By the time we hit the East Side Drive, we had it planned out.
I gave the cabbie a slightly circuitous route, just to make sure our tail was sticking with us. Then I directed him to a corner near a hotel where I knew cabs would be waiting.
We pulled over and Des Casey climbed out, making an elaborate show out of saying so long, and heading into the hotel. I went on alone in the cab. Behind me, the squat guy’s hack had paused half a block behind, and now took up my tail, apparently secure in the cover the other cabs were lending.
But it was a damn near sure bet our squat pal’s hackie didn’t notice Casey slip back out and catch a cab behind him, falling in line on our little caravan.
My cabbie, a Puerto Rican in his twenties, pulled up in front of the Hackard Building. I leaned up and passed him a ten. His grin was blazing white in his brown face.
“You’re Mike Hammer, ain’t you, man?”
“I used to be,” I admitted. “Keep it.”
“I should have you sign it, man. Frame the damn thing.”
“Naw. Buy the baby some grub.”
“How you know I’m a new papa, man?”
Little knitted blue baby shoes were hanging off his rear-view mirror.
“I’m a detective,” I said.
My office was on the eighth floor of the old building, which had seen better days and was overdue a renovation. I had that odd feeling you get when you return to the familiar after a long while away—a mingling of comfort and apprehension. As I stood in the lobby waiting for the elevator doors to open, I thought about how she was up there, waiting for me, business as usual. And yet there was nothing about Velda that was “usual.”
It had been a long, long time away from her, a hungry time, often a desperate time, wondering if the odds were so long that seeing her even once more was too much to dare hope for...
At 808, I turned the knob gently and eased the door open, stepped inside, and closed it silently. The outer office was empty, but the roses I’d had sent to her were in a vase on her desk. I smiled.
My inner office door was open and I found her standing behind my desk, a hand on my chair as if on my shoulder, her back to me, staring out the window into a blazing sunset that was pulling a dark curtain over the city. The black velvet of her hair made a beautiful torrent spilling down over her shoulders, filtering the fading light. She wore a cream-colored silk blouse separated from a dark brown skirt by a wide tan belt, such a simple ensemble and yet they served so well the strength and loveliness of a tall, full-breasted body reflected in the width of her shoulders, the narrowness of her waist, and the athletic grace of her posture.
I said, “Hello, Velda,” and she turned around slowly, her deep brown eyes wide for a bare instant, a smile taut with concern blossoming into one of pure joy in the microsecond that she saw I was really there and alive and smiling at her.
“Mike...”
She didn’t have to say anything more. That was enough. She came to me and I came to her and she was in my arms, one big bundle of love that exploded against me in tears and sobs of pleasure and relief, her mouth searching for mine in a frenzy of passion.
I held her away and looked at her, not able to do anything more than give her a silly grin. “You’re slipping. I didn’t think anybody could sneak up on you.”
Her full, sensuous mouth managed to go pixie-ish in a smile as she lifted her right hand and let me glimpse the little .32 nestled in her lady-like palm.
I laughed and said, “It’s great to be home, kid.”
“Oh, Mike, you idiot. You great big jerk. How long have you been in country?”
“Yesterday.”
“And you didn’t call?”
“I was under a sort of house arrest. A little hotel called the Pentagon. I think it’s one of the Hilton chain.”
“Jokes. Your face...” She touched it here, and here, and there. “Some new scars... That’s a new trenchcoat, too, isn’t it? What, Burberry? And a new suit?”
“Yeah. They decked me out before they showed me off to the press. What I turned up in wasn’t that presentable.”
“I’m so glad you’re in one piece.”
“Why, didn’t you think I’d make it?”
Velda wiped her eyes with the side of a fist and let a laugh take over. “I knew you’d make it. I bet on you. Literally. There are people who’re going to owe me money tomorrow.”
“I’m glad somebody had confidence in me.”
“Couldn’t you have called? Couldn’t you have written? No. I’m sorry. Forget I said that. I’m no one to talk.”
Her jaunt behind the Iron Curtain had lasted seven years, after all.
“Just getting those flowers ordered,” I said, “was a small miracle.”
“You didn’t sign the card.”
“No. Everything’s top secret where they had me.”
We walked out into the outer office, I hung up my hat and trenchcoat, and we sat on the couch.
