My Gun Is Cute
I didn't write this story, but I heavily edited it to be furry and fit in my furry universe. It was orginally in the National Lampoon magazine way back in the mid-1970s.I'd like to thank https://thtiger.sofurry.com/ for helping me edit and proof-read the story.My Gun Is
Cute
Germaine
Spillane
(Henry
Beard)
It was a
little before five when I put the last hemstitch in my case and delivered a
set of eight-by-ten glossies to Ms. Sandra Maxfly in her apartment on West
Eighty-third. Everyone thinks the life of a private eyelash is all glamour and
excitement and handsome bulls, but take it from me, it isn't. Sometimes it's
dressing up in a goddamn rabbit suit with a Minox in your cottontail and
letting a bunch of corn muffins from Muncie with pricks the size of thumbtacks
play touch-the-tit so you can catch a couple of snaps of some Chester who
thinks that down there in the Batteries Not Included type on the marriage
license it says it's okay for him to go looking for nookie jars to stick his
hand in while the little lady rhumbas with the Hoover and makes the Rice-A-Roni.
When I left,
I had ten crisp hundred-dollar bills in my purse, which I figured would keep
me in Pink Ladies and Sardo long enough to get the bad taste out of my mouth
and the paw prints off my skin.
In the
elevator, some mug who was carrying a couple of inches of bourbon under his
belt to keep his other couple of inches company gave me a few wolf whistles to
show me he knew something else he could do by putting his lips together and
blowing.
He looked at
his watch. It was upside down. "Hey, honey, ish eleven thirty," he slurred.
"How 'bout a nightcap?"
He wasn't
feeling any pain. I thought about that, and it just didn't seem fair. I made a
quick movement, and he crumpled up in the comer, groaning. "What the--" he
croaked.
I grinned.
"Sorry, Jack, I thought you said kneecap."
I got into
my heap and headed downtown. It was rush hour, and the traffic was
bumper-to-bumper, like dogs sniffing each other's' tail holes. I cut back and
forth and nosed into the park at Seventy-second. By the time I got to the
office I'd been called more names than steak houses have for a piece of dead
cow, but I figure men have to be allowed that. After all, they haven't got much
left since they stopped slinging brontosaurus cutlets through the cave mouth
and turned in their spears for Bic pens. It's either let them wedge their
paunches behind a steering wheel and play Hercules Unchained for two hours
every day or have them come home at night with a loaf of bread, crying, "Look
what I won!"
It was a
quarter to six when I finally walked into the office, and Wilbur, my office
boy, was halfway out the door on his way home. When I got a guy to hold down
the office, I figured I might as well get a Gorgeous George as a Mr. Potato Head,
and I sure got my hands on a nice piece of beefcake when I turned up Wilbur. He's big and he's handsome and he's hung like a horse. Which
is only logical since he is a horse. He's also
smart, something the good-looking ones usually aren't.
"Well,
speak of the she-devil. I've been calling all over town for you. I thought
maybe you'd gone to one of those clinics in Sweden for an estimate."
I pulled
most of Sandra Maxfly's thou out of my purse and tossed it on his desk. "Here,
kiddo, pay the bills, buy yourself some of those tiny jockey shorts that show
off your junk, and file the rest under M for
Mazuma. Now what's the fuss?"
He took the
C-note salad and locked it up. "Detective Skyler's been calling since around
noon. They fished some fluff out of the river. She didn't say why, but she
thinks you might be interested."
I went into
my office and got a frosty can of Heublein's premixed Banana Daiquiri out of
the little refrigerator Wilbur fixed up to look like a safe so the clients
wouldn't get the wrong idea. I opened up the can and let the sweet liquor slide
down my craw. Then I picked up the Princess phone and spun out sky's number.
"Meg here, Sky,"
I said when she came on the line. "What's in the oven?"
Skyler
sounded preoccupied. "How soon can you get downtown, Meg?"
I looked at
the battered Lady Speidel I've been wearing ever since it stopped a slug once
when I was scratching somewhere where a bullet could do a lot of damage. It
keeps lousy time, but I figure most of mine is borrowed anyway, so I can't complain.
"Six thirty," I said.
"See you
then." She hung up. Wilbur poked his nose through the door. "Need me for
anything, Meg?"
"Nix," I
said. "Am-scray."
