by Dane Hartman
The two antagonists separated and faced each other warily from across the torture chamber. When she wasn’t bent double, Harry could see that she was a tall, muscular woman with streaked hair that came to just below her ears. In her bare feet, in her bare body, she still looked to be close to six feet tall. She had no breasts to speak of and while all women were supposed to have ten percent more adipose tissue than men, Harry couldn’t find it on her. She was all coiled hemp muscles, coarse hair, and glistening sweat.
“Madame, I presume?” Harry asked.
The woman guardedly nodded, letting a grim smile spread her lips. She moved back toward the gun.
Harry ran around to block her. She feinted to the right, moved in, and swung the hook in a fast, vicious arc. Harry almost fell for it again. The hook smashed into the iron mask that Harry hastily raised, split it open, and wrested it from his grasp. Callahan spun, grabbed the bars the woman had been trapped in and held those up as a shield.
“And you’re Dirty Harry,” the naked woman said, not even breathing heavily. “You’re not very smart, Inspector.”
“But I’m very hard to kill,” he answered, moving back.
“What?” the woman asked. “Afraid of a woman?”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Harry said, still moving back. “Looked in the mirror lately?” He stepped forward, swinging the bar down over his head. The woman parried by lifting the hook effortlessly, pulling the bar out of Harry’s still-burned hands. The bar clanged into the hanging gibbet, setting it rocking back and forth with an ugly creak.
Harry backed up to the wall, and the woman moved in with the hook up over her shoulder. She brought it down to sink into his face, but Harry slid down the wall and grabbed the hooks right behind the points. He straightened and pushed back. He underestimated the woman’s strength. She held firm, then tried to knee him in the groin. He blocked that with his thigh, but then the woman pulled up on the hook with all her might, wrenching it from Harry’s weak grip and catching him under the chin.
Harry looked through the purple splotches that colored his vision for a second, put his foot in her stomach, and kicked out. She dropped the hook and fell over the chopping block. Harry picked up the hook in one hand. The naked woman got to her feet with a headman’s axe. It had been under the block all the time.
The adversaries stood facing each other.
“What do you get out of it?” Harry asked.
“I love it!” the woman roared. “Do you have any idea how easy it is? Out of the hundreds of millions of people in this country alone, do you know how many pretty girls there are? And out of them, how many with loose parental ties and no steady boyfriends? Do you know how many could simply disappear without anyone really noticing?”
“And the computer finds them,” Harry filled in.
“My husband is an expert,” she bragged. “He calls the different machines up, plays a different code to each one over the phone, sets a hook-up, and these things just spill their guts!”
“Your husband?”
“The Gentleman,” the woman elaborated, “as the girls are wont to call him. No names, please. We gave ours up seven years ago.”
Harry was legitimately stunned. “How many girls have you taken?”
“Not many,” the woman shrugged. “Eight, maybe ten a year. After a while we filled specific orders. Once the oil crisis and U.S. auto sales plummeted, the Arab and Oriental nations were eager to buy what we were selling. We supply only the best to the best.”
“That your motto?” Harry suggested sarcastically.
“Shame, shame, Inspector Callahan,” the woman admonished. “Our girls are treated very well by their owners. They are rich enough and powerful enough to keep them very happy or very quiet. It is the girl’s choice.”
“Not here. Not tonight.”
“Well, that is all your fault, Inspector. We had the situation well in hand until you became involved. And after you are gone, we’ll relax for a while with our accumulated wealth.”
“It couldn’t buy you better security,” Harry reminded her, motioning his head upstairs to the fly-ridden corpses in the ambush hallway.
“We get by,” the woman sniffed. “We never utilize a large staff. The less mouths, the better security. We only use as many as we need to control the supply. Tonight is our biggest shipment in some years. Five million dollars worth.”
Harry’s mind raced furiously. It was tonight. Fish hadn’t lied about that. But how many more guards were there? And where were they? “Five million!” Harry exclaimed aloud, letting a look of surprise flash over his features. “How many girls do you have now?”
“Just three,” the woman confessed. “A natural blond, a liberated black, and the policewoman.” The woman frowned. “The blond and your friend make up the bulk of the package. Negroes are not in great demand in the Middle East. But we can probably unload her in Japan or China.”
The woman sighed and set her footing, waving the axe from side to side. “But I could talk to you all night, Inspector,” she said. “It’s so rare that I actually get to talk about all this. You know how it is. After a hard day at work, your loved ones don’t want to talk shop.”
And after that, the woman raced in, swinging the axe with an athletic grace. Callahan wasn’t used to the awkward weapons, and his hands were stiff after the tense action of the last few hours. He successfully blocked the new attack, but he couldn’t get under her offense.
She whirled like a dervish, slamming the axe blade against the double-pointed hook with increasing force. She kept moving forward, flailing the axe in dazzling geometric patterns. Harry couldn’t get away from it. She pushed him back up against the wall, then ran backward, laughing.
“Come on,” she urged him forward. “Come on, Inspector. Don’t let a woman beat you. Come on.”
Harry looked across the room at his gun. It was way beyond reach. He looked at the littered floor of the dungeon. He saw the iron mask she had knocked open with one swipe of her arm. He saw the shadows of something inside. Harry looked at the hook in his hands. He saw his hands were vibrating. The strain of the fight was becoming too much. He dropped the hook and walked purposely forward.
The woman looked at him approaching empty-handed for a moment with disbelief, then she swung back the axe blade with a delighted look on her face. “Don’t think I won’t,” she warned.
Harry kept coming.
She grinned with all her teeth showing and lunged forward, the axe already slicing through the air.
Harry simply dropped beneath the blade, scooped up the iron mask, rose up behind her swinging arms, and slammed it on her face.
