Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill

by Dane Hartman

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, I have to know. Are you with me, Harry?”

  Harry looked over toward Wendy who was obliviously unpacking the goods she’d purchased, putting some of them into the depleted refrigerator and leaving others on the table. Even though she was wearing the clothes she’d had on the night before she still looked incredible, especially early in the morning. Whenever she leaned forward the slit in her white skirt would part to reveal a mesmerizing stretch of trim golden leg; he was getting fixated almost to the point of forgetting about Harold.

  “Harry? Is something wrong with your connection?”

  “No. Everything’s fine with this connection. What the hell, sure.”

  “What the hell sure what?”

  “What the hell, sure, I’ll go to Mexico for you.”

  “That’s great, Harry, that’s marvelous. Come by later this afternoon.”

  Wendy, for the first time realizing who it was, turned to face Harry, then threw her hand over her mouth to keep the laughter from getting out.

  C H A P T E R

  N i n e

  “Slater Bodkin, what kind of a name is Slater Bodkin?”

  Harry turned to the lean, practically emaciated figure who sat beside him on the pier, waiting to see how the man would react.

  “I don’t rightly know. Doesn’t sound Italian, does it? It’s the name my mama gave me. Not my papa. We come from what you’d call a very indeterminate heritage.”

  With his cap tugged down to shadow his gnarled brow and with his unlit pipe dangling between his lips, he looked the picture of the classic sea captain. He could have shipped out with the Pequod and gone looking for Moby Dick.

  Slater loved to talk. From Harry’s first introduction to the man, he’d picked up on his loquacious tendencies. “I been sailing Harold’s boats for going on forty years now. I remember the first boat he had, a ketch you could barely shit in. That was before he was making any money fall. Me and him, we’d go out fishing together. Salt water must be in our blood, I always told him. Shame about what happened to the Hyacinth. I’d have been on it but for the business with my back.”

  Here he twisted around so that Harry could better see his back. There was nothing to interest him there.

  “Shot to hell. Tuna that did it. You ever try and catch a tuna, a really big tuna?”

  Harry owned that he’d never done so.

  “Tuna can be a bitch. Trouble is it thinks it’s better than you are.” Slater hesitated, spat out some phlegm that he’d kept rolling around in his mouth like chewing gum. “Generally it is. Well, one time I was foolish enough to think I could outfox one. Can’t outfox no tuna, you can outlast it sometimes, but you can’t outfox one, don’t care what anyone says. Pulled my back something awful. Never quite recovered. Then I go ahead and do some damn thing and strain it all over again and I have to lay up for a month. Can’t even walk to the can it gets so bad. Have to use one of those bedpans. It’s generally humiliating.”

  Harry nodded. Almost nodded out. How he wondered was he going to take a stretch of days, maybe weeks, in this man’s company? But he was fortunate in one thing. Slater didn’t seem to need him in order to conduct a conversation; a couple of grunts, an affirmative mumble were quite sufficient for him.

  “So I wasn’t with the crew down Mexico way when those pirates came aboard. I’ve seen pirates in my time. Once off the coast of Colombia I remember I was on a ship, a couple of them bastards crept up on deck, knifed one of the watches something terrible, conked the other one over the head. You want to know what they were looking for?”

  “What’s that? Oh no, have no idea.”

  “They were looking for Colombian cash. Seems we print the damn stuff here in the States, ship it down there. Funny, how it works. All the worthless currency in the world, including our own, and we got to be printing it. Generally adds insult to injury, wouldn’t you say?”

  Harry said that sounded right to him.

  “You done much sailing in your time?”

  “Couple of motorboats now and again.”

  “Mmmm. Thought so. You looked to me like you got land in your blood. I can sense when somebody’s done his tour and when he hasn’t. So Harold wants you on as security.”

  “He tell you that?”

