by Dane Hartman
The light show was driving Harry’s pupils crazy. He had to get into a room that had a little consistent illumination. He didn’t worry about Sweetboy. Where Harry went, the hitman would follow. Lord knows Callahan had followed him long enough—it was about time he returned the favor.
Harry stayed quiet and still until he thought he sensed some blue amid the blackness. A strange thing about darkness; it had a way of throwing off all one’s other senses as well. All Harry had to go on was instinct and common sense. All the rooms couldn’t be windowless and all the windows couldn’t be covered, so it was just a matter of finding that room. Keeping a pair of mental fingers crossed, Harry followed the feeling of blue.
A few steps later and he was feeling a bit more secure. The blue was getting stronger. A few more feet and he was certain. He was following a definite light to its source. The trail led into another room. There Harry could see a line of bright beige, like the semblance of a lamp escaping through the crack of a door. Harry marched up to it and put his hand up where a doorknob should be.
A round globe of metal slipped into his hand. He twisted, pulled, and pushed his gun inside the tiny room. The rest of the area was immediately bathed in illumination, revealing the last room in the museum. It was a storage area in the back, complete with an emergency exit door and the control closet, into which Harry was presently pointing his revolver. At that moment, the lights went on again.
Right in front of his barrel was a blinking Peter Nash. His hands were still cuffed in front of him, but all his fingers were poised over the switches that controlled the spotlights for the entire museum. The ex-deputy’s eyes were glazed and half-closed. It was obvious he hadn’t recognized Harry yet. But before the inspector could say anything, both the back door and entrance door flew open.
Cops started pouring in through the back and Sweetboy appeared framed in the front.
“Kill the lights!” the hitman screamed.
It was Harry who complied. Nash froze up in confusion, so Callahan shifted his aim to zero in on the light box. Nash fell back as Harry pulled the trigger. There was an explosion of sparks, and then the entire museum was bathed in blue again.
It was a blue that was soon filled with yellow-orange specks. The cops blasted away with careless abandon. To their way of thinking, they had nothing to worry about. As far as they were concerned, all their targets were mad-dog killers. It was every bullet for itself.
Harry hit the floor and crawled deeper into the control booth, hoping to make contact with Nash’s legs. Although he found himself against the rear wall, the ex-deputy had seemed to disappear magically. Harry sat up and listened. Among the hectic police gunshots, he could hear a rapid coughing and the noise four feet made when running. According to all evidence, Sweetboy was making good his getaway still in Nash’s company.
Even though he hated the hitman’s guts, Harry found a lot to admire about him. He could appreciate Sweetboy’s ability, speed, and accuracy. Given all that to commend him, Harry thought it best to follow the assassin’s example. When the smoke cleared and the lights went back on, he didn’t want to be around with any dead cops riddled with .44 Magnum holes.
Harry waited until all the cops stampeded through the back room and into the museum. Then he went out the back door. The river floated him to safety beyond the park cordon.
C H A P T E R
E i g h t
“Again? You let him get away again?” Hannibal Striker was incredulous. Mitch Strughold was in pain.
“For Christsake, Sweetboy showed up! He hit me and started going crazy!”
“I know that!” Striker raged. “I can believe that! What I can’t believe is that you let Williams, Nash, and Callahan get away from you again!”
The businessman rose from behind his desk and paced across the thick white carpet. Never before had he been so amazed at one man’s performance. For years his empire had run well and his power had seemed absolute. Then one lousy inspector from Los Angeles shows up and the whole thing falls apart. His own personal hitman turns into an obsessive cowboy, desperate for a gunfight at the OK Corral, and his own personal lawman turns into an incompetent, accident-prone idiot.
“We’ll find him,” said Strughold in pleading tones from the couch. “There are only so many places Callahan can go . . . !”
“Callahan!” Striker roared again, the veins on his neck getting as big as shotgun barrels. “Who gives a fuck about Callahan?”
“But I thought . . .” the sheriff stuttered.
