The Shadowers (21 page)
I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a pompous jackass or a self-pitying martyr to duty, or something. I didn’t know how to tell her that she was a swell girl and I liked her proposition fine but she’d better find herself a man who wasn’t a human lightning rod, if not for her own sake then for the baby’s. I was glad when the telephone began to ring noisily. Somehow I knew it was for me. With that kind of timing it could only be Mac. It was.
“Eric? I was hoping to catch you before you left,” he said. “Have you finished your business with the lady? Can you get over to New Orleans fast? You know the number to call when you get there.”
I looked at Olivia. “Yes, sir,” I said into the phone. “I’m finished here. I’ll be there before midnight.”
I stuck the knife in my pocket, picked up my hat, and left. The first three steps toward the door were the hardest. After that it got easier, a little.
Donald Hamilton was the creator of secret agent Matt Helm, star of 27 novels that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Born in Sweden, he emigrated to the United States and studied at the University of Chicago. During the Second World War he served in the United States Naval Reserve, and in 1941 he married Kathleen Stick, with whom he had four children.
The first Matt Helm book,
Death of a Citizen,
was published in 1960 to great acclaim, and four of the subsequent novels were made into motion pictures. Hamilton was also the author of several outstanding stand-alone thrillers and westerns, including two novels adapted for the big screen as
The Big Country
and
The Violent Men.
Donald Hamilton died in 2006.
COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
BY DONALD HAMILTON
The long-awaited return of the United States’ toughest special agent.
Death of a Citizen
The Wrecking Crew
The Removers
The Silencers
Murderers’ Row
The Ambushers
The Ravagers
(February 2014)
COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
PRAISE FOR DONALD HAMILTON
“Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.”
Anthony Boucher,
The New York Times
“This series by Donald Hamilton is the top-ranking American secret agent fare, with its intelligent protagonist and an author who consistently writes in high style. Good writing, slick plotting and stimulating characters, all tartly flavored with wit.”
Book Week
“Matt Helm is as credible a man of violence as has ever figured in the fiction of intrigue.”
The New York Sunday Times
“Fast, tightly written, brutal, and very good...”
Milwaukee Journal
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
BY MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS
THE LOST MIKE HAMMER NOVEL
Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a small beach town on Long Island after wrapping up the Williams case
(I, the Jury).
Walking romantically along the boardwalk, they witness a brutal beating at the hands of some vicious local cops—Hammer wades in to defend the victim.
When a woman turns up naked—and dead— astride the statue of a horse in the small-town city park, how she wound up this unlikely Lady Godiva is just one of the mysteries Hammer feels compelled to solve...
