by Dane Hartman
“No,” the man said. “I was in a lot of courts in my time, but never in yours.”
The judge shook his head. Sometimes, the people whose trials he presided over sought him out for one thing or another, believing mistakenly he could function in the role of a social worker or psychiatrist.
“Then what can I do for you?”
At that moment, his wife called to him from upstairs. “Ed, what is is? Is someone there?”
“It’s all right, dear,” he shouted up.
It was then Gallant slipped his right hand underneath his jacket and removed the .44.
Gallagher paled when he saw the gun. In all the years he’d been on the bench, nothing like this had ever happened to him. Now he was convinced the man was dangerous.
“Whatever you want, please, we have so little, but you are welcome to it all. But please, please don’t hurt us. I am an old man and my wife . . .”
Gallant was disinterested in listening to his feeble appeals for mercy. “You know a friend of mine named Callahan, Harry Callahan?”
“Callahan,” the judge said, rummaging through his memory to place the name. “Yes, I believe I once . . .”
Again, Gallant wouldn’t allow him to finish a sentence. “Well, then, this is for him.”
The .44 was much louder than Gallant had expected. The recoil was so powerful that it nearly threw him off balance. He wasn’t used to handling a gun so big.
When he recovered from the shock of the blast, he looked to the chair where the judge had been sitting. The judge wasn’t there any longer. He was sprawled out on top of the desk which had, in turn, toppled over to the floor. Blood soaked through his bathrobe and his arms were splayed out so he seemed to be assuming the posture of Jesus on the cross. His eyes were still open but they were rapidly filming over. There was no question he was dead. Out of the wound blood was slowly leaking onto the pages of a California statute book.
Not unexpectedly, the blast had been audible upstairs. Rather than stay put, which would have been the wisest course of action, Gallagher’s wife had come rushing down to see what had happened and she now stood at the door to the study, horrified by the sight of her murdered husband. Her eyes bugged from their sockets, her jaw gaped open, and it seemed she was incapable of producing any sound.
She was in her mid-fifties, by the looks of her, a woman who had never been beautiful. Gallant had only come to kill Gallagher. He hadn’t even known he had a wife, hadn’t even considered the possibility.
Had he been wearing a mask, he might have permitted her to live. But the fact was he wasn’t. Until Turner had his face altered, as he’d promised, he could still be recognized.
“I hate to do this,” he said apologetically.
Too late, she reacted, and turned, and tried to run from him.
With no urgency at all, Gallant raised the .44 and, sighting it on the back of her head, on the bun of coarse graying hair, he fired.
This time he was better prepared for the recoil, and it didn’t unbalance him the way it had before. Betty Gallagher seemed for an instant to rise in the air, like a marionette suddenly tugged up and offstage. Her head blazed as though fire danced from it. But it wasn’t fire, it was blood. A torrent of blood.
Something sticky had gotten on the legs of his pants. He looked down and saw it was a part of what had been inside the woman’s skull. He did his best to expunge the stain with soap and water, but it only seemed to make it worse. A conspicuous dark oblong patch remained. It was a good thing, he thought, that Turner had given him several changes of clothes.
Especially, as this was only the beginning. There was much to accomplish before the sun came up.
Morris Page lived in a crumbling building in an area guidebooks, if they described it at all, referred to generally as “seedy.” It lay in sight of the Yerba Buena Project and the new Moscone Convention Center which was still under construction. From what Gallant could determine, the building was a transient hotel. There was a sign to that effect hanging over the doorway, but it was so faded it was impossible to know whether it applied any longer. Here and there the windows were lit, but mostly they were dark. The shades were pulled down against the chill nighttime air.
Gallant had never met Page, yet he believed he knew him as well as anyone. For the fact was, Page was a man much like himself, a convicted murderer, a loner, a loser in the eyes of the world. Unlike Gallant, however, he was out of jail legally, having served only three years of a five year sentence, meted out by none other than the late Judge Gallagher.
