Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  He became aware that he was still on top of the super, but the man’s finger wasn’t twitching anymore.

  “All right, Harry, that’s enough,” DiGeorgio repeated, gently pulling on the Inspector’s battered arm. “You don’t have to do it anymore. I think he’s dead.”

  The Sergeant was correct. Both the super and marshmallow-head were dead. One way or another, Harry had killed them.

  Callahan let himself be taken off the corpse. He sat heavily in front of the cot, trying to get his brain to function without hemorrhaging. Only when DiGeorgio got him in the front seat of his car and wrapped in a blanket was he able to put a whole sentence together.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” was the first thing he could come up with, looking at DiGeorgio as if he were a figment of his fevered, dying mind.

  “A long, long time ago,” the Sergeant said disgustedly, “in a galaxy far, far away, you put in a call for assistance. Four cops were killed answering that call, and then we find out that one of the cars those guys drove was parked in the fucking lobby of the Fairlawn hotel. I figured wherever the other car was was where you’d be.”

  Harry tried to put it together, but it was too much for his battered brain to bear. “Where was the car?” he had to ask.

  “Whoever that guy was,” DiGeorgio answered, “he was in such a rush to kill you slowly that he parked it inside the apartment’s parking lot. The dumb bastard.”

  Callahan still couldn’t understand. If it was in the parking lot underneath the apartment house, then it couldn’t be seen from the street.

  “Then how did you see it?” he asked, knowing the answer, but unable to put his finger on it.

  “When I came back to Patterson’s apartment,” DiGeorgio said. “Looking for you.”

  Callahan leaned back and closed his eyes. His brain slowly cleared, revealing a simple memory. Harry had once thought he could be an island; that he could exist without friends and be a man alone. He forgot about that pretentious stupidity.

  Without his friends on this one, he would have been dead twice over. For some stupid reason, there were a couple of people in this city who cared about him.

  DiGeorgio had had it with the comfortable silence. “Where to, massah?” he asked, hoping Harry would say the hospital.

  He was disappointed, but not surprised, by the answer. “My place.”

  Not only did Harry ignore all of DiGeorgio’s protests about going up himself, he walked up all three flights with gun in hand. Only after Harry had checked all of the rooms was the Sergeant able to get him into the lav.

  Together, they did the best they could with his facial and torso wounds. By the time he came back into the main area to dress, Harry looked like a one-eyed pirate. A gauze bandage was taped over one eye, there were Band-aid patches on his nose and chin, and his chest was wrapped like a mummy’s.

  He pulled on a loose shirt and slacks while slipping into some sneakers. Even with the huge welts across his shoulders and under his arms, Harry insisted on painfully pulling on his shoulder holster.

  He came back downstairs gingerly, pulling on a warm-up jacket over everything. But, even then, he wouldn’t let his partner get him to the emergency room.

  “We’ve got one more stop,” he told him, easing himself back in the car. “Besides,” he grimaced. “The salt stopped the bleeding and prevented infection.”

  Harry went up the stairs of the run-down apartment as if he had no wounds. DiGeorgio had to struggle to keep up, but they both made it to the second-floor door at the same time. Harry checked the padlocks. They were still in place. Somehow, that made him feel worse than if the door had been smashed open.

  Seized by doubt, and desperate to burn off a little frustration, Harry blasted the two locks out of working condition. A moment later, he wished he hadn’t. Both his arms and his torso did a stirring version of the Death March in three-part painful harmony.

  DiGeorgio jumped back in surprise, but then backed up his partner by kicking in the door. The two cops piled into the room. As Harry had dreaded, it was empty.

  The Sergeant checked the bathroom while Harry took a beer out of the icebox, leaned against the wall, and tried to unscrew the cap. He had reason to regret the latter two actions as the still-raw welts complained across his upper body.

  “Patterson?” DiGeorgio asked, as he came back into the room.

  “Patterson,” Harry said, handing him the bottle.

  “Shit,” the Sergeant said while easily opening the beer. He handed it back.

