Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death

by Dane Hartman

  “Uh-huh,” said Harry. “Enjoy the show.”

  “I never get tired of this stuff,” said the guard, even after Harry had moved away from him. “Have a nice day.”

  Harry started checking out all the aisles. The place wasn’t sold out so early in the morning so there was plenty of room to search.

  “There are millions of nebulas throughout our galaxy,” a sonorous voice boomed down from the projected heaven as Harry stalked his prey in the semi-circular rows. “Just as there are millions of stars and planets, there are billions of these beautiful masses of gases throughout the universe. And among the stars, there are thousands growing old and going nova every single second of every single day . . .”

  As the omnipresent voice spoke, the picture on the curved ceiling changed again to a pulsating red sun which seemed to burn down the very walls. The crowd gasped again, and the entire place looked like the inside of a photographer’s developing studio. And just as the picture changed, a hunk of the seat that Harry had laid a hand on, spun off into his stomach.

  The cop fell flat on his face. Now he knew Cunningham was in the planetarium and still had a loaded automatic with a silencer.

  The picture above him changed again as the bodiless voice explained, “Dying suns come in two categories; the red giant and the white dwarf . . .”

  As the white dwarf was given shape, Harry risked sticking his head up and checking the chair’s damage. The missing piece was knocked off from across the room and to the right, if Harry was any judge of bullet trajectory. But by now Cunningham would have changed his position. The bastard could spend the whole show shooting from the cover of an unknowing kid in the audience until he finally pegged Callahan. Harry decided not to risk it.

  It was getting to the security guard’s favorite part when he felt the tug at his pant leg. He looked down, expecting to see a lost little girl or boy. Instead, he saw a big, craggy-faced man in a damp tweed jacket lying on his back. Smiling pleasantly, the man motioned the guard to lean down.

  Ted Cunningham looked over the top of a seat across the theater and saw only the back of a tourist’s head. He scrutinized the entire area, looking for any sign of Harry Callahan. All he saw was the security guard slowly leaving the dome room through one of the eight doors on the opposite wall. Cunningham wondered whether it was possible his one shot had caught the homocide inspector after all. He remembered seeing the chair back break off and Harry go down. With the strength of his automatic, it was possible that the bullet went through the wood and into the cop’s stomach. God knew the silenced weapon was heavy enough. Maybe the security guard had discovered Callahan’s body and was going to report it without raising a general alarm.

  The criminal took a second to look down at the long dark weapon in his hand. The Browning automatic looked like a miniature Howitzer in his hand. The fourteen 9mm rounds in its clip weren’t incredibly accurate, especially with the silencer which added almost three inches to its snout, but what it lacked in aim, it made up for in power and intimidation. With it, he had made a few of his pre-teen “charges” wet their BVDs and cream in their Sergio Valentes.

  Cunningham looked up again and smiled. If the bullet had hit Callahan anywhere on his torso, the cop would be down for the count. And with Harry out of the way, it would not make any difference how many cops were surrounding the place or how many would charge the planetarium to back him up. Good old Ted would be long gone. If anybody asked, all the regular help would say that there was only one way to enter or exit the theater. But Cunningham worked there. Only he and the planetarium director knew about the director’s booth.

  That was the core of the entire dome show. That was where the experts worked up and controlled the action on the computers. That was where the sound and lighting equipment was. And that was where an ample air-conditioning duct was. Cunningham knew he could slip in the theater door to the director’s booth, make some excuse to the controller, and make good his getaway. Even if Harry wasn’t dead, he couldn’t stop Cunningham now. He wouldn’t know how. The air-conditioning pipes were big enough to let Cunningham slide and crawl to the outside. He would get out a second exit no one knew about.

  As Cunningham hitched up his rubber slacks and crawled for the other side of the room, Harry Callahan stuck his head up a third exit. He had snaked out the theater on his back and sat down with the custodian just outside the theater. Fatso Devlin had showed up, and Harry, explaining the situation, had him place a small army outside the main doors.

