Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  “Holy shit,” DiGeorgio said succinctly, realizing the same thing. Without offering any kind of explanation, the two men raced down the hall, trying to trace the sounds to their origin.

  By the time they reached the center of the floor, the main nurse’s desk was already in tumultuous activity. Meanwhile, the gunshot sounds continued. Harry grabbed one of the scurrying nurses by the arm. “Where is that noise coming from?” he asked the wide-eyed girl.

  “Surgery,” she gasped. “Down in the new wing.”

  As the nurse slipped out of Callahan’s grasp, DiGeorgio was already flashing his badge and getting detailed directions from the flustered desk nurse. The two men took the stairs down several flights until they reached a locked basement door. They could hear the gunfire coming clearly from the other side.

  “Is it worth it?” DiGeorgio asked.

  “It’s worth it,” Harry answered, already backing up.

  The Sergeant’s Ruger Police Service Six revolver came out of his belt holster. Standing to the side of the door, he blew the knob and lock off. He did it from the side, because he didn’t want one of his .357 caliber loads accidentally hitting an innocent bystander.

  As soon as the metal knob had clattered to the floor, Harry moved forward, drawing his .44 Magnum and pulling at the broken door. Just as he pulled it open, the body of a wounded black intern fell face-first from the other side onto the stairway floor.

  “Christ,” DiGeorgio exclaimed in surprise, automatically leaning down to check on the man’s condition.

  While he was doing that, Callahan stepped around the bleeding man and plastered himself against the left frame of the open door, his gun up. He hazarded a look around the corner. All he saw was a long, thin hallway made up of reinforced cinder blocks occasionally interrupted by windows. At the far end of the hall, he saw the back of a uniformed patrolman kneeling behind the corner.

  Harry looked back at DiGeorgio. “It wasn’t my bullet that did this,” the Sergeant reported. “He was shot high in the back.”

  “Get to a phone and make sure police back-up is coming,” Harry instructed. “I don’t want hospital security handling this alone.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply before turning the corner and running down the hall. He kneeled down next to the patrolman, who reacted to his appearance with a start. Harry looked into the face of a surprised, sweating Jim Petrillo. The next thing he noticed was that the cop’s holster was empty, and that the gun wasn’t in his hand.

  “What happened?” Callahan demanded.

  “I don’t know!” Petrillo practically wailed. “One minute he’s got the shakes—he can’t walk, he can hardly talk—the next minute he’s running around like Tarzan!”

  Callahan looked around the left-hand corner to see another long corridor with two hospital workers huddled behind a vending machine while a security guard lay motionless, face down. The gun was missing from his holster, too.

  “Explain,” Harry said tersely.

  Petrillo calmed himself with an effort. He breathed deeply several times and swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “I carry Maggin to the emergency ward. He’s so bad off he can’t even stand. They stick him into an examining room with a bunch of doctors, nurses, and interns, and they ask me to wait outside. I figure that’s all right, because the junkie wouldn’t get five feet in his condition. Inspector, I’ve seen addicts before. I know faking when I see it, and Maggin wasn’t faking. He was gone!”

  Harry had seen addicts, too, and he had to agree with the patrolman. Either Harry was more tired than he thought, or Maggin was a superb actor.

  “All right,” he concurred. “What happened then?”

  “So all of a sudden, he comes tearing out of the examining room like a banshee, slugs me, grabs my gun, and goes running. I took off after him, but now he’s moving like O. J. Simpson. I get him cornered down here and he starts shooting.”

  Harry looked around the corner again. The hall was beginning to fill up with thin, white smoke, and the gunfire had ceased. Replacing the shots, however, was a crackling hum.

  “What’s that?” Harry wanted to know.

  “You got me,” Petrillo answered.

  “Stay here,” Callahan commanded. “Wait for the cavalry. I’m going to get those people out of there.”

  Again not waiting for a reply, Harry moved down the hall in a crouch, his Magnum up and ready. The thin plumes of smoke stung his eyes and nostrils, but he made it to a position behind the vending machines without incident. But when he placed a hand on the shoulder of a kneeling nurse, he was rewarded with a shriek. The doctor in front of the girl turned at the sound.

  “Oh, my God,” he said.

  “Police,” Harry told the terrified duo, cursing his misleading disguise. “Get back around the corner. I’ll cover you.”

  “We can’t leave him in there,” the doctor said stridently.

  “We’re not going to,” Harry promised. “But we can’t have any more injuries. Now get going.”

  The nurse was more than pleased to slink out of the way, but the doctor wouldn’t budge. “You don’t understand . . .” he said. He was interrupted by the appearance of Marshall Maggin two doorways down, brandishing two revolvers.

  “I saw that!” Maggin screamed, pushing the guns out before him and pulling the triggers. The bullets whined off the cement walls and slammed into the candy and beverage machines, putting holes in eight packages of Doritos and springing a leak in the Welch’s grape-soda tank.

  As the beverage dispenser began spitting carbonated water and bleeding purple syrup, the nurse cried in shock and fell in the hall. Petrillo grabbed her arms and dragged her around the corner as Maggin disappeared back into the room.

  “Get the hell out of the way,” Harry warned the doctor as he moved forward.

