Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death

by Dane Hartman

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to hide him?” the bouncer whined, pushing the shrubbery aside. “I’ve heard of playing it safe, but this is ridic . . . !”

  His sentence was cut off by a big, gnarled hand around his throat and a sledgehammering knee in his balls. His eyes bulged and his face puffed out purple before a second hand grabbed his hair and threw him with the force of a bowling ball against the side of the building. A meaty thunk reverberated along the wood exterior of the disco, then all that could be heard was a rustling of bushes and the crickets.

  Elizabeth Cook finished on the toilet. She pulled up her black satin panties, pushed down her dress, flushed, and went out to wash her hands. The woman outside was over by the door with her back toward Cook, seemingly straightening out her outfit. Elizabeth only glanced in her direction before turning her attention to the sink.

  She had just turned the water on and wet her hands when the thing slapped over her face. She reared back in surprise, her hands dripping, only to feel the hard shape of someone behind her. Someone who held her around the waist and pushed her head back to rest on that someone’s shoulder. Cook had her mouth half open when the horror clamped. Her features froze, her right arm was wrenched up her back and her left arm was grabbed just above the elbow.

  She remembered that she had to pull the lavatory door open to get in, so all the woman behind her had to do was propel her forward. Elizabeth slammed by the door, through the hallway, and fell on the mat inside the other door, which the gentleman had opened. The gentleman swung the door shut and pounced on her. It had all happened in five seconds.

  The gentleman grabbed one wrist and slapped on one section of the handcuff. He rolled her onto her stomach and slid the other wrist into the metal rope. Her arms were now clinched behind her back. He started cooing while he attached the second pair of handcuffs to her ankles. He dodged her kicking legs like an athlete, then clicked the hitches into place. Her legs were together. He grabbed the last pair of handcuffs in one hand and the short metal chain between the ankle cuffs in the other. He pulled back on the legs, attached one open cuff to the short chain on her wrists and the other to the ankle chain. She lay on her stomach, her knees bent, her high heels almost touching his outstretched fingers behind her back.

  The gentleman rolled her on her side and applied both his hands to her stomach. He pushed in hard, then immediately unclamped the thing from her face. It fell away to reveal Cook’s mouth and eyes wide open. The gentleman had knocked the air out of her. She couldn’t catch her breath. He filled her mouth with the rubber ball, nimbly buckling it tight behind her head. He pulled her hair from under it and tightened it even more. Only then could she breathe. Her breath exhaled around the obstruction prying her jaws wide open. She moaned in discomfort and confusion.

  “Now, now,” the gentleman admonished. “Mustn’t make any noise.” So saying he pressed the sponge end of the leather pad firmly over her opened mouth and the ball, then buckled its ties, all of which fit neatly around the ball buckle. Another thirty seconds had elapsed. The woman walked nonchalantly in, looking down at their helpless captive with satisfaction. They had their blond. The woman signaled the bartender.

  The bartender relaxed. He always got a little uptight when they were set to snatch a chick at ground zero. There was so much to watch out for, especially with Tony gone. He had to signal if anyone went downstairs after the targeted prize. He had to keep filling drink orders, and he had to watch out for any undue action on the floor. He was always happiest when it was all over and he knew he had a new toy to play with when he got to the Cave.

  The bartender looked over the unusually large Monday crowd. The joint was usually jumping after eleven every night, but here it was hardly ten and the place was packed. He smiled at all the faces that went by. The bartender really enjoyed his work. He felt a special kind of supremacy that only came from knowing you could have any girl you wanted. And not because you were suave or rich, but simply because you wanted her. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  The bartender was about to be proved wrong. He worked his way down the bar, cleaning the polished surface, chatting with customers, and making drinks. He finally came to the far end, right next to the waiters’ station. Two burly guys, probably football players from the college, ordered some brew. The bartender handed them the beer, then twisted his head to the right to take the order of the guy sitting on the bar’s last stool. The two ball players went back to their seats, clearing the bartender’s sightlines. The guy sitting on the last stool was Harry Callahan.

  “I’d like a drink,” he said.

