Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death

by Dane Hartman

  Harry pretended to ring Turner’s bell. The Chinese man shook his head, then resumed his sweeping. Harry waited until the man finished and went inside.

  The door had been left open. In the gray light of the empty hallway, Harry noticed a set of stairs which he took up to Turner’s apartment. From a door opposite, rock music was blasting. The snap of the lock as Harry forced it, was scarcely audible with the music so loud.

  Rather than switch on a light and attract attention, Harry elected to use a flashlight. He needed little light to see it was a drab apartment consisting of three rooms, and cluttered to the rafters with newspapers, many of which had been clipped for specific articles, and magazines which lay in stacks along the walls. There was hardly room enough to move to the bathroom or to the bed which had been left unmade.

  Notebooks were piled on top of a table in the front room, and examining them, Harry assumed they were in Turner’s hand, and found they constituted an outline of a book he appeared to be writing. The book Turner envisioned, championed putting money in gold, silver, antiques, rugs, strategic metals, anything, in short, that wasn’t paper currency or bonds. A part of the book—and it seemed to be an enormously ambitious project—was to be devoted to the war that was sure to follow in the wake of the economic decline. Turner made it clear that survival was not only possible, but probable, so long as the reader followed his prescriptions.

  Harry was in the midst of perusing these notebooks, hoping to find the clue Turner might have left to identify himself, when the door behind him squeaked.

  It wasn’t much of a sound, and with the rumble of music coming from across the corridor, it virtually drowned it out. Nonetheless, the squeak was sharp and cutting, like chalk scratched across a blackboard. Harry felt it more than heard it. He glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing in the gloom.

  Maybe it was nothing. Still he doused his flashlight, dropping onto the floor while simultaneously extracting his gun.

  All at once, there was a concussive blast and the door disintegrated in dust and an explosion of fragments that scattered across the room like shrapnel.

  A light shone into the room. Harry couldn’t tell what sort of light it was, but it was enormously powerful, throwing everything into relief, like lightning.

  Harry was so dazzled by the light’s intensity, he could barely see to shoot. He rolled to the side as another gun blast demolished the table, and with it, Turner’s notebooks. Scraps of paper filled the air and came floating down covering Harry. Soon he was blanketed with Turner’s broken paragraphs, sentences, words.

  He fired. He hit the wall. Blinking furiously, he attempted to dispel the spots of phosphorescent green light that had been temporarily imprinted on his retinas. There was yet a third blast which blew an enormous hole in the wall of old newspapers Turner had amassed, while at the same time setting them ablaze.

  Harry sprang up and rushed headlong into the adjoining room. A succession of shots followed him. One knocked out a window and sent the glass cascading down onto Jackson Street. A second hit a radiator, producing a terrific clanging din that was only a prelude to a great thud as the radiator collapsed to the floor.

  Smoke, meanwhile, was pouring into the apartment and out the ruptured window into the street. It was dense and acrid and rapidly sucking the oxygen out of the air.

  With such an abundance of paper material in the place, it was no wonder the fire spread as quickly as it did. It leapt from one pile of magazines and newspapers to the next. When Harry looked behind him, he saw the mattresses were aflame. In front of him, the fire was voraciously consuming the entire dining and living rooms. He suspected his assailants had fled—they would only put their lives in peril by trying to pursue him into the flames—and they must have assumed their mission was done. It would be easy to imagine Harry was trapped and would soon go up in smoke along with old copies of the Chronicle, Barron’s Weekly, Soldier of Fortune, and Turner’s own unique contributions to American arts and letters.

  There was just one window available to him in the only corner which was still free from the enveloping blaze. He tried drawing it open, but it was painted shut. Though he might eventually have gotten it unstuck, he did not have the time to struggle with it. So he knocked out the glass with the butt of his gun. The gun was getting harder to hold because the metal was absorbing the heat.

  Sticking his head through the jagged opening he’d created, he breathed deeply. For a moment this was enough, just to be able to breathe air not contaminated by smoke. But as the flames lapped at his feet, singeing his ankles, he recognized he’d have to act quickly.