  Harry considered the bottle, wondering whether Carr would go so far as to poison it. He took a long pull on it anyway, one part of him thinking he might welcome poisoning at this point.

  “So what now?” DiGeorgio asked.

  The effect of moving his head back to swallow the brew nearly knocked Harry over. His body hadn’t begun to recover from the brutality of his beating. He hadn’t let it, up to now. But, with the confirmation of Patterson’s disappearance, Callahan had let everything catch up with him.

  “Now, the hospital,” he said, none too steadily. The beer fell out of his hand, the bottle smashing on the floor.

  DiGeorgio helped his partner on a flight of stairs for the second time in his career. “Tough luck about the girl, Harry,” he commiserated. “And today of all days, too.”

  Harry was in bad shape, but now he reacted to something that had been bothering him all night. “There it is again,” he complained. “When Bressler calls me for the bust, he apologizes for the time. When Dobbin gives me the lowdown, he apologizes for the hour. What’s so damn special about it all of a sudden?”

  DiGeorgio looked at his partner incredulously. “What planet do you live on, Harry?” he said, with quiet pity. “It’s December, remember? Today is Christmas.”

  C H A P T E R

  F o u r t e e n

  Dr. Henry Lester Carr had two men left. Three, counting the mole, but the mole wasn’t used for enforcement. After that, if he wanted any more, he’d have to ask his superiors for them. His superiors would ask why. And he couldn’t very well tell them that all the rest of his security force was slaughtered by one lone San Francisco cop, could he?

  He couldn’t tell them how that came to happen, either. Three years of trouble-free research, and then three weeks of total chaos. And still the problem was not solved. The woman was taken care of, but the Inspector was still at large. And as long as he remained free, the Program had something to worry about.

  Harry Callahan may have been at large, but he wasn’t up and around. The superintendent had seen to that. He had beaten the cop so badly that he was confined to a private room at the S.F. General Hospital, where he had been recuperating for one full work week so far.

  Carr wasn’t worried about the cop blowing the whistle during that time. He knew no one would believe him without Patterson’s corroboration. He was also sure that Harry knew he’d only be making himself more vulnerable to an “accident” by making wild accusations be had no way of proving.

  Callahan was already showing signs of erratic behavior. Word had it that he wasn’t taking any hospital food. He’d only eat what his partner and immediate superior had brought to him. But the force hierarchy had seen to it that that kind of cushy favoritism was eliminated. The Inspector must be very hungry about now.

  All the better, because Carr had reluctantly released his last two men into the field. Their orders were simple. Eliminate Callahan at any cost. Short of the Program’s exposure, of course.

  Getting into the hospital was easy. It always was, since Carr was on the staff. Besides, the men entered at the start of the “graveyard shift,” when even the most dedicated of employees becomes slightly apathetic.

  Getting by the nursing staff was child’s play. There were no doctors to speak of. The two men just walked through the halls, side by side, wearing their lab coats and forged IDs, until they came to the private wing.

  There was no cop at the door. Sergeant Frank DiGeorgio had demand
ed one, but the police department heads saw no reason for it—over the objections of Lieutenant Al Bressler. Especially since Inspector Callahan himself denied the need for it.

  “Oh, nurse?” one of the men hailed a passing girl. “Could I see you for a moment?”

  The little redhead stopped midway past the door, looked up from her medicine chart, then walked over to where the two good-looking young doctors were standing.

  “Yes?”

  The other Carr man moved toward the door next to Callahan’s room, while the first read the girl’s tag, “Nurse Nichols, I wonder if you could assist me with the patient in room six?”

  “Sure, I guess so,” the girl said helpfully. “I’ve got to give the patients their medications soon, but I can spare a couple of minutes.”

  “Fine,” said the man, taking her by the arm as his partner went into the room adjoining the Inspector’s. “Thank you.”

  Nichols was a shield. Just in case Callahan was waiting for something like this, the killers were going to come at him from two directions and push the girl in first.