  “He’s in there with a weapon and several dozen kids. I don’t want the whole thing to turn into a shooting gallery.”

  “OK, Harry,” Devlin had agreed. “We’ll surround him.”

  “I don’t want a hostage thing on my hands either,” Harry had countered. “I just want the place secure so if I don’t luck out at least you have him boxed in.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Me and Max here,” Harry explained, nodding toward the smiling custodian, “have an observation post picked out for me. If I see Cunningham I’ll bring him down. If not, good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Devlin had said laconically.

  “Least I could do,” said Harry, motioning that Max should lead the way.

  “Harry . . . ?” Fatso called after him.

  Harry turned.

  “Don’t make too much of a mess. You know how I hate cleaning up after you.”

  So Max led the inspector to the long, flat room of electronic machinery under the dome theater. He had brought Harry beneath the pit where the $140,000 projector was hung. Max had silently pulled open the bottom of the pit so Harry could stick his torso up directly under the dumbell-shaped device. Harry was just tall enough that his eyes looked over the crest of the pit. The bottom section of the projector was just above his head, its concentrated light masking him from the crowd. But while they couldn’t see him, he could see them just fine.

  “Soaring throughout our galaxy are packs of comets,” intoned the show’s continuing narration. “These interplanetary hoboes range in size from the smallest of specks to the most incredible of satellites. Many are even bigger than the Earth . . .”

  On that word, Harry saw Cunningham. The man was crawling from the end of one row, across a carpeted aisle and into the same row on the other side. Harry looked in front of the creeping crook to guess his destination. It was easy. Besides the entrance, there was only one other door. Harry pulled his Magnum out.

  “These gigantic hunks of compressed ore speed throughout the heavens,” continued the melodic voice from the theater’s speakers, “always moving in the same long orbits. As we see them through our telescopes in the night sky, they are cold and grey. We call them comets . . .”

  Callahan propped the barrel of his .44 on the lip of the pit. He sighted it along the row of chairs Cunningham was worming behind. He moved it along the lip at the speed he guessed his target was moving at. The barrel passed several innocent sitting figures looking happily up at the increasingly dazzling show.

  “But when any of these hurtling stones reach our atmosphere,” the narration continued, “and start to flame and burn from the air around them, we call them meteors . . . !”

  And the planetarium theater lit up with the blaze of projected falling meteors. The audience cried with delight. Cunningham took it as a cue to make a break for the director’s room door. He hopped up with his back to Harry and started climbing over the three sets of rows in front of his goal. Callahan quickly realigned his aim and checked to see that no innocent person was close to his field of fire.

  The Magnum barrel was pointed right at the middle of Cunningham’s back as the man scrambled over the final row of chairs.

  “Many meteors have struck the Earth during recorded history,” the disembodied voice above Harry stated. “Incredibly, the daily count often reaches close to one hundred million. Most of these burn up harmlessly . . . but some . . . some have, and some will, strike the Earth with the force of fifty atom bomb
s! What will happen then?”

  The audience held its breath in anticipation. Even Cunningham hesitated, pivoted, and looked up. Harry heard a fiery, crackling whooshing sound above him and felt a slight heat on the back of his neck. The projector was getting hot. Above him, a five-mile-wide meteor was coursing toward a fragile-looking blue marble. When the marble became the Earth and the meteor an orange ball of molten fury, Callahan barked out his order.

  “Cunningham! Hold it!”

  The man pinpointed the voice immediately He stuck his Browning out in front of him. Harry tightened his right forefinger. Both guns fired the moment the meteor smacked into the planet.

  Cunningham’s bullet gouged a foot long tear in the carpet in front of the projector pit. No one noticed the cough of his silencer. Harry’s weapon boomed over the crash of the meteor, sending stabs of flame out at the edge of the projector pit. Its lead caught Cunningham in the right shoulder, a shot Harry prided himself on. There were two things Dirty Harry really knew how to hit—the right shoulder and right between the eyes.

