The Consummata by Max Allan Collins, Mickey Spillane Read Free Book Online Page A

over a year he lay in wait. Then he moved quickly. He had to. My people have a vengeful nature.”
    I nodded. “Do you have him located?”
    “Not yet. But we do know where he has been, and one other thing—and this, señor , is most important—we know the single weakness that will trap him eventually.”
    I leaned forward, the beer almost forgotten. “What?”
    “His thirst for sexual gratification,” Gaita said. “His vanity and his physical need for a woman. Not just any woman, Morgan—only the most beautiful will do.”
    “So what’s his kink?” Sounded like a game show.
    “His tastes run to the...rough. He likes them young, but he also likes a woman of experience—any woman older than thirteen and younger than fifty, if she is beautiful and willing to...to play his sick games.”
    An S & M freak. Hell, it was a place to start.
    She looked at me for a long moment. “With just that one thing, you should be able to find him.”
    “If it’s that easy, why don’t you just run him down yourself?”
    Gaita’s face was absolutely impassive, but there was a strange expression in her eyes.
    “Because, Morgan, he is a totally deadly person—a ruthless man trained to kill, who enjoys killing...and is more than the match for anyone we might send after him.”
    Well, maybe not anyone....
    She went on: “We have many who have volunteered for the mission, but these are brave Cuban boys we cannot afford to lose—young men of bravery but who were...what is the expression? In water over their heads.”
    “But you’re okay risking a gringo ’s life?”
    “That is not fair, señor .” Her expression turned grave. “Three who took the assignment on their own initiative were successful enough to locate him, only to die painfully for their efforts. Slow deaths, señor . With a knife. Here.”
    She touched her belly.
    “Since then,” she said, “we have discouraged any such attempts. All those three succeeded in doing was to warn Señor Halaquez...and now he will be more wary than ever.”
    I drank half the beer and put the can down. “He’s only safe with the money when he gets to Cuba. You don’t head west to get there. He could go south and try to cut across from Mexico, but my bet is you have pipelines into there, too, and he’d be picked up or your people alerted.”
    She nodded.
    “He wouldn’t chance getting caught in open country by somebody with a rifle, so he’d have to stay where any hostile contact would be made personally, so he could handle it, and that would mean sticking to the cities, and those Mexicancities sure wouldn’t be friendly to him at all. If he went north, his only available exit points would be international ports, and even there your people and sympathizers might lay hands on him.”
    She nodded again, slowly. “ Where then, Morgan?”
    “Right here in his own back yard,” I said, “where he has previously established contacts. He’s close to Cuba, if he can make escape arrangements, he knows the area, and the probable moves of your organization...and all he has to do is wait for the right time and place to skip on out. Do you have any theory about why he hasn’t already skipped?”
    “We do not.”
    “I do. He needs to launder that money—well, not launder it, exactly. He’ll need to get it exchanged for currency that’s legal in Cuba—money from a country with normalized relations.”
    “Would that be difficult for him?”
    “No, but he would likely go through underground channels. And because he’s keeping his head down, he’s probably using middlemen. That may give me a lead on him. It’s the one thing that would force him out of hiding.”
    Her eyes tightened. “Unless...”
    “Unless what?”
    “His own lust for the perverted sex, that may also...as you say, force him out.”
    I looked around the room. “Well, he’s not coming here.”
    “No. But there are other such places. And there is one other possibility.”
    “Yeah?”
    “When he learns,