by Dane Hartman
Keeping low, Callahan pushed open the door. Steele was sitting in the bathtub seven feet away. He had a Mauser 9mm automatic in his hand. His eyes were bleary, his hair unkempt, and his nose running. He was highly drugged.
Pulling his fingers out of his mouth, Steele pointed the gun at Harry’s head. “Don’t come any closer,” he warned, his face blank. “I’ll kill you.”
“Then do it!” Harry yelled. “If that’s what it takes to convince you, go ahead!”
The two men stared at each other for five seconds as the police fire continued to howl around them. The cop’s face was set, but Steele’s visage was covered in amazement. It finally dawned on him that Callahan wasn’t his assassin.
Following that realization came little unintelligible murmurs. He seemed to forget about Harry, lowering the gun and looking at the tub’s faucet.
Harry breathed again. All he had to do now was drag Steele out the hole in the kitchen floor and wait until McKay’s Armageddon subsided.
He looked back down the hallway. The attack seemed to be tapering off. Harry looked back to Steele in time to see him putting the automatic in his mouth.
“No!” he roared, leaping forward. He got his hand on the Mauser just as Steele pulled the trigger.
C H A P T E R
F o u r t e e n
Steele’s head rose above Harry’s hand and splattered against the pink tiles. Callahan fell back against the sink as Steele’s body slowly slid into the tub. On the way down, his shoulder turned on the hot water tap. He came to rest beneath the spigot as a stream of liquid washed his headless body.
Harry holstered his now empty Magnum. Then he was hurled against the medicine chest as a propane tank exploded. The trailer front heaved into the air, pushing the axle off the cinder block foundation.
Harry gathered his thoughts. The detonation of the second tank would be enough to rip the pipes out of their ground moorings. The trailer would slip, catch, and roll down the hill in back, mangling everything inside like dolls caught in an electric washer.
Harry leaped out of the bathroom just as the second tank was engulfed by the flames of the first. He ducked back inside as the second tank exploded, ripping off the trailer’s front end and sending hunks of hot, spinning metal through the rest of the interior.
Harry was fighting the combined shock waves a second after. The floor was moving beneath his feet and the walls were waving and cracking like the ocean’s surface, but he knew he had to get out before the steel box fell over the side.
The trailer’s convulsions were pulling him toward the bedroom, but even if he could slip out a window there, the sliding home would crush him. He pushed himself purposefully down the hall toward the hole in the kitchen floor and the jagged new one in the front.
Harry grappled for holds with all his limbs like a spider. He tumbled over the wall unit which had dropped, spilling the T.V. and stereo. He slipped on some records but managed to keep upright, his arms flailing like windmills.
He made it into the living room, standing amid the bodies, just as the trailer fell off its concrete moorings. The rectangular structure tipped to the right, making the left wall the floor and the floor the right wall.
As hard as he tried to ride it, Harry was thrown down, the vision of the yawning escape holes ripped from his view. He fell heavily, feeling some glass break under his weight and a metal fist punching him in the stomach.
His hand fell onto this fist just as the mobile home continued to roll sideways and back. He felt it give under his grip as the room started to spin again. Harry felt the new floor going backwards and then dropping out from under him completely. He realized that what he had fallen on was the door—the metal fist being the knob. It had swung open when the trailer had rolled onto its ceiling, dropping him out with a load of debris.
Callahan raised his head in time to see the trailer dip over the apex of the hill. He heard the wrenching crash as he pulled himself painfully up and ran for the incline’s lip.
He arrived just as the shattered trailer came to a stop near the drain Harry had first entered.
The S.W.A.T. teams ran toward it while only Bressler came over to Harry. “I tried to stop it,” he swore. “But it was too late.” He looked at the scurrying enforcers, who looked like ants encircling a particularly tasty morsel. “At least they didn’t get you,” he said with resignation.
“But they got the only proof I had,” Harry replied through gritted teeth, holding onto his battered side.
