Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  “So what is it, Harry? You planning to take a vacation in El Salvador?”

  “Uh—uh.” The Inspector shook his head. “We made a deal. I don’t ask where you got these things, and you don’t ask what I’m going to do with them.”

  “All right,” MacKenzie said reluctantly. “You’re the boss, Harry. But I’d feel a lot better if I knew what you were into.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” the cop promised.

  “Be that way, then,” the supplier said with mock indifference. “You’ve got the Browning, and you’ve got the Mac—complete with enough ammunition to start your own Third-World country.”

  MacKenzie turned to survey the weaponry with professional satisfaction. “That’s the ticket, Harry,” he said, as the cop finished off the third sandwich. “Stick with American goods. No one knows more about murdering its own.”

  Everybody was all smiles at the office the next morning. Everybody, that is, except Harry Callahan.

  He had had a miserable night. After leaving MacKenzie’s, he had sold his car. He had taken the money and bought another one from a perfect stranger. He couldn’t chance getting help from any of his police car associates, since he didn’t want this vehicle traceable to him.

  He had actually gone to one of those car forests that was open twenty-four hours a day, and had caught the salesman in seven lies before he could convince the baby-eating bastard to give him a decent deal.

  Then he took his new car, parked it in an alley, and did the best tune-up job he could, minus tools or lights. Afterward, he managed to sleep in the back seat for a few hours without his screaming subconscious keeping him awake.

  If he was going to live through the next few days, he figured he needed the rest. That rationalization quieted one set of nerves, but stretched another to its breaking point.

  His mental alarm clock woke him at the crack of dawn. He found a place to park the car and took a taxi to headquarters, fully expecting to fall down the flaming mouth of Lieutenant Bressler.

  At best, he thought he’d have to make some kind of sense out of last night’s obstacle course and subway shoot-out. At worst, he thought he would be brought up on charges of recklessly endangering the public.

  Instead, when he entered the Lieutenant’s office, Bressler got up from his chair, came around the desk, and shook his hand. Then he offered Harry a seat on his beaten couch and suggested that they both have a slug of his bottom-drawer whiskey to clear away the sandman’s cobwebs.

  Callahan sat, refusing to be surprised by this sudden change, with a paper cup of whiskey in his hand, listening to Bressler explain to him what he had done last night and why he had done it.

  “The report came in to the Commissioner last night.” The Lieutenant nearly gushed with relief. “The fingerprints of the man in the subway matched those of Corporal George Daley, an army man right in the middle of a court-martial for unbecoming conduct. He escaped off the Miramar base in San Diego and turned up here.” The Lieutenant took a swig of his booze and smacked his lips. “The Commissioner is satisfied,” he concluded.

  “Satisfied of what?” Harry wanted to know.

  Bressler looked over at the Inspector with surprise. “That Daley is our man,” he said, with conviction. “Look, Harry, Maggin was a mistake, we’ll admit that. He was so far gone on drugs, he probably didn’t even know what he was doing at the hospital, or why.

  “But Daley was being drummed out of the military because of his antisocial behavior. He was an extremely violent man who couldn’t understand why that didn’t please his superiors.”

  “That doesn’t say anything about why he would push women onto subway tracks,” Harry interrupted. “He was mad at the army, not at women.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” Bressler said, leaning over his desk with concern. “Didn’t you know? His first victim, this Ms. Patterson, did work for the military.”

  Callahan felt a slight chill across his back. He covered his feeling of approaching doom by swallowing the whiskey. He handed back the empty cup for a refill. He needed it.

  Bressler reluctantly refilled Harry’s cup, and went on with the official story. “The base psychiatrist has already stated that Daley was so satisfied with the feeling of power he got from shoving Patterson onto the tracks that he continued doing it.”

  “Who said that?” Callahan asked him. “Did you talk to him?”

  “It’s all in the report,” Bressler replied.