  The bartender started with surprise. Before he could move off, Harry grabbed his lapels in both hands and pulled him back.

  “I said I’d like a drink,” he said dangerously, then added softly, “hands on the bar.”

  The bartender slowly put his palms flat on the oak surface, nervously looking around all the while. His waiters didn’t notice.

  “Eyes here,” Harry quietly instructed, pointing at the bridge of his nose. “Take it easy. Just keep moving as if nothing is wrong. Make me a drink and talk to me.”

  “Sure,” the bartender smiled widely. “What’ll you have?”

  “A beer,” Harry said. “Where’s the girl?”

  “What brand?” the bartender answered. “Downstairs.”

  “What have you got?” Harry continued the charade. “How many with her?”

  “Michelob, Miller, Heinekin, Schaeffer, and Becks,” the bartender replied to the first question. “Two,” he said to the second.

  “I’ll take a Miller,” Harry said simply.

  “Light?” the bartender asked.

  “No, with all the calories.”

  The bartender kept smiling, but he didn’t move. “Uh,” he said, “can I reach down and get it?”

  Harry leaned forward and looked at the small freezer on the floor behind the bar. The only buttons he saw were across the room. “OK,” he said, “but keep your hands away from the lip.”

  The bartender knew what he meant. If Harry saw any digit heading toward the underside of the bar, the man had had it. The bartender backed away, keeping a careful smile plastered on his puss. As he expected, Harry remained natural. So natural, in fact, that he glanced at the dance floor for a second.

  In that second, the bartender threw open the sliding door on the cooler and pulled out a silenced MAC 11 submachine gun.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw the bartender’s quick movement that required the use of two hands. Harry kicked out against the bar, overturning his chair just as the bartender brought up the weapon and pulled the trigger.

  Everyone noticed the big guy in the tweed jacket toppling over, but no one seemed to notice the fourteen holes and flying chips of wood that erupted from the bar. The MAC 11 was just a plain black box with a handle and a tube. The hefty silencer completely muffled the reports under the throbbing disco music. It wasn’t until Harry brought his feet under him and pulled out the .44 that anyone realized something was very wrong.

  Harry blew a hole the size of a quarter through the bar wall. The boom of his Magnum rolled like a wave, over the dance floor, stopping everyone in a progressive pattern. His slug swept by the bartender and smashed the mirror behind the bar. It flew out over the bartender and the patrons, throwing off the man’s aim and creating a panic.

  People began scurrying in every direction. Harry stood straight, his gun pointed directly in front of him. The bartender shook the glass out of his hair. Harry shot him in the chest. The man flew back, his white apron suddenly decorated with red, the MAC 11 flying across the bar and hitting a shocked girl in the side.

  Harry kept his gun straight. A waiter ran to the other side of the bar and reached over to hit the console of buttons. Harry shot the black man right between his eyes. The waiter’s red blood splashed the backs of patrons scurrying to get out the door. His body fell onto one of the college football boys, who just shouldered him
back without looking. What was left of the waiter’s head bounced off the edge of the bar.

  Harry pivoted as the dance floor cleared. Everyone had pressed away from the bar when the shooting started so the opposite wall of the place looked like a solid throng of terrified cakewalkers. Terrified couples huddled together under tables and in far corners. Harry wasn’t interested. He was looking for the other two waiters.

  Roy Hinkle leaped up in the disc jockey’s booth, panic-stricken before he realized he was behind one-way glass. He wondered whether he should try to warn the gentleman downstairs or whether he should remain safe in the booth. Hinkle, The Professor, sat down. He decided to wait until Callahan was otherwise occupied and then escape with the couple downstairs.

  The woman and the gentleman looked up. Naturally the hostage room was soundproof but there was no disguising the difference between dancing and running feet. The two slavers looked at one another with questions in their eyes. Elizabeth simply twisted, turned, and cried on the floor at their feet. The woman buzzed the men upstairs with her beeper. There was no reply.