"Take care
of yourself, Meg," he said softly. He had that look in his big, brown eyes that
said he wouldn't mind seeing me on my back in the altogether, but not on a slab
downtown. You can never tell with guys: one minute they're as hard as nails
and the next they go all mushy like Joey Bishop.
"Okay, kid."
I chuckled. "I'll hire a cub scout to help me cross streets. Now blow." He
flashed a big smile and took off. After he left, I took a few more glossies out
of my purse and addressed them. A couple of hairy-handed rubes I couldn't feed
an elbow sandwich to without spoiling my cover were going to be in for a
surprise when the lady of the house opened up the mailbox and found a nice
eight-by-ten of hubby on the make in the Big Apple on the Mississippi in there
with the Burpee seed catalogues. Like I said, this job isn't all glamour, but
there are bonuses.
I left the
envelopes on Wilbur's desk for him to mail in the morning and took a cab over
to the sterile concrete building where Detective Skyler and Cedar Rabbit's
finest worked. She's an investigator in Femicide, and all policewoman, but she
doesn't look like she should be tearing up elevated trains in some Jap horror
movie or hitting Joan Crawford across the kisser with a ring of keys in Women's
Prison. She was a lean Mexican shepherd
with her raven hair perpetually tied back in a single braid that almost reached
to her shapely ass.
Skyler was a
dedicated rug-muncher, but she liked to think that no one knew. It couldn't have been any more obvious if she
wore biker boots and a plaid lumberjack shirt with a neon sign on her head
flashing "Dyke", but I respected her need for privacy.
You don't
get too many cops passing the time of day in Kaffeeklatsches with private
clits, but Sky wasn't like a lot of gumpumps who never got over making it past
metermaid and wore their badges as if they were a brass rag. She had brains
enough to know I could operate around the edges of the law where the pinking is
kind of ragged, and I knew without her on my side I had about as much chance of
getting anywhere with the CRPD as a good-looking rape victim who hasn't got a
judge for a witness.
As I came
into Sky's cubicle, she looked at the clock. "Why Meg, honey, you're five
minutes late."
"You can
spend your whole life waiting for a woman," I said. She laughed. I took out a
deck of Virginia Slims and fired a cig, then tossed the deck across to Sky. She frowned and pointed her nose to the NO
SMOKING sign on the wall. I just sneered
and took a long drag on my smoke. I
said, "Wilbur tells me you found a stiff in the drink and I might be
interested. Say, what's cooking? You look like you just douched with Mace. She
someone we know?" Skyer ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head. "I
don't think so--not that you'd recognize your own sister after two months in the
Big Muddy. It wasn't a pretty sight: raw, red, flaky skin, like living in
dishwater for ten years. We'd never have found her, except some sand hogs
dredging near the docks brought her up in a clamshell. She was wearing a chain
jumper and a pair of concrete high heels. The lab boys figure she was around
twenty-five, but they're just guessing. Bunny.
Blond. No identification. And no more fingerprints than you'd get off a
dish of yogurt." Skyler shuddered. "A bad way for a girl to go."
"Where do I
come in?"
Skyler
reached into her drawer and picked out a little scrap of waterlogged
appointment-book paper. Scrawled on it in faint ballpoint was "Margaret Hammer"
and the phone number of my office.
"I don't
get, Sky. I know in certain circles I'm worse than a pound of fudge to a
weight-watcher, but I don't figure a sister getting chilled just for inking my
tag in her hush book."
"Me neither,
but I wish it were that simple. Here's another wrinkle. The lab boys were able
to discover she was a drug user, and a heavy one."
"Horse?"
Skyler
nodded. I thought that over. I still didn't get it Junkies end up in rivers,
sure, but they usually get there under their own power, either because they get
to thinking they can cross them without wasting time with bridges or they get
so low, holding hands with Charlie the Tuna begins to look like a good time.
And either way they don't invest in iron foundation garments and cement Hush
Puppies along the way.
"You
figure maybe she was dealing and got in too deep?"
"Could be,
but the way I see it, if she was a junkie, she couldn't have been big enough to
attract the attention of the kind of hoods who go in for the briny kiss-off.
They don't trust junkies, don't want 'em around. Maybe it bothers their
consciences." Her face was a mask of hate.
"Last thing
I heard, they didn't kill women either," I said.
