by Dane Hartman
She blinked, her mouth working. Seconds later, she realized she could still talk and there was still a chance of escape. Her spent wind was collected again with a deep exhalation and again her mouth stayed open. Then the fist rocketed down again.
As she lay somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, the soft grass seemed to take on a firmer substance—each blade becoming as hard and annoying as a dull pin. This completed the aura of pain wafting across and through her. Dimly, she could understand that the assaulter was pulling her toward the bridge’s underside again. As she was dragged, the hard grass blades scraped across her back like picks. She was surprised that they didn’t send out a musical tone as she drifted across them like fingers on a harp.
The only measure of true consciousness she experienced again was when her assaulter dragged her by the chin and hair over the bridged bluff and dropped her in a tiny, shallow creek, made up of the mist that had fallen during the day. Her hair seemed to suck up the moisture like the roots of a plant, her vision clearing enough to show her that the fog had thickened like a roof and four walls around them. The only thing that could signal the distant cop now was her voice.
Valiantly, bravely, she collected breath to try one more time even though she told herself it was hopeless. She was fully expecting her assaulter to stop her by covering her mouth or hitting her again, but she was beyond caring. In fact, she expected anything but what he actually did.
As soon as she had been dragged into the bushes, she could only think of one thing: rape. She was totally convinced that she had been captured so her assaulter could abuse her in that way. She held no misconceptions of her own attractiveness. She was very pretty with a very good body. Something deep inside her ego told her that it would be ridiculous for this beast to waste that.
It was a horrible, degrading thought to die on. As her mind signaled her voice to work, something bigger, harder, and faster swung down. It was the metal pan of a small, dark green shovel. The kind that folded up; the kind they used in the military.
It smashed across her face with devastating effect. Her head slammed down. She could feel it sinking in the wet ground. She could feel her nasal bones breaking and her nostrils spreading across her face. She could feel her lips split. Her vision disappeared under a layer of exploding darkness. The blood spread across her visage like a mask. She could feel her skull give way partially and her face cave in.
Before she died, she saw her attacker’s face clearly. It was a young face with dark hair and prominent cheek bones. Just below his long nose was a brown mustache. It was the face of the policeman she thought she saw on the other side of the trees.
Her mashed face rolled over to the side, her streaming blood moving in that direction. As it covered her blinking eyes, she saw that the faraway figure’s arm was out. He wasn’t the policeman at all, but a man in a blue suit walking his dog. The policeman was above her with a small, folding military shovel.
She felt herself being dragged deeper under the bridge, where two more hands collected her legs and pulled her into complete darkness. She died just as she saw that the second figure was Kim Byrnes. She fell into the bottomless pit just as it began to rain.
“Come on,” said Lisa Patterson’s lover. “Let’s do it and put her with all the others.”
Trevor Samuels hated his dog, hated to take it for walks, and this morning he even hated San Francisco. The dog was a fox terrier, the walk was between the reservoir and John McLaren Park, and the morning was dreadful. Samuels kept a firm grip on the frisky canine’s leash and the hilt of the cheap black umbrella as he tried to keep his balance in the rain.
It was practically a torrential downpour compared with what he was used to. A fastidious man who had spent his entire life in the city, Samuel was used to minor downpours only deep in the winter months. According to his almanac, the wet was only supposed to come between November and April. But this September was one of the most rainy in history.
In honor of the freakish weather, he had stopped on the way to work to buy a Woolworth’s Special—a small, black umbrella made of thin metal and thin fabric. It had done fine for him for about five days, then the edges began to fray, the opening mechanism began to catch, and the supports began to give way. With the rain coming down in pounding sheets it was practically no help to him at all this morning.
The dog, on the other hand, seemed to think that the unseasonal rainfall was a cue to go crazy. He ran up and down the inclines like a pup possessed, champing at the circular neck bit. In no mood for this kind of levity, Trevor jerked irritably on the leash, giving himself a certain sadistic satisfaction but unable to diminish his pet’s enthusiasm.
