by Dane Hartman
“Come on, Harry,” the black man said affably. “You know how it is. A guy comes to the end of his rope. Any little thing can set him off. He forgets all about morality. He sees something he wants, and he takes it. All the rules are off. No rhyme. No reason.”
It wasn’t good enough for Callahan. Something was very wrong. He still couldn’t convince himself that Browne had a good enough reason to break the chain. “You show the police sketch in the restaurant?”
Collins sluffed that off. “Sure, but you know how many people come into a restaurant’s bar on a busy night. And it had to be at least yesterday when he came in since the girl was snatched this afternoon. Maybe he sat at a table, and she was the only one who really took any notice of him.”
“In other words,” Callahan translated succinctly, “no one recognizes Browne’s picture.”
“Nobody has to!” Collins stressed. “He had no classes at the time she was snatched. No one can give him an alibi during the time she was snuffed. No one saw him from the time the girl disappeared to the time you broke into the basement. And there she was, in the middle of the goddamn floor, for Chrissakes! What more could you want?”
Harry wasn’t sure, but he still felt something was missing. And Collins’ flippant attitude was irritating the hell out of him. He sized the detective up. “You always this callous?”
Collins was unaffected. “Only when it’s this open and shut,” he admitted happily. “Face it, Harry, we’ve got our man. All we have to do now is arrest him.”
“All you have to do now is find him.”
“With a .44-caliber wound in his shoulder and every cop in the city looking, how far could he go?”
“That’s what I thought when I first shot him,” Harry reminded him.
“Yeah,” Collins concurred, coming down from his high a little bit. “Too bad you lost him.”
“Yeah,” Harry drawled back. “Has any cop in the city found Christine Sherman yet?”
“Your point,” Collins conceded. “No, we haven’t found her yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”
“The only problem with that is,” Harry lectured, “that it’s only a matter of time before Browne finds her, too.”
“OK, OK, Inspector,” Collins gave in, throwing up his hands. “Ease up on this voice of conscience, will you? I just thought you’d like to tag along and see the Boston PD at work.”
Harry leaned up against the Volvo. “It looks like I’m doing all their work for them.” He closed his eyes.
“Yeah,” Collins laughed. “Right. Speaking of that, Inspector, now that we’re alone . . . I thought you might also like to discuss the possible ramifications of the Browne collar.”
Callahan opened one eye to see a smiling, expectant black face in front of him. “You’re sure blowing a mighty loud horn for a man who hasn’t booked the suspect yet.”
Collins’ suave, worldly façade suddenly fell away to reveal a man totally filled with vengeful joy. “Don’t you get it, Harry? I was right! All along I had it all over those pompous lily-asses upstairs, and still they took me off the case. But you proved me right! You caught Browne with his pants down.
“Now this is a noteworthy occasion. This is an important bust for me. But never let it be said that Christopher Collins did not give credit where credit is due. So let’s deal, Inspector. What do you want the arrest report to say?”
Harry could no longer keep his amazement to himself. “You get me out of bed at eleven o’clock at night to bring me to some garage graveyard to discuss credit? Whose name goes above the title?”
“Hey, fair is fair,” Collins said appeasingly. “I was only trying to be honest about the whole thing, Inspector. I don’t know about the SFPD, but there’s still a nigger problem here, Mr. Man. Most of the Boston force comes from Southie, otherwise known as South Boston. You may have heard of it. They’re the ones who were overturning the school buses full of black children a couple of years ago. I’ve got to grab hold of every opportunity I can. And this Browne thing is the biggest!”
“Look,” said Harry, sighing. “Browne is still at large. Sherman is still missing. There are five kids, five goddamn kids and one mother-fucking cat dead, and you want to divvy up the Brownie points?”
Collins backed off. “Hey, look, Inspector, I didn’t mean to trample on your sensitivity, but I don’t get it. You’ve blown away more people than that in any given month! You killed your own superior officer once.”