  The waiters were busy. The two men came sweeping out of the office with unsilenced MAC 10s in their hands. These armaments were slightly larger than the 11s, but they were just as deadly. Harry dove over the bar and crashed to the floor behind the beer cooler. The waiters riddled the front of the bar with bullets. Harry heard them thunk and ping through the wood, off the metal, and into the glass. He’d have to do something about them, and quick. The only other difference beween the two MACs was that the 11s were .380 caliber. The 10s were .45. Any closer and the lead would go right through the metal Harry was behind.

  Harry reached into the cooler and pulled out a bottle of beer. It was a Heinekin dark mixture. He ripped off the label, pulled off the cap by hand, dug into his pocket for a Kleenex and stuffed it into the open top. He then got on his knees and lobed the bottle toward the dance floor while screaming “Molotov!”

  He gave the waiters a second to react, then jumped up. The bluff had worked. As the bottle smashed harmlessly on the thick glass dance floor, Harry shot the waiter to his right. The waiter was cringing away, so the bullet entered his chest from the side, just below his shoulder. He dove sideways from the force of the lead as blood and gore spit out of his other underarm.

  Harry was over the bar and running toward a row of couches circling the dance floor. He tried to get the last waiter completely in his sights, but the man was moving too close to the remaining innocent bystanders who hadn’t been able to get out any of the doors. Harry dove to the carpet as the waiter realized he had been snookered, slid, and rolled behind the sofa nearest him.

  The waiter opened fire and tore the stuffings out of it. But as soon as Harry had landed, he had crawled behind the couch next to that and then the couch after that. The Professor could see what Harry was doing from his vantage point, but the waiter could not. He just kept riddling the same sofa with bullets.

  “I’m gonna kill that sucker!” he shouted, laughing.

  Hinkle saw his chance. He threw open the booth’s door and shouted. “Over there, stupid! He’s over there!”

  If the circumstances had been a little different, Harry would have taken time to thank the child pornographer. As it was, when the waiter looked back in surprise at Hinkle, Harry shot him in the chest.

  It had to be the chest. Only there was enough bone, muscle, and cartilage structure to stop Harry’s .44 slug from hitting anyone behind him. The waiter threw his MAC 10 into the air and flew back like a human starfish into the horrified dancers behind him.

  Roy Hinkle caught the gun. He grabbed it out of the air at the same time he grabbed a girl dancer by the hair. He pulled the girl in front of him, wrapped his arm around her neck, and stuck the muzzle of the MAC against her temple.

  “That’s it, Callahan,” he said, pulling the girl back toward the booth. “It’s over. Put your gun down.”

  In reply, Harry stood up, his gun still out before him.

  “Come on, Callahan,” The Professor taunted, keeping his head behind the statuesque blond. It was the second girl the gentleman had scouted. Hinkle had chosen her for her proximity and height. “I count one bullet left in your gun. Do you think you can nail me with that one bullet? Are you that good? Or are you going to blow this little lady’s head apart? Or plug one of the people behind me? What do you say, Callahan? Do you feel lucky?”

  By then, The Professor was close enough. He jumped back into the disc jockey’s booth pulling the girl with him. He slammed the door behind him and turned the music all the way up.

  The noise on the dance floor was nearly unbearable. Everyone slapped their hands over their ears and crawled away from the blaring speakers. Harry used his last bullet to smash the amplifier nearest him. He was about to empty the shells and shove in an auto-loader when a .45 bullet bore through the booth’s one-way glass and nicked Harry’s ear.

  Harry dropped behind the couch, his revolver still open. That miserable son of a bitch was shooting at him from behind the safety of both one-way glass and a hostage. He knew Harry couldn’t shoot back blindly for fear of hitting the girl. And now The Professor knew that his weapon, kept on single fire, would only put a hole in the glass, not shatter it. He could see Harry, but Harry couldn’t see him.

  The cop quickly reloaded his gun. He looked in every direction. People were painfully groveling away from the cacophony of the thundering disco music. The bass beat alone seemed to be shaking the entire building. He located another speaker above him and shot it out. There was one by the bar. He rolled over and shot that too. Now the noise was just about bearable. He looked around at the cowering patrons inside the disco.