“That’s it,” Samuels muttered miserably. “That’s all the chance you get,” he told the dog. “We’re not out here for fun, damn it.”
He dug his heels in and pulled the dog back, trying to turn around. The animal would have none of it. At that moment, a gust of wind pushed by, catching the weak underside of the umbrella and turning half of it inside out.
The rain splashed on the side of Samuel’s face and the umbrella tried to leap out of his hand. Swearing, the middle-aged man brought up his other hand to steady the umbrella, only to have the terrier pull the leashed hand back.
“Damn it!” Samuels yelled, jerking the hand back, causing the dog to choke. “Stop pulling on me, you stupid dog.”
But the dog would still have none of it. He continued to exert pressure on the leash, trying to continue forward. “Jesus H. Christ!” Samuels barked, only to have the dog do the same. “Jesus,” he repeated, turning in place, trying to cover up from the bombarding water.
As he twisted and turned, his right foot smacked into a patch of slick mud, causing his shoe to slide. “Christ!” he screamed, falling.
He slammed face first into the sodden ground, both the umbrella handle and the leash flying out of his hands. The umbrella was caught in the wind and went rolling off in one direction while the freed dog went galloping off in the other.
“Oh Jesus,” Samuels breathed, pushing himself out of the muck, looking at his dirt covered coat and shirt front. “Oh Christ,” he concluded, feeling the rain pounding down hard on his sparse hair. Only after he took an assessment of his ruined suit did he fully realize that the dog had gone running off for parts unknown.
Getting up and trotting in the direction the canine had disappeared, Samuels tried to spot his pet in the early morning greyness. “Oscar!” he called. “Oscar, get back here you bad dog!” The name was his little joke. Being as fastidious as Felix Ungar in “The Odd Couple” it was natural that he would name his crazy, disruptive pet Oscar Madison.
“Oscar, you get back here this minute!” Samuels shouted miserably. In the distance he could hear the terrier barking in reply. He followed the sound, carefully navigating the treacherously soaked ground. He kept moving until he came to the lip of a steep hill—an incline that had been practically turned into a mud waterfall by the rain.
“Oscar?” he called out in trepidation. The barking reply came from the very bottom of the valley, just as he had feared. “You get up here this instant!” the man demanded, as if expecting the dog to comply. He stood and waited, getting no further reply.
“You hear me?” he asked, when the dog did not appear after a few seconds. Again, the dog did not seem to come running or bark back. “Oscar, are you crazy or something?” he demanded of the gloom more than anything else. “It’s terrible out here. I’m getting soaked! Please, baby, let’s go home and I’ll give you a nice Milk Bone.”
Just as he finished speaking, he saw the dim outline of the terrier tortuously making its way back up the gooey hill.
“That’s the boy,” Samuels urged him on. “Come to Poppa now so we can get out of this awful rain. Come on home so you can get a nice Liver Snap.” The words seemed to make the canine double its efforts.
The man’s inviting smile grew harder the closer the dog got, his teeth clamping down on each other and his l
ips curling back.
“Come on, Oscar, that’s the baby. You can do it. Just a couple of feet more. That’s the way.” As the terrier got closer, Samuels could see that he had changed from his greyish-white color to a mud-dark brown.
In addition, he labored up the cliff-like hill with something dark and chunky between his teeth. Good God, Samuels thought, the dumb dog put me through this hell for a bone. It had smelled the appetizing tid-bit from way off and went right for it like a heat-seeking missile. By God, he’d have the dog’s hide for this.
Samuels expectantly waited for Oscar to appear before him, his hand already raised. He started in on him verbally the moment his head poked up above the hill’s lip,
“Why, you miserable little . . .” He bent down to deliver the first slap when he froze.
Once out of the sliding muck, the rain began to wash the mud away from both the dog and what it held in its teeth. As Samuels watched, the brown, gritty coating slid away to reveal a familiar bone structure.
