by Dane Hartman
They stood facing each other in the very center of the dim exhibit hall, with the motionless wax bodies of history’s unfortunates all around them. Their increasingly harried conversation was halted by a third voice reaching their ears.
“Tell her why,” said the voice.
Jay was frozen in place. Angela gasped in surprise, her head looking in every possible direction.
“Tell her why,” the voice repeated, “tonight was the last time.”
As the words, spoken in accented English, echoed throughout the hall, Angela saw a shadow detach itself from one of the exhibits. Then Jay grabbed her hand and ran madly for the exit. Another shadow appeared in front of that. Jay immediately turned toward the lobby. Another human shape stood between the brightly illuminated foyer and the dim museum interior. They were boxed in, with the Chinese laundrymen and Empress Tzu Hsi on either side, staring with waxen pity.
Jay stumbled back, then wrapped his arms protectively around the girl.
‘Go on,” said the shadow next to the exhibit. “Tell her.” The hall was filled with silence for a moment. “If you don’t, I will.” Jay still refused to say anything. A frightened Angela looked from his face to the shadowy figure over her shoulder. “All right,” said that figure. “Tonight was his last night at his uncle’s because the gambling parlor is no more. They are all dead.”
Angela gasped again. “Is this true?” she whispered pleadingly up into Jay’s face.
“They ought to know,” Jay said angrily, holding her closer. “They killed them.”
Angela looked in each direction as the shadows began to approach slowly. She was building up to a scream until she saw their weapons emerge before them in the little pools of museum light. The blue steel of their automatic weapons seemed to glow in the eerie illumination. Their bodies and facial features took shape immediately after. They were Japanese—the same three Japanese who had tried to kill Jay before.
“Nihonmachi,” Angela breathed in amazement.
“What are you doing here?” Jay asked rather stolidly. “How did you get in?”
“We knew your girlfriend’s name,” said the VZ man, coming closer from his hiding place behind the exhibit. “We knew where she worked. We knew all we needed to know about you.”
“What do you want?” Angela demanded.
“Not to talk,” said a harsh voice behind her. Both Chinese spun their heads as the MAC man behind them violently pulled the girl out of Jay’s grip. The young Chinese reacted instinctively, for the last time. He lashed out quickly with the heel of his hand, catching the Japanese on the side of his nose. If the blow had landed straight, the man’s nose would have been broken at best—and his nasal cartilage would have been driven into his brain, killing him, at worst.
Instead, the hit snapped the MAC man’s head around, sending him back but not knocking him over. He maintained his grip on the girl, though, pulling her farther away from the Chinese boy. The Japanese with the Uzi needed no more encouragement. Almost as soon as Jay had struck, letting loose a karate-inspired yell, the Uzi user spread his stance and pulled the Israeli weapon tight against his hip.
One burst of four bullets raced up Jay’s torso. One bullet thwacked into his side just above his belt. The second split open the side of his shirt and drove itself into the top of his stomach. The third burrowed into his armpit, tearing apart a lung. The fourth smacked into his neck, just below his jawbone.
Angela managed one thin, shocked, screech before the MAC man found his footing and shoved his free hand over her mouth. He jammed the MAC barrel under her chin in an additional effort to keep her mouth closed. She reared in his clutches, burbling madly behind his hand, tears streaming out of her eyes.
Jay Kuong Chien stood stock still for a moment, refusing to allow the bullets to move him, until he realized that he was dead. His mind knew it before he would accept it. Even then, he inwardly demanded his body to take vengeance on his killer. With a sudden, spasmodic move, his body whipped around to face the Uzi user.
The Japanese was unimpressed. He simply shot Jay again, point-blank, in the face and chest. The Chinese fell back, landing like a dropped board. The noise of the chattering Uzi reverberated among the wax exhibits, then disappeared—the only sound then being Angela’s renewed, muffled horror. She twisted and shook in the MAC man’s grip, her eyes wide and staring at Jay’s motionless and bloody body. He looked back at her, his eyes as wide and empty as the wax men around him. “Fight now, Bruce Lee,” the Uzi user said derisively.