“Don’t think!” Striker commanded. “Do! Find Sweetboy Williams and kill him!”
“But what about Nash’s evidence?” Strughold asked, confused. “If he knew all about the payoffs, he must have a hell of a lot of evidence somewhere.”
“It’s hidden,” the businessman said very quietly, putting his arms on either side of the sheriff’s shoulders, which rested on the back of the couch. “Nash wouldn’t tell us where it is and we couldn’t find it so that means that no one else is likely to find it either.
“But,” Striker continued, his voice rising in volume, “Williams knows enough about this operation to bury me, you, and everybody else in the city! And if he decides to do any harmonizing with Nash, it’ll kill every crooked official in the state! Forget about Nash’s papers. We could tear his whole house apart and not find them. Find Williams! Kill Williams!”
The sheriff had been right for once. There were only a few places Harry could go. He had already used Tucker’s place. He could hole up on public property, but that was a losing proposition. He needed time to think, plan, and eat. Another change of clothes wouldn’t hurt either.
It was the latter desire that made up Callahan’s mind. Taking plenty of time to stake out the grounds, Harry slipped into Nash’s neighborhood, waited until night, then broke into the ex-deputy’s cellar. He stumbled over to the stairs, flicked on the light, and looked right down the barrel of a service revolver.
Lucky for him, Carol Nash was holding it. She took one look at her target, dropped the gun like it had suddenly heated up to five hundred degrees, and fell sobbing into Harry’s arms.
After Harry changed into his original pair of pants that Carol had washed so long ago, eaten, and cleaned up, he started tearing the basement apart.
“What are you looking for?” Carol asked from her seat on the cellar steps.
“I’m not sure,” said Harry. “Some papers. A file. A book. I don’t know, just something that could tell me a little more about what I’m fighting against.”
Carol picked at the stitching of her designer jeans. “Harry,” she began tentatively. “Is it all worth it? I mean, all the planning. All the games. Boris’ death. Your coming here . . .” She let her spoken thought trail off.
Harry turned from the mess he was making of the wall. “What are you asking?”
“I mean . . . do you think . . . is Peter all right?”
Harry thought about soothing her. He thought about being optimistic. But there was something in Carol’s voice that told him to be truthful. “I don’t know.” Then there was something in his own mind that told him to add, “I doubt it.”
Carol nodded and looked down at the section of jean she was picking. Harry went back to the wall, irritated. He had to admit it to himself. Carol had hit the nail right on the head. It had been a gigantic game to Nash. All the research, all the arrests, all the work was just expended so he could realize a pet theory of law enforcement. All the give and take didn’t have any reality for him. He was happy to sit in his cellar and do all the planning while Tucker had had to walk into the fire.
Only the fire had come looking for Deputy Nash. He was a pawn in a larger game of hide and seek. And Harry really couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry for him. Nash had been playing with matches thinking he’d never get burned. He had all the righteous smugness of a general who sent his men into battle. It wouldn’t keep Harry from doing everything he could to save him, but it kept him from feeling any sort of pity.
“I guess I wasn’t a very good cop’s wife,” came Carol’s voice into his thoughts. Harry looked to find the woman had moved over to stand right beside him. “I’d have lunch with all the other men’s wives and they’d all be talking about what their husbands did,” she continued, “and I’d think about Peter working away in here. I remember him planning a particularly big arrest. He was using . . .” she moved her hand around in the air, “. . . little chess pieces. That’s all the others were to him. And that was all right . . . for a while. I felt the police needed him. They needed a planner.” She looked up at Harry’s face almost apologetically. “Peter didn’t like to get his hands dirty.”
“What changed your mind?” Harry asked quietly.
Carol placed her hands on the wall and lowered her head until it was resting between her palms. “I met Sheriff Tucker . . . Boris. He wasn’t a piece of plastic. He was . . . so alive.”
