by Dane Hartman
He stopped halfway around and slowly returned to his previous stance. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye as he was turning. It was something unusual happening on the lighted boat. Just as Harry was turning, a blond man with a mustache had clubbed a chubby, dark-haired man on the deck. As he looked back, he could just make out a cut-off high-pitched scream over the thumping rock music. If he had not seen the man get hit up top, he would have assumed the screech was part of the music. Instead, he stood by the van and paid careful attention to the rocking, lit-up yacht.
The blond man with the mustache looked down at the man he had just slugged. The guy was facedown on the highly polished deck, a small pool of blood forming under his face. He must have broken his nose when he fell flat on the deck, the blond figured. There was also a stream of blood oozing from the cut on his scalp where the blond had hit him with the butt of his Colt .45 automatic.
Smugly satisfied that the chubby troublemaker would be out for some time to come, the blond told an aide to keep watch and casually went below deck. In the main cabin he found the group as he left them. Two men were beating the young “captain” of the ship while the third had his girlfriend. The captain looked to be in his early thirties and would have been rakishly good-looking if not for all the bruises and cuts the beating duo had splashed his face with. He was rocking back and forth on his wheeled desk chair as the two men took turns punching him with their fists and handguns.
The girl was a streaked blond in her middle twenties who filled out a one-piece bathing suit admirably. Her captor had her left arm wrenched high up her back and kept his other arm locked around her windpipe. She struggled, choked, and mewed to the delight of her attacker.
“That’s enough,” said the blond with the .45, holding it up. “For the moment.” The two men beating the yacht’s owner immediately stopped and pressed the man’s arms to the arms of his chair, which were already cruelly bound there with strands of his own clothing. The blond leaned into the bleeding, purple, puffy face of the tortured captain.
“Now I told you before,” he said quietly, “before we were so rudely interrupted by your ‘first mate,’ that you’re carrying a load for me. You picked it up in the Caribbean and hid it aboard ship. I want to know where it is.”
“And I’ve told you,” the beaten man breathed through swollen, cracked lips, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The blond swung the .45 across the captain’s jaw in a vicious arc. The resulting sound was so sharp and painful even to hear that the girl gasped in shock. Somehow, the captain managed to remain conscious although he moaned and cried.
“All right,” he finally managed to gasp. “But it isn’t yours. I swore to my father that I wouldn’t . . .”
The blond interrupted him by shoving the barrel of the .45 into his mouth, cracking three teeth in the process.
“Look,” he said. “This could be a little easier or a lot harder. You can tell us where the stuff is or you can watch us gang rape your girlfriend before I blow off the back of your head and we pull this fucking boat apart. Now what is it going to be?”
Tears streamed out of the captain’s eyes, while blood streamed out of his mouth and around the dark automatic barrel. He couldn’t make words around the obstruction of the gun, but finally he shook his head from side to side.
“All right, asshole,” said the blond. He turned to his fellows. “Let’s go, boys,” he continued. “It’s party time.”
The blond took the gun out of the captain’s mouth just as the girl was thrown to the floor, and the three men set upon her like wolves on a banquet.
“Stop it!” the captain yelled. “Stop it! It’s in the hold. It’s in a space between the wall and the hull. Now please, stop it.”
The blond was satisfied. He pulled a kerchief out of his back pocket and stuffed it in the captain’s ruined mouth. He turned to the pile of people on the floor who seemed to have no intention of stopping.
“Come on,” hissed the blond. “That’s enough. We’ve got to get the stuff and get out of here. Tie her up and gag her, then get into the hold and get working. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
One of the men looked up as the other two began binding the girl with wire and tape. “I’m not going to make it with some corpse!” he complained. “Aren’t we supposed to kill these guys?”
“Of course, stupid!” said the blond. “But not here. We’ve got to put them someplace where they’ll never be found. Hurry up.”