“Forget it,” Bressler contended. “Let’s get back to headquarters, get you a doctor, and start building a case against them.
“Too late,” Harry maintained. “If something isn’t done right away, they’ll be long gone.”
“So what are you going to do?” Bressler asked with exasperation. “What more can you do?”
Harry looked directly at Bressler, the expression in his eyes extremely pained. “I’ve got to walk into the lion’s den.”
Golden Gate Park was heavenly quiet compared to the hellish chaos of McLaren Park. While the rain at the latter seemed like a pounding punishment, the rain here seemed calm and natural. While it smashed down on the trailer’s roof, sounding like a thousand fights, here it dropped off the trees and grass like a peaceful waterfall.
The street was quiet at this time of night save for the tortured steps of Inspector Harry Callahan up the stairs of Kim Byrnes’ apartment house. He knew it was likely that no one would be home, but to his surprise, the locked door was buzzed open at his first ring.
Similarly, Kim’s door was open on the second floor. Harry pushed it back and walked into the darkened rooms. He moved in quickly, pushing himself back against the wall, his Magnum in his hand. As he tried to peer into the darkness, the girl’s bedroom door opened, light flooding in from the other side.
She stood there, the illumination silhouetting her curves. “Harry?” she called quietly.
“You decided to tough it out,” he stated flatly from the darkness.
“Harry?” she called again as if she hadn’t heard. “What do you mean?”
“You figured with Steele dead we had no solid evidence against you, so all you had to do was stop killing and there was nothing anyone could do. You had committed the perfect mass murder.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” her featureless face said.
“Then let me spell it out for you,” Harry said. “I knew there was a leak in the department. The press knew too much about everything for there not to be. A man who I had been following just before this case said so. He said he had an ‘in’ at the department.
“Then, all of a sudden, not only the press but SAFE knew all there was to know. They were ready for me at every turn. From there, it was simple. There had to be somebody who had a connection with the cops and SAFE. That connection was you. I told you what was going down and you told Steele.”
“Harry, that’s crazy,” she breathed, although remaining motionless in the doorway. “Why would I do anything like that?”
“You’ve got me,” Harry admitted. “But it had to be you. Steele and his men were flying so high on PCP that you could’ve controlled them easily.”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” the girl said evenly, as if reminding Harry.
“It doesn’t have to,” Harry contended. “The lab told me that all the dead SAFE men and all the dead McLaren corpses had something in common. All the men were snow blind and all the women were once homosexuals belonging to SAFE. The first corpse was three years old. You came to town three years ago.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” the girl spoke with a sigh. “There are still a lot of holes.”
“All the holes are plugged up if you had an accomplice. A cop connection who supplied you with the drugs to feed Steele, who did all the raping, and filled in all the police information you couldn’t get from me.”
“A cop?” she exclaimed. “What makes you think there was a cop, Harry?”
“You shouldn’
t have called McKay with the tip about Steele’s trailer,” he answered. “Only someone on the inside would skip me and Lieutenant Bressler to go right for the man they knew would go off half-cocked.”
The two stood their ground, Harry in the darkness just inside the front door and Kim still just a black shape in the bedroom frame.
“You got a load of nothing, Inspector,” she said coldly. “Without Steele, you’ve got no solid evidence.”
Harry smiled, reaching for the light switch. “That’s why I figured you’d stay,” he said cunningly. “If you ran now, it would look suspicious. And you had to know how much I knew.”
Byrnes nodded again. “Enough of this,” she said firmly. “What do you want, Callahan?”
Harry hunkered up the wall, his sore side complaining as he prepared himself. His throat tightened and his muscles bunched. “I can’t let you get away with it,” he said, forcing the words out of his mouth one at a time.
The lights went on immediately. Harry’s hand swept over from the switch, which he had not touched. He wrapped his fingers around his Magnum butt and pointed it directly at the girl. His index finger was tightening on the trigger when he saw that the female in the doorway was not Byrnes, but the bound and gagged figure of Lynne McConnell.