Angela twisted away from the sight, clawing at the MAC man’s arms like a trapped cheetah. She bit and scratched at his flesh until he had to throw the MAC down to get a better grip on her. Angela pulled his mucous-covered hand off her mouth. His arm then settled around her neck. She gasped, cried, and moaned as his other arm clamped around her middle. As they had for the last few seconds, the two struggling figures moved like a toy ostrich drinking from a glass of water. They would bob forward under the weight of Angela’s struggles, and then the Japanese’s strength would pull her back, her feet kicking off the ground.
“Come on,” the MAC man hissed. “Help me with her, would you?”
The Uzi user moved forward immediately. The man with the VZ stood in place in front of Empress Hsi. The Japanese using the Israeli weapon slung it on his back and grabbed the girl’s hands. Together they pulled her down to the floor. When she realized what they were going to do, she tried screaming again, but once her back was flat on the floor, the MAC man’s hand was over her mouth again. The three other Japanese hands were occupied elsewhere on her body.
“All right,” the VZ man said indifferently in Japanese. “You got your revenge, and you got your innocent bystander. Let’s get on to the main attraction of the night.” He still stood in place.
“There’s time,” the MAC man said in Japanese, ripping at the girl’s skirt while pushing down on her lips and teeth all the harder. “We won’t be able to do this with the other one.” And the MAC man didn’t mean the corpse of Jay Kuong Chien. He meant the person they had been instructed to kidnap after wiping out the gambling shop.
“No,” the Uzi user agreed. “The other one is of our kind. Japanese. You know we are not supposed to soil her.” So saying, he tore open Angela’s shirt.
All right,” the VZ man said again. “But hurry up. We should kill this one and get the other one soon. Let’s get home before midnight.”
So the Japanese stood as a guard with his Czech weapon held loosely while the other two young men took turns raping the Chinese tour guide. The last thing she saw through blurred eyes before merciful unconsiousness came was Little Pete—the hatchet man—writhing in the barber chair.
C H A P T E R
T w o
Inspector Harry Callahan got home before midnight. He pulled his long-suffering used car off the sloping street and down the driveway to the one-floor garage under the ancient mansion. As usual, there was a thin space between the Toyota and Pinto in front of the section of wall with the faded stencil painting of the cop’s name.
It wasn’t always like that. When a Cadillac first moved in across the floor, the owner had taken delight in parking his monster across Harry’s and the Toyota’s space. Harry had removed a small, but extremely important part of the Caddy’s drive mechanism and left a note on the windshield saying the Caddy owner could retrieve it only after pushing the car to its rightful place across the way.
The next morning, the Caddy owner came stomping and snorting up to Harry’s third-floor apartment—which the cop had so graciously noted on the windshield message—only to be faced with all six feet and some odd inches of Harry’s rock-hard body and coarse, weathered face.
The Caddy owner suddenly forgot what he had planned to say, swallowed once, and then uttered these four words. “I’ll move the car.” Harry hadn’t had any trouble since. The dependable, consistent San Fran homicide cop slipped his old car between the two compacts with just inches to spare on either side. He cou
ld only get his door half-open to squeeze his strong frame outside.
Standing wedged between the two cars, his door scraping the outside of the Toyota’s side, Harry glanced at the faded, chipped name on the wall in front of him. “Calahan.” It had been spelled wrong from the very first day, so every time he got a notice from the landlord about a raise in rent—which seemed like every six months—it was addressed to “Harold Calahan.” And no matter how clearly he signed his checks “Harry Callahan,” the situation never changed.
Harry took this minor cosmic aggravation in the same stride that he took the dozens of killings he had to investigate week after week. Some things were facts of life for him—like misspelling and murder. It was something he decided to live with, and he did what he could about it. Otherwise, it was nothing to get unduly concerned over. Enough truly terrible things had happened in his life to make him want to cherish the good things and ignore almost everything else.