I said, “I just couldn’t risk contact while I was over there, kitten. I didn’t want my location pinpointed. They would have expected that and had the mail covered, and phones were out of the question. That damn country is a mix of peasantry out of the middle ages and technology out of science fiction. No, I wasn’t about to take any chances.”
Velda nodded. “I know. And I understood. At least we knew you were alive, from the stories coming out of TASS and Pravda. I’ve saved the clippings.”
“Great. Make a scrapbook out of them and give them to me for Christmas in thirty years.”
She was sitting sideways on the couch, her skirt above her knees. Her legs were long and muscular and tan. I was a damn fool for ever looking at any other woman.
“And now,” she said, eyebrows high, “can you please tell me all about it before I bust?”
I pulled her in close to me and nuzzled the side of her neck. “Why don’t I bust you,” I whispered. “In the mouth...” I put a hand on a full, silk-covered breast and the nub of a nipple poked back at me. “Or why don’t you bust me...”
She laughed lightly, pushed me away, and leaned her head back with that playful superiority a lovely woman can wield over a guy. “Later, Tarzan. Tell me the story first.”
“I’ll buy you a paper. I gave a press conference and it should be in the late edition.”
“I’ll take the uncensored version, if you don’t mind.”
It took half an hour to tell the story, though I did censor aspects having to do with the late Zora. We had an understanding, Velda and I—I could sow wild oats until I was ready to marry her, as long as I didn’t bring home any big diseases or little bastards.
Anyway, we went through half a pot of coffee as I gave her chapter and verse, and she was narrow-eyed and intense, as she took it in, asking only occasional pertinent questions when I skipped or blurred over something.
When I finished, she immediately pointed out the incongruity of it all.
“A capture, an escape, a chase,” she said. “And the K.G.B., or anyway their masters, risked the kind of international hell that would be stirred up, just to ask you a few questions about Art Rickerby’s espionage group?”
“There may have been a revenge angle. I took out a hell of a lot of their people, back in ’52.”
“Oh, I remember...”
She should.
She had been there.
Stark naked, hangingfrom the rafters by a rope that tore at her wrists as her lovely body twisted slowly in a lantern’s light, and the guy in the porkpie had whipped her with a knotted rope, drooling at her in his perverse passion, unaware I was nearby, tommy gun at the ready, and when I let him have it, I made sure the chopper chopped that arm off first so it could drop on the floor in a splash of gore and he could have a goddamn good look at it before I let him have a bellyful of lead.
“Mike—are you all right?” she asked, touching my arm. “I lost you there for a minute.”
“I’m fine, kitten. It’s just. my little Russian tour stirred some things up.”
Her eyes narrowed; they had an almost Asian cast. “You think they went to the trouble of capturing you to even the books for something that happened over ten years ago? That’s a long time to wait for revenge.”
“Yeah, me, I’m not one of these dish-best-served-cold types. I like it served up hot and right away. But I’m not a Russian. Anyway, there’s something much more recent.”
Now her eyes widened. “Loose ends from when I was over there?”
“Possibly. And there’s the Dragon—I took out the woman and turned the man over to Rickerby, and the K.G.B. was out one top execution team.”
He’d been big, the male half of the Dragon team, a big, big, burly guy with Apache cheekbones, thick black eyebrows over Slavic-cast eyes, a cruel slash of a mouth, and we’d fought in that barn to the near death, on top of each other like rutting beasts only we weren’t creating life, we were trying to end it, his teeth tearing at me, massive fists pounding, butting my head with his, but in the end I did the smashing and he was a bloody pulp on the straw-flecked floor as I went looking around until I found a nice big axe that I was about to bury in his belly until my conscience got the better of me—I had promised to turn him over alive, to Art Rickerby, who wanted this half a Dragon to suffer a thousand deaths before three thousand volts finished the job. To each his own. So I grabbed a twenty-penny nail and a ball-peen hammer off a workbench and I held the nail in the middle of the back of his hand and slammed it in with the hammer and slammed and slammed and slammed until it dimpled the skin, pinning his hand so tight to the wooden floor he’d never get loose, not without some painful help. Better than handcuffs. And then I’d called Art.
Velda had no more questions for me. She had accepted every word and knew I spoke the truth and that I shared the same doubts about the Russian motives behind my capture. We had moved from the couch and I was sipping coffee, with her perched on the edge of her desk, a frown creasing her eyes.
“What are you going to do, Mike?”
“About what?”
“About what. About being number one on the K.G.B. hit parade!”