The blond turned toward the door as the three men wrestled the girl onto the daybed, her wrists already bound behind her. The blond climbed the ladder to the deck and called to the lookout he had stationed there. “Bring the van down, would ya? We’ve got to load up now.”
The guard turned, nodded, then headed off down the wide wharf to their dark, empty vehicle. He slipped into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine, and slowly drove the van to the calmly bobbing boat. He parked it in such a way that its rear doors faced the yacht door leading below deck. Inside, the four men were ripping out the inside wall to find brick after brick of hashish and marijuana. Outside, the lookout got out of the van and opened the back doors in anticipation.
Under the van, Harry Callahan loosened his grip on the hot undercarriage of the vehicle and silently lowered himself to the wharf. With the guard surveying the scene on deck there was no way he could sneak down the pier. So, he crawled under the van as the guy approached and let him unknowingly chauffeur him to the scene of the crime.
It only took an hour to load the relatively small amount of drugs into the van under the cover of night, but even that amount was worth a fortune on the street. While they worked, Harry patiently calculated the opposition. Unless one was on guard with the hostages below deck, there were five guys—all young, all armed with high-powered handguns. In addition to the blond leader and the sandy-haired lookout man, there was a brown-haired guy, a balding man with a mustache, and a black-haired man with a beard. All very able-looking and all readily identifiable. Harry pulled the Magnum out of his holster with hardly a sound.
“Right on schedule,” said the blond man. “The restaurant owners’ll be showing up here to get their fish for the day pretty soon. So let’s get the others and get out of here.”
Harry knew a cue when he heard one. He had to break up the modern-day pirates before they got the cover of innocent bystanders. He looked between his feet out the rear of the van. Four of the men were already wandering in an uncertain formation back toward the boat. He looked over his shoulder. One man was staying by the van, next to the driver’s side. Harry saw no way he could get out from under so that he’d have the drop on all of them. And he sincerely doubted that they would take kindly to a homicide inspector who suddenly slithered into their midst.
But he couldn’t just roll out and start shooting. He had no evidence that these smugglers were any worse than roughnecks looking to get rich quick on the ultimate high. From his vantage point at the end of the pier, he couldn’t see inside the boat and after the first scream, he didn’t hear anything more over the rock music. Harry would have to let the five smugglers name the tune he would play.
Harry slid to his right, pulling his body until it was completely clear of the van’s underside. He pushed his .44 out in front of him, pointing it at the men trudging toward the yacht.
“Police!” he shouted. “Freeze.”
As Harry expected, the name of the game suddenly became “kill the cop,” then “cut and run.” The quartet reacted to his voice like a flock of nuns meeting Jack the Ripper. Two raced at the yacht. Two others dived back for the other side of the van. All four started blasting at the spot they thought they heard the voice come from. Their only mistake was that they thought he would be standing. The bullets whipped over Harry’s head as he shot the two men stampeding toward the yacht one after the other.
His first slug hit the balding man at the crown of his head. The flesh erupted and the skull cracked with t
he sound a coconut makes when it is torn open. The corpse jumped into the air and fell facefirst on the disembarking platform. The second slug caught the bearded man high up his back, sending him colliding with the yacht’s side. He slid down the wall to get caught between a pylon and the hull. The boat rocked on the water, crushing him like a hydraulic compressor.
Harry rolled to his feet just in time to see the lookout man lean around the front windshield with his gun aimed. He jumped back to the cover of the van as the lookout’s shot grazed his ear. He pointed the .44 at the dark blue siding of the vehicle and pulled his cannon’s trigger. The big gun bucked and the bullet passed through the first metal wall across the drugs, diagonally through the front windshield and into the side of the lookout’s head, just in front of his ear. The man swung around as if he had just been punched by a combination of Ali, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano. He unconsciously threw his gun off the opposite side of the wharf, where Harry heard it clatter instead of splash.
Harry raced to the other side of the van around the front to see the brown-haired man running toward the wharf edge away from him.
