Read Mickey Spillane - [Mike Hammer 13] for Free Online

don’t want to be seen.”
    When I scowled at him he knew I had gotten the message. Only his eyes smiled back until the pain started showing. It was the diluted agony of a medicated death. He didn’t want me to speak because he had more to say and no time to say it in. “They left eighty-nine billion , Mike. Billion, you know? I know where it is. They don’t.” Before I could speak I saw the spark begin to go out.
    His voice was suddenly soft. It had the muted quality of great importance and I leaned forward to hear him better. He said, “You can . . . find out . . . where it is.” His eyes never closed. They just quietly got dead.
     
    Pat was waiting for me in the lobby. I didn’t have to tell him Dooley was gone. It was written all over my face. The half-healed wounds in my side had a new ache to them, the flesh being drawn tight from the tension of watching while an old buddy died. When I thought of what he had told me a creeping river of pain seemed to flow from my body to my brain and I stopped, holding on to the back of a chair.
    Pat said, “You all right?”
    “No problems,” I lied. “Too much walking.”
    “Baloney. Sit down.”
    I took a seat beside him and forced some controlled breaths. A couple of minutes later I felt myself going back to normal.
    Pat knew when it happened. “Was it bad?”
    I nodded. “He was hurting. Damn, he was really hurting.” I turned my head and looked at him hard. “How’d he get it, Pat?”
    “How come you never asked before?”
    “I didn’t know if I could take it or not. I had just been down that road myself.”
    “Now you’re okay?”
    “I’m fine, Pat.”
    “Okay. He was home alone. He had come in from a solo supper a little after nine o’clock, apparently read the paper and made out four monthly bills. He was on his fifth and last when he died. There were no powder burns on his body, so it wasn’t a close-up shot. The impacts knocked him right out of his chair. When he went down he took the phone with him accidentally. The receiver was off the hook, but the base was right beside his hand and he dialed 911 and managed to tell the operator he was shot. They traced the call and got him to the hospital. He was unconscious until a few hours before you got here. The doctors didn’t want him to have any visitors.”
    “He recognize who shot him?”
    “Apparently not. It was an easy hit, though. The door was unlocked. Someone just gave it a shove, opened it enough to see Dooley sitting there about fifteen feet away and pumped three slugs into him from a .357. The perp had plenty of time to get away clean and so far no witnesses have come forward with any information.”
    “Any trace on the slugs?”
    “No. Just about any gun shop carries them.”
    “What did the lab technicians come up with?”
    “Nothing. The shooter never set foot in the room. There was powder residue on the door jamb and the edge of the door itself, so it was pretty apparent how it was done.”
    “What’s your opinion, Pat?”
    His eyes drooped a moment in thought, then: “Considering the background, somebody was very lucky. He tell you who he worked for?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “he told me. Lorenzo Ponti was his boss, but his work wasn’t inside the mob. He was—”
    “I know,” Pat cut in. “He was a field hand, a handyman on Ponti’s estate. We checked out his social security records first thing and it was all down there. He tell you that?”
    “That’s right.” I didn’t add to it. Not yet, anyway. Dooley’s last words were meant for me alone. If he had wanted us both to know he would have said so.
    “But he said more, didn’t he?” Pat stated deliberately.
    Again, I nodded. “He told me there was trouble in the ranks.”
    “There’s always trouble there.”
    “Not like this. The trouble is fraternal, as if the kids were ganging up on the parents.”
    “We know about that. Something’s been brewing for the last six years. There are still guys running the