Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  “All right, all right,” the lead man complained. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all.”

  Actually, the kid had cold feet, Harry figured. That put Callahan’s benefit of doubt on the brunette’s side. He wouldn’t kill him unless he absolutely had to. But, from the way the others were approaching it, their exit from the human race might be reason to celebrate. Not surprisingly, they were all talking as if the old drunk wasn’t even there.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the football player called from the other end of the car.

  “Nobody’s going to miss him,” the blond at the nearest door hissed. “Get it over with.”

  The hesitant brunette looked to the handsome standee. He, in turn, looked to the nervous ferret and nodded. The sitting one nodded back, his eyes glowing, and he removed a switchblade from his baseball jacket pocket.

  What they were planning was simplicity itself. A long, thin blade shoved up between the drunk’s ribs and the old man would be quietly, almost cleanly dead within seconds. Then the five would simply wander off to other cars. The corpse would remain sitting. By the time the run ended, and his death was discovered, no one would have the slightest idea who might have killed him, or why.

  But Harry had some ideas of his own.

  He heard the knife open rather than saw it. He didn’t have time to see it if he was to get to the end of the line alive. He had to use the fact that the five thought he was a bleary-brained, near-paralytic. He also had to use all of his props.

  Harry gripped the top of the booze bottle in the paper bag on his lap with his left hand. He jerked his right hand forward as he swung the glass container up while kicking out.

  His sweeping right fist collided with the kid’s knife hand, driving the blade away from his side and into the kid’s thigh. At the same time, the thick, green sour mash bottle slipped out of the rumpled brown paper bag and smashed across the good-looking guy’s face. Finally, his foot hit the lead brunette’s family jewels.

  In one move, Harry had evened the odds considerably. Like most young, middle-class sadists, the nervous kid with the knife really didn’t know what pain was, so when his nerve endings started sending hysterical messages of anguish from his thigh to his brain, he completely overreacted. Grabbing his thigh, he slipped from the seat to the carpeted floor, howling.

  The sour mash bottle all but ruined the handsome one’s possible modeling career, the heavy glass spinning across his ripped skin like termites going to work on a wooden foundation. His arms went up, useless to prevent the shredding, and he slammed solidly against the sealed sliding doors behind him.

  The brunette did what almost anyone kicked in the balls would do. He doubled over, his hands covering the damage, his face purple, and his mouth frozen in a high-pressured round O. His eyes moved wildly, trying to take in his friend’s plight before his pupils teared. Harry waited until the youth closed his eyes before standing and driving his fist into the unprotected face.

  The brunette snapped to attention like a recruit on his first day at boot camp. His tortured expression became blandly peaceful, and then he fell swiftly back, his hands at his sides. He collided with some seats across the aisle, thus interrupting his perfect backward plank drop.

  “Police,” Harry managed to say. “You’re all under arrest.” He had his hands full with the blond who came charging to his associates’ aid as soon as the supposed drunk showed teeth.

  The blond tried to tackle the cop, but Callahan utilized a classic shoulder throw, dumping the kid onto the floor in front of him. He looked over the flipped kid to the last man. Much to his shock, the football player had produced a snubnosed revolver from his waistband.

  Harry did what any red-blooded American cop would do in such a circumstance: he ducked behind the dazed blond kid. He heard the nasty little gun fire with a sizzling crack, and heard the bullet thud into flesh behind him. He glanced up to see that the switchblade kid had managed to stand, pull the knife out of his leg, and stumble within striking distance.

  The thirty-eight-calibre bullet put an end to the kid’s pained attempt. When Harry ducked, the lead dug into the youth’s chest, scrambling everything just below his sternum. The bleeding hole in his thigh was joined by a fountain of drooling, crimson liquid pumping out from between his stomach and his chest.

  The kid’s mouth opened in surprise, he blinked, all expression of suffering left his face for a second, and then he died in anguish. Amazed by the sudden death of his friend, the football player wrenched open the connecting door behind him and ran for it.