“He deserved it,” Harry said flatly. “These are kids. Morrisson and Browne. Tim Marchelli, the kid who Browne sicced on me. They’re almost teenagers, for Chrissakes.”
“Teenagers who raped and murdered,” Collins reminded him.
“That isn’t proven,” Harry shot back.
“What do you want then?” Collins demanded hotly. “A directive from God? What has gotten into you on this case, Callahan?”
Harry didn’t answer. He had lost interest in the entire conversation. “I don’t know,” he finally said, his voice holding more weariness than he had ever heard from it before. “Something’s wrong.” He got up and moved toward the exit, leaving the last vestige of Cathy Bryant behind. “I’ll tell you when I find it.”
Harry put his hands in his pockets as he went out into the Brookline Street. A sign said Huntington Avenue. Harry moved due east. It was close to midnight on a Tuesday evening, but the streets were still pretty busy. By the time Harry reached Northeastern University and Symphony Hall, things had quieted down a lot. It was another miserable section of the city—one of Boston’s few. Although the concert center was grandly designed, it sat in the middle of a corroding slum. The rolling, buckling streets were littered with cans, glass, and McDonald’s wrappers.
Harry turned left and went up Massachusetts Avenue. He knew if he kept walking north along that road, he would cross the Charles River into Cambridge, home of M.I.T. and Harvard. Harry didn’t go that far. As he passed a squat apartment building on the left, an incredibly majestic, incredibly large building rose on his right.
It was a magnificent cathedral, flanked by a marble, monolithic building, all built around a huge, flat reflection pool. The complex seemed dropped in. It was an oasis of architectual magnificence in a section of abject poverty.
That was Boston all over, Callahan thought as he traversed the beautifully built square. On the surface, it was clean, calm, and serene. The many colleges rolled on and the many stores existed off the students. It was a university town made up of over two hundred educational facilities. But just under the surface, corruption bubbled. There were dank, evil things that waited in pockets of gloom all over the city. Waiting. Just waiting for someone to take the wrong step.
Beyond the religious-looking square, things got better, and Harry’s mood lifted somewhat. He walked up the back stairs to the Prudential Building, once the highest skyscraper in Boston. He walked around the closed-up building, which looked like a giant three-dimensional computer card, into another square built at the front.
By then, the city seemed devoid of life. There was a statue of a muscular God in front of Harry as he looked out to see a sign that identified the road in front of the insurance building as Tremont Street. Callahan may have imagined that Boston was a subtly insidious city, but it was also a close-knit one. He had walked almost to the intersection where Collins had driven him that first morning.
As he thought of Collins, he saw two uniformed policemen walking below him. They were chatting pleasantly, secure in the knowledge that the beat was at its daily quietest. He heard the men talking.
“The Pru is still here,” said a baby-faced one.
“Hey, you ever been to the restaurant on the top floor?” asked his partner, a man with a mustache.
“Yeah. Took my wife there once.”
“You know what they call it?”
“Sure. Top of the Pru. Why?”
“Well,” said the mustached cop. “They were thinking of building a restaurant just like it in that new insurance
building down the street.”
“What, the Hancock Building?” asked Baby-face incredulously. “They only built that to be taller than this one. And it hasn’t settled yet!”
“Still. They want to open a restaurant on the very last floor. And you know what they’re calling it?”
Both men said it at once. “The Top of the Cock!” The mustached one cracked up. The baby-faced one smirked and nodded his head. He had heard it before.
Harry hadn’t. He grinned, as much at the rotten joke as at the pair’s comaraderie. They had moved past the statue and the fountain in front of it to walk through a splash of light coming through a storefront that Harry couldn’t see.
As he watched, Baby-face slapped Mustache’s arm. The two looked in through the window out of Harry’s sight line. Then they went for their guns and ran forward.