Page had plea-bargained, ratting on his accomplices, and consequently escaping with minimal punishment while his companions were put away for life. Page and his luckless companions were found guilty of holding up a branch of the Bank of America and killing one of the guards. Page pointed out at his trial that he wasn’t the one who had pulled the trigger. Gallant believed the only reason he hadn’t was the lack of opportunity. Page was not bound by conscience certainly. Nor was he given to sudden fits of compassion; it wasn’t in his nature.
Of course, it had been Harry who’d arrested Morris Page. It was no secret that Harry opposed the mitigation of his sentence.
So they did have something in common, Page and himself: a hatred of a homicide investigator and several years wasted behind bars.
Gallant found the door unlocked and stepped inside a hallway that smelled like eggs gone bad. An imitation Tiffany lamp was suspended over a desk to his right. A register was open on the desk, but there was no one there to tend it.
Behind the desk, Gallant saw a succession of mailboxes. The names and room numbers were inscribed on adhesive tape below each of them. Morris Page was listed as residing in Room 310. His box was empty.
As he ascended the stairs, he began hearing voices, raucous and loud, and punctuated by frequent bursts of laughter. It seemed even at this late hour a party was in progress. The party turned out to be going on in a room just down the hall from 310.
Well, it didn’t concern him. In fact, the noise might be helpful. It would drown out the sound of a gunshot. Bending over, he looked under the door of 310 but could see no light. He concluded that Page must be asleep.
Nonetheless, he was as quiet as he could possibly be. He tried the door, and to his surprise, found it open. With the .44 in hand, he entered the room ready to fire on the sleeping figure he anticipated seeing. But the bed was empty.
He risked flicking on the overhead light. A predictably dreary room was revealed. Cockroaches lined in formation along the wall mirror, scurried quickly back into the haven of the darkness.
There was no bathroom—that must be down the hall somewhere—but there was a sink, whose drain was ringed with a yellowish stain, attesting to the use to which it was put late at night when Page balked at leaving his room to relieve his bladder.
Gallant was far more disappointed than he thought he’d be. To have come all the way to this part of town, and come so close, he could not bear the idea of being denied his victim. Extinguishing the light, he left Page’s room. A haggard old man with the blood vessels broken in his nose, was shuffling down the corridor, clad only in a sleeveless undershirt, and carrying a dirty towel.
“Old man, you know Morris Page?”
The man stopped and screwed his eyes up at Gallant as though he’d just arrived from Mars. He grunted and indicated the door from which all the loud voices and laughter were originating.
As soon as he vanished into the bathroom, Gallant stepped up to the door marked 322. Listening attentively, he determined there were four, possibly five, men inside. From the desperation of their laughter and the shrillness of their voices, Gallant sensed that they’d been drinking quite heavily, and for so many hours, they would be slow to react to any danger.
He had a picture of Page in his mind, and given the time, he might have been able to pick him out from a group, but in a situation like this there would be no time—he had to presume that men who lived in such a place would be armed. While he
could have waited in Page’s room until he returned, he hadn’t the patience. No, he thought, he would take the whole lot of them out.
Grasping hold of the brass knob, he turned it slowly. But the door refused to give. These men were not that trusting. He could, of course, shoot the lock off, but that would alert the room’s occupants, and he didn’t want that to happen.
So, impatient as he was, he decided to bide his time in the expectation that with all the drinking they were doing, sooner or later one of them would come stumbling out to use the bathroom.
It was sooner rather than later. He stood back, against the wall, when he heard the door opening. A stocky man in an open white shirt appeared. Gallant took him wholly by surprise, digging the barrel of the .44 into his enormous stomach.
The man, who was not Page, was so shaken that all he could do was stammer unintelligibly and raise his hands. Gallant prodded him back into the room. He caught a glimpse of three men sitting around a bridge table, with a couple of decks of cards and several empty and half-empty bottles of liquor between them.
