by Dane Hartman
“Jesus, Harry,” said Fatso Devlin, puffing alongside his partner. “All he said was ‘Can I help you?’ ”
Harry grinned grimly, keeping up his quick pace, then spit into a corner of the lobby. Actually spit.
“Harry,” huffed Devlin, “you’re losing your objectivity.” Then they were inside. As Fatso took in the incredible array of aquatic creatures in the vats and wall displays that littered the first floor and tried to get accustomed to the soft blue light, he had to admit to himself that this was a case to lose your objectivity on. Finding an eleven-year-old girl curled up dead in a garbage can was bad enough, but then to discover that she was a victim of a child pornography ring was enough to get the most seasoned cop mad.
And make no mistake. Harry was mad. When Harry was mad he did things like breaking people’s faces. But only when those faces belonged to known members of the pornography gang. It had taken six weeks of intensive investigation to make sure Ramirez was part of the gang, so if a smart lawyer got him off the rap, at least Harry had the satisfaction of putting a big hole in his smile. It would be a while before José enticed any more children with those pearly whites of his.
But Ramirez was just the scum on the bottom of the rock. There were a few more members to run down. Namely Ted Cunningham, Earle Snelson, and Bobby Gagne. All three worked at this complex: the California Academy of Sciences—a perfect place to bring a child without drawing any attention. It was made up of three attractions, the Science Museum, the Morrison Planetarium, and the Aquarium, which Harry was presently scanning.
Cunningham worked there as a scuba diving instructor and fish feeder who would dive into the main pool at set times during the day. Gagne had the job of cleaning up after him, so they both usually holed up together in a locker room on the third floor. Harry hit the stairs while Fatso moved toward the elevators. The entire place was surrounded so neither worried very much about escape; all they hoped was that somebody tried to resist arrest.
Harry lucked out the very first time. He kicked open the locker room door, even though it wasn’t locked, and pointed his big revolver straight down a row of lockers. He had timed his attack perfectly. Both men were there, Cunningham half into his scuba outfit.
“Freeze,” Harry shouted, looking as crazy as he could.
Cunningham was the slick one. He followed orders. Gagne was the jerk. He panicked and ran.
“Jesus Christ, you fool!” Cunningham screamed after him. “Hold it, hold it!”
Harry punctuated Cunningham’s outburst with a burst of his own. He fired the Magnum right through the open locker door. Even though the distance was at least twenty feet, the high-powered hunk of lead went through the thin metal without throwing the door back. It made a hole almost an inch wide and ripped off the shirt cloth from Gagne’s elbow as he ran.
Harry looked to his left. The locker room was fairly big, with three rows of lockers ending with a wall of scuba and feeding equipment. From where Harry was standing he could not see another exit, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Harry pointed his gun at Cunningham.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he warned.
“Not me,” said the diver, both hands up.
Harry moved quickly to the left. A moving target was better than a too cautious one. Just as he hopped from the cover of the first locker row to the second, there was a whipping, springing sound and a spear shot over his right shoulder and ripped sparks off the concrete wall behind him. Callahan immediately leaned to the right and fired. The bullet tore the spear gun in half but Gagne was gone again.
“Don’t be an idiot, Bobby,” Harry heard Cunningham call out. “He’s got us dead to rights. Come on out so the good cop can take us in.”
Harry didn’t like the sound of that. Especially since Cunningham’s voice was coming from a different place than Harry had left him. Rather than hazarding another hop between rows, Harry moved silently back to the first locker row. He looked around the corner of them to see Cunningham turning the corner at the other end. On the bench where he had been sitting was a box of shells.
So good old Ted came to work prepared with a weapon in his locker. Harry sadly shook his head and quietly slipped in two new shells to replace the spent ones. Then he moved down to where Cunningham had been sitting. He made a mental calculation of how far the bench was from the locker, how tall the lockers were, and what kind of effort it would take to vault them. Then he looked at the ceiling.