The window blew outward, taking Mustache with it. Harry saw it just before he heard the familiar boom of a sawed-off shotgun. The mustached cop went down on the wide sidewalk among hundreds of spinning glass globes. He landed on his back and blood squished out onto the pavement around his torso in a halo effect. His gun clattered across the concrete and dropped off the curb.
Baby-face was returning fire even before his dead partner’s gun had hit the street. He ducked just before there was another boom. Harry was taking the steps down to the street three at a time. He wrenched out the Magnum as the baby-faced cop tried to run for cover. A car screeched around the closest corner and jumped the curb. It barreled right for Baby-face, smashing aside a row of shopping carts and a bicycle rack as it went. The cop emptied his service revolver at the oncoming leviathon, but his .38 bullets didn’t even slow it down.
Callahan strode out onto the wide walkway ten feet behind the petrified cop. With one quick shot he blew out the big car’s front left tire.
Baby-face didn’t hear the roar of Harry’s cannon. All he knew was that the auto had suddenly lifted up on one side and was swerving away from him. But the danger wasn’t over. The vehicle was still barreling while turning increasingly sideways. The cop ran to the right and threw himself forward just as the rear of the car swung by him. Harry saw the rear bumper skim the small of Baby-face’s back.
Then the car turned completely around and screeched to a halt, facing in the opposite direction. The lone driver screamed out his side and started shooting out the passenger window at the crouching cop.
“Come on!” the driver screeched. “Let’s go!”
No one had seen Harry yet. He ran out even farther from the building’s side to see the shattered storefront of a twenty-four-hour Star Market. Inside were two men hauling money-filled cases and several employees as well as patrons lying on the tile floors.
Baby-face was caught in a cross fire. He was out in the middle of the sidewalk with an empty gun while the crooks inside the store were shooting at him and the driver was pumping lead through the car’s side window.
Harry shot the driver in the back of the head through the rear window just as the man stepped on the gas again. The .44 slug ripped through the heavy car glass and drilled into the driver’s head. The front of the man’s face came off and spread across the front windshield. His leg muscles spasmed, pushing the accelerator to the floor.
The car sped forward, the flat tire dragging it sideways again, half-off and half-on the sidewalk. It slammed broadside against a newspaper machine, caught the undersides of two side tires then started flipping down the street. It barrel-rolled five times before crashing into a line of parked cars. It flipped high over them, its hood and trunk flapping open, then came down on its roof, crushing the two vehicles beneath it. The night was cracked by the splitting whump of four more tires exploding out.
The baby-faced cop looked down the street at the devastated cars. He should have been looking behind him. As Harry ran around to the front of the store, one of the ski-masked men inside shot Baby-face in the back. Harry shot the robber back. The cop fell forward, his eyes still open. The robber flew backward, his arms flailing in the air, his .45 Army automatic flying into the fresh fruit department.
The last man ripped off his ski mask to get a clear look at what was going on. He followed his fellow robber’s trajectory as the already dead crook arced over a bagging table and fell on top of a cash register. The machine rang and the money drawer popped out.
The man shot wildly out the front window at the fast-moving, shadowy form and ran toward the back of the store. Harry came into the light and leaped through the shotgun-shattered front window, the Magnum smoking. He jumped up on one of the cashier counters and followed the last robber into the body of the store.
He ran across the front of the aisles to locate his quarry. He caught him speeding down aisle seven. He aimed and fired the .44 just as the man threw himself across the meat counter that stretched all the way across the rear wall. Harry’s slug dug into a shoulder roast, sending out little hunks of plastic and raw meat.
The robber popped up from behind the counter and sprayed the aisle with .45 rounds. Bottles of grapefruit, grape, orange, and apple juice exploded out, and liquid bled across the rows. Harry threw himself against a stack of Saltines, still moving into aisle six. He ran all the way down to the side of the store and the bread department where the meat counter in the back ended. The robber couldn’t get a bead on him there.