Giving them no chance to calculate the odds, he kicked the door shut, then discharged his appropriated weapon at point-blank range into the man’s gut. A ragged bloody stain took form on the white of his shirt as he pitched backwards, overturning the table, and causing a furious clatter as the liquor bottles shattered.
“What the fuck!” one of the men cried as he attempted to take shelter behind the fallen table.
They were all shouting at once. Only Gallant was silent. He dropped to one knee, fired at a second figure who was scrambling in the direction of an adjacent room.
With a piercing scream, he catapulted into the air, and smashed down in a lifeless heap. A moment later, a bullet whistled past Gallant and was impacted in the plaster of the wall directly behind him. He cursed himself for taking too long. There were still two survivors, one of them his intended victim, Page. He was practically certain it was Page who’d managed to get his weapon out in time to return the fire.
In an exposed position himself, Gallant threw himself to the floor just as a second round sped toward him. It opened a hole in the door. Aiming straight at the underside of the bridge table, he fired again. There was never any doubt that the .44 had the strength to penetrate the fragile metal surface of the table and hit the man behind it.
He did not succeed in killing Page, only in wounding him. But the pain must have been fierce for it caused him to jerk up involuntarily so that Gallant had a view of his head. He fired again.
Suddenly, half of his face disappeared. There was just a single eyeball dangling in a welter of red. Then Page dropped out of sight.
One man remained. For a few moments, Gallant couldn’t understand where he had gone. He walked into the other room and discovered him cowering beneath the bed. He lifted the mattress and regarded him, through the springs, with mild amusement.
“No, no, no, please,” the man was mumbling, and Gallant listened to him for only a second. He could begin to make out the distant wail of sirens, which meant someone had summoned the police. He squeezed the tip of the .44 between the springs so that the gun virtually rested in the trapped man’s hair.
Still imploring Gallant for mercy, he attempted to crawl out from under the bed.
Gallant hesitated, allowing the man to get his head into the open, thinking his victim’s predicament was not so much different from what his had been in Sheila Richmond’s apartment a few short hours ago. Then he discharged the gun.
The bullet entered at the base of the man’s spine. He buckled once with a hideous scream, then flopped down. Blood was strewn all over the mattress Gallant was still holding up with one hand. But the man was not dead, he was writhing, still struggling to get out from underneath the bed. Gallant put another bullet into the back of his neck.
As soon as he stepped into the hall again, he found himself facing the same old man in the undershirt who’d directed him to room 322.
The old man looked stupified, partly with booze, partly with astonishment. There was no telling how long he’d been standing in front of the door.
When he saw Gallant, a trickle of urine started to run down his bony legs.
“You going to say something about this, old man?” Gallant asked in a deceptively casual voice.
The old man might have been mute, certainly he was terrified, for he said not a word. He just shook his head emphatically.
Gallant shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t believe you.”
He kept his eyes fixed on the old man while he brought up the .44 and shot him in the groin. He was hurtled back against the opposite wall and crumpled up with a sad shudder. He’d had such a tenuous hold on life in the first place, that it did not require even this much for him to abandon it completely.
There was a commotion coming from far down the hallway, and up from the floors below. Gallant was unconcerned. He took the stairs down at an easy pace. Someone might have observed him, a fleeting figure with flecks of blood on his clothing, but he doubted anyone would have obtained a good look at him. Even if a witness did step forward to give the police a description of a suspect, no one would link it to James William Gallant. James William Gallant was dead.
It was now getting early in the morning, but the skies were as black as they’d been at midnight. A scattering of gray clouds hinted at another day of little sun and sudden fog. The hour and the weather were of little importance to Gallant. It was difficult for him to believe he had achieved so much since his escape from prison. He couldn’t quite remember exactly how many people he had killed during that time, but it seemed to him eight was the correct figure.
