Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  Harry smiled while slipping into the clothing. “Okay, so where does this Patterson woman live?” he asked lightly.

  DiGeorgio grimaced. “I was afraid you’d remember that,” he admitted. “Don’t you think it would be a real good idea to leave this one alone, Harry?”

  “You saw how she reacted when I mentioned the subways, Frank,” Callahan retorted. “And you, yourself, mentioned the similarity between the way she and Martha Murray looked.”

  “Yeah,” DiGeorgio countered, “but the first girl was not a good-looking blond—she was an ordinary-looking, black-haired girl. And her having bad memories about the subway is no big deal. She fell onto the tracks, remember? That would put anybody off BART travel.”

  Harry still wasn’t convinced, but he couldn’t quite tell his partner why. He didn’t think he could explain the connection between the girl blowing on her fingertips in the hospital room and the chill he had felt in the Fulton Station—at least not in a way that wouldn’t make him seem overworked.

  “Her address, Frank,” he said simply.

  Callahan couldn’t bring himself to do it. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t bring himself to go to Patterson’s address directly from police headquarters. He could feel his brain turning to mush. There was just no benefit in going over there if he was unable to put a coherent sentence together.

  Realizing that, Harry’s first stop was his third-floor apartment on Russian Hill, where he fell into his unmade bed without undressing. He fell asleep immediately, and woke up a little more than six hours later, his cut arm aching and his empty stomach growling with a vengeance.

  His second stop was Jaffe’s Kwik Lunch, his favorite hot-dog hangout, which stayed open for the dinner as well as the midnight-snack crowd. The place hadn’t changed very much since the time Harry had had his lunch interrupted by a bunch of bank robbers down the street during the Scorpio Sniper investigation. He had broken up the heist with six shots of his .44, then he had gone back to finish his frankfurter.

  The only major change had come in the form of three video game machines stuck in the back corner, where a regular crowd of acne-ridden adolescents with excellent hand-eye coordination congregated. They never seemed to go to school or stay home.

  “Economics,” Jaffe had explained. “They play a game, they buy a hot dog. They buy a hot dog, they play a game. To tell you the truth, I make more on the machines than I do on the wieners.”

  “So why don’t you turn the whole place into a pinball parlor?” Harry had irritably suggested.

  “Because of you, Harry darling,” Jaffe had whispered. “Only because of you. Now will that be a lunch Callahan special or a dinner Callahan special?”

  A lunch special was one dog, while a dinner special was two. This night, Harry ordered a dinner, complete with fries, coleslaw, and a large milk. He watched the kids racking up millions of points on “Qix,” “Ms. Pac-Man,” and “Centipede” while he waited. While he ate, he blessed Jaffe for keeping the volume turned down on the sound effects, at least.

  It was late in the evening by the time Harry got to Patterson’s address, but he was feeling fairly human by that time. It was a nice four-story apartment building near Grand View Park, just across the way from the Shriner’s hospital. Entering the well-lit but narrow foyer, he checked the buzzers until he saw the tag saying “4-B: D. Patterson.” He pressed the button, hoping that she was home—for more than interrogatory reasons. He liked the way she looked. And there would be nothing he would like better than to find she had had nothing to do with the Murray killing.

  The speaker crackled, and he heard her distorted voice asking, “Who is it?”

  “Inspector Callahan,” he replied. “The policeman you met at the hospital today.”

  After a long pause, the door buzzer sounded, and he was let in. He walked up the long and winding carpeted staircase, to find Patterson waiting for him in the doorway of her apartment. Hers was the second of only two apartments on that floor.

  D. Patterson was wearing faded jeans and a V-necked sweater. There was no shirt under the sweater, and only thick socks on her feet. Harry was extremely impressed with his own taste. Had she not been part of the case, he would have faked evidence to make her a part.

  “Inspector Callahan?” she said skeptically. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

  “Our talk was interrupted,” Harry reminded her.

