Mickey Spillane - Arm Quotes

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If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane
They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
"Drunk," the cop said.
The other one turned me around into the light. "He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either."
"Mugged?"
"Maybe."
I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.
Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.

Mickey Spillane
In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he'd give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

Mickey Spillane
Don't worry, I don't underrate the cops. But cops can't break a guy's arm to make him talk, and they can't shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a.45 to remind him that you aren't fooling. I do my own leg work, and there are a lot of guys who will tell me what I want to know because they know what I'll do to them if they don't. My staff is strictly ex officio, but very practical.

Mickey Spillane
I couldn't think. I couldn't remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. That was as much as I could take. I gave a hell of a kick and a fat face in a fedora pulled back out of focus and started to groan, all doubled up. Maybe I laughed, I don't know.

Mickey Spillane