  As he neared the swinging door, girl in tow, the first man nodded at the second—who was watching for that signal from the next room’s doorway. The latter man instantly moved to the connecting door, pulling a silenced Walther PP .380 automatic from his coat pocket.

  The first man did the same, as he propelled the girl before him through the front door. She stumbled in and stopped two feet from the bed as the men came in right after, their guns pointed directly at the headboard.

  “I don’t understand,” Nurse Nichols exclaimed, not seeing the men hastily shoving the guns back in their pockets as she stared at the empty bed and around the empty room. “Where’s Inspector Callahan?”

  Inspector Callahan was in the “Pit of Hell.”

  He had avoided it until now. Even after the painful purgatory at the hands of the superintendent, he had staved off the worst, thanks to the machinations of his enemy.

  The department was convinced that Harry and the North Beach officers had either stumbled into a war between two gangs for the two-and-a-half million dollars worth of diamonds Goldfarb stole, or, the whole thing was a setup by a terrorist group to kill police officers.

  The fake histories the Program computer fabricated for each killed assassin saw to that. And, since the cops were already dead, and the diamonds were recovered off the floor of Jessup’s devastated office, the department didn’t much care which solution the investigating committee decided upon.

  Neither did Harry. He had his own problems. First, he had sneaked out of the hospital long before his time. Second, he had borrowed an orderly’s outfit. And third, he had stolen an ambulance.

  Just as easily as Carr’s men got in, Harry had gotten out. He had only waited long enough for DiGeorgio to deliver to him the information he had requested. When he got that, he was gone—as the last pair of assassins discovered.

  He had gone to Jackson Square, the three-block area once known as the “Pit of Hell”—the sulphuric center of the infamous Barbary Coast. In the early part of the century, decent citizens didn’t set foot on the streets there unless they planned to leave the area in a box.

  In mid-century, it mutated into the “International Settlement,” which was neither international nor settled. Finally, it was renovated up to its present high standards—an oasis of luxury where there was once only shit and blood.

  Harry looked at the sumptuous townhouses with distrust, guiding the ambulance carefully along the cobblestone streets. He passed beautifully designed and realized wrought-iron shutters and Federal-style façades, delicate and tastefully rendered detail work, and perfectly manicured yards.

  He stopped the Cadillac meat wagon in front of 425 Gold Street. He got out and ran to a fifteen-foot-high fence consisting of black, spear-shaped bars, sculpted into an elegant design. It also concealed the fact that the house was in a cage.

  The door was locked by a buzzer arrangement. A uniformed doorman stood on the other side.

  “Can I help you?” he asked Harry, looking at the ambulance with concern.

  “What do you think?” Harry asked impatiently. “Open up, I’ve got to get inside.” At least he wasn’t lying.

  The doorman stammered something about not being told.

  “Are you kidding?” Harry exclaimed incredulously. “They’re going to ask your permission for a heart attack?”

  “Oh, my God!” the man gasped, but still he didn’t clear the way. “But the servants . . .”

  “The servants called me,” Harry explained quickly. “They didn’t call you.”

  Halfway through the final lie, the man buzzed the gate open. He was picking up the phone on a little table to say the intern was coming up when Harry gave him a straight shot to the jaw.

  The doorman’s neck snapped back, he dropped the phone, and then dropped himself. Harry caught the phone receiver. He gingerly put it back on its base before leaping up the front steps two at a time.

  Before trying the front door, he circled the structure, locating the main phone line and cutting it with the pliers he had told the late Patrolman Petrillo never to be without. Only then did he return to the front door.

  He came in quickly and grabbed the first maid he saw. She was walking across the front room with a silver tray, and she was decked out in a classic French maid’s outfit. If he had seen her at a costume party, he would have laughed. Here, it just made him feel a little sick.

  She was young, dark-haired, with a facial structure that said she probably was French. She only glanced at him when he entered because he marched in with such assurance. She started to worry when he grabbed her around the waist and pulled a huge gun out from under his shirt.