“Hold it!” shouted the cop, putting his gun out in a classic position—both hands wrapped around the butt, his feet planted wide.
The man responded by leaping off the wharf. A second later, bullets began erupting up from underneath, right through the wharf’s planking. Callahan didn’t wait around for the brown-haired guy to get lucky. He ran to the other side of the pier, where the lookout had inadvertently thrown his gun. He jumped too, landing feet first in a small dinghy, tied to one of the pylons.
The brown-haired guy was across from him, stradling another row boat. He fired at Harry. The bullet ricocheted off the pylon. Harry’s body rocked with the small boat, but his firing arm remained rock steady. He shot the guy in the heart. The guy flew back as if pulled by a wire and did a backward belly flop into the bay.
Harry heard the van’s engine roar into life above him. Doing a quick mental inventory, he figured it had to be the blond leader trying to get away with the goods. As Harry remembered it, the blond must have pulled open the side door and jumped in when the cop had come around the other side of the vehicle. Then, when the brunette was holding Harry’s attention, the blond slid into the front seat and got cracking.
Harry looked up. He wouldn’t be able to climb back up onto the pier in time to stop the van. He looked to his right and jumped. He caught onto the hull of an adjoining sailboat and pulled himself aboard. He raced across its bow and jumped onto the front of a cabin cruiser next door. From that elevated height, he leaped back onto the pier just as the van was roaring by.
Callahan got a glimpse of the blond driver through the passenger’s window just as he thrust the Magnum out and pulled the trigger. Just before the scene sped past, Harry saw a glassy spider web grow out in a radius from the blond’s ear. Taking no chances, Harry then fell to one knee, and with his last round, blew out the left rear tire.
The vehicle swerved crazily across the length of the pier, its front tires caught sideways on the planking, and then the van leaped, spinning, up into the air. It turned over one and a half times before scraping across the pier and leaping again. This time it landed half off the right side of the wharf. It twisted, a metal howl filling the night air, and then catapulted itself off the pier and against the dockside.
The van slammed against the reinforced land fill, then slid down into the water with a steaming hiss. It bobbed up to the surface afterward, a twisted, dead metal boat floating next to a cabin cruiser.
Harry slowly walked over to the scene, surveying the water for any survivors. He could see water bubbling into the van’s cab from the big .44 bullet hole in the passenger’s window. Beyond that he could see floating white pieces of cloth, floating hunks of green and gray plants and a few strands of red-flecked blond hair.
Callahan lowered his gun and was about to go check out the yacht when he heard his car radio crackling in the distance. He went back to his parked vehicle at a flat run. He made it just before dispatch signed off.
“Inspector seventy-one,” he said into the mike, stretching it out the driver’s window.
“Hey, Harry,” came the voice of Sergeant O’Neill, who was handling the early morning calls. “We got something on that van you were looking for. A vehicle answering its description was found abandoned.”
“Where?” Harry asked, breathing heavily.
“Chinatown,” was the one-word answer.
C H A P T E R
T h r e e
The captain and his girl were extremely grateful. In return for untying them and promising police protection, the beaten young man gave Harry the run of the ship. As the shaken girl tended to her lover’s wounds with a first-aid kit, Harry quickly rummaged through their sleeping quarters. Although the “captain” was shorter and slimmer than he, Callahan managed to find a brown corduroy jacket with black suede patches over the elbows which fit him. Maybe it was owned by the young man’s father, whom the captain kept babbling about.
The pair had just returned from a two-week vacation after picking up a shipment of wrapped goods for the man’s father—which had been secreted in the hull as per the pater’s instructions. Given the contents of those wrappings, Harry hoped the jacket was the captain’s dad. He wouldn’t be needing it for a long time. Harry emerged, the .44 Magnum stuck in his belt.
“You’ll be all right?” he asked the pair—the girl kneeling and dabbing the battered face of the seated young man.
The girl, looking little the worse for wear, nodded. “We’ll be ok now. Thanks to you. Those men were going to kill us.”