  Harry pulled out his gun as he rose. The blue steel Smith and Wesson model twenty-nine .44 Magnum gleamed in the BART light. The flipped blond started to get up in front of it just as the glass-torn, black-haired man tried jumping Callahan from the side.

  Harry brought the butt of the weapon down on the top of the blond’s rising head, as he dug the fingers of his left hand into the cut guy’s face. The blond hair sprouted several red strands as the Magnum-made slice in the kid’s skull spit blood and he stopped rising.

  Harry then pushed the once-handsome, black-haired man away from him. Callahan slammed the suspect against the subway car’s wall. The guy’s face seemed to be slipping between Harry’s fingers, as if his visage was made up of bloodworms. The kid whined in torture. Harry was about to let up on him when he remembered how Sandy Richards looked half-naked among the garbage at the bottom of Telegraph Hill.

  “How does it feel, punk?” Harry asked the squealing kid.

  Callahan purposely squeezed the man’s ruined face. The black-haired man fainted from the pain. The cop immediately released him, hopped over the prone, pistol-whipped blond, and went after the gun-toting football player.

  He found him in the last car just as the BART train swept out from under the Bay and into Oakland. The lights from that city made a backdrop for the tableau of the muscular blond holding an old lady in front of him for protection as he stood framed in the window of the rear door. The other three passengers looked on in amazement.

  “Don’t come any closer, cop,” the blond punk warned stridently, “or I’ll blow her brains all over this car!”

  Harry stood in the middle of the section, his big .44 still pointing at the two standing people. The old lady was frightened enough by the initial attack, but when she saw the Magnum, she nearly swooned in shock. The brawny football player kept her sagging body upright.

  “You already have one murder against you,” Harry reminded him flatly. “With the right lawyer, you might be able to beat that rap. Ain’t no way you’re going to see anything but stir if you kill that lady in front of all these witnesses.”

  The brawny survivor of the preppie rapist-murderers looked wildly around. “I’ll kill all of you,” he announced. “I’ll kill you all and then get away at the next station.”

  Callahan interrupted the short cries of fear from the trio of innocent bystanders. “That’s a .38 Special,” Harry told him with slow purpose. “You don’t have enough ammunition to kill everybody.”

  Harry watched in satisfaction as the guy glanced at the snubnose in confusion. He was anything but professional. He probably didn’t even know what kind of gun he was using. All he knew was that he was one tough, gun-toting hombre, who carried around the guilt of gang-raping a secretary like a Boy Scout badge of merit. He made Harry sick, so the cop wasn’t averse to rubbing it in a little.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking, does this .38 take five or six bullets? Well, in all this excitement, I kind of forgot myself. So, now you’ve got to ask yourself a question. Do I feel lucky?”

  Harry raised his heavy revolver, the barrel seeming to glow in the train compartment, until it was level with the last guy’s head.

  “Well?” he asked. “Do you, punk?”

  Before the football player could make a decision, the BART train rounded a left corner at forty miles an hour, causing the car to lurch. Everyone was thrown to the side. In order to ke
ep his balance, the man had to drop the nearly unconscious lady. He twisted as he fell so he could keep the snubnose pointed at Callahan.

  Harry fought gravity enough to keep from sliding into the right wall, but he let his feet slip out from under him. He landed on the carpeted floor sideways, his own gun still aiming as well.

  He waited while the surprised gunman instinctively pulled the snubnose’s trigger while trying to regain his balance. The bullet plowed into the floor two feet in front of Harry.

  “Drop it,” Harry warned.

  He rolled over to the left as the kid pushed himself away from the wall and fired again. The bullet hit an upright on a window frame, cracking the glass and ricocheting into the ceiling.

  “Give up!” Harry yelled in anger, unable to fire back until he was sure he wouldn’t hit any of the others. He pushed off from the opposite wall and got up on one knee as the train straightened.