  “No, old Harold he don’t tell me shit. But there’d be no other reason for you, the way I see it. He’s thinking there’ll be more pirates, I suppose. Don’t go getting the wrong impression. You fight off pirates; and that’s what you’re good at, well, fine with me. I’m too old, and my back’s too far gone, to do that sort of shit any longer. But that don’t give you the right to shirk your responsibilities running the ship when nothing exciting’s happening.”

  “I have no intention of that.”

  Slater grabbed Harry’s hand and shook it vigorously. “Then we’ll get along just fine.”

  Harry now directed his eyes toward the clipboard he held in his hands. On it was a paper with the names of prospective crew members. One of them was already confirmed—Max Wilmier. It was written in Slater’s handwriting.

  “You been out with this joker before?”

  Slater’s eyebrows rose just slightly. “I take it you met Max. People when they meet Max generally don’t take so well to him. Yes, I been out with him. Got nothing much for a mind, I admit you that, but he’s a damn hard worker, believe it or not. Doesn’t have to have anything in his belly, he’ll toil in the tropical sun for you all day and all night too if you want. Never complains, never tires down. Problem is if he gets a little too much to drink, can’t control him then. Always have to pull him out of altercations. T’weren’t for my niece I wouldn’t have signed him on.”

  “Wendy’s your niece? You got one hell of a family, I’ll tell you.”

  “Some girl,” he said with a mysterious smile. And that, to Harry’s surprise, was all he had to say on the subject of Wendy Keepnews. He might have talked a bluestreak on everything else but about Wendy he was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Slater and Harry had rented an unused bait shack at the edge of the pier, just a five-minute jog down from the tourist bazaar on Fisherman’s Wharf, and here they interviewed the men who came seeking work on a boat Harold hadn’t gotten around to purchasing yet. Didn’t matter, Harold had told them, they had only to find three men who seemed both able and minimally trustworthy.

  The men came because they’d heard about the job in the local saloons or because they’d gotten wind of it down on the docks where the fish were offloaded early every morning.

  Slater didn’t exactly interview any of them. He was convinced that he had the intuitive powers to judge a man from the mere sight of him. Harry, who was not averse to intuition, still had his doubts regarding Slater’s methods. Especially when he’d selected his choice of a crew from among the parade of mostly scurvy-looking individuals who turned up at the pier.

  One was a fellow named Booth, a husky, somewhat Neanderthal figure whose arms were festooned with tattoos testifying to a strange love for a girl named Maria and an interest in Nazi emblems. “Heavy customer all right,” Slater admitted, “but he’ll work his ass off and keep his mouth shut, that kind always does, and that’s the way I like them.”

  That wasn’t the way Harry liked them necessarily, not when they looked like Booth, but then he wasn’t the one in charge of this part of the operation.

  The second said his name was Vincent. In contrast to Booth, he was lean and nimble, with an angular face whose skin had been worked over by the sun of the tropics until it had become leathery and almost Negro-black. Vincent conceded that he had done time but that “was years ago and didn’t mean shit.”

  “Another good worker?” Harry asked, thinking of the crew he had to cope with—Max, Vincent, Booth, and the garrulous Slater Bodkin.

  “You bet,” Slater said with customary authoritativeness, complacently stuffing more of his foul-smelling tobacco into his pipe.

&
nbsp; Although there was no boat available, Keepnews had assured them that by the time they were scheduled to sail—the 20th of August—their craft would be waiting for them. And who could doubt Harold Keepnews? He made his reputation keeping his word.

  But even when they got the boat there was the problem of where exactly to take it. It was one thing to direct someone into the waters off the western coast of Mexico, but presumably the object was to disembark in whatever infested town all the heroin was originating from.

  This was exactly what Keepnews wished to speak to Harry about when he put through a phone call to him. A phone was the one luxury Harry and Slater could count on in their little hovel by the pier.

  Slater spoke for a few minutes with Keepnews, then handed the phone to Harry, adding, “I told him we got our men.”

  “He want to see them?” Harry hoped that Keepnews would. One look at the whole lot of them and he’d throw them out on their collective ass—Max, Booth, and Vincent were men he wouldn’t trust with a rowboat.

