cars were leftovers from another era, but now it was a damn nuisance. Coal dust had powdered everything, settling into the mohair seats like sand and hanging in the air so you could taste it. Summer was two months gone and the mountains and valleys outside were funneling down cold Canadian air. There was no heat in the car.

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded, but now the chill made my whole side ache again under the bandage and I was calling myself an idiot for listening to that doctor and his wild ideas about me having to take a complete rest. I could have holed up just as well in New York, but instead I fell for the fresh air routine and took his advice about this place.

  Lake Rappaho was the end of the line. A single limp sack of mail and a half dozen packages came off the baggage car as I stepped down from the last one.

  On the other side of the platform, a black ’58 Chevy with a hand painted TAXI on its door stood empty. I saw the driver, all right. He and a wizened old stationmaster were in the office peering at me like I was a stray moose in church. But that’s mountain country for you. When you’re out of season and not expected, everybody goes into a G.I. hemorrhage.

  I waved my thumb at the taxi, picked up my old B-4 bag and the mailing tube I kept my split bamboo rod in, walked across the station to the car, threw my gear in the back seat, then got in front for the drive into Pinewood. It was another five minutes before the driver came out.

  He opened the door on the other side. “Afternoon. You going to Pinewood?”

  “Anyplace else to go?”

  He shook his head. “Not for fifty miles, I guess.”

  “Then let’s go there.”

  He slid under the wheel and kicked the motor over. In backing around the corner of the station he made a pretense of seeing my duffel in the back. “You going fishing?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “No fishing now, you know. Wrong season.”

  “It’s still open, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “For the rest of the month. But there’s no fish.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  It was a four-mile trip into the fading sun to Pinewood and he didn’t say anything again, but every foot of the way his hands were white around the wheel.

  Pinewood had a permanent population of 2,500. It lay where the valley widened on one end of Lake Rappaho, a mile and a half long and four blocks wide. The summer cabins and homes on the outskirts were long closed and what activity there was centered around the main crossroads.

  The Pines Hotel stood on the corner, a three-story white frame building whose second-story porch overhung the entire width of the sidewalk.

  I paid the cabby, grabbed my luggage and went inside.

  The two big guys bordering the door waited until I had crossed the lobby and was at the desk. Then they came up and watched while I signed the register. The heavy one took my card from the clip and looked at it.

  “Mister Kelly Smith, New York City,” he said. “That’s a big place for a whole address.”

  “Sure is.” The clerk edged up from his desk with a small, fixed smile divided between the other two and me.

  “I’ll be here two weeks,” I told him. “I want a room upstairs away from the sun and take it out in advance.” I pushed a hundred dollar bill across the desk and waited.

  “Like if somebody wanted to find you in New York…” the big guy started to say.

  I snatched the card from his fingers. “Then you look in the phone book. I’m listed,” I said. I was feeling the old edge come back.

  “Smith is a common name…”

  “I’m the only Kelly Smith.”

  He tried to stare me down, but I wasn’t playing any games. So instead he reached out and picked up my C note and looked at it carefully. “Haven’t seen one of these in a long time.”

  I took that away from him too. “The way you’re going you’ll never see one,” I said.

  The clerk smiled, his eyes frightened, took the bill, and gave me $16 back. He handed me a room key. “Two-nineteen, on the corner.”

  The big guy touched me on the shoulder. “You’re pretty fresh.”

  I grinned at him. “And you’re a lousy cop. Now just get off my back or start conducting a decent investigation. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll be glad to drop by your office, give you a full E.G., let you take my prints, and play Dragnet all you want. But first I want to get cleaned up and get something to eat.”

  He suddenly developed a nervous mouth. “Supposing you do that. You do just that, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Later maybe,” and watched him go out.

  When the door closed the clerk said. “That was Captain Cox and his sergeant, Hal Vance.”

  “They always pull that act on tourists?”

  “Well, no… no, of course not.”

  “How many are in the department here.”

  “The police? Oh… six, I think.”

  “That’s two too many. They pull that stunt on me again while I’m here and I’ll burn somebody’s tail for them.”

  Behind me, a voice with a cold, throaty quality said, “I don’t know whether I want you here or not.”

  I glanced at the clerk. “Nice place you run here. Who is she?”

  “The owner.” He nodded to a hand-carved plaque on his desk. It read, Miss Dari Dahl, Prop.

  She was a big one, all right, full breasted and lovely with loose sun-bleached hair touching wide shoulders and smooth, tanned skin.

  “You haven’t any choice, honey. I got a receipt for two weeks. Now smile. A lovely mouse like you ought to be smiling all the time.”

  She smiled. Very prettily. Her mouth was lush like I knew it would be and she hip-tilted toward me deliberately. Only her eyes weren’t smiling. She said, “Drop dead, you creep,” and brushed by me.

  There was something familiar about her name. The clerk gave me the answer. “It was her sister who killed herself in New York last year. Flori Dahl. She went out a window of the New Century Building.”