  Unfortunately, there was no fire escape. Gazing down, all he could see was a drop of three floors. A great many faces, predominently Chinese, were staring up at him, their expressions reflecting a mixture of horror and fascination. Up the block he could hear the wail of sirens, but he doubted whether help would come soon enough to rescue him from his predicament.

  He pounded out as much of the remaining glass as he could though there were still huge shards clinging to the frame. It proved a torturous maneuver squeezing himself through the broken window. There was barely room to accommodate the thickness of his body. He decided to go feet first so he’d have the windowsill to cling to when he got his body fully out.

  But there were still several ragged pieces of glass that lay across the length of the windowsill. When Harry struggled to retain his grip, forcing his hands to carry the entire weight of his body, the glass cut into his palms and his fingers. The more he struggled to hold on the more deeply the glass cut, until the pain from the wounds and the sheer physical exertion of keeping himself suspended merged into one agonizing spasm that almost caused him to blank out altogether.

  There was no way he could continue to hold on for more than another fifteen or twenty seconds. Already he could feel his fingers slipping. Looking down between his legs, he saw the window immediately below was drawn open. It was maybe a foot or two below his dangling feet.

  He tried to ignore the pain in his hands and concentrated instead on his legs which he swung as far out as he could get them, then let go of the windowsill, shooting his legs in toward the building at the exact same moment so he succeeded in altering his downward trajectory.

  He fell at a pronounced angle, his legs propelling the rest of his body. A couple of seconds later, he found himself lying in an awkward heap in somebody’s bedroom. Something had torn or else been twisted in his left leg, and his hands hurt like hell and continued to bleed.

  Dazedly, he looked about him, only to find he was being observed. Not more than six feet away, a man of about sixty and a girl—who appeared scarcely older than twelve—were entwined in bed, all hairy limbs and soft thighs and gray matted hair and blond tresses. Their presence together explained why they’d not gone to their window to see what all the commotion was about in the apartment above them. Shootouts, fires, police sirens: what possible difference did it make to them? The possible demise of Harry Callahan was not worth coitus interruptus. However, his unexpected appearance in their bedroom did cause them to look up.

  Harry managed to get to his feet and unsteadily proceeded to the door. The couple gaped at him, too much in shock to speak.

  “Sorry about bursting in on you like this,” he said. “Just go back to what you were doing, folks.”

  He opened the door and stepped out.

  “You didn’t get him, I told you you wouldn’t get him. Your men, you’ll pardon me for saying this, are shit.”

  Turner’s face went very red. It was unlikely he was going to forgive Gallant. “My men are professionals. They are trained for combat in war, they are trained to resist the Communists. Some of them have served in Rhodesia, in Nam, in Angola, they’re better than you can ever hope to be. And when I ask for your opinion, I will solicit it. You owe your life to me.”

  Gallant shrugged. He had no desire to argue with Turner, not so long as he was still dependent on him. But on the other hand, he did not want Tur
ner or his end-of-the-world mercenaries poaching on his territory. And Harry was his territory. It was one of those strange ironies of life that Gallant now favored Harry at Turner’s expense. When the time was ripe, he would move in for the kill. But the time wasn’t ripe and he surely did not need any surrogates undertaking the kill for him.

  He tried, as diplomatically as possible, to make Turner understand this.

  Turner was unconvinced. “I know we go way back, Jimmy, but this is not a debt you can call in. Do you think it’s a mere indulgence, taking out Callahan? I don’t give a shit about him. As far as I’m concerned you could have him. But it’s no longer a question of what you want. It’s gotten beyond that. Now he’s jeopardizing the Saving Remnant. After that fuckup a week ago when he came out here, do you think I’m about to sit back and let him do further damage?”

  “Hey, what’s the problem? He busted me in that fuckup and I’m free.”