“I was afraid of that,” Byrnes’ voice continued from behind the hostage cop, who looked like she was just barely able to stay upright with help. The lower half of her face was tightly swathed in bandages and her hands were secured behind her with her own handcuffs. She was wearing the same outfit Harry had last seen her in.
“Put it down, Callahan,” Byrnes said. “Put down the gun or she gets it in the back.”
“Then you’ll lose your shield,” Harry said, his teeth grinding against each other, his gun still.
“If you were going to shoot through her to get to me, you would have done it already,” Byrnes said. “Drop it or watch her die.”
Harry dropped his gun.
“Kick it over here,” she instructed. He did as he was told. “All right,” Byrnes continued. “Go get it, Art.”
Slipping out from behind McConnell was a young man with a mustache in a police uniform. He scooped up Harry’s weapon and pointed it at Harry with a wide, winning smile.
“Patrolman Arthur Sullivan, I presume?” Harry said, his hands at his side. The man’s smile disappeared.
“How did you know?” he asked,
“I know all the cops in this city,” Harry said wearily. “And the only easy way Byrnes could have gotten raped and Patterson murdered by one cop was if it was done by the Golden Gate Park patrolman—which was you.”
“So you knew,” Sullivan said. “All the time, you knew.”
“He knew nothing!” Kim interrupted, pushing McConnell forward. In Byrnes’ hand was the cop’s own silver .357. “I told you he knew nothing, but no, you had to make sure. If you hadn’t told me to report the rape in the first place none of this would’ve happened.”
“He would’ve traced Patterson to you,” Sullivan maintained, motioning his head toward Harry. “He would have made the connection.”
“So now he has anyway,” Byrnes argued. “I told you we should’ve taken off.”
“We will,” Sullivan promised, turning back to Harry. “We had to know how much you knew,” he repeated. “You see, I heard what you told Steele up on Mount Douglas. I knew you were getting close. So, just in case, I picked up the sergeant on the way here. I drugged her so heavily that she won’t remember a thing. I could check you out without her checking me out, you get it?”
“Enough of this shit,” Byrnes cursed. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sullivan looked back at Harry, the smile again on his face. “You heard the little lady, Inspector,” he said philosophically. “I’ve never killed another cop before. Especially one of such high rank, but there’s always a first time, I guess.” He raised the .44 until the barrel pointed right between Harry’s eyebrows.
“Goodbye, Inspector,” Sullivan said.
C H A P T E R
F i f t e e n
“Don’t move,” Harry said.
Both looked at Harry.
“Give yourselves up,” he went on.
Byrnes laughed. “What the fuck are you babbling about? What are you going to do to stop us?”
“You won’t get two miles,” Callahan promised.
“Are you kidding?” Sullivan said incredulously. “After the slaughter at the trailer park, McKay would have stamped a big Case Closed on the Mortician Murderer file.”
“Lieutenant Bressler is surrounding the place now,” Harry contended.
“Bressler doesn’t have enough balls to become a juggler,” Sullivan said. “Even if he did, he couldn’t get the clearance from McKay. There’s not enough evidence.”
“There is now,” Harry said. “I told you that I first got wind of the leak in the force from a phone conversation which I was bugging. After the theater fight, I simply had my partner move the equipment from the hitman’s hotel room to here while I was . . . entertaining . . . Byrnes at my apartment.”
The uniformed cop and the girl’s cunning, triumphant expressions began to melt.
“Motherfucking bitch!” Byrnes yelled. The patrolman looked stupefied.
“You take one step out of this apartment and you’re dead,” Harry warned.
“Then I’m going to take you and this cunt with me!” Byrnes screamed, pushing the .357 forward.