Oscar had a skull in his teeth. A skull minus the jaw bone and bottom teeth. A skull with pieces of flesh, muscle and hair still stuck to it. A human skull.
C H A P T E R
T h r e e
Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Homicide Department didn’t like standing in torrential rain any more than Trevor Samuels did. But at least he was doing a job—his job, the kind of thing he knew how to do best.
At times like this, however, he couldn’t help thinking that maybe he could learn another trade just as well, real fast. While it was always a great pleasure to get a piece of murdering scum off the street, it was never as easy as simply walking up and politely requesting it to leave the road right away. Harry had never met a murdering piece of scum who responded by saying, “Sure, why didn’t you ask sooner?”
No, they didn’t get to be considered murdering scum by being nice and Callahan didn’t get the nickname “Dirty Harry” by being polite. He got it by being relentless, determined, and by leaving as little to the imagination as possible. When Harry waded into the fray, one could be sure of one thing. The fray was going to be faced with one big hunk of well-armed policeman who carried enough firepower to put down a Third World revolution.
Take the Brown Bender investigation for example. The hulking, impeccably tailored black man had been spotted coming into town by Bill MacKenzie, the ex-cop who now ran the burger concession out at the airport. And even MacKenzie knew—especially MacKenzie—that when the Bender hit town, someone’s number was definitely up.
The hamburger man specialized in chili and bloodcurdling stories; both strong enough to make your hair and your stomach roll over and play dead. In his repetoire of appetite suppressing yarns were several tales of gruesome woe that were attributed to the skills of master hitman Mister Brown Bender. Nothing could be proved, of course—Bender was too big and too slick, but the various arrests and trials had taken their monetary toll. He was now in need of some fast bread.
And when somebody like the Bender needed cash fast, he might be setting himself up for a first mistake. So, before the big man got his luggage, MacKenzie had already called inspector number seventy-one, who collected his fat Irish partner, and was already filibustering his lieutenant for some immediate surveillance duty. So Harry Callahan and Patrick “Fatso” Devlin found themselves on the trail of Brown Bender.
Up until then, Bender had prided himself at being able to shake any tail with his street-smart senses, but he hadn’t knocked thick heads with Harry before. Callahan wasn’t the kind to depend on tried and true methods as taught in the Police Academy. He let experience show the way.
Having finally tracked the black hitman to his hotel—the Commodore International on Sutter Street—Callahan got some bugging equipment from the neighborhood electronics dealer, Sid Kleinman, and installed it while Bender was out and Devlin was eating lunch. That was why Paddy was called “Fatso” and Harry was called “Dirty.”
“You can’t use anything you hear in a court of law,” Devlin reminded him when Harry rejoined his partner in a room in the building next door.
“I’m not collecting evidence,” Harry replied. “I’m just getting information.”
“The D.A. would come down on you like the Hindenburg if he knew you were doing this,” Fatso went on apathetically.
“I’m not interested in making a case for Rothko,” Harry countered. “I just want to know what I can expect of the Bender. Besides,” he mused, turning to his partner, who was still stuffing corned beef into his face. “Who’s going to tell him?”
His mouth full, Devlin looked up, made a wide, cheeky smile and put an onion ring over his head to serve as a halo. “Nobody here but us kosher chickens, boss,” he said.
So it was that Harry saw Bender pass by a man in Lafayette Park who expertly handed off an envelope to him. Harry stuck with the hitman while sending Devlin after the messenger. The partners reconnoitered after the assassin returned to his hotel digs, and Devlin reported.
“High class stock boy for investment firm.”
“Who owns it?” Harry asked.
“Already called it in and got the word,” Devlin replied. “Theodore Comstock, alias Teddy Tuccio.”
Callahan listened with satisfaction. When somebody of Bender’s tightly wound egotism joined forces with someone of Tuccio’s slimey stupidity, sparks were destined to fly.