  The kid had planted himself in the middle of the car. He saw Harry rising, the Magnum steadying as he came up. In panic, the football player squeezed off two more shots. The first smacked into the floor between Harry’s foot and bent knee. The second ripped through the side of Harry’s loose drunk’s jacket.

  “That’s five,” Harry shouted, adding the bullet which had killed the kid’s knife-wielding friend. “Quick, does it have a sixth chamber? Take a guess, punk.”

  The football player gave his answer by pulling the trigger one last time. As the .38 hammer clicked on a spent shell, Harry shot back. The .44 slug grabbed the killer by the chest, picked him up, and threw him against the rear door. The combination of the shell’s point-blank power and the guy’s weight sent him through the glass. He somersaulted backward out of the car, and tumbled brutally onto the BART tracks as spinning hunks of tinted window fell like jagged snowflakes around him.

  All that remained of the man, in the BART car, was the snubnose, which had flown out of his hand and clattered onto the floor. Harry holstered his own smoking gun and rose. He walked between the stunned passengers, one of whom was tending to the old woman. He leaned down and picked up the gun he had immediately recognized. It was a Charter Arms Undercover .38 Special.

  “Colts are the ones with a six-round chamber,” he told the night beyond the broken window, as he opened the snubnose. “Charter Arms has five.” He clicked the weapon shut. “Only five.”

  C H A P T E R

  T h r e e

  The operation took a while to clean up, but the mop-up officers were used to that by now.

  “Sorry,” the Inspector said to one of the officers pulling the various dead and wounded bodies out at the Oakland BART stop.

  “That’s okay,” a plainclothesman said with a smirk. “When we get the word that Dirty Harry’s on a job, we put the meat wagon on twenty-four-hour standby alert.”

  Callahan sighed and looked out over Oakland and Alameda. The sun was just coming up, tracing the horizon in thick tones of blue and red. Harry looked and knew he wouldn’t sleep for several hours yet. There was still more to do. Only after he joined the Oakland officers for a little talk with the BART fight survivors was he able to get back on the Oakland-San Francisco run for a subway ride home.

  It had all come out at the hospital. The boys had prowled the nights looking for “fun” until fate intervened and delivered Sandy Richards into their hands. She had thought that, by going with all of them, she’d be safe on her trip home. They had thought that she, by refusing to service them for the favor, wasn’t being a good sport.

  Naturally, they didn’t mean to kill her. Between the youths forcing themselves on her too hard, and her fighting back too much, something snapped. The accident didn’t make her any less dead, and the guys’ reaction wasn’t any less criminal.

  Harry was ruminating on the new generation’s amoral stupidity when Martha Murray was thrown into the BART people-processor below the train.

  Callahan turned away from the pale stationmaster and vaulted back to the Fulton Station’s platform just as a group of trainmen rushed to their boss’s aid.

  “Seal off the entrances and exits,” Harry instructed them quietly. “Put a seven-fifty into Homicide headquarters at the Justice Building.”

  The stationmaster swallowed. “There’s no need for that, is there, Inspector?” he asked hopefully. “This was just an accident, wasn’t it?”

  Harry kneeled at the lip of the platform so that no one but the transportation boss could hear him. “She would have had to do a double somersault just to get to the edge,” he said. “I’m handling it as a homocide until we find out whether she was suicidal.” He got up and faced the other trainmen. “Go to it.”

  They all looked at their shaken boss on the tracks. He nodded. They went to it. The stationmaster awkwardly pulled himself back to the platform. Harry was too busy surveying the crowd to help him. The BART boss finally got to his feet, wheezing, next to Harry.

  “You don’t think this had anything to do with the two other pushing incidents this past month, do you?” he asked the cop, with more concern over the threat of scandal than the loss of young life. Although he was still unnerved, he had relegated the formless corpse below the train to the very back of his subconscious.

  Harry kept his eyes on the milling, upset crowd while he blew on his fingertips. “I hope not,” he said to himself. “This city has enough drug pushers. We don’t need a subway pusher.”