He closed his car door, leaving it unlocked, and walked back the way the car had come. If anyone really wanted to steal the old wreck, they were welcome to it, Harry figured. The city would simply give him another one. The department had learned long ago that you didn’t give a new car to Inspector seventy-one. No, Inspector seventy-one had a bad habit of putting the car between him and a lot of bullets. Harry always got the cars the city had already written off.
Harry climbed up the driveway to set foot on the sidewalk outside his apartment building. The area wasn’t brilliantly lit by the street lights, but it was clear enough to see almost all the way down the block in either direction. The rest of the street’s dwellings were like his; delapidated mansions which had seen better days, transformed into apartments. Some of them had even turned condo. Harry could hardly wait until the landlord informed “Harold Calahan” that the same thing was going to happen here. Harry’d be damned if he’d pay some absurd amount to buy a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom hardly big enough to sit up in.
The only life stirring on the left side of the street were the various rooms alight with images of Johnny Carson entertaining the masses. Off to his right, however, was one lone female figure coming toward him on the sidewalk. Even from all the way down the block, Harry recognized his first-floor neighbor, Suni Michelle. When they had first met, in 1973, she had just moved away from home and was calling herself Sunny.
At first, there had been only a sexual attraction. At the tender age of eighteen, she was already sexually experienced, coming on to him in the lobby of their building. She lived in the apartment behind the mailboxes, so when he was retrieving his bills one day she appeared and coyly said, “I’ve been living here for almost six months now. What does a girl have to do to go to bed with you?”
With almost equal subtlety, Harry replied, “Try knocking on the door.”
She did, that very night, and they did—both studiously ignoring the dusty, yellowing photo of Harry and a happy, pretty blond in a cheap frame that sat on the night stand next to the bed. It was no more than a one-night stand until Harry saved her life from a mailbox bomb that was meant for him.
After he cleaned up what was to be called the “Magnum Force” case—because he had broken up a ring of murdering vigilantes within the police force—he and the girl had let their defenses down a bit. She told him about her strict, emotionless Oriental upbringing which left her desperate for any kind of affection and he told her about his wife—killed by a drunk driver in an auto accident.
He watched her turn from a cock-teasing, self-possessed college girl to a self-assured businesswoman with a strong sense of her own worth. He watched her now, coming up the street. She was wearing a light, long dark jacket which seemed to blend into her hair—which was flecked with reddish highlights thanks to the bright California sun. Between the jacket’s lapels Harry could see a dark maroon V-necked leotard. Beneath the jacket’s hem Harry could see thick leg warmers from her thighs to her shins, ending up in two orange Frye boots.
She smiled when she saw him waiting for her and quickened her pace. As she drew near, he saw a thin sheen of sweat covering her skin between the leotard’s cloth. It made her upper chest glow and was extremely sexy somehow. From her perspiration, the way she was dressed, and the way she was breathing—deeply—Harry assumed she had just come from a late exercise class.
“Hello, Harry,” she said, slipping her fingers under the lapels of his brown tweed jacket. “Working late as always, I see.”
Harry nodded with a grin. “You too,” he said, making a point of staring at her outfit with appreciation.
Suni looked down at herself with a certain pride. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said throatily. She flipped open the bottom of her coat to let her whole right leg appear, showing Harry that she had on nothing but the leotard, sheer, almost sparkling pantyhose, and the thick leg warmers. A second later, she flipped the coat flap back in place. “You got a search warrant, copper?” she quipped.
“Probable cause,” Harry murmured. “That’s all I need.”
Suni laughed and gave him a quick kiss. “You got it,” she declared. “Come on.” Harry followed her hopping shape up the porch steps a little more slowly. She stopped at the door and waited a second for him. “Eaten?” she asked as she twisted the knob and pushed the heavy door in.
Harry had to think about it. His life was full of chili dogs and B.L.T. cheeseburgers caught at all hours. “No,” he finally decided. “You get the mail, I’ll get the door,” he said, reaching into his pocket.