  The bastard spun into the wall, a full two feet off the ground. His Browning flew out of his hands, slid along the curved wall for a few yards, then fell neatly into a garbage can at the end of an aisle.

  The lights came on and the narrating voice hoped everyone had enjoyed the show. The excited audience left the theater happy; only a few stopped momentarily to wonder why there were so many cops outside the doors and why the big guy in the wet tweed jacket jumped on the back of the man lying on the back-row carpet.

  C H A P T E R

  T h r e e

  “Really great job, Callahan,” Captain Avery said sarcastically. “Water damage bn the third floor, the second floor roof looks like the surface of the moon and the Aquarium experts are afraid their sharks might get sick from eating one of the alleged perpetrators.” The blond, muscular police officer put his fists on top of his big dark oak desk and hung his head. “Eaten. Holy Mother of God.”

  “I really think you’re being a bit harsh on the Inspector, sir,” Lieutenant Al Bressler suggested from his standing position next to Harry in front of Avery’s desk. “He captured all four of the suspects in a potentially explosive situation . . .”

  “Potentially explosive?” Avery burst out. “Callahan never wastes the potential of any situation! If there’s anything to destroy, the Inspector will do it!”

  Bressler looked at Harry, who raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I’m sorry for the poor choice of words,” the lieutenant began back to the captain.

  The captain interrupted. “Do you have anything to say about this, Callahan?” he barked.

  Harry shrugged casually. “If you don’t like results, sir . . .”

  “Results?” Avery cried, pouncing on the word. “You wound all four of the suspects, close down two of the city’s most prosperous attractions in the middle of the summer vacation period, and cause untold damage, and we’re no farther along than when you started on this case!”

  Harry looked honestly confused. “How can that be?” he asked. “We’ve captured four of the pornography ring’s major members. One of them is bound to talk.”

  “How can they talk?” Avery countered. “One’s dead, one is in serious condition, and the other two are in the hospital’s intensive care unit one with a destroyed shoulder and the other with a mushed mouth. The only talking they’ll do is to their lawyers about suing the city for using excessive force! We’re no closer to The Professor now than we were at the beginning of the investigation. If anything, this hunting trip of yours will probably send him underground, and we’ll never find him.”

  “The Professor is a sadist,” Harry said with conviction. “He won’t stay under long. He likes what he does. The loss of four gang members won’t stop him.”

  “You’re guessing, Callahan,” Avery said. “You’ve got no guarantees. I want tangible results, Inspector.”

  “You’ve got three men in custody, sir,” Bressler mentioned.

  “Who do us almost no good!” Avery retorted brusquely. “You want to know what we have that’s tangible? I have a bill here from the Academy of Sciences. You want to know how much the damages were . . . ?”

  “No, Captain,” Harry interrupted suddenly. “You call up the parents of that eleven-year-old girl we found in the garbage can with a vagina that looked like hamburger. You tell them the cost and ask them if they think their daughter was worth that much.”

  Harry didn’t wait for a reply. He turned around, walked out of the captain’s office, and left the door open.

  Avery’s heavily lined face settled slowly down. The lines that had been arched upward drifted into a sloping position. He looked down at the bill sadly and fought the urge to crumple it. Instead he let it drop to his desk and sat down heavily.

  “Close the door, Lieutenant,” he instructed Bressler, “and let’s talk.”

  Harry went back to his office in Room 750 on the seventh floor of the Justice Building. The Homicide department was in its regular uproar. It was the summer murder season, and people were getting croaked with their normal regularity. One nice thing about San Francisco was that it really didn’t have any seasons. The average mean temperature for January was fifty degrees. The average mean temperature for August was sixty degrees. So it wasn’t like New York where murder became epidemic in the summer and settled into dull slaughter in the winter. San Fran was constant, averaging a regular rate of homicide all year round. The only drawback was that things never really let up. Room 750 always had something to keep its occupants entertained.