  With that, Callahan began circulating around the platform, looking at every person. By the time he reached the midway point on the platform, one of the trainmen returned with a uniformed San Francisco officer in tow.

  “This is the guy,” the trainman said to the patrolman.

  “I recognize him,” the uniformed cop replied, snapping off a salute at Harry. “All the exits are covered as you ordered, Inspector.”

  “To our knowledge, no one’s gotten out,” the trainman pitched in.

  Just then, the increasingly surly captive crowd surged aside to allow a television camera crew to get by. Complete with an on-the-air reporter, cameraman, and soundman, the unit was filming wildly, trying to get to the head of the stalled BART train. Harry looked meaningfully at the trainman.

  “Well,” the embarrassed transportation man drawled. “I said no one had gotten out. I didn’t say anything about getting in.”

  But Harry and the patrolman had already moved forward to cut the television crew off before they could film Murray’s remains. Callahan’s appearance before them was reason enough for renewed celebration. The reporter immediately recognized the inspector, and just as quickly assumed that the death was a homicide.

  “What can you tell us about the murder, Inspector?” the reporter demanded, as Harry and the uniformed cop halted their forward progress.

  “It’s a death, that’s all,” Harry said tiredly. “I was just coming back from Oakland when it happened. That’s all I know, so far.”

  That wasn’t enough for the reporter. “Do you think this is connected with the two other BART pushings in the last month?” he pressed. “Was this victim a young girl, just as those two were?”

  “We’re still investigating,” Harry announced, beginning to move the television crew back.

  “Well, how long is this going to take?” an angry businessman interrupted. “I see no reason why we should be kept here while you clean up the mess. We’ve got jobs, too, you know.”

  As soon as he started complaining, the camera swung in his direction, which didn’t stifle his “righteous indignation.” Harry saw that he was in a no-win situation. No matter what he said to the press or to the impatient businessman, the police could be made to look incompetent. He decided that honesty, in this case, was the best policy.

  “Someone has died a brutal, ugly death,” he told the interrupting man flatly. “We can’t act as if nothing has happened.”

  “I can understand that,” piped up a middle-aged woman who had been listening, and who moved in from where she was standing against the wall. “But do we have to
be kept down here? It’s so cold. Look,” she continued, holding up her hands, “I’ve already started to get frostbite.”

  Sure enough, the tips of her wrinkled, gnarled fingers were the pasty-white color which came when blood didn’t reach the extremities. Callahan suddenly became aware that his own fingers were cold—that was why he had unconsciously blown on them earlier. There was a strange chill in the air down here. Even though it was mid-December, the San Francisco season was such that the temperature rarely sank below fifty-five degrees. Even the Oakland night air was mild compared to the chill of the Fulton Station.

  There was a general murmur of agreement from everyone nearby about the cold and about the unfairness of keeping them all stuck underground. To keep their minds off their captivity, Harry instructed the patrolman to start collecting each witness’s story. If anyone saw more than the girl falling, he wanted to know about it.

  The Inspector continued to work his way down the line, preoccupied with looking at every person on the platform. But try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of the reporter, who tagged along behind him like a pet dog overly proud of his talent for heeling.

  “How do you feel about this death, Inspector?” the reporter asked with a straight face—seemingly trying to get “up close and personal” in his reporting. When Harry didn’t answer, the man tried again, holding his microphone up as if he were checking Callahan for radioactivity. “Do you feel that subway crime is on the upswing? Can we expect a rash of criminal activity on the BART system?”

  As the reporter’s voice droned on, Harry looked ahead, seeing a plain, brown-haired girl standing at the very edge of the platform. She held her books and musical instrument case tightly, as if they were beloved friends. Her eyes were cast down, and she seemed intent on examining the tips of her penny loafers. Harry began walking in her direction.

  “What action can we expect the police department to take in these matters?” the reporter asked, as Harry picked up speed.