"Maybe they
got picketed." She leaned back in her swivel chair, the material of her top
stretching across her nicely-sized melons. "And here's another twist. To have
the kind of habit that would show up after two months in the river, she'd have
had to have been using a frosting gun to take the stuff in, but the boys in the
white smocks say she never used a hypo."
"This whole
thing is beginning to give me the pip," I said. "Nuts. Why couldn't she have
written 'a dozen eggs and a quart of milk' or 'pick up shoes on the ninth'?
Then I could have come across a two-inch item on page twenty-seven and clucked
my tongue like everybody else, then turned the page and read 'Miss Peach' and
forgotten about it."
"Nobody's
making you take the case, and as far as I know, nobody's paying," Sky snorted.
"Just try to
keep me out of it," I snorted back. "And anyway, there's always pin money in a
murder. What else have you got?"
"Just this."
She tossed a water-soaked matchbook on the blotter. It was from the Club
Aristo, a sexist gyp joint down in the tenderloin.
"What do you
know about the place?" I asked.
"It's run by
a cheap hood named 'Clams' Casino. Gangland gossip says he's in the mob, but we
haven't got anything on him. Not that it means he's in line for the Good Housekeeping
seal of approval."
"And you
figure people might talk to me who don't make it a practice to talk to cops?"
"Something
like that," Skyler said. "I thought I owed you a shot at it." I was probably
getting ready to ruin my figure by picking up a pound of lead, and no one was
handing out soap coupons, and for all I knew the sister on the slab was some
cheap twat who got what she deserved, but my intuition said no. Bats! It was
dizzy. But I could see the faces of those goons as they dropped her off into
the water, and that made me mad, and when I get mad, my nose gets shiny, and
that makes me madder. She'd been in trouble, and she'd been about to turn to
me for help. I was going to nail those goons, and I was going to be giggling
when I did it. I picked up the matchbook and put it in my purse and told Sky
I'd be in touch if I got anywhere.
"Take it
easy," she said as I was leaving. "If anything happened to you on this one, I'd
never forgive myself."
I grinned.
"Don't worry, Sky, I don't plan on getting killed because I haven't got a
thing to wear to my funeral. Anyway, didn't you know you can't kill a girl
unless she wants it?"
*
* *
It was
starting to rain when I got outside, so I hopped a cab uptown. I was headed for
the Club Aristo, but I stopped off on the way at Jenny's for an avocado salad
and a Gablinger's. Jenny told me Wilbur had been calling for me, but I knew
that. By the time I left, I also knew that Kim Kardashian and Kanye
West were headed for the splits and
the reason Jennifer Aniston looked so
young was she drank goat urine and spent enough time in mudpacks to qualify for
Soil Bank allowances.
The rain had
stopped by the time I left. The Club Aristo was five blocks east and a couple
north, but I walked the other way. I wanted to play second jaw in a concerto
for two mouths with a two-bit punkette I knew named Connie Baker.
She came from one of those towns that supplies Cedar Rabbits with half its
sorghum and all its hookers. Way back she was an airline stewardess, and for a
while a Kelly Girl, until they found out that as far as taking dictation went,
she made more money by stopping at the first syllable. After that she peddled
reefers, and the last thing I heard she had a nice little racket going where
she matched up lonely society matrons with a string of nice-looking mouse boys
by posing as a society reporter and bringing along a "photographer" for 50
percent of whatever he got. She was a sweetie.
She used to
hang out in a seedy bar on the waterfront, and that's where I found her,
nursing a Grasshopper in a back booth. She was wearing false lashes the size of
Japanese fans, and when I came in, her eyes opened so fast the turbulence must
have capsized every fly in the place. I guess she must have figured it was
time to powder her nose, and maybe take one too while she was at it, because
she was halfway out of the booth by the time I got a handful of something she
didn't fed like leaving behind and squeezed. She sat down in a hurry.
"Hello,
Connie," I said. "Long time no see. How's the girl?"
"What do you
want with me, you goddamn flatheel?" she spat.
"Well, I'm
not looking for any studs or Mary Jane, or any of your other goodies," I trilled.
"I just saw my old pal Connie Baker in a bar and I say to myself, why not drop
in and catch up on a little blab. By the way, what are you selling these days,
Connie? You seemed awful anxious not to make my acquaintance."
"I sit here
minding my p's and q's, and some private dike comes barging in like Lizzie
Borden looking for something to dice, so naturally I get an urge to freshen up.