“That little hood is certainly coming up in the world, isn’t he?” Harry suggested.
Fatso shook his head sadly while returning to his post at the window overlooking the Commodore’s entrance. “ ’Tis a pity when one has to sink so low to be so rotten,” he said in a soft brogue. “Who do you suppose he wants to be rid of?”
“Anybody in his way,” Harry replied, returning his attention to the earphones and tape recorder.
“Bender must be pretty desperate to take money from a rat like Tuccio,” Devlin figured.
“If I know our little Teddy,” Callahan said, “Bender probably hasn’t gotten the money yet. He’ll keep the hitman on the string for as long as he can get away with it.”
A light flashed on the bugging console indicating the phone in Bender’s room was ringing. Brown Bender sounded incredulous when he picked up the receiver and heard the voice of “Theodore Comstock” on the other end.
“I can’t get you the money yet,” Tuccio said.
“What?” Bender boomed. “Are you crazy, man?”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Tuccio said easily. “I’ve got an ‘in’ at the station. No tap has been set up at your hotel. If it had I’d know about it.”
Callahan smiled.
“Hey, honkey, I don’t much care about your ‘ins.’ Nobody calls Brown Bender and says they can’t pay. I can make all your ‘ins’ ‘outs.’ You understand me, fool?”
The hitman sounded plenty mad, Harry thought. He didn’t return to the vernacular of the Negro streets unless he was sufficiently riled.
“Listen, be cool,” Tuccio said with conviction. “That’s the only reason I’m calling personally, you see? I’m real busy with this deal I’m making, OK, so I just can’t make the appointment we set up initially. But don’t worry. I put an anti-bugging device on this end and called you to set up another meeting, right?”
Callahan shook his head in disbelief. Tuccio had been lying so long he wouldn’t have known the truth if it came up and put its fist through his face.
“You just tell me where and when,” the hitman growled threateningly.
“Seven A.M. at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market,” the businessman said. “Between the Southern Freeway and the railroad tracks near the corner of Oakdale and Silver Avenue, OK?”
“I’ll be there,” Bender said. “You just make sure you’re there too, and with the money. I don’t let anybody pull something like this on me twice.”
Brown Bender was a monster who had bashed his way out of his middle-class roots to buy as much repectability as he could while he graduate
d from running suburban numbers to fixing high school, then college, then professional ballgames. Discovering that he was his own best enforcer, Bender, named for both his father’s and mother’s families—Brown and Bender—went to where the real money was: professional assassination.
Tuccio, on the other hand, had lied and cheated his way to an insecure standing in the business world by combining an innate cunning with a low I.Q. While he could think of brilliantly vicious cons, he usually screwed himself during the implementation. But the one thing he was best at was putting up a slick front. The man could talk with the best of them. He could convince anyone that he was on the level, then disappear when things fell apart.
Harry only hoped that the con wasn’t trying to kid Bender or else this time he had bitten off more than he could chew. Bender would have little trouble finding him and then emptying what little Tuccio had between his ears through his nose. But it was hardly concern for Tuccio that made Callahan hopeful. He just wanted to be there when one known criminal gave money to another. At that point, they could both be taken in and Tuccio might just be made spineless enough to try and save his hide.
Between the rain and the time of day, the Produce Market was fairly quiet. Most of its business occurred between four and six in the morning when the restaurant representatives showed up to cart off vegetables and fruit. Any buyer who’d normally be left at this time was chased away by the inclement weather. Although the market stalls had ceilings, most of them were made of canvas and light wood, which hardly protected the client from a rainfall as heavy as this.
About the only ones left were the sellers themselves, putting away their wares and shutting down for the day. They and at least two cautious, rain-soaked cops. They were enough, however. Even without the various buyers, the marketplace was still abuzz with activity. Between the bosses pulling down their awnings and the helpers loading the leftover produce onto trucks with handheld and crane-like baskets and hooks, there was enough colorful movement to make Fatso dizzy.