He ran to the rear of the store just in time to see the last man pushing through two swinging doors into the refrigerated meat section of the market. Harry vaulted the meat counter and went after him. The man spun with his back against the conveyor belt which brought the cut, wrapped, and marked meat out to the counter. Both men’s breath appeared as frosty clouds in front of their faces. Harry’s face was misting. The robber’s face was pumping out clouds of white fog.
He pulled up his automatic on a level with Harry’s chest. Harry brought up his own gun. The robber, at the same time, tried to steady himself with his other hand. A mistake. He put his palm on the red-hot machine that seals plastic wrap around meat. His skin was melted instantly. He screamed in pain, his other arm jerked and the Army automatic boomed.
Harry shot at the same time. Cooly, steadily, with two hands. The robber’s bullet whined off the concrete ceiling and metal supports. Harry’s lead punched into the man’s chest just under his neck.
His torso was thrown back, his feet slid across the icy floor and swung up. His hand remained seared to the plastic-stapler machine. The robber landed heavily on the conveyor belt, the stench of burning flesh beginning to fill the air. The .45 rolled out through a flapping door and onto the meat counter.
Harry approached slowly. Blood was soaking through the man’s jacket as the belt tried to bring him outside, but his stuck hand was making him stay. He looked at Callahan through drooping eyelids. There was a flash of recognition.
“Cops,” the robber said disgustedly. “They’re never what they seem.” Then he died.
Harry pried the man’s hand off the plastic-sealer and dropped the corpse on the meat-packing floor. If the cops didn’t find him, the store butchers would know what to do with him later in the morning.
Harry was brought into the manager’s office by a grateful cashier. He called the police and asked for Collins.
“Come over to the Star Market on Tremont,” Harry suggested when the detective came on. “Now I have a mess for you to clean up.”
It was almost four-thirty in the morning before Harry got back to the Holiday Inn. He was lucky. If Collins hadn’t been there to pave the way for his quick release, it would have been questions, forms, and detention until at least Wednesday afternoon. As it was, Harry did a swan dive onto the hotel room’s bed and slept until ten.
They say that murderers have nightmares. They say that people who are twisted and sick often have subconsciouses that run wild while they sleep. Many say that is a reason that all the weirdos prowl the night. They don’t want to sleep. They don’t want to look at themselves.
They say that killers don’
t have nightmares. They might dream about this or that, but their visions don’t dredge up horrible scenes of gore. They say it is because the people who deliberately kill know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. They are not expending personal desires or fulfilling a blood lust. If they must kill, they do, and it doesn’t fester.
Callahan didn’t dream. There were no visions of melting hands or bleeding strippers or Christine’s pleading face at the bottom of a well filled with blood. These visions tickled Harry’s mind when he awoke, not when he was safe at rest.
First thing he did was call room service. He ordered parts of nearly every breakfast. He knew it would take a while, so he showered, shaved, changed into a brown suit, and called Collins.
“Nothing to report, O Lord High Executioner,” the black man cracked, referring to Harry’s shooting spree of the previous night. Nowhere in Collins’ voice was there any evidence of the tense talk they had had in the Brookline parking garage. Callahan suddenly remembered the last robber’s last words. “Cops are never what they seem.”
Emptying his mind of memories for the moment, Harry heard that Browne had not been run to ground yet, that the Sherman girl had not been seen, and that otherwise everything was all right with God and country. Harry hung up. Everything might be right in Collins’ world, he thought, but the sword still hung over the Donovan family.
Harry had to push things along. He had to be sure of what Shanna was and who’s side she was on. Was she an innocent bystander, a possible victim, or a knowing accomplice? There was a knock on the door. Callahan decided not to find out until after breakfast.
Ten hours after Harry had hit the sack, he was hitting the road again. The sky was getting a bit bleak—gray clouds wisping overhead—but Harry liked it that way. The cloud cover brought out the other colors of the city all the more forcefully. Everything was sharp and outlined against the dull background tapestry. There was a comfortable feeling of moisture in the air that wasn’t clammy but crisp.