  “Where is it? I’d like to read it.”

  “The Commissioner has it.”

  Harry heard the words as if they were etched on a stone that slammed shut over a grave. He kept trying. “Where did Patterson work?”

  The Lieutenant thought about: it. “The report didn’t say,” he remembered. “But it did say that Patterson has since left the military’s employ. I’m sure she’ll be happy to know that the man who pushed her is no longer at large. Do you know where she lives, Harry?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s not important.” Bressler waved the thought away. “What is important is that the department is satisfied that you were acting in the best interests of the San Francisco citizens.” The Lieutenant stood up and put out his hand. “You did a great job, Harry. Congratulations.”

  Bressler kept shaking Harry’s hand as he led him out of the office. “Now, look, Harry, take it easy like I told you before, okay? I want you fit, rested, and ready to go when the Goldfarb warrants come in, all right?”

  Harry nodded absently. Bressler let go of his hand, clapped him on the shoulder, and returned the nod. “Go home, Harry. I’ll call you when I need you. Go home.”

  With that, the Lieutenant went back inside his office and closed the door. Harry stood in place for a few moments, digesting the Daley information, then turned toward his own office cubicle. Frank DiGeorgio was standing inside, staring with a troubled look at a piece of computer paper.

  Harry stood in the doorway as the Sergeant looked up, at a loss for understanding. “It says she doesn’t exist, Harry,” he said incredulously. “Yesterday, it said that Denise Patterson lived at the Grand View Apartment House, number 4-B. Today, it says ‘No Data.’ No data, Harry. I just don’t get it.”

  Callahan moved into the office and stopped just inches away from his partner. “Don’t get it, Frank,” he warned urgently, almost in a whisper. “Forget about it. I’m telling you straight. Forget about it, forget about the last few nights, and forget about me. I don’t trust you anymore, Frank, you understand? I don’t want you to be my partner anymore. If they call you for the Goldfarb bust, tell them I won’t work with you.”

  “Harry,” DiGeorgio said in confusion. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Callahan went to the door. “You don’t want to be around me for a while, period. Get it?”

  DiGeorgio nodded reluctantly.

  “Say hello to your wife and kids for me,” Harry reminded him pointedly, and left his office.

  He left the homicide department, left the seventh floor, and left the Justice Building. He couldn’t help wondering whether he’d ever come back.

  He couldn’t keep running. In fact, he couldn’t start running. If he did, he’d be what they call a “naked runner” in the espionage trade. That’s a man with nearly no contacts, no defense, and no place to go.

  If he tried running for it, his enemy could pick him off easily, making it look as if he had died in one of dozens of seemingly natural or accidental ways. But if he stayed on his own turf and met them on his own terms, his possible death would at least raise some eyebrows, create some suspicion.

  That way, whoever it was he was fighting might think twice before killing him. Either that, or they’d have to wait and do an awful lot of careful planning to have Harry die in a perfectly acceptable manner.

  Unfortunately, a perfectly acceptable manner for a big-city homicide cop was an explosive in the car, a bomb in the mailbox, or a sniper on the opposite roof—all of which Harry had experienced durin
g his career.

  Even so, he knew he couldn’t put it off forever. He had to go back to Russian Hill sometime. And he figured his hunters wouldn’t want to raise any commotion in his apartment building. Unlike Grand View, it wasn’t filled with military employees.

  As long as he was careful, and didn’t do any unusual posturing in front of the windows, Callahan figured that, contrary to the famous saying, you can go home again.

  That didn’t mean he was just going to waltz in, however. Harry waited until night had fallen and all of his neighbors had settled in for a long winter’s nap. Only then did he cross the street, quietly unlock the front door and go upstairs—with his Magnum held in his right hand.

  He stopped only when he got to his floor. The hall light was off. A bad sign. It was a naked, pale yellow bulb, so it wouldn’t be unusual for it to be out, but tonight wasn’t a good night for coincidences.