  What the unanswered front-gate phone hadn’t brought, the clatter of her spilled silver tea service echoing through the first floor did. A man in a three-piece suit appeared from a door on the other side of the foyer. Another man appeared at the top of the spiral staircase at the base of which Harry was holding the girl. Both men started to reach for the sides of their belts.

  “Don’t,” Harry suggested strongly, his Magnum much in evidence. The men didn’t but their hands stayed where they had frozen them. They were ready to go at the first opportunity.

  “Now you don’t really want to hurt the girl, do you?” the one at the top of the stairs said unctuously.

  “You notice the gun isn’t pointing at her,” Harry said flatly. “She’s here in case you want to hurt me.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” the man asked.

  “Because the gun isn’t pointing at her,” Harry reiterated. “Cut the comedy.”

  “What do you want?” the man on Callahan’s level demanded, expressionlessly.

  “Take me to your leader.”

  “We can’t do that,” said the one up above.

  “I can do it without your help,” Harry reminded them. “You should see me when I’m not being polite.”

  The staff saw the error of their ways. Harry herded them all into the study, where the master of the house sat, stunned.

  “Down,” Callahan commanded. “On your knees, hands behind your back.”

  The butler/bodyguards complied quickly. Harry circled behind them, pulling their small Astra automatics from their hip holsters. He dumped them in the wicker trash container. The maid looked at the owner, not really sure what to do.

  “Have you lost your mind?” the homeowner blustered.

  “Can it,” Harry suggested. “You’re not in command anymore, Colonel. Dr. Carr took that from you long ago.”

  The Program’s mole seemed to sink in his chair as if punched. His sudden silence convinced the girl to act the same as the others. Harry had two nice, shiny pairs of handcuffs for each of the staff. One locked their hands, and the other attached so that their wrists were locked to their imprisoned ankles.

  “Complete the package,” Harry suggested, standing in front of the fireplace, his gun pointing in the general directio
n of everyone else. “Paint the whole picture.”

  “You are not to summon help of any kind,” the owner told the trio in bondage. “That is a direct order. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the men said reluctantly.

  “Good,” Harry commented. “Now, come on, we’re going for a little ride.” He took the mole by the arm and propelled him toward the door. Looking back at the struggling bundles on the floor, he couldn’t help himself.

  “Je suis regrette,” Harry said to the maid, quietly. She did a double take, then smiled wanly at his apology. Harry swiftly closed the door behind him.

  “Put that thing away,” Dr. Carr’s mole said, trying to take command of the situation immediately as Harry hustled him down the stairs.

  “Make me, Hux,” Callahan told the man whom he had once known as the BART lush.

  “Would you really have used that thing?” the man who had been Ted Huxley asked, as they went out the door.

  “If you had played dumb, I would have blown your fucking head off,” Harry promised. “I’ve got nothing more to lose. Now get in.” He held the door of the ambulance open for the man. After he had gotten in, Harry paused to throw the handcuff keys on the doorman’s unconscious body before getting behind the wheel.

  “How did you find me?” Huxley asked, once they were speeding along Van Ness Avenue, siren silent.

  “It wasn’t easy until I accepted the fact that you were the leak,” Harry said, without taking his eyes off the road. “It just seemed too great a coincidence that the subway drunk I met by chance was Dr. Carr’s connection.”

  “When the impossible is eliminated,” Huxley said sadly, “the result, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  “Don’t paraphrase Conan Doyle to me,” Callahan warned. “This isn’t some fucking fantasy. Real people are being killed.”

  Huxley wasn’t ready to face it yet. “But how did you find me?” he repeated, stressing the last word. “I’m not Ted Huxley.”

  “Yeah,” Harry agreed. “You’re also not imaginative enough to come up with a decent pseudonym. Carr’s computer can’t get rid of everything, you know. I had my partner run every variation of the name through our computer and came up with Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lee; retired. It was right on your file—nickname ‘Huck,’ as in Mark Twain. Ed Huck Lee. Really clever, Colonel.”