  “Nah, he trusts my judgment.”

  “Of course.” He put the receiver to his ear, half-expecting Keepnews to announce he’d found out about him and Wendy. But no, he sounded as smooth, as untroubled as he always did. “Harry, how’re you doing? Glad to hear you’ve made progress down there today. Tell me, you know a place named Winnicker’s? It’s down somewhere near the Embarcadero, don’t know where exactly, you’ll have to look it up. A real dive from what I’m told.”

  “Not the sort of place I generally hang out.”

  “Didn’t expect so. Anyhow, I think you ought to check this Winnicker’s out. My sources say that there are men there who are substantially involved with the drug business. The mules—the couriers, you know—they frequent it, not the big-time folks. I would think that you’d have a better chance of eliciting information from them as to where the heroin is coming from in Mexico. We need a name, Harry, we need a name.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Good man. If I couldn’t depend on you who could I depend on?”

  Harry hung up, not knowing exactly how to take this last remark.

  Winnicker’s was not easily found. It was on a street that was short, poorly lit, and in a neighborhood that looked as though it hoped everyone would simply ignore it and leave it in peace.

  Harry didn’t leave it in peace. There wasn’t much he came in contact with that he left in what you could call peace.

  Winnieker’s wasn’t a dive exactly, although that might have been its intention. It didn’t reek of urine, for instance, which Harry took as one auspicious sign. Maybe the only one.

  He didn’t fit in, that was obvious from a single glance. On the other hand, this didn’t much surprise him. Fitting in wasn’t what he had in mind.

  The customers, of whom there were a considerable number at seven in the evening, did not especially look like drug runners if drug runners can be said to have a “look.” But they did exude a certain air, not of mystery but of calculation. Their eyes moved with practiced speed, took in everything, took in Harry most of all because clearly he was not a regular and had the appearance of someone who would only make trouble for them. They didn’t move down the bar away from him, but they ignored him deliberately, muting their voices in his vicinity.

  Then, suddenly, one man, who was probably wired on speed or going through a nervous breakdown, rushed up to Harry and said, “Hey, I know you!” From his voice you couldn’t tell whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  He was thin as they come, emaciated was more like it, all angles and bones with eyes that were beginning to burn holes in their sockets.

  Harry was not prepared for recognition. He scrutinized the joker in front of him, thinking that there was in fact something familiar about him.

  “Chuck,” said the man now, “Chuck Loomis.” He stuck out his hand. “Don’t you remember me?” Disappointment tinged his voice.

  “I’m not sure I do . . .”

  “You fuckin’ arrested me in 1975. Assault with a dangerous weapon.”

  “Ah hah.” This to Harry did not seem like reasonable grounds for a great friendship. The more he studied Chuck Loomis, the more his memory cooperated in conjuring up the incident in question.

  “You do remember, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I certainly do.” Especially since the assault with a dangerous weapon had been directed against himself. Left a large gash in his left cheek, hurt like hell for a week.

  “Sent away for five years.”

  Now it’s coming, Harry thought, prepared for an outburst of anger, a demand for restitution, a vicious threat.

  “Served all your time?” A harmless question he figured.

  “Three years of it. Good behavior. But it wasn’t so bad. I mean I don’t hold it the fuck against you, you know what I’m saying? Some people, they’d get right on your fucking case, but I’m not some people. I was doing shit on the street, I get inside, well, I got a roof over my head, friends in the yard, I was head of the tennis team there. Wouldn’t believe it from looking at me, but I was one hell of a tennis player. Watched TV, smoked a couple of Js before I went to sleep nights. Not a bad life considering the circumstances, you know what I’m saying? And I learned a lot of shit, got myself all lined up once I was on the street again.”

  Harry could imagine just what sort of education the man had acquired in prison and to what use he’d put it now that he was free.

  “Now it’s not that I was grateful for you busting me. It’s a little bit hard working up a spirit of gratitude for somebody who’s sent you away for a fin, you know what I’m saying?”