Harry remembered the man Carol was trying to describe. She was right. Tucker was one of those men who lived what all those actors faked in beer commercials. More than anyone else Harry knew, Tucker lived with gusto. He didn’t have to sail boats, or work on an oil rig, or break broncos to really live. Tucker was a man who improved the world by just being in it. The way his wife loved him and the way his kids were growing up proved that.
“I—I started to see something in Peter I had never seen before. As he planned out all these dangerous things for real people to do . . .” She stopped, embarrassed by her awkward confessions. “You know,” she added suddenly, “I could never call him Pete?” She laughed at that, a high, barking laugh that died as soon as it was born. “He just wasn’t the ‘Pete’ kind,” she finished sadly.
Harry took her into his arms as the tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“Oh God, Harry,” she choked out between short sobs. “I feel—I feel . . .”
She never finished her thought. And whatever it was, it didn’t keep them from making love.
Later on, if Harry ever was feeling a little bit cynical, a little bit loose, and a little philosophical with his barroom buddies, he might have called what he had with Carol Nash as sex of the very best kind. It was a slightly illicit emotion combined with shared fear, need, and desire. It was dangerous because of the threat all around them; dirty, because she was another man’s wife; and desperate, because they both felt it might be the last love they’d ever experience.
That might be how Harry would term it if he ever talked about it. But Harry would never talk about it. And Harry wasn’t analyzing it. And Harry wasn’t enjoying it. It went beyond anything like that. It was like the rest of his life. He was doing it because he thought it was right and he had to.
He awoke with his conscience speaking. It was a small police voice in his head telling him the woes of the world. At first he thought it was a dream. But then his eyes snapped open and his brain completely cleared. There was a tiny police voice speaking, and it was coming from somewhere up above.
Carol shifted in her sleep and mumbled something against his chest. He looked down at her sleeping face framed by a cascade of dark hair. It was a shame that she looked so good, Harry thought. He might feel less guilt if she were a dog.
He gingerly slipped his arm out from under her and got out of bed. Her weight had cut off all blood in the limb, so Harry moved outside with what felt like a log attached to his shoulder. He moved around the house’s upper story until he pinpointed the sound as coming from an attic opening in the ceiling.
There was a string hanging down from the opening which Harry pulled to reveal a folded ladder. Stretching it out, he hopped up the rungs until his head poked up into the warm dark room made by the house’s roof. The voice grew louder.
Something brushed against his forehead. He jerked back thinking it was a bug of some kind. But then he saw another string hovering before him. He grabbed it and pulled. There was a click and then there was light.
The voice was coming from an impressive ham radio outfit in the corner of the attic. Harry moved all the way up and walked over to the chair in front of the large, sit-down machine. The entire thing came up to Harry’s stomach and was almost three times as wide. The sloping face of the radio was covered in switches and dials and had one long microphone on an adjustable arm smack-dab in the middle.
A green felt-covered desk came off of that, covered with schedules, notes, and an incongruous-looking, long-barrelled .22 revolver. Beneath that, between the radio’s thick legs, were mounds of multicolored wire that seemed to grow right into the wall.
“Peter’s computer,” said Carol Nash, taking Harry by surprise. He turned to see her at the top of the attic ladder, wearing a peach-colored nightgown and hugging herself with wrapped arms. “Between the cellar and the attic I never saw him.”
Harry turned his attention back to the radio, trying to find some way to control it. “A regular Batman, wasn’t he?” he commented.
“Had it on an automatic timer,” Carol explained, coming over. “It would always go on at the damndest times. I—I guess I forgot to unplug it.” Harry kept checking it out, so the woman thought it necessary to keep explaining. “He gathered a lot of his intelligence from that. Collected it all and entered it into that thing over there.”
Harry looked toward where she was pointing. A tiny Apple home computer sat in a corner next to a small Sony black and white television set. Next to those was a tape-carrying case.