Suni had a duplicate mailbox key for Harry’s apartment. He made a point of giving her one after the bomb incident as a kind of souvenir. At first, she was reticent to approach the box, but then Harry reminded her that “lightning never strikes twice in the same place.”
“Besides,” he added once she had put the copy key in the lock the second time, “now everybody’ll know that they’ll only kill a little girl if they try it again.” She chased him around her apartment after that little verbal trick. Now, almost a decade later, she pushed the key in without fear.
“Amazing,” she mused, pulling his crinkled letters out. “After all this time, you’re still getting the same stuff.”
Harry took the two envelopes she handed him as he held the plain inside door open with his body, and she retrieved her own stuff. “I’m not much for letter writing,” he grumbled, looking at the letters’ return addresses as she brushed past him. One was an annual pleading for his PAL dues and the other was an urgent request for money from the Handgun Control Organization in Washington.
Harry believed in every man’s right to bear arms, but he had personally killed so many of those arm bearers that the anti-handgun agency would get a hard-earned tener from Harry. Fuck the big-game hunters, Harry thought. Deers had rights too, as far as he was concerned.
“You want to go out to eat?” Suni asked, slipping the key into her apartment door lock.
“I don’t know,” Harry musingly answered, still looking at his two pieces of junk mail as if they were the latest issue of Playboy. “I’ll think about it.”
“You want to come in?” Suni asked in a softer, more personal tone. Harry stopped at the stairway and looked over at her. She stood, naturally provocative, a bit behind her open door. It was a blaringly open invitation.
For a second, Harry was drawn to it like a paper clip to a magnet. Then his famous self-control took over. “Then we’ll never get to eat,” he told her with a smile. “And if you say, ‘Depends on what you’re hungry for,’ I’ll take you across my knee.”
Suni frowned mockingly at the first part of his declaration, then cheered up at the second. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she promised. “I hope you’re not tired.”
“Just want to change,” Harry assured her. “I’ll be right down.”
“I’ll meet you halfway,” Suni compromised. “I’ve got some leftover takeout in the fridge. You got some beer?”
“Sure.”
“Tell you what, then. I’ll warm the food and
bring it up . . .” She paused momentarily, looking at the floor with a grin. Finally she could no longer contain herself. “Then I’ll do the same for you,” she said with a knowing exaggerated look that spoke volumes.
Harry brought his right forefinger up and waved it at her in an admonishing motion. “I warned you,” he said. “My knee will be waiting.” And then he couldn’t keep from adding, “among other things.”
She laughed and went inside her apartment as Harry turned to start the three-story climb to his place. On the way up, he thought about Suni. He was both father-confessor and lover to the woman. He was hardly around, but when he was, she told him things no one else knew. Harry probably knew more about the twenty-seven-year-old than her parents did. The one thing her parents had over him was knowledge of her real name. Sunny had become Suni, but Michelle had stayed the same. It was not a Japanese name, but the woman remained adamant about keeping it. Harry could understand why. From what she had told him about her absurdly strict, nearly hypocritical upbringing, it wasn’t surprising that she had renounced her past.
Harry unlocked his door and twisted the knob. Unconscious habit made him do this with one hand, leaving the other one free in case of emergency. His door swung in with an uneventful creak, revealing an almost octagonal room that gave new meaning to the word “quaint.” It was quaint the same way a slum could be called “rustic.” To the left of the door was a bureau. To the left of that was the bathroom door. To the left of that was a small refrigerator. To the left of that was a kitchenette so small the fridge had to be put in the living area.
To the left of that doorless doorway was the night table with his wife’s picture on it. To the left of that was the unmade bed. The covers might not be that great, but Harry had bought the best mattress and box spring that money could buy. The last thing he needed was back trouble or insomnia. Next to the bed was another table with a portable black-and-white TV on it. Behind that was a two-door closet. Next to that was the front door, and it all started over again.