To that number there now had to be added one more—unless other people got in the way as they had the habit of doing. This was a man named Marc Torio. Gallant recalled he lived in Oakland, in one of those anonymous towering apartment blocks not far from Lake Merritt. He had a piece of paper with the exact address written down on it that he dug out of his jacket pocket. It was soaked through with someone’s blood and because it was, he had a problem deciphering the writing.
He got lost a couple of times. Somehow, in spite of the maps he consulted, he couldn’t find the Oakland Bay Bridge. He kept missing a turn-off or going too far. It was growing patently obvious to him how really exhausted he was, and that he was pressing his luck by continuing his campaign of vengeance. If he had any sense he’d quit, find a place to sleep, and resume tomorrow. But now that he had a momentum going, he could not bear to suspend operations, even for a few hours’ rest. Besides, he reasoned, there was just this one person left, this Marc Torio, before he could move onto other things.
The truth was he couldn’t recollect why he had chosen Torio as a victim while he was in prison. Unquestionably, the man was an avowed enemy of Harry’s, and it seemed to Gallant he had done some time, and that he had managed, even more cunningly than Page had, to evade the machinery of justice. But all the details of Torio’s case had slipped his mind. He wasn’t thinking straight. The gray clouds in the sky might just as well have been in his head. His vision wasn’t much better. When he gazed out his windshield toward the lights of Oakland, which he’d finally located, more by pure chance than following the directions he’d determined from his maps, all he could see was a dull haze of pink and amber.
When he got to Oakland, he found an all-night diner and stopped for some coffee. There were only a few other patrons at the counter, and only one girl behind it. They all stared at him and then quickly averted their eyes in embarrassment. It was only then Gallant realized what a grotesque sight he must be presenting, with so much blood spattered on him. He didn’t care to imagine how he smelled. He decided not to stay, but bolted up and returned to his car.
The sky was smudged gray, but it was finally getting light, signaling the arrival of the new day. Gallant was standing in the middle of an asphalt lot. Towering above him, on every side, were massive apartment buildings, one resembling the other. There was hardly any sound except for an
occasional abrasive honk. He had read or been told somewhere that Lake Merritt was a refuge for wild ducks. He reasoned that was what he was hearing. Once in awhile, he’d look up in the sky and see a bird swoop down.
He could find no one to ask for the location of the building he was searching for, so he wandered from one doorway to the other, trying to match the address to what was scrawled on the bloodstained paper he held in his hand. He saw his hand was shaking. How the hell was he going to shoot Marc Torio, assuming he could find him, with his hand shaking?
Eventually, he came upon the building he was hunting for. The apartment number, 8C, indicated that a N. Raphael lived there. It could be his information was erroneous. Either Torio had moved away or else had never lived here to begin with.
Well, he would have to discover for himself. The door to the inside hallway was locked. There was a buzzer to the left.
Gallant rang one apartment after another, avoiding only the apartment marked N. Raphael. As he expected, someone buzzed him in.
He tried to stop shaking, but couldn’t. By the time he stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor, his whole body was trembling. He was feverish, and his skin was drenched in sweat.
Standing in front of 8C, he put his ear to the door and listened. He thought he could make out a person’s voice, but it was muffled, and indecipherable.
For almost three minutes, he struggled with the lock to get it open. It was a simple lock, and if he was less anxious, he could have had it open in half the time. At last it snapped, and he pushed against the door.
It wouldn’t yield all the way. A brass chain was pulled taut in the gap between the door and wall.
It was a one-room apartment as far as Gallant could tell. The bed was situated along the opposite wall and there was a man and a woman in it, the sheets tangled about their naked bodies. A lamp in the far corner of the room was on, and Gallant had a fairly good view of the woman, though not of the man. The man might have been asleep, for he was partially obscured in darkness. But the woman was awake. It was possible she’d heard him opening the door because she was propped up on her arms, her eyes riveted on him, a very dazed expression on her face.