  I remembered it then. It made headlines when she landed on a parked U.N. car and almost killed a European delegate about to drive off with a notorious call girl. The tabloids spilled the bit before the hush needles went in.

  “Tough,” I said, “only she oughtn’t to let it bug her like that.”

  I had supper in White’s restaurant. I had a table in the corner where I could see the locals filter in to the bar up front. The few who ate were older couples and when they were done I was alone. But everybody knew where I was. They looked at me often enough. Not direct, friendly glances, but scared things that were touched with some hidden anger.

  My waitress came over with a bill. I said softly, “Sugar… what the hell’s the matter with this town?”

  She was scared, too. “Sir?” was all she could manage.

  I walked up to the bar.

  At 8 o’clock, Captain Cox and Sergeant Vance came in and tried to make like they weren’t watching me. Fifteen minutes later, Dari Dahl came in. When she finally saw me her eyes became veiled with contempt, then she turned away and that was that.

  I was ready to go when the door opened again. You could feel the freeze. Talk suddenly quieted down. The two guys in tweedy coats closed the door behind them and walked up to the bar with studied casualness. Their clothes were just the right kind, but on the wrong people because they weren’t Madison Avenuers at all. One was Nat Paley and the bigger guy you called Lennie Weaver when you wanted to stay friends, but, if you had a yen for dying quick,
you gave him the Pigface tab Margie Provetsky hung on him years ago.

  I felt that crazy feeling come all over me and I wanted to grin, but for now I kept it in. I pushed my stool back and that’s as far as I got. The little guy who stormed in was no more than 20, but he had an empty milk bottle in one hand and he mouthed a string of curses as he came at Paley and Weaver.

  Trouble was, he talked too much. He tried to spill it out before he cut loose. Lenny laced him with a sudden backhand as Nat grabbed him, took the bottle away, and slammed him to the floor.

  He wasn’t hurt, but he was too emotionally gone to do anything more than cry. His face was contorted with hate.

  Lenny grunted and picked up his drink. “You crazy, kid?”

  “You dirty bastard!” The words were softly muffled. “You talked her into working for him.”

  “Get outa here, kid.”

  “She didn’t have to work up there. She had a job. You showed her all that money, didn’t you? That’s why she worked. She always talked about having that kind of money. You bastards! You dirty bastards!”

  When Nat kicked him, the blood splashed all over his shoes and the kid just lay there. He twitched, vomited, and started to choke. The only one who moved was Dari. She managed to get him face down and held him like that until he moaned softly and opened his eyes.

  She glanced up with those wild eyes of hers and said, “Sonny was right. You’re dirty bastards.”

  “Would you like a kick in the face too, lady?” Lennie asked her.

  For a second it was real quiet, then I said, “Try it, Pig-face.”

  He spun around and my shoe ripped his sex machine apart and while he was in the middle of a soundless scream I grabbed Nat’s hair and slammed his face against the bar. He yelled, swung at me, and one hand tore into the bandage over my ribs and I felt the punk draining right out of me. But that was his last chance. I almost brained him the next time and let him fall in a heap on the floor with his buddy.

  I faked a grin at Dari, walked past the two cops at the table, and said so everybody could hear me, “Nice clean town you got here, friend,” and went outside to get sick.

  The window was open and I could see my breath in the air, but just the same I was soaked with sweat. When the knock came on the door I automatically said to come on in, not caring who it was. My side was one gigantic ball of fire and it was going to be another hour before the pills I had taken helped.

  There was no sympathy in her voice. The disdain was still there, only now it was touched by curiosity. She stood there, her stomach flat under her dress, her breasts swelling out, and I remembered pictures of the Amazons and thought that she would have made a good one. Especially naked.

  “Sonny asked me to thank you.”

  Trying to make my voice sound real wasn’t easy. “No trouble.”

  “Do you… know what you’re doing?”

  She paused.

  “What do you want in Pinewood?”

  “A vacation, kitten. Two weeks. I have to do it. Now, will you do me a favor?” I closed my eyes. The fire in my side was building up again.

  “Yes?”

  “In my B-4 bag over there… in the side pocket is a bottle of capsules. Please…”

  I heard the zipper run back, then the sharp intake of her breath. The gun she found in the wrong side pocket suddenly fell to the floor with a thump and then she was standing over me again. She had the bottle in her hand.

  “You’re a damned drug addict, aren’t you? That’s the way they get without their dosage. They get sick, they sweat, they shake.” She poured the caps back in the bottle and capped it. “Your act in the restaurant stunk. Now act this one out.” With a quick flip of her wrist she threw the bottle out the window and I heard it smash in the street.

  “You filth,” she said and walked out.

  It was three in the afternoon when I woke up. I lay there panting and, when the sudden sickness in my stomach subsided, I got to my feet and undressed. Outside, a steady light rain tapped against the windows.

  A hot shower was like a rebirth.

  The .45 was still on the floor where Dari Dahl had let it drop and I hooked it with my foot, picked it up, and zippered it inside my leather shaving kit.