  “Not the least because of my influence.” Turner leaned back in the Queen Anne chair he’d expropriated for his personal use. “You know, he’s busy checking out how you and I are linked, and I wouldn’t be surprised he discovers it if he’s not stopped in time. Why do you think I spread that story about taking off to Hawaii? I had to go underground.”

  Given their location at that moment, Gallant said, “Well, you’re underground all right.”

  And it wasn’t an atomic bomb, but a San Francisco homicide detective that had driven him under, Gallant thought, not without some amusement.

  The phone was ringing on Turner’s desk. He picked it up, spoke briefly to whoever was on the other end, then, placing a hand over the receiver, brusquely dismissed his visitor. “You have an appointment with Dr. Pine, I understand.”

  Gallant indicated that this was so.

  “Well, then, don’t keep him waiting.”

  “What about Callahan?”

  “I have nothing more to say about the matter. He’s no longer your concern.” His unrelenting gaze only emphasized the threat his words so thinly veiled.

  Gallant was not a man to be so easily dissuaded. After all, he’d not escaped from prison twice, once by virtue of his own cunning, once by virtue of a legal technicality, to give up on his goal and slink away into the night. If he had to kill Turner so be it. Without Turner, he lacked the means to infiltrate Jay Silk’s compound.

  In any case, his face still needed altering before he could expose himself to the world again—especially now that it was likely the police had learned he was not dead.

  Although Gallant resolutely and routinely confronted danger of one sort or another without fear, he was reduced to jelly by the thought of having someone take a scalpel to his face. He had visions of emerging from the operations Pine intended to conduct on him scarred for life.

  When he entered Dr. Pine’s improvised surgery, he was scarcely reassured. The presence of a nurse, particularly a pretty one, would have been of some consolation, but apart from Jonas Pine, there was only one assistant, a broadly built man with a somewhat moronic expression on his face. He was standing ominously in the glowing light from the lamp dangling over the operating table. In back of him was a sink where Pine was scrubbing, and several shelves containing sterilized sutures, bandages, and trays of instruments. Gallant was given to understand this operating theater was installed in anticipation of any emergencies that might develop among those of the Saving Remnant who’d escaped death at Ground Zero.

  Dr. Pine wheeled about to regard his patient. His mouth was covered by a mask, his hands hung out in front of him, sopping wet.

  “Just take off your shirt, please,” he said, “and my assistant, Mr. Mulqueen will do the rest.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Gallant muttered under his breath. “That’s just what I’m afraid of.”

  It seemed like days, but it was merely a matter of hours, till Gallant recovered consciousness. He was stretched out on a bed in one of the few rooms in the shelter that was not cluttered with antiques. It was a functional room with nothing but several other beds, like his, though they were all empty. Nothing hurt but he suffered from an uncomfortable numbness in his face. When he tried to move his lips, he felt no sensation whatsoever.

  Lifting his hands to his face, he found that it was partially enveloped in gauze. Perforations in it allowed his eyes, nose, and mouth to show through.

  All he could do now, he supposed, was pray.

  It occurred to him, as he lay there, that sometime during the operation, he’d overheard a conversation taking place between Pine and Mulqueen. The anesthesia had put him under all right, but a part of his consciousness must have remained alert for a time, for how else could he have recalled what they said? And there was no doubt in his mind the conversation had happened, and he wasn’t just imagining it.

  He remembered distinctly Mulqueen had told Pine of a hit he’d been contracted to undertake at Turner’s behest. Pine might have been used to such talk for he’d expressed little interest in the matter until Mulqueen had mentioned the name of the intended victim. It was to be Harry Callahan.

  “Oh yes,” Pine had said, “I remember him, the detective who had us arrested. Strange bird, that one.’’

  Mulqueen proved very talkative. He said he’d served in mercenary forces in Angola and in Laos before the end of the Vietnamese War. He and a friend, whom he wouldn’t compromise by mentioning by name, were not going to fail like the others who’d followed Harry to Jackson Street. The hit, Mulqueen stated, was to be made early the next morning, while Harry was asleep in his apartment.

