Dirty Harry 07 - Massacre at Russian River

by Dane Hartman

  “DIRTY HARRY” CALLAHAN—

  HE FIGHTS FOR THE LAW

  OF THE LAND, HE LIVES BY

  THE RULE OF THE GUN!

  A lot of grass—the illegal kind—grows in the hills of Northern California. Where there’s marijuana, there’s money. Where there’s money, there’s murder. And where there’s murder, there’s Dirty Harry. In a wilderness where even the local cops are criminal, Harry must live—and kill—by a law higher than the law of the land: his own.

  DEATH RACE

  Kilborn surprised Harry by flattening himself out in the path of the oncoming vehicle. Harry couldn’t stop or redirect the van in time and ran right over him. But he heard none of the sounds one would customarily expect running over a body. He guessed that being as thin as he was, Kilborn had managed to position himself in such a way that all four tires had missed him completely.

  Harry couldn’t be sure though. He brought the van to a stop, opened the door and peered back.

  His supposition was correct. Kilborn was alive and in good health. He was taking aim at Harry and firing . . .

  Books by Dane Hartman

  Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

  Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks

  Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death

  Dirty Harry #4: The Mexico Kill

  Dirty Harry #5: Family Skeletons

  Dirty Harry #6: City of Blood

  Dirty Harry #7: Massacre at Russian River

  Dirty Harry #8: Hatchet Men

  Dirty Harry #9: The Killing Connection

  Dirty Harry #10: The Blood of Strangers

  Dirty Harry #11: Death in the Air

  Dirty Harry #12: The Dealer of Death

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 0-446-30052-7

  First Printing: June, 1982

  DIRTY HARRY #7

  MASSACRE

  AT

  RUSSIAN

  RIVER

  Opening Round

  North of San Francisco, Highway 101 runs through Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties straight into Oregon. Right across the line separating Mendocino from Humboldt can be found the Old Redwood Highway, a two-lane blacktop characterized by trees that have spent thousands of years reaching for the sky.

  Old Redwood yields onto a mud road riddled with potholes which in turn gives way to other roads, steeper, more impenetrable. After a while, if no one puts a stop to one’s progress, one comes to the very heart of marijuana country.

  There, among the giant trees and the thick nettled brush, gardens are filled with Guerrero, purple skunk, sinsemilla, Thai, Columbian, and Kauai, pedigree, and hybrid, weed that drives a man crazy and weed that does nothing but make him cough into the night.

  People make hundreds of thousands of dollars there, sometimes millions, while remaining perpetually stoned in the process.

  That was how Jud Harris went about his life, at least until one afternoon early last autumn.

  Harris stands at six-three and has a wired intensity about him, a piercing stare, and a set of thin lips that hold back a smile like a hidden treasure. He favors loose overalls, sports a beard, and wears his hair so long in back that in order to make it manageable he’s knit it into a ponytail. He goes about in hip-high boots, prowling his garden. His plants are all in a row. That way, he thinks, they won’t be so easily spotted from the air.

  The thousands of dollars that Jud Harris raked in last year are not in plain sight. The house that he and his old lady Bonnie share is a modest five-room affair, put together on the cheap with materials pillaged from a crumbling barn located down the road a piece. One of those five rooms has a crib in it. No baby, just the crib. The baby is due in mid-November.

  Jud has a four-wheel-drive. Just about all the marijuana farmers thereabouts do because there’s no other way of getting around. In addition, he has a pick-up and a car, but they wouldn’t be considered luxuries.

  Most of Jud’s money has found its way to San Francisco, where he maintains a beautiful house overlooking the bay. He and Bonnie go to that house whenever they feel like getting away from marijuana country on a vacation.

  Even dopesters need vacations. Weed is not always a fun business.

  It was a little after four in the afternoon. The sun was out, for the first time in days. Shafts of its radiant light penetrated the outstretched branches of the trees that ringed the electronic fence Jud had constructed. When it had last gone off Jud had rushed from his house, a .22 rifle in his hands, only to discover that a curious deer had triggered it. He and Bonnie had feasted on venison that night.