Besides, I'm clean. Hammer."
"Sure you
are, Connie," I cooed, grabbing a handbag big enough to hold Baby Jane Holzer's
trousseau off the seat next to her. "I know you're really working undercover
for Avon. Mind if I spelunk?" I added, giving the purse a quick riffle. She
snatched at it but got her wrist caught in my hand. "My, my, a new kind of tampax,"
I said, holding up a handful of marijuana joints just far enough so she could
see them. "And just the cunningest little lead dispenser," I added, showing her
the handle of a little nickel-plated 380 automatic. "What will they think of
next?"
"Why don't
you lay off?"
"And my
goodness," I went on, "one, two, three cans of Esoterex feminine hygiene spray.
New brand? What's the matter, Connie, do the squirrels throw up when you go
walking in the park?"
She suddenly
turned very pale and put a hand on the bag. When she saw I was going to let her
have it back, she snatched it away.
"You don't
look so good, Connie." She didn't, either. Her nose was twitching and she was
as nervous as a nun who's three weeks late. I got hold of one of her arms and
rolled up her sleeve, then did the same with the other.
"No tracks.
Funny, you look like a junkie."
Her eyes
flashed. "Just what do you want, anyway?"
"I want to
know all about Clams Casino. Runs a place called the Club Aristo."
"Never heard
of him." They're right. Women are lousy liars. Her lips fluttered like those
little streamers they tie on fans to let you know they're running.
"Either you
tell Meg all about it, sister, or you, me, and that drugstore in your purse are
going downtown and play go fish with the cops for a few hours, and then you're
going to go off and play solitaire for five years."
She looked
scared. "Look, Hammer, don't you know that busybodies end up just plain
bodies?" She looked anxiously around the room. No one seemed to be interested
in us.
"Well," I
said, "if you don't talk, I'll kind of let it be known that you did,
sweetheart, and then..." I picked up one of her hands and held it tight and
turned it palm up. "And then," I continued, running my finger along one of
the creases, "you'll meet a couple of short, greasy strangers and they'll
take you to this seafood place. The surprise is, you're the seafood."
She didn't
look at me, but she talked, very fast and very quiet. "Dope. Horse.
Sometimes he uses the showgirls as pushers, but otherwise the club's just a
front. Honest, that's all I know!" I didn't think she was lying, but it didn't
look like she'd know herself one way or the other anymore.
"Okay, play
it your way," I said in a loud voice. "But I'll remember." Then I left
looking like I hadn't got anything. If anyone was watching, it wasn't going to
give Connie much of a shot at reaching menopause if I left looking happy.
I shoved a
butt in my mouth, lit it up, and headed for the Club Aristo. I did it on foot
to give myself time to try to figure it all out, but if, as a lot of people
think, my brains are in my feet, the stimulation didn't help much. I was
beginning to wonder if I should have pressed Connie for more, but I figured I
was lucky to get what I did.
The Club
Aristo was on Forty-eighth, between Seventh and what used to be Sixth until
they changed the name to Cedar Rabbits Blvd. All it did was make it easy for
the cabdrivers to tell if you were from out of town so they could fleece you.
The front
window was pasted full of signs that said Topless and a bunch of faces that
looked like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp but weren't, popping out of the left-hand
comers of publicity photos. Inside, a tone-deaf band called Tito Guernica and
Los Terribles were making a good case for having their visas revoked, and a
couple of dancers who weren't quite topless did some lurching that even a Japanese
soldier who spent twenty-five years in a cave could have watched for a month
without getting a hard-on. As soon as I walked in, a nasty-looking greaser in a
cheap tux slid over to me like a piece of zucchini in a pan full of Mazola.
"I am
sorree, Senorita," he hisssed, "but e'est impossible for zee unescorted ladies
to enter zee club."
I wanted to feed
him some finger canapes. "Take it easy, buster," I said. "I'm here on
business. I want to see Mr. Casino. About a job."
He looked me
over. "Okay, kid, I'll tell Mr. Casino you're here, but don't count on him
seeing you on account of he's a busy man. What's the name?" He'd forgotten all
his Berlitz.
"Hammond.
Mary Hammond."
"Stay here."
While he was gone I fished out some chewing gum. Men believe all women are
stupid, but with a mouthful of Doublemint, Madame Curie could have been mistaken
for Paris Hilton.