I shrugged. “I go about my business. And wait.”
“For how long?”
“Until they make a try. See, it may all be talk. Do they really want to risk blowing this incident up into another missile crisis? What makes me worth that kind of risk?”
She nodded, her lower lip clenched between her teeth. “So that’s all you do. Wait and see if they’re. all talk.”
“No. We’re going to work this thing from the New York angle.”
“What is there to work?”
“What if Ralph Marley was shot so that I became the guy who accompanied the senator on his Russia trip?”
Her forehead furrowed. “You mean, the K.G.B. wanted to get their hands on you, for whatever reason, and Marley’s death paved the way for you to step in?”
“I was the natural second choice for the senator.”
“If that’s true, that means there is a New York angle to this. That there are deep-cover Soviet agents right in this city who manipulated those events.”
“Bingo, baby. They are directly responsible for Marley’s murder, and they are indirectly responsible for the death of that little Russian doll.”
“Did she. mean anything to you, Mike?”
“She was my friend, kitten. She was just a kid who dreamed about defecting and that made her expendable. An enemy of the state. A convenient pawn to be sacrificed in a very crooked game.”
“So she did mean something to you.”
“Whether she did or not, she didn’t deserve to die.”
Velda swallowed, waved a hand as if using an eraser on blackboard. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound jealous. Ours is an open relationship. I’m fine about that.”
But was she really? I was the only one taking advantage of that open status. Sometimes I was ashamed of myself. Just never at the right times.
I went over and put my hands on her arms. “Look, if you’re right, and there’s more to this than just the K.G.B. wanting to grill me about Rickerby’s group, or play overdue revenge games on my carcass, then looking into Marley’s murder is the place to start. It’s the only window into this dark room that we can see into.”
“Which means you’ll be climbing in through it.”
“You got it, sugar.”
I didn’t have to turn around to know he was there.
That he’d come through that door and was standing behind me—I had felt Velda’s body stiffen with a sudden intake of breath and her fingers bite into my upper arm with a spasm of fear.
I turned easily. I was, after all, unarmed.
The squat little guy in the raincoat and gray suit with feathered fedora stood there with one hand in his side pocket, watching us intently. He had the kind of froggy face that split the difference between goofy and sinister. I had seen that expressionless expression on others in the kill racket, and I was wishing I had the .45 that was still locked up in my apartment uptown.
Sloppy, so sloppy. I had dispatched Des Casey to brace this guy, check him out, even take him out if necessary, and further told the M.P. not to come up to the office right away when he was through with his mission, since I wanted some alone time with Velda. Confidence. Arrogance. A thin line. I’d crossed it....
Velda’s little .22 was on the other side of that desktop where she perched, two and a half feet away. Or was that a million miles?
The froggy face had just started to twist into a peculiar kind of smile when Des Casey came up behind him and laid the leaded end of a collapsible billy over our guest’s ear and the feathered fedora took flight while he dropped like all his bones had melted.
“Nice timing, Des,” I said. “Velda, Des Casey. Des, Velda Sterling. My partner in crime.”
The big sergeant—having traded his M.P. uniform in for a blazer over a gray sweater with white shirt and charcoal slacks— stepped around his fallen victim. He shifted his billy to his left hand so he could shake with Velda, who slid to the floor from the desk perch to smile at our savior.
“You handle that like a pro,” Velda said, nodding toward the billy.
“I have a decent batting average,” Casey said. He grinned at me. “Now I know why you were so anxious to have some privacy up here. Can’t blame you a bit.”
Velda gave me a half-smiling look. “So this is the M.P. bodyguard you told me about,” she said. “You didn’t say he was so good-looking.”
She was needling me a little, probably because of that Russian girl, but the way they were measuring each other up had nothing to do with sex—this was two pros recognizing their own kind and enjoying the privilege.
I nodded at the unconscious lump. “Why did it take Froggy so long to come a courting?”
“He made a call in a booth in the lobby,” Casey said. “Then he stood around smoking for half an hour until he got called back. Looked like serious conversations.”
“And he didn’t make you?”
“Naw. I was rapping with the doorman, asking if he had any job leads in the neighborhood.” He jerked a thumb at his handiwork on the floor. “What shall we do about our friend?”
“I got him,” I said.