  No road led to the Harris farm. The road was half a mile away; it just sort of dropped off into mud that, for all the sun it got, never quite hardened. But Jud and Bonnie could still hear traffic on the road or what passed as traffic because generally no more than two or three vehicles used it in any one twenty-four-hour period.

  Bonnie was a woman of juices and flesh, even before she became pregnant. Her face was pretty, dairy-maidish; the rest of her spread out and blossomed, no angles, no curves, just lots of soft round contours.

  “Jud, it’s the Reardons!” she called. She knew the sound of their truck. She didn’t need to see the whites of their eyes to identify her visitors.

  The Reardons, Tom and Tom Jr., his son, and Lou, his brother, had been coming around of late, making inquiries, expressing an interest in buying out Jud. Jud didn’t want to be bought out. He was happy, he was rich and getting richer. He liked tending his weed, he liked experimenting with fertilizer and crossbreeding plants, and he didn’t see what else he could do in life that would be nearly so satisfying. Besides, even if he wanted to sell his property and the lucrative plant life that sprang from it, he would not for one moment consider selling to the Reardons.

  The Reardons were shit. The Reardons carried the plague in their chromosomes. The Reardons were crazy. But the Reardons were persistent.

  Jud had been talking to some of his fellow farmers. He wasn’t the only one the Reardons had approached. No, they’d been around to most of the farms in the area, playing it real casual, sometimes offering to buy out an entire crop, sometimes offering to go in on a deal, sometimes holding out for the whole shooting match, just as they were doing with him.

  They came marching, muddy boots, red faces, over the rise in the hill, the three of them single file, Tom Sr., leading the way.

  Jud didn’t know why he should be thinking of grabbing hold of his .22. The Reardons had never used force or threatened either him or Bonnie in any way. If there was any danger at all it was in their eyes; you looked into them and you could see fire simmering inside their skulls.

  Still, he told Bonnie to head them off, delay them. He would make certain his gun was within easy reach. He had no intention of actually producing it. That might only provoke them, and if there was one thing Jud Harris was it was peaceful. It was just better to have the weapon available.

  If Tom had been a tree, he would have been one of the giant redwoods. Physically, he was an impressive sight, towering above Jud, with a frame that was more massive still and limbs bulging with muscle that seemed ready to burst from the protective skin around it. It was unfortunate that his intelligence was nowhere as formidable as his body. Junior year in high school was as far as his education had taken him. That might not have been a handicap nece
ssarily, but he was in possession of an IQ that would never see the other side of 100. He was probably conscious of his below-average intelligence, and it was equally probable that he used his body to compensate for it.

  His son was pushing twenty and was a mite smarter but less strapping, more on the thin side. His gaze was insistent but blank, as though he still hadn’t quite figured out what to make of the world. His uncle Lou was built of the same rough-hewn material his brother was, but he hadn’t the sheer brawn and craziness that Tom had.

  Bonnie stepped forward, barely allowing her eyes to travel back to the open doorway of the house where her husband remained concealed.

  “How are you doing today?” she asked with feigned cheerfulness.

  “Fine, just fine,” Tom Sr., said, assuming the role of spokesman.

  “You looking for Jud?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s not here right now.”

  Tom peered in the direction of the house, clearly unconvinced. “Oh, is that so? His car is here. So’s the truck. He surely couldn’t have gone far.”

  Bonnie was improvising fast. “He took a walk over to the Emerson place.”

  “The Emerson place,” Tom said. “Funny, we was just over there and we didn’t see any sign of him. You sure you didn’t just lose track of him? It happens, missus can’t find her old man. You know how often my missus can’t find me?” He laughed. His brother laughed. His son laughed. The family that believed in togetherness.

  Jud, having overheard this exchange, decided that there was nothing to be gained by staying out of sight.