  “Get out!” he shouted. “He doesn’t want you! Go on, get out of here!”

  Needing only that permission, the revelers moved back toward the exits. While they slowly filed out, Harry grabbed the bottom of the sofa and tipped it over. As it fell forward, another bullethole appeared in the booth’s glass and plunked deep into the couch seat. Harry moved forward a bit more. Then he repeated the action. The sofa fell a bit closer to the booth. Another bullethole appeared. The slug blew off the bottom of an upturned wooden leg on the furniture.

  With one more push, Harry got the sofa all the way to the dance floor. Any farther and Hinkle could hit him from his perspective. Harry lay behind the couch and found the remaining four speakers. He shot out two of them. The music was still playing, but it continued only in regular stereo. Without the din, Harry could think again.

  To compensate for the lack of disco beat, Hinkle started dotting the sofa with bullets in a regular rhythm. Every other second another hole would appear somewhere on the glass and another slug would rip through the couch. It was just a matter of time before they found a human target.

  Harry saw one tear up a hunk of wood from the dance floor right between his legs. He knew it was time to move on to other cover. He quickly looked to the side. There was an overturned table not three yards from him. But those three yards looked a lot longer from where he was lying.

  Another bullet whined off an innerspring and shot out of the upholstery not a inch from his head. It was time to move. Harry was steeling to cover himself when he remembered the blond in the maroon bodysuit. He couldn’t shoot back into the booth, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t shoot at all.

  Harry turned over onto his stomach and got up in the start position for a race. He held his Magnum pointed toward the booth. He leaped forward and shot at the same time. It just barely worked. His bullets whacked into the ceiling over the booth, but that didn’t keep Hinkle from returning the fire. The edge of the couch ripped open and then the bullets trailed Harry’s movements like a faithful dog. The cop stopped behind the table, but the bullets kept going.

  They smashed into the tabletop in a wavy line, some embedding deep in the thick wood, others ramming through. But since Harry was flat on his back, they went over his head. Even the hostage situation had its positive aspects, Harry
realized. At least holding the girl as a shield screwed up Hinkle’s aim .

  Harry exhaled mightily while emptying his second set of shells. He placed his third auto-loader in and he looked up at the ceiling to see what damage he’d done. His bullets had blown out a light and nicked the tube that was holding the mirror ball steady above the dance floor. Harry smirked in spite of his predicament. Every disco had to have its mirror ball. The bigger the disco, the bigger the mirror ball. Madame’s had a huge one.

  Harry halted his derision. He spun over onto his side and hazarded a glance at the booth. Another bullet hole appeared as he watched. He snapped his head back. But it was enough. He saw that the one-way glass was thoroughly dotted with holes. And off of most of these holes were tiny cracks. They weren’t enough to shatter the cover, but one large push might be enough to do it. A .44 bullet couldn’t do the job, but a reflecting wrecking ball could.

  Callahan studied the mirror ball above him. There was the rod in the top which turned it around. And there were four wires holding the rod steady. One wire going in each direction. Harry had six shots. He had to do it with five and he couldn’t do it from directly under the ball.

  Clamping his jaw together and grinding his teeth, Harry grabbed onto the table’s one thick center leg with his left arm. He tightened his grip on the Magnum in his right hand. He pulled his feet under him.

  Harry stood up, took two steps back, and started firing.

  He held the table in front of him like a medieval shield as he kept all his attention on the mirror ball’s wires. He heard and felt Hinkle’s shots flying around him. One shot, the west wire snapped. Two shots, the south wire broke. Three shots, the east wire was cut. A .45 bullet smashed against the side of his shoe. His foot went numb, his leg shifted, and the fourth shot went wild.

  Harry almost fell. He almost dropped the table. He yanked his body straight again and with his lips pulling off his teeth, he aimed the gun at the already nicked tube. The mirror ball was already spinning wildly in every direction, throwing thousands of rectangular light beams across the walls and floors. Every time Harry thought he had the tube lined up, a light beam would flash in his eyes and the aim was off again.