I lifted the guy up and threw him on the couch like a bag of laundry. We emptied his pockets and tossed the stuff on the desk. He had a gun all right, but it wasn’t in his pocket where his hand had been. It was a .38 Banker’s Special in a clip on his belt, and on the other side a leather case held a dozen shells for it. This was my first indication I might have misread the situation—that wasn’t the type of rig a hired killer would use at all.
“Oops,” Velda said. “Mike, look at this.”
She held out our uninvited guest’s wallet. Pinned to the inside flap was an agency badge in gold and blue enamel with a matching identity card bearing his photo, prints, and the seal of Rickerby’s select group.
Casey, leaning over the guy, gave me an embarrassed glance. “What about it, Mike? Did I screw up?”
“I told Rickerby to lay off. I treat all tails as unfriendly.”
“Maybe I hit him too hard...”
“Naw. He’s breathing just fine. Get some water, Velda.”
She came back in a minute with a glass and I forced him to sip some. His eyes opened gradually, focused on me, and he mumbled, “Jesus Christ.”
Not a prayer.
The welt over his ear looked like a plump sausage. He’d be a long time before putting a hat on again, feathered or otherwise, and a while longer after that before he didn’t grimace doing it. He took the glass from my hand, finished its contents, and tried to push himself upright. Velda helped him.
After a few minutes, he was breathing regularly. Finally, he spoke: “That wasn’t necessary, Mr. Hammer. Not at all necessary.”
I pulled a chair over and sat. “You could have spelled trouble for me, buddy.”
His eyes burned holes in my face. “I came here to identify myself.”
“Why didn’t you do it earlier? I spotted you on the plane.”
“I was told not to introduce myself until we were in private. Anything in public might mean exposing ourselves unnecessarily. And putting you at risk.”
“I told you feds that—”
“I’m aware of what you told them,” he said curtly.
My hands began to tighten with repressed anger. “Okay. Then I’ll tell you again. Any tail on me is going to be treated like the enemy, get it? Sergeant Casey is all the backup I agreed to, and if anybody, however well-meaning, adds to that, and winds up hurt? It’s their own damn fault.”
His smile intermingled indignation and discomfort. “I will be sure to underscore that in my report.” He touched the side of his head gingerly, and winced. “Now, since you’ve destroyed my usefulness, at least temporarily, I’ll get back to the office. If you don’t mind.” He paused, then said: “You’ll stay in touch, of course.”
“I told your boss I would.”
“I know. And he told me to remind you to do so.” The froggy little man sighed, then lurched to his feet. “May I have my things?”
“Not a problem,” I said, and I went and got his gun, glancing at the I.D. in his wallet before handing the stuff over, saying, “Friendly word of advice, Mr. Rath. Stay the hell out of my hair.”
“Don’t worry about that, Mr. Hammer. Once I report in, I’ll be assigned to a desk for a while, and glad to be.” He grunted some displeasure, then put his gun in the hip holster, and the wallet in his pocket, gave us one last disgusted look, and went out the door.
“Your friend Rickerby didn’t waste any time,” Casey said.
“I didn’t expect him to,” I said.
“Think we’ll get any hassle over that?”
“Nope. I told Art what to expect, and I’m sure he passed that on down along the line.”
Casey laughed without much humor. “Too bad nobody told that poor slob.”
“Mike...”
I turned and Velda was sitting in her desk chair, holding the drinking glass up to the light.
“What?”
“Come here.” Her tone was no-nonsense.
I walked over. “You have something?”
“Take a look at this.” Wearing a nasty little smile, Velda rolled the glass around in the overhead light until it caught a clear print on the side. “That’s his. Our guest’s.”
“That could be my print or yours, baby. But so what if it’s his?”
She put the glass down carefully and her eyes were intense. “I just cleaned those glasses. No one else used that.”
“So?”
“So when you threw that’s guy’s wallet over here, I checked his I.D. Photo looked like him, all right, or enough so that I didn’t pay much attention. What I did happen to notice, just by dumb luck, was his thumb print. The central pattern was a distinct whorl with a scar through it.” She nodded toward the displayed print in the light. “The right thumb print on the glass is a loop. No scar.”
I felt the chill go right through me. “Damn!”
Casey, yanking a .38 Special from under his left arm, was already out the door, checking the hallway.
Velda said, “Better make a call, Mike.”
I reached for her phone, direct-dialed the D.C. number I’d long since committed to memory, and got Art Rickerby on the line. When he answered I said, “Mike Hammer, Art.”