  “Even so,” she countered, “I thought you might at least wait until business hours.”

  “We couldn’t find your place of business,” Harry said honestly. As much as DiGeorgio had tried, he had come up with zilch. “Besides, I thought it would be best if we talked when I wasn’t smelling of bad hooch.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, taking in the brown wool slacks, maroon sweater, and tweed jacket he had changed into after waking. “That’s much better. Won’t you come in, Inspector?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Harry answered, following her lead.

  The apartment immediately opened up on a combination living and dining room with a three-paned bay window across the far wall. Harry could see three more doors to his left. He assumed one led to a kitchen, the next to the lav, and the last to a bedroom.

  The living room proper was handsomely appointed, with thick Oriental rugs on the shiny hardwood floor, a decorator couch, a large color television, an impressive stereo system in its own free-standing cabinet, a fine dining room set, and a border of flowering plants hung around the bay window. Whatever Patterson did for a living, she made more than the average secretary or teacher.

  “Make yourself at home, Inspector,” she said breezily, heading for the far-left door. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?”

  “No thanks,” Harry said, standing amid the tasteful splendor of her place. “But it won’t be easy for me to make myself at home. What do you do for a living? Rob banks?”

  There was silence from where Harry had correctly guessed the kitchen to be, until Patterson replied with sweet suspicion. “Is that your clever way of sugarcoating a third degree, Inspector?”

  “Not especially clever,” Harry countered, sitting down on the beige couch. “What do you do for a living, Ms. Patterson?”

  Patterson laughed as she came out of the kitchen with a large, steaming mug of coffee. “Why, ‘Ms.’, is it?” she exclaimed. “You must be one of these new liberated policemen, Inspector.” She sat at the head of the dining table on the other side of the television. She looked at him with calculating but inviting eyes from over the cup’s rim as she sipped.

  Harry sighed and leaned forward. “I’m investigating the death of a high-school girl,” he said plainly. “Now, she might have fallen on the subway tracks, or she might have been pushed. Now, you might be adjusting to the shock of her death, or you might be trying to avoid answering my questions. So, again. What do you do for a living?”

  She didn’t have a chance to answer.

  Harry was considering standing up and walking toward her, but he decided against it. That decision saved his life. It was someone’s bad aim that saved hers.

  Callahan saw the glint and heard the click at the same time. He could have ignored one or the other, but not both at the same time. His Magnum was magically out of its holster and in his already pointing hand when one of the panes of the bay window cracked, and Patterson’s coffee mug shattered into dozens of pieces.

  C H A P T E R

  S i x

  The Magnum .44 roared with deadly rage.

  The center pane of the bay window exploded outward, revealing what the blinding reflection of the living-room lights had covered before. There was a man in a black suit, his face covered with a dark mask, hanging by a system of cables outside of Patterson’s apartment.

  Callahan’s bullet not only destroyed the window, but smashed into the side of the man’s chest as well. The man swung outward first, the silenced Remington .308 calibre rifle falling from his quivering fingers; then he tipped over. The waist harness kept
him from falling to the ground, but was unable to keep him upright. Harry saw just a glimmer of movement to the assassin’s right, but, before he could react, the cracked windowpane to the left exploded inward.

  It was too much, too late. There was another hanging killer outside the window with a silenced semi-automatic weapon, but, by the time he started firing, Patterson had already fallen back and had ducked under the thick table. His rapid-fire, high-calibre bullets rattled ineffectively into the apartment’s walls.

  Callahan threw himself forward, rolled to the left, and came up firing. The .44 bucked twice, but the Magnum slugs failed to silence the chugging weapon outside the window. Its target merely changed from Patterson to Callahan.

  Harry fell flat on his face as the enemy’s bullets tore into the television and the couch back. He spun onto his back when he heard the apartment’s own door being smashed open. By the sound of it, whoever was coming in had no thoughts of rescue. The predicament made the cop willing to take a big chance. Simply judging the position of the open door by memory and by the sound, Harry fired a fourth .44 slug through the couch.