Harry thought about the five young corpses littered all over the east basin. “That’s nice to know,” he said under his breath. “I’ll get some uniformed men down here fast. Don’t go anywhere, all right?”
The girl nodded again. The man moaned. Harry went above deck, jumped off the yacht and trotted back up to his car. As he reached the throng of curious onlookers, two patrolmen were already working their way through the throng from the other side.
“I’m Inspector Callahan of the homicide office,” Harry told them as they broke on through. “There’s two witnesses in the yacht with the lights on, two D.O.A.’s on the pier and three more in the water. The corpses were pirates.”
“Christ!” the first officer breathed, seeing the blood on the planking and the crumpled van in the water. “You got any idea what killed them?”
“I did,” Callahan said, moving toward his car.
“Shit!” he heard the second man call after him. “You must be Dirty Harry!”
He did not deign to reply to the correct guess. Nowadays it seemed as if he needed only to wave his gun and not his badge for identification. Leaving the messy scene to the rest of Frisco’s finest, Harry pushed his auto into gear and shot off toward Chinatown. He took Jefferson to Hyde to Beach and then onto Columbus, which led him right to the east side of the Oriental center.
The streets were relatively clear, given that it was four-thirty in the morning. There was a bit more activity outside the Chinatown Wax Museum on Grant and California streets. As soon as he got into visual range, his car was stopped by some officers manning a police barricade. Harry saw the van parked in front of the museum, but he had to spend ten minutes convincing the boys in blue that he was one of them. His wallet, badge, and driver’s license were back in his apartment, along with his jacket and speed loaders.
Finally, it got to the point that the patrolmen weren’t sure whether to arrest him for carrying a cannon without proper I.D., driving without a license, or going on police business without a shield. Instead of doing any of these, they let him through. As they rationalized later, anyone looking like Harry who carried a .44 Magnum had to be either a cop or a very curious gunfighter.
Callahan approached the scene slowly, the hanging lanterns giving the misty street a wet glow in the early morning light. Sudden flashes of red and blue danced across his face from the
silent, spinning turrets of the cop cars. The whole scene disquieted Harry. There were much too many officers at the scene to make it just an ordinary abandoned car. He got the sinking feeling that Suni might have been abandoned with the vehicle—both lifeless.
Cops were crawling all over the van and the museum entrance. As Harry grew near, the van’s back doors suddenly flew open. The cop was taken by surprise, freezing in his tracks. He relaxed when he realized that the van was empty and dry, while the men bursting out were fingerprint specialists.
As soon as he assimilated this, the doors of the museum swung wide and two teams of paramedics wheeled out two covered bodies. Harry moved away from the van to catch the people just before they hauled the corpses into the waiting ambulance. Harry placed a hand on the first paramedic’s shoulder.
“What have you got?” he asked blandly, his stomach boiling.
“Two Orientals,” the medico replied. “A boy and a girl. The male had enough lead in him to make a set of barbells. As near as I can tell, the girl was raped and suffocated.”
Harry pulled back the first sheet. What used to be a young Chinese face looked back up at him. Miraculously, the eyes were open and untouched. But the rest of the face looked like moldy red apple sauce. Someone had done a dance on this boy’s face with a machine gun. Harry waved that one on, and had the second sheet-covered body served to him like a picky gourmet at a royal meal.
He pictured Suni’s face underneath the covering and then pulled the sheet back. His fantasy and what he saw did not match. This was a young Chinese girl, whose normally pretty features were distorted by purple mounds of puffed-up skin. As if someone had inserted an air pump into her head.
The sight of the viciously murdered girl did a strange thing to Harry. Before he took the sheet off her face, he felt his tensed muscles loosen in fear, his eyes cloud in resignation, and his brain go slightly soggy with regret. As soon as he saw the young Chinese whom he didn’t recognize, however, the adrenaline started throbbing through his veins once again. It wasn’t over yet. Suni was still around somewhere. And hopefully, she was still alive.