The brainstorm came when he was looking at the case. Ignoring the radio for the moment, Harry got up slowly and moved like a mesmerized man toward the computer. Carol watched his progress with a questioning expression. Harry moved past the TV and the keyboard to the case. It wasn’t locked. He flipped it open to reveal twenty-four cassette tapes; eight in three columns.
Neatly typed onto the cassette spines were the names of different video games. In the first column there were such things as “Blackjack,” “Space Attack,” “Backgammon,” and “Lunar Landing.” Harry riffed through them all, not finding what he wanted at first glance. Carol came over to look over his shoulder.
“Oh, the kids loved that one,” she commented, pointing at the tape marked “Superman.” “A little computer man with a cape catches falling planes.”
That gave Harry his second brainstorm of the night. “Was there any game he didn’t let the kids play?”
“Yes,” Carol said musingly. “One. He said it was too complicated for them.” She pointed.
Harry should have known. It was the cassette marked “Cops and Robbers.”
It wound up being too complicated for the San Francisco inspector as well. After fifteen minutes of concentrated effort, Harry was unable to get the cassette to give up its program on the video screen of the TV set. He tried several other tapes to make sure it was the taped computer “program” that wasn’t working right and not him.
He turned on the set, which had no channel selector. He pushed the power button on the computer console. He stuck the “Space Battle” cassette into the tape recorder attached to the TV. The TV screen flashed “ready.” Harry pressed the “Entry” button on the keyboard. Sure enough, a fleet of UFOs appeared among a set of video cross-hairs.
The computer was working, but the “Cops and Robbers” cassette didn’t seem to. That made sense, Harry figured. Nash wouldn’t have wanted just anyone to decipher his evidence. Harry tried a series of possible codes. After installing the cassette and the screen flashed “Ready,” he typed in “TUCKER,” and pressed “entry.” Nothing.
He tried “PETER NASH,” “CAROL,” “STRIKER,” and “VILLAVEDA.” Still nothing. Then it occurred to him that Nash may have changed the code regularly for an extra measure of safety. He thought about Nash’s reasoning. What would Nash have used to win a “Cops and Robbers” game?
Harry typed his own name and pressed entry. Again nothing. He grinned. That’s what he got for harboring delusions of grandeur. Nash probably didn’t think he was the answer. But, not to leave any base unchecke
d, he typed in “DIRTY HARRY.” He pressed entry. For the last time, nothing. Harry was about to give up when he thought about what was really destroying Striker’s system.
He typed in “.44 MAGNUM.” He pressed the entry button. Facts started spilling across the TV screen.
Harry spent another fifteen minutes taking in the incredible labyrinth of facts that Nash had compiled. There was enough in just that amount to put Striker and most of the Sheriff’s office away for several lifetimes. If all of Nash’s facts were verifiable, the businessman would come up for parole in 2250.
Harry stopped the tape, rewound it, ejected it, put it back into its plastic holder, and carried it downstairs. He turned the home computer off but left the ham radio on. Carol had lost interest ten minutes before, so as Harry dressed, he smelled the welcome aroma of bacon and eggs from the kitchen.
Carol Nash had washed his shirt to boot, so Harry put on the soft shirt, slipped into his own pants, Boris Tucker’s boots, and Fred Tucker’s corduroy jacket. For the first time since coming to San Antonio, he was feeling a little good. With his Magnum in its holster and the cassette tape in his pocket, he saw a little light down at the end of the Tucker case. All he had to do was deliver the evidence to the proper authorities.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know who the proper authorities were. There was no way of being sure of any Texas cop with Striker’s money reigning supreme, so it became a matter of getting out of the state. That is, getting out of the state after settling the score somewhat.
He went down to breakfast smiling, secure in the knowledge that revenge in this case was practical. First, it would be mighty hard for him to get over state lines the way things were. He’d have to clear his name a bit so that every ranger wouldn’t be hot for his blood. Second, by the time he got back to Frisco and processed the evidence, both Striker and Sweetboy would probably be long gone. Harry had to settle accounts then and there.