  All it would take was one man inside a dark apartment to put one silenced bullet into him as he entered, and there’d be no witnesses for one more dead cop whose murder would never be solved.

  But Harry wasn’t going to turn back now. He slid forward and put his hand on the light. It flickered to life for a second. In that second, Callahan saw that there was no one else in the hall.

  He twisted his hand, and the light went on. It was slightly unscrewed. The question was: how? By gravity or by hand? Callahan felt himself smiling. Suddenly, he looked forward to going in.

  He found himself wanting to face whatever they were going to throw at him. They’d find out all too soon that he wasn’t some dupe they could push onto the subway tracks.

  He went in fast, low, and professionally. He kicked open the door, threw himself sideways, somersaulted, and came up pointing his Magnum right into the face of Denise Patterson.

  C H A P T E R

  N i n e

  Now just what the hell do you do?

  It was the first thing Harry wanted to know after he closed and locked the door behind him. He was about to flick on the lights when her outstretched arm stopped him.

  “Please . . . please don’t. I’m afraid.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” Harry reminded her, but took his hand off the switch. “You didn’t seem paralyzed with fear when your apartment was attacked.” He remained standing by the door. She sat near the head of his bed, her legs tucked under her.

  “You don’t understand . . .”

  “Make me understand.”

  “They want to kill me.”

  “That much is obvious. They want to kill me, too.”

  She waved her arms abruptly, as if trying to clear the air of all the words which swooped around and stung her like verbal bees. He saw her silhouette against the clear winter moonlight slipping under and around his pulled shades.

  “Please. Let me explain. It’s hard for me.”

  “Better start talking then,” Harry said hastily, moving into the room. “I’m only here for a couple of minutes.”

  As the young woman began to talk, Harry began checking up the electronic junk he had picked up at Sid Kleinman’s shop on the way home. Sid had outfitted him with the body mike he had used when delivering the extortion money to the Scorpio Sniper way back when, and he had serviced Harry’s police needs ever since then. But tonight he had outdone himself. Still, in all those years, his payment never changed.

  “Bring it back in one piece,” he would say. “That’s enough.”

  Harry didn’t know what he’d do without friends like Kleinman and MacKenzie. Actually, he did know what he’d do. He’d die.

  First, he tested the room and the phone for bugs, using a little box-shaped counter. There were none. Next, he started installing little things in the receiver and base of the phone. While he worked, the woman told him her life story.

  Her name was Denise Barbara Patterson and she had graduated from Cornell with honors, going on to graduate work in the biological sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work so impressed government representatives that they offered her a job with Uncle Sam.

  She was an executive secretary to the Surgeon General for five miserable years, during which time she fought sex discrimination so that she could be transferred to active research duty. Once she had finally achieved her goal, she had had reason to wish she was back in the typing pool.

  She became a lab technician for the West Coast ARDF—or, as they called it affectionately, “Arf.” Sadly, it turned out that this dog’s bite was worse than its bark. It all spelled out the Army research and Development Facilities—a fancy name for an autonomous government-funded unit dedicated to one thing: the perfection of germ warfare.

  “Dr. Carr, the head of the Program, is a brilliant scientist,” Patterson admitted, “but, like many dedicated scientists, he loses track of the means through which to achieve his end.”

  “Which means he doesn’t give a shit about people,” Harry translated, screwing the mouthpiece of the phone back on.

  “Y-yes,” she hesitantly agreed. “He needed a method with which to test our latest advance which incorporated the responses of several thousand cases. And he was sure that the government wouldn’t grant him the right because of the recent cutbacks in spending, and the danger of mutated contamination . . .”

  “Hold it,” Harry declared. “Inflation I can understand. What does the rest of that mean?”

  It seemed that the substance they had come up with was not a permanent one. There was a possibility that it could change from causing temporary light damage to causing permanent heavy damage.

