“Here we go.” Wiggins’s shout was robust, and there he was, reaching out from the red caboose, his strong hand grabbing mine and pulling me aboard.

When I stood beside him, breathing in gasps, he turned to me and folded his arms in mock disapproval, but his eyes were twinkling almost as bright as the stars we passed.

“That was a near thing, Bailey Ruth. You cut it rather fine. However, your mission was flawlessly executed.” He smiled in approval. “As for your delay in coming aboard”-his tone was casual-“that’s neither here nor there. Sometimes, as far as official reports go and your status as an emissary, least said, soonest mended.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“However-”

I should have known I wasn’t quite home free.

“I have a question.”

I steeled myself.

His ruddy face folded in puzzlement. “BOOMS?”

I laughed in relief. “Things have changed on earth, Wiggins. Young people send each other text messages on their cell phones, and they use a great many abbreviations. BOOMS means bored out of my skull.”

“BOOMS,” he repeated with delight. “I’ll remember that. BOOMS! Not”-and his tone was kindly-“a state you were long willing to endure. Bully for you, Bailey Ruth.”

Bully for me. Ah, every age has its style.

“Thank you, Wiggins.” I almost told him what a fine fellow he was, then decided that might be presumptuous. But I was too ebullient not to celebrate. “Wiggins, we have a bit of time before we get to Heaven.” I reached out and took his hand. “Have you ever cha-chaed?”

Grave Matter – A Mike Hammer Story by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the early 1990s, Mickey Spillane and I created a science-fiction variation on his Mike Danger character for comic books. (The Danger character had been developed for comics by Mickey just before World War Two, and he attempted to market it after the war, as well, without success. In 1947, he decided to change “Danger” to “Hammer” and I, the Jury was the result.) At some point, the comic book company asked Mickey and me to develop a prose short story for a market that fell through. Mickey approved this story and gave me notes but did not do any of the writing, which explains the unusual byline above (with me getting top billing). Later, I recycled this idea for a third-person short story that used a different lead character, but this represents the first appearance of the story in its original, intended form… although for various reasons, I have changed “Danger” back to “Hammer.” The tale takes place in the early 1950s.

If I hadn’t been angry, I wouldn’t have been driving so damn fast, and if I hadn’t been driving so damn fast, in a lashing rain, on a night so dark closing your eyes made no difference, my high beams a pitiful pair of flashlights trying to guide the way in the vast cavern of the night, illuminating only slashes of storm, I would have had time to brake properly when I came down over the hill and saw, in a sudden white strobe of electricity, that the bridge was gone, or anyway out of sight, somewhere down there under the rush of rain-raised river. When the brakes didn’t take, I yanked the wheel around, and my heap was sideways in a flooded ditch, wheels spinning. Like my head.

I got out on the driver’s side, because otherwise I would have had to swim underwater. From my sideways-tipped car, I leapt to the slick highway as rain pelted me mercilessly, and did a fancy slip-slide dance, keeping my footing. Then I snugged the wings of the trench coat collar up around my face and began to walk back the way I’d come. If rain was God’s tears, the Old Boy sure was bawling about something tonight.

I knew how he felt. I’d spent the afternoon in the upstate burg of Hopeful, only there was nothing hopeful about the sorry little hamlet. All I’d wanted was a few answers to a few questions. Like how a guy who won a Silver Star charging up a beachhead could wind up a crushed corpse in a public park, a crumpled piece of discarded human refuse.

Bill Reynolds had had his problems. Before the war he’d been an auto mechanic in Hopeful. A good-looking, dark-haired bruiser who’d have landed a football scholarship if the war hadn’t gotten in the way, Bill married his high school sweetheart before he shipped out, only when he came back missing an arm and a leg, he found his girl wasn’t interested in what was left of him. Even though he was good with his prosthetic arm and leg, he couldn’t get his job back at the garage, either.

But the last time I’d spoken to Bill, when he came in to New York to catch Marciano and Jersey Joe at Madison Square Garden, he’d said things were looking up. He said he had a handyman job lined up, and that it was going to pay better than his old job at the garage.

“Besides which,” he said, between rounds, “you oughta see my boss. You’d do overtime yourself.”

“You mean you’re working for a woman?”

“And what a woman. She’s got more curves than the Mohonk Mountain road.”

“Easy you don’t drive off a cliff.”

That’s all we’d said about the subject, because Marciano had come out swinging at that point, and the next I heard from Bill-well not from him, about him-he was dead.

The only family he had left in Hopeful was a maiden aunt; she called me collect and told me tearfully that Bill’s body had been found in the city park. His spine had been snapped.

“HOW does a thing like that happen, Chief?”

Chief Thadeous Dolbert was one of Hopeful’s four full-time cops. Despite his high office, he wore a blue uniform indistinguishable from his underlings, and his desk was out in the open of the little bullpen in Hopeful City Hall. A two-cell lockup was against one wall, and spring sunshine streaming in the windows through the bars sent slanting stripes of shadow across his desk and his fat, florid face. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, eyes hooded; he looked like a fat iguana-I expected his tongue to flick out and capture a fly any second now.

Dolbert said, “We figure he got hit by a car.”

“Body was found in the city park, wasn’t it?”

“Way he was banged up, figure he must’ve got whopped a good one, really sent him flyin’.”

“Was that the finding at the inquest?”

Dolbert fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, right behind his tarnished badge, lighted himself up a smoke. Soon it was dangling from a thick, slobber-flecked lower lip. “We don’t stand much on ceremony around here, mister. County coroner called it accidental death at the scene.”

“That’s all the investigation Bill’s death got?”

Dolbert shrugged, blew a smoke circle. “All that was warranted.”

I sat forward. “All that was warranted. A local boy, who gave an arm and a leg to his country, wins a damn Silver Star doin’ it, and you figure him getting his spine snapped like a twig and damn near every bone in his body broken, well, that’s just pretty much business as usual here in Hopeful.”

Under the heavy lids, fire flared in the fat chief’s eyes. “You think you knew Bill Reynolds? You knew the old Bill. You didn’t know the drunken stumblebum he turned into. Prime candidate for stepping out in front of a car.”

“I never knew Bill to drink to excess-”

“How much time did you spend with him lately?”

A hot rush of shame crawled up my neck. I’d seen Bill from time to time, in the city, when he came in to see me, but I’d never come up to Hopeful. Never really gone out of my way for him, since the war…

Till now.

“You make any effort to find the hit-and-run driver that did this?”

The chief shrugged. “Nobody saw it happen.”

“You don’t even know for sure a car did it.”

“How the hell else could it have happened?”

I stood up, pushed back, the legs of my wooden chair scraping the hard floor like fingernails on a blackboard. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”