When
greaseball came back, he took me into a corridor that led past the hatcheck and
the rest rooms to an office with a big sign that said Private, so when the
customers got sloshed they wouldn't come in by accident and pee in the
ashtrays.
He knocked,
and a voice said, "Okay," and we went into an overheated little office done up
in the motel style goons think is class. The bouncer went over and stood
behind the boss, who got his name probably because his face looked like
something you usually get six of, only smaller, when you order cherrystones.
"Vinnie says
you're looking for a job, Miss Hammond," Casino said softly. "Is that so?"
"Yeah,
that's right, Mr. Casino," I said, munching on every word.
"Sit down,"
he said, pointing to a chair. I did. I was about to go into some heavy chewing
when I saw a piece of paper on the corner of his desk that caught my eye. It said
Esoterex on the top. That was all I could read upside down, but it was enough
to make me wonder about the coincidence and want to have a closer look. There
didn't seem to be any way that was going to happen.
"Out of
work?"
"Yeah, you
said it. Nobody wants a secretary who can only type forty words per." I
had a brain wave. I picked my purse off the floor and put it on my lap. Then I
pulled out a cigarette, stuck it in my mouth, and palmed the wad of gum. While
I made like I was rummaging for matches, I stuck the gum on the bottom of the
purse. Casino picked up a lighter off his desk, and I leaned forward far enough
to give both of them something to look at, put the purse down on top of the
piece of paper, and leaned on it.
"Had any
experience?" Casino asked.
"No, but I
can learn."
He looked at
me closely. "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
"Gee, I
don't think so. Maybe you got me confused with someone famous. People tell me
I look like Paris Hilton."
"Yeah,
maybe." He didn't sound convinced. "Okay," he said after about a minute. "Give
me a call in a week.
Maybe I'll have something for
you."
I got up and
slowly picked up my purse. The paper was gone. "Gosh, thanks, Mr. Casino. I
sure could use it." Vinnie came out from behind his chair and we went out. When
we got into the corridor, he pointed to a door marked Emergency Exit. "No
offense, baby, but do you mind going out the side? Wouldn't want any vice-squad
boys to think we was the wrong kind of place, would we?" Eleanor Roosevelt
could have held UNICEF meetings there and the place still would have smelled,
but I didn't do any arguing. It looked like it might be a setup, but I figured
I'd be a jerk to put up a fuss and have Casino get wise to me.
Which didn't
make me feel any less like a jerk when Vinnie's blackjane hit my head halfway
down the alley.
When I woke
up, I was sitting in an alley, which I was willing to bet wasn't the same one,
with a pint of cheap bourbon drying out on my dress and some sticky blood from
a bruise on the back of my head ruining my hairdo. My watch said one thirty,
which meant I'd been out for about four hours, but it didn't surprise me that
no one had called the cops, since anyone besides a hotshot shama still stupid
enough to go into dark alleys in New York would be happy to believe the boozy
smell and leave the drunken floozy alone.
My
boulder-holster was empty, and someone had been through my purse, but I was in
luck. The little piece of paper was still stuck to the bottom.
After a
couple of tries I managed to stay standing up and staggered out to the street.
It was Fifty-second. It didn't much matter. I wasn't going to be able to pin
anything on Casino anyway; all Vinnie would have to say is he showed me out the
back and I must have gotten mugged and isn't it awful the way decent people
can't walk the streets anymore? I wondered how Casino recognized me or flashed
Vinnie the high sign, but that didn't matter either. They know who I was.
It was late,
and I was feeling like I had the curse a million times over, but there wasn't
any time to lose. When I got to where it was light enough to read, I looked at
the paper. It was an invoice, and besides saying Esoterex and giving an address
in SoHo, it had a
whole bunch of numbers and letters, which might be lot numbers and might be a
code but weren't going to get anybody indicted.
I flagged
down a cab and went across town to an all-night luncheonette across the street
from where I parked my car. After ten minutes in the can and a couple of cups
of Sanka, I began to feel almost like a fox again. I knew I was feeling better
because now I was sure Casino had had that girl filled, and I was thinking
about how, if I had anything to do with it, he was going to be wearing a truss
in the hot seat.