  He was rewarded by hearing someone grunt and fall back against the wall. Then, the sofa was all but obliterated by the renewed crashing of high-powered automatic weapons.

  Harry took the few panicky seconds he had to drop the two remaining rounds in his gun, as well as the spent shells in the chamber, and to jam in six new rounds with a speed loader. He couldn’t risk facing whoever these attackers were with only two live bullets in his gun.

  He took advantage of his position by blasting up from the floor toward the doorway. It was easier for him to hit his mark at that angle than it was for the men crowded in the opening to shoot down at him with the furniture in the way.

  A moment later, the attackers seemed to realize that, too. They started leaping into the apartment in all directions.

  Harry didn’t let the sudden change in approach faze him. He relegated the assault to a target practice level. He forced himself to think of these killers on that level so that he wouldn’t hesitate.

  The first man tried to get past the couch and into the kitchen. Hairy quickly shot him in the head as he sped past the side of the sofa. His forward motion was not stopped, but the power of the .44 added a side kick. The man’s skull and brains splashed on the front wall while his body jumped, nearly flipped over, and slid neck first across the living-room floorboards. The spilling blood from his torso left a trail to show his progress.

  The second man tried to race along the side wall on the other side of the sofa, laying down a line of fire he hoped would discourage Harry. But, again, the angle was difficult, and his slugs either bit into the floor in front of Harry’s feet, or sizzled over his head.

  Callahan’s shot suffered neither eventuality. He shot between his prone, outstretched legs, catching the second assailant in the chest. The man jumped backward into the wall, and then dropped onto the floor, his blood creating a modern art painting in his wake.

  The third man came leaping over the back of the perforated couch, screaming. He landed on top of Harry, grabbing his Magnum hand. Harry was quick enough to return the favor, seeing that the weapon was an Iver Johnson Super Enforcer—a .30 calibre machine pistol only for those interested in doing serious damage.

  The two men rolled around the floor between the destroyed couch and the devastated television set, with the masked attacker trying to burst Harry’s eardrums with screams and to disembowel him with kicks. Neither man could get his gun within hitting range.

  Harry may not have had fire power or savagery on his side, but he did have experience, size, and weight. He was able to hurl the attacker off him.

  The man nimbly somersaulted and twisted around, bringing the Super Enforcer to bear. Right behind him, Harry saw the second hanging killer framed in the shattered window, another Iver Johnson death machine cradled in his arms.

  He didn’t bother to sit up. He saw his opportunity, and he took it. Lying upside down on his back, Harry pointed the Magnum at the proper angle and pulled the trigger.

  The Magnum bucked and smacked against the floor, nearly jarring out of Harry’s hands. But the bullet flew true, going right through the kneeling man’s neck and into the chest of the hanging man outside the window.

  Suddenly, the chaos-strewn apartment turned deathly silent. Harry stayed where he was for a second, simply listening. The only things he could hear were the hiss of the heating system, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and a knocking sound somewhere in the distance.

  Something was wrong. After a full-scale attack on the fourth floor of an apartment building, he should have at least heard the outraged or terrified cries of the other occupants. Instead, nothing.

  Harry quickly got to his feet. Three men were lying in the living room, and three more were around the dining area—two hanging dead outside, replacing most of the plants which had been blown away. The only thing missing besides irate tenants was Denise Patterson.

  The cop suddenly identified the distant knocking—the sound of receding footsteps. The woman must’ve broken from behind the table, when Harry was jumped, and skittered out of the apartment. Either that, or she had been totally annihilated by gunfire.

  Harry quickly checked the adjoining apartment rooms: empty. He was just coming back into the main area, looking for a phone to call HQ, when he heard the sound of a car engine outside. He quickly ran to the broken windows, and looked beyond the hanging corpses, where a Continental was pulling out from the apartment’s underground garage. As it turned left onto the street, he saw the unmistakable profile of Patterson who was in the driver’s seat.