“You must be back in the city by now. What is it, Mike?”
“You have an agent named Herman Rath?”
There was a silence of maybe three seconds before Rickerby said, “What do you know about him?”
There was a tight, cold edge to his voice.
“Let’s have it, Art.”
“Rath committed suicide here in Washington about an hour before you left. He was on an extended leave having to do with health problems. There was no connection to—”
“His gun belt and wallet were missing. Right?”
“...Where are you, Mike?”
“My office in Manhattan.”
“Then you just stay put until my people can get there.”
“You’re already too late, buddy. He’s out the door.”
“You just stay there.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I hung up.
Casey came back in, tucking away the .38. He shook his head. “Checked the stairs, the restrooms. He’s in the wind, Mike.”
Velda and Casey faced me, their arms folded, waiting to hear how I read it.
“It might have been a hit attempt,” I said, “but what I think they were doing was testing our defenses. If we had been sloppy enough, and we damn near were, it might have gone down right here and now. But this feels like recon—now they know about you, Des. And they know you’re my only backup. Why do they know? Because, goddamnit, I told them.”
I slammed a fist on the desk and Velda’s roses jumped.
“Maybe we should close down the office for a while,” Velda said. She turned to Casey. “We have a string of apartments and small hotels available as safe houses for witnesses. Just like the cops. We can bounce from one to the other, till this is over.”
I said, “No way, doll. They don’t scare me out of my own damn Batcave. Anyway, they’ll try it a different way, next time.”
Casey’s voice was a low growl. “Who was he, Mike?”
“The first of many,” I said.
* * *
It was midnight before they got through with us. A retired police artist was called in to sketch a picture of the suspect from our description until we were satisfied it could be used for identification. A photo of the late Herman Rath revealed a general physical resemblance that a quick look would buy, but that might not have stood up to a closer inspection.
Des Casey was able to provide the license number of the cab the fake Rath used. That meant the cabbie could be shown the police sketch for verification, and the same would be true for the flight crew on the shuttle plane from D.C.
Apparently Herman Rath had been selected because he had the same basic physical characteristics as the enemy agent who tailed us or possibly vice versa. Rath died in his own apartment in what was now believed to be a murder staged as a suicide. His body had not been not found for several hours, and the missing gun and wallet had not been initially noticed.
The sophistication of seeking a near lookalike among federal agents for the substitution of their own agent could mean only one thing. The Soviets were expending all of their resources on this effort. We weren’t up against one assassin or even a team or two of them—we had an entire espionage organization opposing us.
The print on the glass was obviously not Rath’s. It was classified by an expert on the spot, then rushed to the local office of Rickerby’s group for Telexing to Washington, where it was run through their computerized files without a match. A copy was fired off to several foreign police bureaus, but nobody seemed hopeful that anything would come of it.
From my desk, I spoke on the phone with Rickerby while his men were still there taking Velda’s statement.
“Mike, this is going to increase the heat I’ll be getting from inside my agency and without. They’ll be after me again to keep you under wraps.”
“Remind them I have legal rights and will fight them down the line. If they want that kind of news coverage, they can go for it. You do know I number Hy Gardner among my best buddies?”
“Well, Hy Gardner and no reporter can have this story, Mike,” Rickerby said, insistent. “This is strictly classified. The real Herman Rath stays a suicide, and nobody came around your office this afternoon except maybe the cleaning lady.”
“If so, she looked like a frog and packed a pistol.”
“You surely realize this means that we have to give you more protection than just Sergeant Casey.”
“Hell you say. You’re gonna lay a cover on me now?”
“My agent-in-charge there will fill you in,” Rickerby said, and hung up. Not so much as a goodbye. What did I ever do to deserve such rude treatment?
“Don’t worry, Mr. Hammer,” a tall blond agent in his early thirties told me. He had the kind of blandly handsome face that didn’t look like it had had much use. “We’ll be discreet about it.”
“Is that right?”
“We’ll have two men in an apartment across the street from yours, and an office down the hall here at the Hackard Building has already been rented to one of our dummy corporations. And a pair of female agents will be down the hall from Miss Sterling’s apartment, keeping watch.”
“Son, this is a crafty, canny bunch we’re up against with a real grasp of spy craft. I’ll lay you odds our K.G.B. pals will take note of those new rentals.”