When I got
back to my heap, I slipped my spare Singer .38 out of the compartment under the
dash, checked the action, and stuck it in my holster. Then I rearranged my hair
to cover the lump, swung the rear-view mirror back, and headed downtown.
I found the
address on the invoice without much trouble. It was a grimy loft building on
Spring Street, the east-west drag that runs through the middle of an old
industrial area.
I parked on
a comer and walked back. There weren't any lights on inside and there wasn't
anybody in sight on the street. The only sounds were a rhythmical clanking from
a job printer on the comer and the distant rumble of heavy trucks highballing
down the elevated interstate. One of the windows on the second floor was filled
with a sign that said Esoterex Products. The downstairs door was locked, but it
had the kind of lock women carry keys to around in their hair.
I climbed up a set of wooden stairs to the second floor. The entrance to
Esoterex was through a heavy sliding fire door, and it had a grown-up lock.
After ten minutes of fiddling I gave up and went back downstairs and broke into
the world headquarters of the Superior Envelope Co. in five seconds flat. I
got out my penlight and made my way through rolls of uncut Manila paper to the
back. My luck was still good. The freight elevator was stopped on their floor.
The power was off, but it was half-full of boxes. I climbed through the hatch
on top. It took me fifteen minutes of playing Jane on the counterweight ropes
to get to the second floor, and another five teetering on the second-floor
ledge prying open the doors with a hairbrush handle, but I made it in one
piece.
The floor
was stacked with cardboard crates halfway to the ceiling. I opened up two or
three. They were filled with cans of feminine hygiene spray. I tried enough of
them to find out it came in strawberry, mint, and orange. Maybe they had
tuna-fish salad, too, but I didn't find it. The funny part was that they were
all labeled Pristeen, not Esoterex.
I was trying
to figure out what kind of combination dodge and dago perversion Casino was
pulling when I knocked over an open box and sent a half dozen cans of the stuff
rolling around the floor. It probably wasn't all that loud, but the way my
nerves were, it sounded like Ruby Keeler falling into the orchestra pit I
crouched behind a pile of boxes and gave my Arid Extra-Dry the acid test. I had
just about summoned up enough nookie to start my waltz of the clubfooted
sleuthess again when I saw some light, and the front of a big floor-mounted
air-conditioning unit against the wall opened and someone stepped out with a
six-shot dildo in his hand. He looked around for a moment, and then a voice
from inside said, "Goddamn it, Tony, get back in here. We got work to do." The
voice sounded familiar.
"I tell
ya, I heard something."
"You're
going soft in the head. Now get back in here and close that goddamn door before
someone sees the light." It was Vinnie.
The one
called Tony grunted and went back through the air conditioner, and the front
closed with a dull clang. I looked over to the row of windows that ran along
the streetside wall. I seemed to remember there being five of them outside, but
there were only four, and none of them was covered with a sign. That left the
loft shy a space about five feet by a hundred.
I thought
some more, and then I slipped off my shoes and went over to the air conditioner.
The floor didn't do any creaking, but if my heart belonged to Daddy, he'd have
needed a transplant. I pulled out my tickler and rapped with the butt on the
metal, and then I flattened as much as I could against the wall.
Tony came
running. The door opened. I let him get halfway out, and then I gave him an
iron kiss on the top of the head. He went down faster than anyone's sister in
Tijuana.
I ran into
the secret room. Vinnie was at one end, reaching in his coat.
I waved my
rosalyn at him. "Easy does it, Vinnie," I said. "This isn't a Fallopian
tube."
He froze. I
went over and gave him a free rubdown. I came up with a .45 and a shiv.
He flashed
me an ugly smile. "What's it with you, baby? You making up for not having one
between the legs by carrying a gat around in your paw?"
I smiled
back. "Tell you what I'll do, Vinnie. I'll give you a hole down there," I said,
aiming below his belt, "and then we'll be even."
After that he shut up. I looked around the
room. It ran the length of the building, a little too wide to touch both walls
with your hands at the same time, but only just. Down one side was a long
narrow sideboard, like an assembly line, covered with tools and cans of hygiene
spray, some of them opened up, and a whole lot of Esoterex labels, and glue,
and a big box full of white powder. I tasted some of it. A new flavor. Heroin.
"So that's the angle. A new way
to peddle horse. And I'm betting it's for girls only," I added grimly. "Who's
behind this? Clams Casino? Start talking, Vinnie."