The shadows inside the mask had been those of spikes that pointed inward throughout the device.
The woman’s scream was real this time and horrible as the spikes drove through her lower lip, both cheeks, an eye and her forehead. She tried to swing the axe back, but Harry was too close to her. He blocked the free movement of her arms. Grimacing, he grabbed the back of her head and pushed with both arms. The mask sunk in farther.
Blood spurted out the mask’s macabre eye holes and breathing slits. For a second, it looked like the metal face was crying crimson tears. Harry kept pushing until the woman was bent over backward on the chopping block.
Harry reached down to the other side of the mask, the back of the head portion. As he grabbed its edge, he felt some spikes on that side too. His lips curled up from his teeth like a wolf in blood frenzy. He slammed the mask completely shut. The woman’s body jerked on top of the chopping block. She fell over to the floor, the mask slipping out of Harry’s hands and partially loosening from her head.
Harry retrieved the padlock he had shot off the woman’s initial bonds. He saw that the bottom lock section was ruined, but the top clasp was still intact. He reached down dispassionately and slipped it through the two circles on the outside of the mask. He then jammed it in place.
And still the woman wasn’t dead. She squirmed around the floor on her
back like a spider with half its legs cut off. Or a worm cut in two.
Harry picked up his gun. It felt solid in his hand. The weight was what was needed. The shakiness subsided and disappeared. Harry walked up the steps slowly, ignoring the naked woman with the steel head and the mane of liquid red.
Harry retraced his steps, picking up one of the G3 assault rifles as he went. Most of the candles had died so he was cautious but not unduly so. He made it out the back door and trotted to the side of the house facing Raccoon Strait.
Sure enough, down the hill, there in the moonlight, was a dock. On the dock were three boxes. Harry moved down warily, waiting for any sudden move any leftover guards might make. Nothing happened; he arrived at the port of call without incident. He put the gun in its holster and ripped the first box open with his bare hands.
Inside was a striking blond girl with her arms wrapped around her waist, each hand in a thumbless leather mitten that tightened around her wrists and was attached to the other hand by an unbreakable wire behind her back. Her legs were bent by a strap that attached each ankle to the very top of each of her thighs. The bottom of her face was completely covered by a roll of Ace bandages.
Harry moved to the second box. Inside was Rose Ray. She was lying on her side, her arms held behind her by a single glove that laced all the way up to her shoulders. Her legs were encased similarly in a single black boot. Her mouth was covered with wide strips of silver tape that reached up to the bridge of her nose and then underneath her chin for mooring.
The third box held McConnell. Her wrists were tied to her thighs. Her ankles were tied to each side of the box. Her head was completely covered by a black hood that tightened around her neck. Harry pulled that off. He pulled off the strap over her eyes. He pulled off the cotton balls stuck to her eyelids. He undid the knot tied between her teeth. Then he pulled a sopping wet sack from her mouth. All three women were naked and all three were unconscious.
Harry looked down at Lynne McConnell. She slept in a heavy drug-induced stupor. But her face was serene. Callahan only hoped he had harassed the slavers too much. He hoped they only had had time to get her to the Cave, then go out to Madame’s for the night. He hoped they only had had time to stuff the women in these crates before he showed up.
Harry wondered what it felt like to be meat. To be worthless. To mean nothing. It must be horrible, he calmly considered. Life would become nothing more than a long death.
“I give up, Inspector,” Harry heard a quiet, soothing voice say behind him.
He turned around in the early morning darkness, moonlight reflecting off the water, making the whole environment a deep, calming blue. He saw a man who could only be The Gentleman, also known as Rose Ray’s “lawyer,” standing across the dock with his hands in his pockets.
“You have won, I see,” he continued serenely. “We have tried to stop you at every turn, but you have emerged triumphant. So I will go quietly. I figure it is Kismet. You know?”
The man must’ve known his wife was dead. But any man who could do what he did could not have seen anyone, even his wife, as a real human being.
“Did you do this?” Harry motioned to the boxes.
“We could not let the . . . uh, them raise a fuss if they were to awaken prematurely.”
“The ship doesn’t know what it is delivering then?”
“Oh ho,” The Gentleman said.
Harry nodded, looked down at McConnell, then pulled out his Magnum, and pointed it at The Gentleman.
The slaver’s eyes widened, his hands went out in a pleading pose, and Harry blew his balls off.
Everything between The Gentleman’s legs tore out along with sections of his cream-colored slacks and clean underwear. The mutilated package flew across the surface of the water, skipped, splashed, and then sank.
The Gentleman fell to his knees, his hands trying to stop the flow of gore out of the hole between his legs. He looked at the guts spilling over his hands, shrieked once, defecated, and fell forward.
Dirty Harry Callahan untied all the women and left them sleeping peacefully under the boxes’ packing. He looked out at the water and considered washing his demons away in it. Instead, he kicked off his shoes, rolled up his pant legs and sat on the edge of the dock.
He put the G3 rifle across his knees and waited for the ship to arrive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANE HARTMAN was a Warner Books imprint pseudonym used by two American novelists, Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz. "Hartman" was credited as the author of the Dirty Harry action series based on the “Dirty” Harry Callahan character of the popular 1970’s and 1980’s films starring Clint Eastwood.
Following the release of the third Dirty Harry movie, The Enforcer, in 1976, Clint Eastwood made it clear that he did not intend to make any more Dirty Harry movies. In 1981, Warner Books (the publishing arm of Warner Bros., which made the films) began publishing a number of men’s adventure series under its now-defunct "Men of Action" line. One such series features the further adventures of Inspector Harry Callahan. The series was brought to an end when Eastwood decided to direct, produce, and star in a fourth Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact, which was released in December 1983.