  “What do you want, Tom?”

  “Ah, there you are. And I was just saying to the pretty mama here that I thought you was lost. You wasn’t lost, after all.”

  Jud wasn’t interested in pursuing this. “I told you before, I’m not selling. You want to invest in my harvest then that’s different. Maybe we can work something out.”

  Jud was thinking there was no sense riling the man, better to appease him, compromise.

  “Maybe we can at that. But the truth of the matter is I want to buy what you have here. I’m willing to pay good money. Ain’t that right, Lou?”

  Lou obediently nodded. “That’s the truth. You’re passing up a good deal, Jud, if you refuse.”

  “Ten thousand dollars cash.” Tom was fishing the money from his jacket pocket and starting to count out the bills, slowly, as though he were really quite certain that Jud would accept them.

  Jud had never heard Tom cite a definite figure before and was so positively astounded that for a moment his jaw hung open, struck dumb. Even Bonnie, who rarely expressed surprise, remaining tranquil under the most bizarre circumstances (possibly because she was so stoned), could not resist laughing.

  “You must be joking,” Jud said upon recovering his voice. “Do you have any idea what my crop is worth? Let alone the farm itself.”

  “I most certainly do. I study my investments before I make them, indeed I do.”

  “There’s nothing further to discuss. Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy.”

  Jud turned around and began walking back toward the house. Bonnie was about to do the same when Tom called to her.

  “Hey, pretty mama, wait here.”

  She had no intention of lingering and continued on. Tom then reached out and gripped hold of her arm.

  She shrieked. This made no impression on Tom, who pulled her to him and then laid his hand against her swelling belly, his fingers digging through the fabric of her crinoline dress into her flesh.

  Seeing this, Jud wheeled about. “Take your hands off her,” he commanded.

  Bonnie was trying to free herself from the hold Tom had on her, but she hadn’t the strength. Tom continued to knead her stomach. “Hey,” he said, “I can feel him kicking in there.”

  Jud lunged for Tom but his intervention did little good; he had Tom Jr., and Lou Reardon to contend with. As if on signal the pair seized Jud and kept him squirming in their grip.

  In desperation Bonnie, in a motion too quick for Tom to observe in time, brought her left leg up and kneed him in the groin. He howled in pain and nearly doubled over. Bonnie took advantage of his momentary incapacitation and began to flee.

  Tom didn’t run after her. Instead he reached into his jacket and extracted a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.

  “No!”

  Tom looked at Jud with surprise. It was as though he’d forgotten about Jud’s existence. “No?” He shrugged almost as if to say that it really made no significant difference to him one way or another.

  Then he readjusted his arm, training the gun not on Bonnie but on the man who was trapped by his brother and son.

  An expression of horror and disbelief came over Jud Harris’ face. He struggled more furiously to escape, but Lou and Tom Jr., would not think of releasing him unless Tom commanded them to do so.

  Tom delighted in the power of determining a man’s fate.

  Jud heard the cock of the gun and cried out in desperation. There were no neighbors to hear him, no one within miles who could come to his rescue. There was no phone.

  Bonnie had reached the doorway but remained there, rooted to the spot, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “You should’ve taken the cash and run,” Tom declared, shaking his head sadly. “Some people, they just never learn.”

  Then he fired.

  The bullet punched out a hole directly between Jud’s eyebrows, just at the ridge of the nose.

  A bright crimson spot took form. The back of the head—what was left of it—looked a great deal worse. Jud’s body pitched back and would have been hurled some distance away were it not for the grip his captors maintained on him.

  But now, suddenly, Lou let him go. Jud just sort of sagged. Then Tom Jr., let go, and Jud sank soundlessly to the ground.

  “Look what you did, Tom,” said his brother, pointing to the blood and viscous material on his shirt. “You got it all over me.”

  “I’ll buy you a new shirt, Lou, don’t you worry,” Tom said. He seemed truly apologetic about the mishap.