"Why don't
you ask him yourself?" said a voice from behind me.
I spun
around. Casino was there with two goons, and they all had bang-bangs.
"Well, well,
if it isn't our favorite private cunt," said Casino. "You've got a bad case of gunorrhea there,
sweetheart. It could be fatal." The odds were lousy. I let Vinnie take my gun.
"That's
better," said Casino, walking forward. "You know, you really turned out to be
trouble with tits. I guess Vinnie was right. We should have taken you for a
boat ride as soon as I spotted you."
"Like you
did a certain other chick that gave you trouble?"
Casino
grinned. I wondered what his face would look like with a fork in it. "That was
too bad. She was a good pusher. Too bad she had to find out what it was she was
pushing and got cold tootsies."
"Maybe she
threatened to go to the fuzzies, is that it?"
"Maybe,"
said Casino. "And maybe I've got something too sweet to lose because some dame
gets too nosy. You see, I got a whole racket to myself. You can't interest the
girlies in stacking needles in their arms: it makes them toss their cookies.
But a doc who used to make a lot of beans helping girls with a sudden weight
problem when it was illegal figured out if a guy can snort it, broads could
take it in intrauterine doses, the tissues are sensitive enough. And all you've
got to do to get them on it is put a little in some of the stuff they spray
down there. Later on, they move up to a special tickler, so they can get all
their kicks at once, but by then you've got 'em. And the beauty is, no marks,
and my, ah, sales staff don't even know what they're selling. They think it's
an aphrodisiac."
So that was
it. I'd been a Grade-A scatterbrain not to see it. I thought of all those
sisters with monkeys on their backs bigger than anything Fay Wray ever saw, and
I wanted to hand out lead all around.
I slipped my
purse off my shoulder real easy and put it on a chair. "Mind if I powder my
nose?" I said sweetly. That got laughs all around. Dizzy broad, what'll she do
next?
"Go ahead,
sweetheart," said Clams, chuckling. "We wouldn't want them to pass you by down
in the River Room." That got some more laughs. "But don't do anything nutty, or
you'll be having your period a little early this month."
I bent over
and reached into the purse and brought out my compact, very slowly. It was peep-show time again, and Clams moved closer, licking
his lips. I straightened up and opened the compact and took out the puff. Then
I took a deep breath.
Clams put a hand on my waist and said, "Say, boys, what do you say we--" I
blew the whole compact lull of powder in his face, and while his hands were
involuntarily moving toward his eyes, I grabbed his gun and headed for the
floor. Vinnie and the goons waited a split second before firing because Clams
was still in the way. I shot Vinnie in the head, then rolled over and put two
slugs into the nearest goon. I got the third one in the arm and he dropped his
gun. It was a bad shot, since I was aiming somewhere else, but I was giggling
too hard to shoot straight.
The guy I had clobbered came in so I shot him in the foot, just for
laughs. Then I told them all to line up against the wall.
"Okay," I said, "anyone who moves learns position .38. In case you don't
know what it is, I put a couple of slugs in you, then you lie facedown on the
floor and bleed to death." Nobody did any moving.
I picked up Vinnie's gun and went over to where there was a telephone on
a little desk. "Now," I said, "everyone take out your peckers and hold them
tight." I had to put a couple of slugs into the wall to get my point
across, but they came around. None of them had anything the Smithsonian would
be interested in.
"Okay," I said, "Meg is going to call the janes. If anyone takes a hand
off his joint, I'm going to shoot it off." Clams managed to turn white, even
under all the face powder.
It took fifteen minutes for Cedar Rabbit's finest to get there, and Skyler
showed up five minutes later. I gave them the high points and made a date with Sky
to run through it all downtown the next day. She also told me there'd be about
a 5G reward for the dope haul, and that made me feel better about my dress.
It was 4:15 when I got back into my car and headed uptown to the cave in
one of the cliffs I call home. The city was asleep. I thought, I do the policework,
clean up the city, dust some punks, put a couple of grease-balls in the clink,
cook a big-shot's goose, and they sleep through it all. Don't get me wrong.
Sometimes I just get fed up.
Hell. It was that time of the month again.
Don't
miss Meg Hammer in these other Germaine Spillane thrillers: "Knit One, Kill
Two"; "Add Lead and Serve"; "Me, Broad"; "Blood Pudding"; and
"Gunnilingus."