  Like the little girl in the trash can. Normally, pornography rings were handled by the vice squad. The eleven-year-old girl who had become a week-old corpse made it the Homicide department’s business. Callahan moved back to his office to continue working on the case. Avery or no Avery, Harry was going to put as much time as he could on this one. It irritated his sensibility.

  He wearily passed by all the other inspectors’ cubicles to enter the Inspector #71 cubicle. Seated behind his grey desk was Fatso Devlin. Seated on the edge of the blue trim was an extremely pretty brunette. Now, some brunettes were beautiful, like Leslie Ann Down; all sultry and rich. And some brunettes were just pretty, like the Mary Ann character on Gilligan’s Island. But this woman was extremely pretty: with creamy skin, full, perfect lips, and, to top everything else off, dark green eyes.

  She was wearing a plaid shirt with a dark blue suit. The very edge of the shirt’s collar was fringed with a quarter inch of lace. Her smile was terrific, very fresh and honest and she was using it on Devlin when Harry walked in. When she turned and noticed him, then lightly hopped off the desk edge and walked toward him with her hand out, Harry momentarily entertained the fantasy that he had just crossed over into “Brigadoon.”

  “Inspector Callahan?” she asked, hand still out, “I’m Sergeant McConnell, the cop you wouldn’t let go on your arrest this morning.”

  Harry looked over the girl’s shoulder at Devlin. Fatso stroked one forefinger over the other at his partner in a “shame-on-you” motion. Harry looked back at the girl’s extremely pretty face, which was still stretched in an open smile fit to beat the band. He took her hand and shook it. It was warm, solid, and dry.

  “You’re the police woman from vice?” Harry marveled.

  “Lynne McConnell, sergeant on the vice squad,” she retorted. “Want to see my badge?” Fatso had a hard time holding back his laugh. He wound up snorting on the desk top.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Harry said somewhat stiffly. He walked around his desk and pulled back on his chair. “Why don’t you go wash windows or something?” he told Devlin.

  “Right, Harry. Right,” said Fatso, getting up quickly.

  Harry sat down and motioned for the sergeant to do the same. She did, crossing her slim muscular legs and smiling pleasantly. “What can I do for you, Sergeant McConnell?” Harry asked, rifling through the top drawer on his desk.

  “I think it is a matte
r of what I can do for you, Inspector,” she replied easily.

  “And what’s that?” Harry asked just as easily, going from his top drawer to the first one on the right.

  “I’ve been assigned to this case as the vice squad officer in charge,” she explained with patience. “My job, no, my responsibility was to be with you this morning. I’m wondering why you wouldn’t let me.”

  “I never,” Harry began, then turned to Devlin, who was standing by. “Where’s my cleaning kit?”

  “Bottom drawer, Harry,” Fatso said quickly. “I used it while you were with the captain. Sorry.”

  Harry pulled out the cleaning kit and dropped it on the desk. “I never said you could not go, Sergeant,” Harry continued.

  “No, Sergeant,” Fatso took up, “all Harry said was, that given the situation, an extra officer from vice was not strictly necessary.”

  “My exact words,” Harry overruled his partner, “were ‘I don’t want some girl from vice getting her ass shot off.’ The aquarium was no place for an observer this morning.”

  The office got very quiet for a few seconds after that. McConnell’s face had lost its smile. Instead she watched Harry very intently. Fatso stood back, trying to get into the next office by osmosis. Harry made the first new noise by standing, pulling off the dark suit jacket he had changed into, and hanging it on a wall hook. He then pulled out his Magnum, opened it, and started cleaning.

  “Inspector Callahan,” McConnell said carefully. “I have been on this case longer than you have. If it hadn’t been for my department’s work, you would have never known where to find those men. You would not have heard of The Professor. I think we had . . . I had . . . a right to be on the arrest.”

  “Sergeant McConnell,” he answered, keeping his eyes on his weapon, “I don’t doubt that you were instrumental in this arrest, and I do not deny that you had a perfect right to be there this morning. But I must add that if I had met you prior to the arrest, I would have been so concerned over your well-being that my own capability would have been severely handicapped.”