  Right then there was a loud report. The three men turned to see what had caused it.

  The answer was immediately apparent: Bonnie was standing in the doorway, the .22 in her arms. But she was shaking so much that the bullet she’d just fired at Jud’s murderers had gone far astray of its mark.

  “Shit, and I’d forgotten all about her,” Tom remarked. He appeared to be amused by this turn of events.

  Bonnie was aiming again. The three men, not trusting too much to luck, dropped to the ground. The second bullet whistled over their heads and sank into a tree some distance beyond them.

  “Nobody taught that pretty mama how to shoot,” said Lou.

  “Don’t seem like it, does it?” Tom agreed, carefully sighting his Magnum and firing.

  Somebody had damn well taught Tom how to shoot. His bullet went into Bonnie’s abdomen, killing the seven-month-old fetus and causing massive hemorrhaging. The .22 flew from her hands, and she fell across the threshold of her home. There she lay, her twitching legs and muffled screams indicating that she was still alive.

  “Here you go, Tom,” the father said, giving his son the Magnum. “Why don’t you finish it for us?”

  Tom Jr., gazed at his father uncertainly. He had a great tolerance for bloodletting. He hadn’t recoiled when Jud was shot nor felt particularly saddened when Bonnie’s full stomach burst open. Hadn’t the woman been shooting at them, after all? But this was something else again, administering the coup de grâce, though of course, Tom Jr., would not have used such a phrase to describe what his father was urging him to do.

  “Come on, take it, Tom.”

  Tom Jr., grasped hold of the weapon. Bonnie’s screams were getting louder.

  “Finish it, Tom Jr.,” his uncle was saying. “Shut her the hell up.”

  Tom Jr., reluctantly advanced across the overgrown lawn. His father and uncle watched him impassively as he stepped up to
Bonnie. For several moments he did nothing. He had the gun correctly positioned, but he still wasn’t doing anything.

  “Come on, boy, get it over with! We haven’t got all day.”

  Another second passed. Then there was an explosion. The screams stopped.

  Tom Sr., cast a sidelong glance at his brother. He smiled in satisfaction. “I knew the boy had it in him,” he said.

  C H A P T E R

  O n e

  His name was John Raven, but everybody referred to him as Turk. There was some Turkish ancestry in him but it went way back. He didn’t seem to like being referred to as Turk, but he just never knew exactly how to convince people to refer to him by any other name.

  What Turk did had to be one of the most hopeless jobs ever to be conceived of in any police department in the nation. Turk was in command of the local narcotics squad that worked out of a county-seat courthouse located maybe forty miles from the Harris farm (though that was forty miles as a crow flies, and no four-wheel-drive vehicle enjoyed the freedom a crow did).

  There were no windows in Turk’s office. This was a source of constant complaint for him. He would have given anything for a view. The walls were adorned with photographs of marijuana plants torn out of High Times magazine and Polaroid shots of Turk and various sheriffs posing with bales of confiscated weed. A map of the county was home to several dozen multicolored pins that designated the locations of known and likely marijuana farms. Atop the bookcase were bongs and roach clips, hookahs and hash pipes, lab scales and cookers once used to increase potency of whatever drug had been stuffed inside.

  To amuse himself—and his visitors—Turk kept a record player on which he spun old jazz records with such tunes as “Reefer Man,” “Whacky Dust,” “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” and “I’m Feeling High and Happy.”

  If there was one thing that Turk was not though it was high and happy. Too many obstacles were in his way to happiness.

  For instance, he had only one man to help him. This was a fellow by the name of Frank Davenport. Unlike Turk, whose beard and wire-rim glasses gave him a vaguely academic air, Davenport was the classical image of an undercover agent, a man who in his attempt to fit in anywhere stood out like a sore thumb. Only one look at the conservative cut of his hair, the shades he wore on even the cloudiest days, and his perpetually polished shoes identified him as some kind of cop.