  Gallant jerked up in bed. His body seemed to work, only his face had been touched. He couldn’t let this hit come to pass. To be denied the pleasure of killing Callahan himself just because Turner was fearful for the safety of his organization was an unspeakable humiliation.

  He rummaged through the utility closets in the corner and located his street clothes. His wallet and his two guns—the Dan Wesson and his newly purchased .44—were still there. No one would have had reason to take them away. He was, after all, regarded as one of Turner’s best friends.

  The first thing he had to find out was the time. With no windows, the room he was in was a timeless environment. He dreaded the thought that it might already be the next day and he was too late to forestall the hit.

  Opening the door, he looked out to see one of Turner’s followers pass. He was making a great deal of noise with so many keys jangling at his side.

  He stared at Gallant, because he resembled a mummy with his face swathed in opaque bandages. Then he shrugged and continued on. It was none of his concern.

  “You have the time?” Gallant called to him.

  That this curious bandaged figure should have spoken to him was something of a shock, stopping him in his tracks. After a long hesitation, he said that it was a little past midnight.

  Gallant was vastly relieved. Luck hadn’t deserted him yet. If he drove quickly, he could be in San Francisco before the hit was attempted. That meant he would have to borrow—well, steal—someone’s car since Turner had taken his away from him to prevent him from leaving the shelter. But to James William Gallant, car theft was nothing new. One could say it was almost a habit.

  Mulqueen and the man called Hennessy—not because that’s what his parents had named him, but because that’s what he drank—were standing in front of the apartment building in the Nob Hill district where Harry Callahan had lived for the last several years. Having reconnoitered the area, without so much as drawing a second look from those few people wandering about the streets late at night, they decided on entering the building itself. Mulqueen was carrying a Colt XM177E2. They’d ceased manufacturing the model some years back, which Mulqueen thought a shame. Nonetheless, it was one of his favorite weapons. He’d used it in the Special Forces in Laos, and it had served him well in that part of the world. What was so extraordinary about it was it could double as a sniping or as an assault weapon, could even be employed as a grenade launcher with its 11
.5-inch barrel. It also came with three collapsible stocks.

  Hennessy, a short stubby man with granite for muscles and the dead yellowed eyes of someone who’d spent too long in the bush, settled for a Sterling Mark 5, a British 9mm gun designed so virtually all sound is eliminated. Hennessy was accustomed to moving and killing in silence.

  They risked unveiling their weapons only when they’d gotten to the third floor of the building, and were positioned right outside Harry’s door.

  Hennessy was skillful when it came to sabotaging locks, and just as quiet as when he blew open a man’s skull.

  To their mutual disappointment, however, there was no Harry. He wasn’t hiding—his apartment contained few places in which to hide in any case—he simply wasn’t there, and it was getting on toward two in the morning. As they’d been briefed by Turner in advance, they knew that Harry was on suspension so that meant he could not be working at such a late hour. And he couldn’t be with his girlfriend, according to Turner, because she’d broken up with him and moved in with her father up in that place above Paradise Road. The only conclusion they could draw, based on what they knew of Harry’s life, was he was out somewhere getting drunk with his friends. The way things were going for him, he’d probably want to get drunk.

  So they waited, biding their time in the darkness of their victim’s flat. They did treat themselves to a beer from his refrigerator since they naturally assumed that after tonight he wouldn’t be consuming any of it himself.

  After nearly half a hour, they heard the slam of a car door and voices coming from the street below. Mulqueen went to the window. He’d gotten a glimpse of Harry that night at the shelter when he’d come storming in to rescue Sugar. It was Harry. He was saying goodbye to whoever it was in the magenta Chevy who’d given him a lift.

  Mulqueen wondered why he hadn’t driven his own car, but he soon understood; both of Harry’s hands were wrapped in bandages. Turner had said nothing about this, maybe he hadn’t known. The more he watched, peeking out behind a corner of the shade, the more it became apparent Harry had little mobility in either hand. It seemed to take him forever just to dig his keys out of his pocket.