  What Patterson called the “advance” was a mixture dubbed “Vasculene.” It wasn’t a new hair tonic, but a slowly spreading gas which could cause the tips of the human circulatory system to constrict. In other words, it could cause light cases of frostbite in the fingers and toes.

  “The subways,” Harry breathed, pausing in his toils as the information sank in. “He tested it in the subways.” Callahan remembered the old lady holding up her chalky-colored fingers. He remembered blowing on his own digits, trying to dispel the strange chill.

  Patterson nodded. “I just stumbled onto it by accident. He was keeping it a secret, but I met him by chance down there and noticed a gas-dispensing device on his attaché case. I confronted him with it, right then and there. He argued that it was harmless, and that he was willing to take the risk himself. I argued that it was unfair, irresponsible, and impossible to gauge the results.”

  “Not to mention illegal,” Callahan interjected sourly.

  Patterson laughed—a sick, hopeless satire of mirth. “Then I tripped. I was so upset that when I tried to move away from him, I stumbled and fell off the platform.”

  That’s how it all started. That simply, and that stupidly. By the time she had saved herself and gotten pulled out, Dr. Carr was already gone. She was confused, upset, and in pain from her broken leg. Suddenly, she didn’t know how to tell the truth without dragging Carr’s name into it. So she lied. She said she didn’t know how she had come to fall.

  “Later, I realized that I should have simply said that I tripped,” she admitted. “But by then it was too late.”

  “By then, Dr. Carr was having other girls shoved in front of trains so your accident wouldn’t look so unusual,” Harry reasoned.

  “But I didn’t know that!” Patterson stressed, leaning forward on the bed. “I just thought that my falling had given some psycho a sick idea!”

  Harry got to his feet, work completed. “Until the night I showed up,” he told her. “Come on, we can’t stay here.”

  He took her hand and led her down to the basement. From there, they went out the back way and into an alley. Harry’s new car was parked in a spot across the alley road. Pulling out his .44, he brought the girl across the cold, dark space. He checked the edges of the passenger door before he opened it for her.

  “Get in,” he instructed. She complied, while he checked the rest of the car for wires and other assorted booby traps. With t
he Magnum still in his hand, it took him almost ten minutes.

  “Do you think they’ll try to kill us?” she asked hesitantly as he got in.

  “Not here,” he guessed, turning on the motor. “They can’t afford to make too much noise. It’ll wake up the neighbors.”

  “They could have silencers,” Patterson worried.

  “This doesn’t,” Harry said, holding up his big revolver. He pulled out of the spot and drove into the streets.

  “We had all signed oaths of secrecy,” Patterson went on to explain. “I couldn’t tell you anything when you came that night. And then, when the shooting started, I realized that the Program now considered me a security risk. I thought the only way I could save myself was by getting to Dr. Carr and explaining.”

  Here she paused, looking guiltily down at the cracked dashboard. “Explaining that I had no intention of telling anybody anything,” she confessed. “Our work is important, Inspector,” she said with sudden pride, sitting up straight. “We’re responsible for the security of this entire country. I’m not about to risk that because Dr. Carr got a little overzealous . . . !”

  “Save it for the judge,” Harry suggested with sickened sarcasm as he scanned the streets carefully, looking for any hint of a tail. “Carr, with his Program, is obviously way beyond that point now. The only reason he decided to kill you gangland style was because I entered the picture. He wouldn’t risk your telling me anything. He obviously thinks no leak is too small to drop an elephant on.”

  “If only I could get him . . .” she seethed.

  “Don’t look at me,” Callahan said flatly. “I’m not going to ride through the gauntlet. You’d only be signing your own death warrant, anyway. Carr’s never going to trust you again, no matter what you say. He’s got it in mind that you’re a threat, and even worse, he’s already told his goons to do something about it.”

  “Then,” Denise Patterson said in a frightened, faraway voice, “there’s nothing I can do . . . ?”