  A desperate panic gripped Harry Callahan’s brain. Whatever she was involved in, and the reason Martha Murray was killed, went completely beyond some sick pusher’s kicks in the subway. He just couldn’t let Patterson get away that easily.

  Harry knew his and his .44’s limitations. To hit the car at this distance would be a matter of luck, not skill. The Magnum was best at short range.

  But the Iver Johnson Super Enforcer was another ball of bullets. It, too, was better at short range, but it had thirty rounds in its long magazine which could be spat out at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute.

  Harry scooped the weapon out of a pool of blood on the floor and aimed it at the speeding car. The first bullet burst tore up the asphalt a few feet short of its goal. That gave him the range. The next burst was right on the money. He jerked the coughing gun so that the bullets ran right alongside the rear bumper and then dug into the white-walled radial tire.

  The Continental jerked, jumped, and then the right rear scraped along the road, twisting the car to the side before it reached the corner. Callahan didn’t wait to see Patterson’s reaction. He ran back into the bedroom, leaving the semi-automatic on the floor, and jumped onto the fire escape right outside that window.

  Only then did he see the woman pull herself out of the car and look at the flat. She glanced at him leaping down the metal steps, and then ran toward the intersection. Her still-stockinged feet slowed her down, or Harry wouldn’t have had a chance of catching her.

  As it was, he vaulted midway down the second-floor ladder, falling twenty feet into the apartment house’s yard. As he landed and rolled, he glanced back at the lower floors. Lights were on inside the apartments, but all the drapes were closed, and there were no silhouettes.

  Ignoring that incongruity, Harry pushed himself to his feet, and vaulted over the nine-foot-high wrought-iron fence which encircled the yard. He landed on the sidewalk and ran into the nearly deserted street. Empty, save for parked cars and Patterson’s crippled Continental.

  The Inspector raced down the street, to see the woman turn to the right on Kirkham Street. He made it to the corner in record time, only to glimpse her getting on a bus halfway down the block. There was no way he could reach the bus in time, and, with all the other traffic, he didn’t dare try to blow out its tires.

  But Harry Call
ahan refused to give up. As he prayed for a little luck, he saw the bus pull out into late traffic, but get stopped a few hundred feet beyond by a stoplight. Harry silently thanked the powers that be for that extra one minute edge, and ran through the traffic with abandon.

  He kept twisting and dodging between autos, then leaped on the back of the next car in front of him and started running across the tops of the parked cars.

  He jumped from roof to roof until he was in the line behind the bus, and then he leaped from hood to trunk, suffering the curses of outrage from the surprised drivers.

  But luck wasn’t with him the entire trip. Just as he got within fifty yards of the bus, the light changed. Oblivious to the chase, the transport took off, leaving Harry behind in a cloud of noxious fumes.

  Without pausing, he dropped to the street next to the driver’s window of the last car he had landed upon. Brandishing his badge and his gun, he all but wrested the man from behind the wheel of his Toyota.

  “Police business,” he assured him through clenched teeth.

  “But, my car” the bearded, bespectacled man complained. “How am I going to get home?”

  “Go to the nearest police station,” Harry told him quickly, getting behind the wheel and closing the door on the driver. “Tell them Inspector 71 took your car.” Keeping a thumb on the horn, he awkwardly shifted into second when it sounded as if the engine would rip itself apart, causing the auto to jerk its way across the nearly empty sidewalk.

  It was slow going, since he had to stop for everyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, but he was still covering more ground than those drivers on the congested streets. He stayed on the sidewalk until he reached the corner, and then, horn still blaring, he tore out into the four-way intersection. He managed to slip in between two lanes of traffic, but an oblivious driver, taking a right turn, clipped the Toyota across the back, pushing the Japanese car into the parked vehicles at the side of the street.