There were fire faucets along a pipe just under the cement ceiling. Harry reached into his tweed jacket pocket for a pack of matches. He stood on the bench while bending a match to rest against the flint strip in his hand. He put that in his left hand under the fire faucet and held onto his Magnum with his right. With a flick of his thumb and forefinger the match was lit. He loosened his grip so the match could burn down and set the whole pack aflame. As soon as they flared, the water came on.
The sudden indoor shower got the reaction Harry was hoping for. One of the men swore. Harry pinpointed the voice in the next aisle. He hopped off the bench, ran back, and shot two Magnum bullets through the lockers in the voice’s general direction. He ran right after the bullets, leaped onto the bench again, and vaulted up to the locker tops. He landed flat on his stomach just in time to see Gagne blasting at the lockers with his own gun. He was shooting at where he thought Harry was. Harry shot him from where he actually lay.
Bobby was thrown back, the back of his knees catching on the second aisle’s bench. His head swung down to slam against the closed locker doors with a sound that would make a bell ringer proud. He bounced off that, his legs unfurled from the bench, and he slammed to the cement floor, still and silent.
Harry hopped down, keeping a wary eye out for Cunningham. He was the crafty one of the group. He wasn’t the boss, but he was the closest thing to it they would find here. He heard the door slam. Callahan ran back to the entrance, pushed it open as he passed, then flattened himself on the wall next to it. Two bullet holes popped open in the wood of the door from outside. Cunningham was on the run, armed and dangerous. Harry shouldered his way through the door after him.
He saw Cunningham slamming open the exit door to the roof. Harry walked slowly after him just as the elevator doors opened and Fatso stepped out.
“You sure work up a sweat, don’t you?” he said, seeing Harry’s dripping wet face and soiled suit.
“There’s one back there who won’t give you any trouble,” Harry told him, motioning toward the locker room. “Cunningham’s on the loose with a sidearm and half a wet suit.”
“Which half?” asked Devlin.
“The bottom half,” replied Harry. “So you’ll have no difficulty recognizing him.”
Devlin nodded and pulled out his walkytalky to report to the forces outside. Harry moved on to the roof door.
Thinking better of opening it and walking out, he stepped over to the window to take a look first. As far as he could see was a flat, white-graveled roof flanked on two sides by different sections of the building. Beyond that was Golden Gate Park, the Music Concourse, and the De Young Museum. Cunningham was nowhere to be seen. Harry cursed under his breath. If a half-naked man wearing rubber pants and waving a gun could be lost, the rest of the SFPD could probably do it. Taking a deep breath, Harry pushed open the roof door and stepped out.
Nothing happened until he was midway to the roof edge. Then several little fountains of rock dust gouted up, stinging his legs with gravel shards. Harry ran, rolled, and came up against the side of the building. No more bullets were forthcoming. The attack had told him three things. First, the guns had to be automatics since there were no loud reports following the richochets. That meant they were silenced weapons, and only automatics could be silenced effectively.
Second, the shooting had to be from some distance away. Otherwise he would have been hit by at least one of the shots. Even taking into consideration the lack of accuracy a silenced automatic causes, the attackers would have to be almost out of range no
t to hit a target as big as him. And lastly, more than one shooter had him sighted. The bullets had come from two directions. That meant that Earle Snelson was somewhere nearby.
Harry edged along the side of the building until he reached the edge. Looking down, he saw the large cylindrical pool that housed the sharks. The management thought it was best not to keep them inside. Rather, they had built an outdoor pool that flanked the building so an observation window could be utilized. That way, the patrons inside could feel safe looking at the sharks outside.
Callahan felt anything but safe. It was a twenty-foot drop to the ground and only a few feet of pavement separated the building side and the sunken shark pool. As dangerous as the man-eating fish were, it was hardly more risky than remaining on the roof. Whatever the case, Harry figured, he wasn’t getting anything accomplished. So deciding, he left the security of the wall and stepped out into the sunlight.
