This is my entry for the 2022 ‘Hammered – an Ode to Mickey Spillane’ story event. It’s a follow-on to my submission last year, ‘The Tall Open Window’. This could have gone almost anywhere, but of course belongs here in Romance, for such it is.
All persons, groups and organizations in this story are completely fictional and any resemblance between them and anything or anybody in the real world is purely coincidental. Of course.
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If Boris had ever had a chakra for intuition and foresight, the bullet hole in the centre of his forehead had pretty well erased it.
I looked away with some distaste as the masked woman in the scrubs began a Y-shaped autopsy incision on his chest. To my mind, not even Boris should have to go through this.
Not to mention the other indignities he had been subjected to before somebody had tired of tormenting him and pulled the trigger. Even knowing the kind of predatory slime Boris had been, I winced at little.
“Found his balls yet?” I asked casually.
Lieutenant Sarah Cotton shrugged in the seat next to mine.
“Nope. Maybe Natasha has them.”
“Where’s Natasha?”
“We haven’t been able to find her.”
The couple in question were actually named Alexandr and Marina, but their resemblance to the buffoonish Slavic spies from Rocky and Bullwinkle had been sufficiently remarkable that the nicknames had been pinned on them since their arrival in the country a decade ago.
Not to their faces, of course. Boris had indeed been quite short and, yes, he’d worn a very silly half-sized handlebar moustach, but he’d also routinely won bar bets by, hands on bumper, lifting car tires off the pavement. That didn’t stop everybody, of course. Somebody had gone after him recently, judging from a couple of half-healed scrapes on his forehead. I was pretty certain however that whoever had done that to him that had crawled away with worse.
And Natasha? Well, his wife was indeed a head taller than him, with the cartoon character’s lush figure and long dark hair. She also apparently gobbled Crazy as a dietary supplement. She’d once done nine months in the state guesthouse after decking on a cop who’d tried to stop her from throttling a delinquent hooker, then clocking the cop’s backup, then taking on the next three cops arriving
en masse.
Nobody tangled with Natasha. Not knowingly. Not twice.
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I’d been poring over photos at a spare desk in the morgue office when Sarah had found me. I sensed her standing beside me, looked up.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Working. Missing person.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Bread and butter for me, Sarah. Not all of them make the news.”
“True,” she admitted.
Sarah was a good cop, the backbone of the city’s Homicide Unit. Word was that she’d have been promoted into the corner office but for the unfortunate fact that the the present occupant was the Commissioner’s brother-in-law.
“What brings you here?” I asked.
That’s when she led me down the hall into the viewing room and Boris.
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“I can’t say as I’m sorry,” I said as the scalpel finished its first incision. People like us take humor and satisfaction where and when it comes. Nobody would mourn Boris — well, nobody except Natasha, maybe — and, with his death, the air the rest of us breathed had just got a little cleaner.
She sighed slightly.
“I know, but somebody’ll have taken his place by next week. At least with these two, you know who you were dealing with.”
“That aside, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Her head turned to mine, half irritated, half amused.
“Say what now?”
“They keeping you busy in Homicide, Sarah?”
She relaxed a little.
“Oh, yeah. The fun never stops, Taffy.”
“Anything of interest?”
Sure, confidentiality and… stuff. But we both knew the rules, knew the difference between secrets and
secrets.
To the extent people in our lines of work could trust anybody, Sarah Cotton and I trusted each other. You need
somebody
to talk to when the moon howls.
“Usual shit,” she said, watching as the pathologist started opening Boris’ rib cage with rib shears. The stainless-steel instrument wouldn’t have looked too out of place in a gardening store, something intended for trimming inconvenient branches.
“Domestics,” she continued, “most of them. Some woman got pissed at Hubby losing money at the track two days ago and gave him an attitude adjustment with a frying pan, oops, so sorry about your forehead. Then some brainless idiot comes home early yesterday to find his girlfriend in bed - with another woman. The fool drops his pants, tries to wade in like it's some stupid porn vid and finds out that it’s hard to breath through four pillows.”
I shared her small ‘whistling through the graveyard’ grin.
She settled herself on the bench, watched Boris’ liver being placed in a steel pan.
“Mostly straight-forward, clean-cut and simple. Then this came along. Oh, and three floaters.”
“Three? Friends of Boris?”
“Unlikely. They were all female, Taff and all OD’s. No clothing, no IDs. It’s all pretty thin. We’re still checking.”
“Any of them look like her?” I held up a small photo of Penny Higgins, one of the ones I’d brought to the morgue. She took it, studied it for a moment, handed it back with a shake of her head.
I tried to ask a couple of other questions and started getting one-word answers. Sarah had apparently said all that she was willing to say.
Looking through the window, I’d have thought that the cause of death was a given, but the pathologist was being thorough. When she started taking the top of his head off with a saw, I gave my farewells to Sarah and went back to my photos.
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Back it up a day or two.
“Taffy?”
The voice brought me up from the brooding depths, my thoughts centred on a coffee cup ring on my desk.
I looked up, saw Vladimir, my secretary and office manager.
“Mmm?”
“Customer. I think.”
I pushed back in my chair, made a quick effort to straighten up my desk. Vlad’s term was ‘archeological filing’ and he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Vladimir turned and motioned to somebody in the outer office.
Dark, curly hair and absolutely perfect makeup framed the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. Her smile was practiced, perfect and predatory. The coat she wore was my yearly rent and the pearls around her neck outpriced it.
Don’t get me wrong - I get clients like that all the time. In my dreams.
I made a mental note to raise my fees.
“Thank you, Vlad,” I said, rising. “Please sit down, Ms …?”
“Tendle. Shelly Tendle.”
“Would you care for a coffee or tea, Ms. Tendle?”