She pulled the trigger as Harry jumped back out of the doorway. The bullet just missed his head and plowed into the hallway’s plaster wall. Harry slammed awkwardly against the bannister, his wounds from the trailer episode groaned in paralyzing pain. His knees began to give way as he grabbed onto the thick bannister with all his might.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw Byrnes running toward him, the shiny revolver still held out in front of her. He pulled himself up and vaulted over the stairway. He dropped onto the middle of the steps, his legs too weak to hold him. He tumbled head first the rest of the way, hearing Byrnes fire the gun at him.
He stopped in a dazed heap on the first floor landing, the inside of his head feeling like a whirpool. He tried to force his eyes to focus. By the time he had attained just a slim level of coherence, Byrnes was halfway down the stairs, waiting until she could get a clear bead on the cop. Behind her, Sullivan was holding the .44 against McConnell’s head.
Harry twisted to the side just as Kim fired again. The ballet hit the wall and Harry rolled to the middle of the landing.
Byrnes, growling obscenities, got to the landing and turned the corner just as Fatso Devlin kicked open the cellar door.
Harry was between the two. Byrnes pulled her revolver up, shooting Devlin in the stomach just as his first shot shattered the front door window behind her. Both Harry and she heard the cop fall back down the stairs where the bugging equipment was secreted.
“All right, you motherfucker,” Byrnes told the still groggy Callahan, lining up the shot, “there’s no escape this time.” She pulled the trigger. “Die, you bastard!”
The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Harry rose from the floor like a bear coming out of hibernation. With a maddened shriek, she threw the empty gun into his face and ran toward the front door.
The .357 tore across Harry’s temple as he turned away. He fell against the wall, blinded. Byrnes looked out to see three patrol cars screeching to the curb.
“Give me the Magnum!” she shouted up at Sullivan. “I’m going to kill him if it’s the last thing I do!”
“Come on, Kim!” he answered. “We’ll hold the girl hostage.”
“Fuck the girl,” she spat, running toward him. “We’ll get out the back way.”
Harry had just steadied himself, wiping away the curtain of blood that drooled from his new wound, as Bressler charged in the front door.
“They’re trying to get out the back,” Harry said quickly. “They’ve got my gun. Fatso’s downstairs and he’s h
it.”
“Back up the others,” Bressler told his men. “Block all surrounding streets.” The men followed orders instantly, some going back the way they had come, others pounding up the stairs.
Bressler took Harry gingerly under the arm. Callahan shook the helping hand off. “Thanks,” he said tightly. “But not yet.”
One of the attacking officers stuck his head over the bannister on the second floor. “They broke into another apartment. They got out on the fire escape!”
“So where the hell are they now?” Bressler shouted back.
In answer, a squeal of tires came from the street. Harry was out of the door first, in spite of his wounds. He saw Sullivan’s patrol car screeching out of the alley, sending the cops there scattering in all directions. He took a right down the street, only to be blocked—on both sides—by other cars. All the men were firing pointblank at him.
The auto’s tires exploded and the vehicle took off. It seemed to soar like a plane, then its right front fender caught the tail of a perpendicularly parked car. It spun, sliding onto the opposite sidewalk, careened off the park fence and smashed head on into another patrol vehicle. The car flipped up, landing on its roof across the other auto’s top.
It had hardly come to a smoking halt when Harry was limping toward it. Ignoring all the others, he pushed his way to the sandwiched vehicles. Wiping the blood from his eyes again, Harry peered through the crushed metal and shattered glass.
Only Sullivan was inside, hanging upside down. His eyes and mouth were open, but his entire face was crushed against the steering wheel. Blood poured out of his mouth and cracks in his skull.
“I want this whole block searched inch by inch,” Harry demanded. “She’s holding a cop hostage, but I don’t want that girl to get away. Do whatever you have to, but stop her.”
“Harry,” Bressler interrupted. “McConnell . . .”
“Byrnes was responsible for killing more than twenty members of SAFE,” Harry said quickly back. “If we hadn’t uncovered the McLaren graveyard, she would have gone on without us even knowing it. If we don’t stop her here, she’ll go on killing someplace else. So get going, Al. Get her.”