The bullets began again. First one from his left, then another almost in front of him. But to fire on him, the others had to show themselves as well. Harry saw Cunningham let off a shot from an outcropping on the left corner and the slug went behind his neck. Snelson was behind some boxes in an indentation to the right of the roof door, and his lead dug into the roof between Harry’s feet.
Harry answered both shots with shots of his own. The first whined off the wall Cunningham was behind and the other dug into one of Snelson’s protecting boxes, followed by an insidious clank. Harry was fucking stunned. Snelson had hidden behind some scuba supplies.
Cunningham leaned out and peppered the roof with shots. Harry felt the heat of one across his cheek as he ran to the edge of the roof, jumped as high as he could straight up in the air, spun around and squeezed off three shots from his .44 at Earle’s protective boxes.
As Harry fell, a shattering explosion ripped across the roof. Harry landed on his feet, fell sideways and rolled as hunks of wood and shards of metal flew out and down. As Harry threw himself against the wall away from the shark’s pool, Snelson’s ragged corpse bounced off the edge of the roof and somersaulted into the sharks’ pool. One of Harry’s high-caliber slugs had ruptured a scuba tank, causing it to explode from pressure. This probably did the other tanks absolutely no good at all. It was a good thing the police department had scheduled this attack early in the morning before any of the paying public could enter.
That way no one was shocked by the explosion and no one but Harry witnessed Snelson’s broken body being attacked by the sharks. What little fluid he had left had spread out in the clear blue water, sending the sharp-toothed animals into a blood frenzy. Each animal bit down and tore another hunk off the already rended criminal. Within seconds there wasn’t enough Earle Snelson to fit in a wallet.
Two down, Harry mentally calculated, one to go. He ran over to the side of the building where Cunningham was last hiding. He was in time to see the man run back inside the aquarium. Harry figured he must have been knocked from his perch by the blast, then figured to lose his police tail by getting lost in the exhibits. Harry followed his trail until he was back in the lobby. Police escorts and hospital orderlies were taking care of Ramirez and Gagne.
“Seen a man in wet suit trousers?” Harry asked an officer.
“No one sir,” the cop replied as Devlin approached from the lobby elevators.
“What the hell was all the racket about, Harry?” his partner inquired.
“Snelson,” Harry replied. “All over the place.”
“Oh shit, Harry, where is he?”
“In the pool.”
“I passed the pool. I didn’t see anybody.”
“Digested,” explained Harry.
“Oh shit.”
Callahan walked back to the first floor exhibits as Fatso sat on the steps, his head in his hands. “Didn’t you see any blood?” asked a uniformed man. “Sure,” said Devlin, “the water was red but I thought it was some new sort of cleanser or something.” He looked after Harry’s exiting figure. “I should have known better.”
“He’s the one they call Dirty Harry, isn’t he?” the cop asked.
Devlin nodded. “Now you know why,” he told the uniformed man.
Dirty Harry Callahan went after the last child pornographer. If the cops hadn’t seen Cunningham and he wasn’t on the main floor, about the only logical place to go was down in the cellar where all the water-filtering equipment was running. It was about the only place to get really lost when the rest of the place was crawling with cops. Harry found the door and started to go down the steps.
The country is filled with aquariums, and they are all different shapes and designs. But when one gets to the basement, they really aren’t that different. The exhibits need a fine filtering system, and the cellar is the logical place to put it. So almost all aquarium cellars are thin, low ceiling mazes of pipes, wooden walkways, shimmering pools of lightly vibrating water, and cement shells, painted light blue.
The Steinhart structure was no different. Harry entered an aqua cavern of waving shadows. The liquid reflected everywhere, giving the impression that the whole basement was under water. Things seemed placid. Harry knew it wouldn’t remain that way for long. He pulled an auto-loader out of his pocket to keep it at the ready.
The San Francisco cop sidled lightly down the thin walkway, made all the more narrow by a row of water pools rising three feet off the floor and wild systems of drainage pipes lining the walls, ceiling, and floor. Harry listened intently for any signs of life besides the drip-drip-drip of liquid.