  Harry had a very good idea.

  “But for a cop I figured you weren’t so bad. I liked your manner, believe it or not. I says to myself, ‘Chuck, this is one straight dude. He bears watching!’ Now I’m a well-educated man, been through three years of college, though you wouldn’t know from looking at me. Majored in political science, you want to try that on for size? So I keep up, I read the newspapers. I see your name, I remember it, I read on. So what do I find out? You’re in a shitload of trouble. They fucking suspended you over some shit. That Father Nick character, eh?” His voice abruptly fell lower. “There are dudes in here, they owe Father Nick, but there are dudes here, like me, we hate his fucking guts. You know what I’m saying? We got our territory parceled out, we got our business just like you got yours—or had yours—and this Father Nick, he walks out of the slammer, shoves his butt in, announces that he’s doing the kingpin number. Well, fuck him, I say.”

  As he continued, Harry deduced three things—one that Loomis was probably on speed and couldn’t shut up, two that he’d perceived in Harry a possible ally because he too was in trouble with the law, and three that anyone who busted Father Nick couldn’t be all bad.

  “They let Father Nick walk.” Harry decided to stick with neutral statements—seemed safer that way.

  “Father Nick will always walk. Like that fellow, what’s-his-damn-name in New York, spade pusher, carried $75,000 for spare change, he got out on bail, maybe half a mil, maybe a mil, and he just went and disappeared. The Father Nicks of the world always walk unless somebody stops them cold, guts their insides, and stuffs ’em.”

  “Any idea who’s going to do that?”

  Chuck Loomis allowed his inflamed eyes to survey the inhabitants of Winnicker’s. “No one hereabouts I’ll tell you. Mules got a philosophy. They don’t interfere. There’s a job they do it. The time will come they’ll all be working for Father Nick. You should know there’s no such thing as loyalty in this business once the cash stops flowing.”

  Harry acknowledged that he understood the truth of this. “Tell me something, Chuck,” he continued, trying to sound very casual, “is Father Nick using the same source or is he opening up another one? I hear he’s operating in Mexico these days.”

  Loomis hesitated, but not because he was apprehensive about divulging what information he had, it was just that he w
asn’t so sure about how true it was. “Now you got to know one thing, I’ve been out of this business for some time . . .” He did not realize that he had just contradicted his assertion of a few minutes before that he’d been set up right after emerging from prison. Probably needed to protect himself. “So I can only tell you what I hear the talk is. And the talk is Carangas.”

  “Carangas?”

  “That’s what I hear. Down on the western coast somewhere. Never been there myself. Probation officer don’t like me traveling. I never get farther than Oakland. Besides, it’s new, Carangas, not the town, just the use they’re making of it. Like the Wild West, everyone with guns, knives. You’d probably love it.”

  “I don’t suppose it gets written up much in the travel brochures.”

  Chuck Loomis liked this remark and howled with laughter. This drew some reproachful looks from the others in the house.

  “Say, can I buy a drink for my arresting officer?”

  Harry saw no reason to remain any longer in Winnicker’s now that he had the information he had come for but, before he could refuse the offer Loomis had already turned to the bartender. “Give my friend whatever he’s drink—” He didn’t get any further. Harry looked at him. Loomis wasn’t doing so well, his body had stiffened, and his face, pale to begin with, had gone absolutely livid: a hue well beyond where the rainbow ends. He clutched both hands on the edge of the bar, desperate to keep himself upright. It was not going to work. He tottered like a child taking its first steps, then released his feeble hold on the bar. Dazedly, he stepped aside from Harry and began lurching out into the center of the bar, knocking against a table, much to the consternation of the two leather-jacketed men drinking there. Then, without warning, he spun around, deciding on the opposite direction, thinking possibly that the door might be a better option. As he staggered, a slight, barely perceptible trickle of blood down his pants leg began to turn into a thickly swelling ooze. A jagged trail of glistening red followed him.