  Every time I thought of that crazy broad throwing that bottle out the window I felt like laying her out. That wasn’t getting those capsules back, though. I had maybe another two hours to go and I was going to need them bad, bad, bad. I stuffed 50 bucks in my pocket and went downstairs.

  Outside my window, I found the remains of the bottle. The capsules inside had long since dissolved and been washed away by the rain.

  I shrugged it off, found the drugstore and passed my spare prescription over to the clerk. He glanced at it, looked at me sharply, and said, “This will take an hour.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll be back.”

  I headed for the restaurant. Although lights were on in store fronts and the corner traffic blinker winked steadily, there wasn’t a car or a person on the street. It was like a ghost town.

  The restaurant was empty. The waitress recognized me with a peculiar smile, took my order, and half-ran to the kitchen. The bartender walked across the room to me.

  He was a graying man in his late 40s, a little too thin with deep tired eyes. “Look, mister,” he said, “I don’t want trouble in here.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “You know who those jokers were?”

  He nodded. “We’ll handle things our own way.”

  “Then start by keeping out of my hair, friend,” I told him. “I don’t know how or why those punks are here, but they’re the kind of trouble people like you just don’t handle at all, so be grateful for the little things, understand?”

  He didn’t understand at all and his face showed it. He glanced outside toward the distant slope of the mountain. “You aren’t… on the hill?”

  “Mac, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I think you people are nuts, that’s all. I pull those punks off the kid’s back last night while you, the cops, and everybody else just watch and catch the hard time. I don’t get it.”

  The door slammed open and Sergeant Vance came in. He came sidling over and tossed a sheet of paper down on the table. It was my prescription.

  “This calls for narcotics, mister. You better come up with a damn good explanation.”

  Real slowly I stood up. Vance was a big guy, but he wasn’t looking down on me at all. Not at all. His face was all mean but scared too like the rest and his hand jumped to the butt of his service revolver.

  I said, “Okay, you clown, I’ll give you one explanation and if you ask again I’ll shove that gun of yours up your pipe. That’s a legitimate prescription you got there and, if you do any checking, you check the doctor who issued it first. Then, if it’s bad, you come back to me. Meanwhile, you have a certain procedure to take that’s down in black and white in the statute books. Now you take that prescription back and see that it gets filled or you’ll be chewing on a warrant for your own arrest.”

  He got it, all right. For a minute, I thought I was going to have to take the rod away from him, but the message got through in time. He went out as fast as he came in.

  What a hell of a vacation this was. Brother!

  Willie Elkins, who owned a garage, was willing to rent me his pickup truck for 15 bucks a week. It was a dilapidated thing, but all I needed. He told me how to find old Mort Steiger, who rented boats. The old guy let me have my pick, then shook his head at me and grinned through his broken plate. “You ain’t no fisherman, are you?”

  “Nope,” I shook back. “I try once in a while, but I’m no fisherman.”

  He paused, watching me warily. “You on the hill?”

  “What is this ‘hill’ business? Who’s up on what hill?”

  He waited a moment, sucking on his lips. “You kiddin’? No, guess you ain’t.” He pointed a gnarled finger over my shoulder. “Big place up there just around that ridge. Can’t see it from here, bu
t she has a private road that comes right down to the lake, all fenced in. Whole place like that. You can’t get in or out unless they let you.”

  “Who lets you?”

  “City people. That’s Mister Simpson’s place. Big manufacturer of something or other. Never met him myself. He likes it private.”

  I let out a grunt. “He sure does. He has a real goon squad working for him. I met a couple last night. They needed straightening out.”

  This time his grin got broader and he chuckled. “So you’re the one. Willie told me about that. Could be you’ll make trouble for yourself, you don’t watch out.”

  “It won’t come from two-bit punks, pop. Trouble is, if Simpson’s such a big one, what’s he doing with guys like that on his place?”

  “Maybe I could tell you.”

  I waited.

  “This Simpson feller was a big one long time ago. Bootlegging or something, then he went straight. He had all this money so he went into business. Few times a year he comes up here, does some business, and leaves.”

  “Everybody in town is scared, pop. That’s not good business.”

  His eyes seemed to scratch the ground. “Ain’t the business he does.”

  “What then?”

  “The girls. He sends down to Pinewood for girls.”

  “The place looks big enough to support a few hookers.”

  “Mister, you just don’t know country towns. Comes end of summer and those girls pack up and leave. It’s the others he gets.”

  “Listen, a guy that big wouldn’t try…”

  He interrupted with a wave of his hand. “You got me wrong. He… employs them.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “They go up there, all right, but they don’t come back… well, the same… Rita Moffet and the oldest Spencer girl moved over to Sunbar. Bob Rayburn’s only girl, she never would speak to anybody and last year they had to send her to the State Hospital. She still won’t speak to anybody at all. Flori Dahl and Ruth Gleason went off to New York. Flori died there and nobody has heard from Ruth in months.”

  “Nice picture.”

  “Others, too. That’s not all. Some are still here and every time Simpson and the bunch comes in they go up there to work. Like they enjoy it. He pays them plenty, oh, you can bet that. What stuff they buy, and all from New York.”