He transversed the whole first hall, discovering nothing. As he rounded the bend he found the floor completely covered by six pipes. A makeshift catwalk had been set up consisting of several boards placed side by side atop some cinder blocks. The area was lit by one, low-hanging, naked white light bulb, so the shadows of waves were more stark than before.
Harry cautiously stepped up on the wooden planking and started down the passage. Halfway he wondered whether or not he had guessed wrong. Even though the cellar looked complicated, there was really very little place to hide. And unless Cunningham was waiting in ambush around the next corner, he wasn’t in the basement at all. But still, it made perfect sense—there was no other place for the bastard to go.
Callahan looked at the cement rectangles that held the draining water along the right wall. He looked at the pipes to the left. His hair was scraping the ceiling. He looked down just in time to see the figure under the boards move.
Two 9mm slugs tore through the planks and slapped off the low cement ceiling as Harry fell sideways into the nearest shallow pool. He couldn’t afford to worry about his pride or his suit. If he had merely hopped aside, he’d still be in sight and the ricochets could do some damage. He had no sooner splashed down than he was pushing himself up and returning fire. The sound of his Magnum was deafening.
The .44 slugs punched out whole sections of the boards and whined off of the underlying pipes. Cunningham had slid down the hall on his back and tumbled out from the catwalk at the far end. He stood and fired another silenced shot at the crouched, soaking wet policeman. The bullet sent up a little fountain to Harry’s right. Harry pulled up his gun and had the wet-suited figure stuck on the end of the barrel for a split second. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
Cunningham ran while Harry cursed. The tall cop saw his auto-loader on the bottom of the pool as he threw himself out of the water and barreled down the hall. Around the next corner was an exit door. It had almost swung closed when Harry reached it. He hurled it open and attacked a short flight of stairs. The stairwell was one of those infuriatingly narrow, short ones that made you turn a corner and move up in the opposite direction every six steps.
Callahan took them two at a time, his soaked, heavy clothing keeping him from going any faster. By the time he rounded the fifth corner, he felt his breath getting heavy, but he also saw Cunningham just turn for the sixth time. As Harry pivoted around the corner and plunged ahead, he saw the door at the top of the stairs. He t
ook the last set of steps while pulling out the second of his three auto-loaders and jamming the rounds in the gun’s cylinder. His shoulder hit the door just as he swung the revolver shut.
The door opened up onto the lobby of the planetarium. And the planetarium was open for business. Already busloads of kids from area churches and playgrounds were filling up the large, long room. Moppets of all kinds were milling apart, herded by counselors of all types. Everybody under the age of thirty seemed to be there, except for a man in the bottom half of a diving outfit.
Harry stalked up and tapped on the first semi-adult shoulder he could find. A bearded, chubby, black-haired young man with glasses turned around.
“You see a guy with rubber pants around here?” Harry asked.
The bearded fellow had the look of any harried babysitter trying to tend more than a dozen monsters at once and was about to abruptly tell Harry off until he saw the gun.
“That way,” the young man said, staring at the Magnum and pointing at a set of eight swinging doors. “Right that way . . . sir.”
“Thanks,” said Harry, already heading in that direction. He ignored the shouting lady at the ticket taker’s counter who was saying something about how the show had already started. Harry opened the door a bit anyway and slipped inside.
He was just in time to veer dangerously near a glowing nebula. The audience, seated in a circle and staring up at the dome above them, gasped as Harry slid along the circular wall. Their faces glowed as they neared the bright, shimmering collection of stars. Harry took in each of the faces as best he could. As far as he could tell, Cunningham was not sitting down.
Then Harry spied a security guard a little farther down the wall. The thin, unarmed, uniformed man was staring up in as much rapture as the seated kids. Harry took up a position close to the fellow’s ear.
“Is there another exit in here?” he asked, motioning his head at the doors he had just entered from.
“Naw,” whispered the security guard. “We don’t want anyone to sneak in.”