“We’re not naive, Mr. Hammer, nor are we inexperienced. It may interest you to know we anticipated your actions before you ever got back. Those places were rented then.”
“Okay. So your boss knows his stuff.”
Still, he didn’t appreciate the doubts I’d expressed at all. “We’ll keep a nominal check on your activities, Mr. Hammer. We won’t be in your way. The personnel we assign will be highly experienced.”
“They’d better be. I haven’t seen a federal tail yet that I couldn’t shake if I felt like it.”
His face settled into a cold mask. “Perhaps you don’t realize the gravity of your situation, Hammer.”
No “mister” now
“Ever kill a man?” I asked him.
His head went back, as if I had slapped him.
“Men somewhere out in that city,” I said, with a nod toward the window on the nighttime world that was Manhattan, “are preparing to kill me. And if you think I don’t understand the gravity of that ‘situation,’ check my record, and see how many have tried. and died.”
He had no reply. He just gave me a steady stare for a few seconds, then gathered his team and left. I was still seated at my desk. The spot in my thigh where I’d taken that bullet for Marley felt like a small misplaced toothache, a nagging little reminder of how this whole vicious mess began.
A while back, Velda and I had taken apartments in the same building—it came in handy for business conferences and the like. Also, remind me to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. I sent Casey on ahead with the key to mine, then walked Velda up to hers.
She invited me in, but I said, “We’ll have a real reunion when this settles down,” and she gave me a long, lingering kiss that was a dare to do otherwise, then smiled devilishly, said, “Your loss,” and shut me out in the hall.
I went back up to my pad, 9-D, where Casey was waiting just inside, with the door open. While it was pretty much as I’d left it, the telltale signs were there.
“A nice, thorough, professional job,” Casey said.
“Guess you can’t say the place was tossed,” I said, “when they’re this careful.”
Locked drawers had been neatly opened and closed without forcing them, but scraps of paper I’d inserted to betray tampering were gone. So was the single hair stretched across the concealed gun cabinet built into the closet wall. None of the firearms appeared messed with, though.
The big tell was a funny one—the apartment had been closed up for over two months, but there wasn’t any dust. They’d had to clean up after themselves because otherwise the dust would have betrayed them.
Casey asked, “Anything missing?”
“Not that I can see without a full-scale inventory.”
“Were they looking for something?”
“Don’t know. Just poking around, I think. Getting to know their prey.”
I went to the window on the street. The building across the way had been renovated and refaced while I was away. Most of the windows were slatted with Venetian blinds and it was impossible to tell which apartment belonged to Rickerby’s boys.
Casey said, “So how does it feel, being a piece of cheese that’s waiting for a rat to take a bite?”
“It stinks, friend. But there are lots of ways to deal with rats.”
I went over and pulled the .45 out of the wall cabinet, shoved a full clip into the end of the butt, jacked a shell into the chamber, and thumbed the hammer on half-cock, then to safety. My hand felt complete.
I hefted the weapon. “You tell me, Des, how the hell are they’re gonna stop me?”
“Simple. Manpower.”
I grinned at him. “Ever hear of Charlie One-Horse?”
Casey shook his head.
But I didn’t explain.
We got Blue Ribbons from the fridge and wound up in my little TV room with Johnny Carson going. We were both in athletic T-shirts and trousers, and the Negro’s massive musculature bore the puckered indentations and white scars that lived under that chestful of ribbons.
“Okay,” the M.P. said. “I’ll bite at the cheese. Who was Charlie One-Horse?”
“An Indian who declared a one-man war against the U.S. Army back in the eighteen-seventies. He did millions of dollars worth of damage to government property, knocked off a few hundred soldiers, and kept several regiments detached from regular duty just to catch him.”
“Did they ever?”
“Yeah, but not because the Army was that good. Charlie’s wife was having a baby and he wasn’t willing to leave her by herself just so he could get away again.”
“What happened? Firing squad?”
“You kidding? They handled him with kid gloves and tenderly put him down in nice quarters on his own reservation. They were afraid there might be more like him, out in the hills and valleys and plains, and they couldn’t afford the action.”
“So now you’re Charlie One-Horse, I suppose?”
“Let’s just say I’m on the war path. You keep watching Carson, buddy.” I hauled myself to my feet. “Charlie One-Horse need shuteye.”
Then I was climbing between clean, crisp sheets. Nice to be back in my own rack again.
With that .45 under the spare pillow where it belonged.