  “Wait!” the doctor cried, as Callahan silently hopped over the guard’s prone body and flattened himself against the opposite wall. “Please,” the doctor pleaded.

  Harry looked back at the man’s desperate face. “He’s in our most technically modern operating room,” the doctor stressed. “There are literally millions of dollars of delicate equipment in there.”

  “That’s not going to buy these men’s lives back,” Harry said, motioning to the still security guard.

  “But it can buy many others’ lives back,” the doctor countered. “Please, please be careful.”

  Callahan continued through the smoke, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Petrillo was moving forward to collect the distraught surgeon. Harry slid along the opposite wall until he was right outside the operating room Maggin had holed up in.

  “Come on, Marshall,” Harry called. “You’re only making things worse.”

  He was answered by several bullets slamming off the door frame. But the junkie was cunning enough not to show himself so that Harry could bring him down.

  “You’re running out of bullets, Maggin,” Harry continued, undaunted. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  This time, the answer was a hysterical laugh. “You think so?” Maggin’s screeching voice asked. “Then come get me, pig. I’ve got something waiting for you.”

  Harry mentally counted the rounds the creep had used so far. He and DiGeorgio had heard at least four. The one that felled the intern made five. The security guard made six. The vending machines took at least three more. The operating room entrance took two additional bullets. And, as far as Harry knew, Maggin only had Petrillo’s and the security guard’s six-chambered revolvers.

  That left the junkie with either one slug left, or possibly none, if Harry hadn’t counted right. It was worth a small risk to nail the obviously crazy guy.

  Harry steeled himself, and then jumped into the operating room doorway on one knee, his Magnum thrust out in front of him. He had just enough time to see Maggin standing over a naked body on an operating table and fooling around with some sort of crane, before he was knocked aside.

  The Inspector fell over to the left, regaining
his balance a second later. He spun to see that Petrillo had, for some reason, dived forward and pushed him out of the way. The patrolman remained crouched in the doorway for a moment, saying, “It’s a—”

  Then his arm flew up and his legs straightened, throwing him back against the wall. He smashed into it solidly, then slid down to sit on the floor, looking like a thrown rag doll. His eyes were open, and he had a stupid, open-mouthed grin.

  But while Harry watched, a thin, red line appeared in the middle of his face—as if an artist had drawn a vertical line from his brow to his lower lip. Then the line started to drool red ink. It wasn’t long before the blood was bubbling from behind the razor-thin cut, making a pool inside his shirt.

  “It’s a laser!” The doctor completed the message for the dead Petrillo from the other side of the hall. “We use it for cataracts and cancer operations.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place, you asshole!” Callahan shouted angrily from the other end of the corridor. “I don’t give a fuck about million-dollar equipment, but this is a killing machine!”

  “No it’s a lifesaving machine,” the doctor wailed. “It’s only powerful enough to make a shallow incision—no deeper than a scalpel!”

  “Deep enough,” Harry yelled, waving his Magnum at the patrolman’s corpse. “Can you pull the plug on it?”

  “It has its own power supply,” the doctor admitted.

  “Wonderful,” Harry said to himself. And who knew when that power supply would run out? At close range, Maggin might be able to make confetti out of them all for days to come. “Who is that in there with him?” Callahan asked the doctor.

  “That’s Mr. MacCurdy,” the surgeon replied. “We were removing some nodes from his vocal cords when this crazy man burst in. If we don’t get back in there soon, he’ll die from choking on his own blood.”

  There seemed no way around it. Harry would have to race into the face of a death-ray if he didn’t want a drawn-out hostage negotiation process. By then, MacCurdy would already be dead, anyway. Harry tightened his grip on his Magnum and prepared himself.

  “What are you going to—!” said the doctor, just as Harry ran forward into the operating room.

  His timing couldn’t have been better. Maggin, in his maddened state, had been listening to the hallway conversation closely, so when Callahan moved in the middle of the doctor’s question, the junkie wasn’t prepared to act. Harry twisted to the side, trying to get a clear shot at the nut without hitting the overheating laser scalpel or the prone patient.

  That gave Maggin enough time to grab the cranelike laser barrel and swing it over at Harry. The Inspector didn’t see anything, but he felt a slicing pain across his right arm. That wasn’t enough to make him drop his gun, but it was enough to throw off his aim.

  When his finger pulled the Magnum’s trigger, the bullet smashed into the right side of Maggin’s pelvis, folding the junkie in two. Maggin collapsed, his scream of pain drowned out by the .44’s roar. A moment later, both were cut off.

  When Maggin fell, he didn’t release his grip on the laser. He had pulled the device right across the top of his own head. The hardly visible beam of concentrated light sliced through his skull bone as if it were rice paper, and through his brain as if it were bread pudding.

  Harry stayed exactly where he was, and yelled for the doctor. “Get the hell in here and turn this fucking thing off!”

  The nurse and the surgeon ran into the room and tended to their patient and to the machinery. Quickly following was a small army of security guards and police, including DiGeorgio. Callahan was nursing his cut arm by moving it around.

  “Where’s Patterson?” the Inspector asked quickly, almost ignoring the confrontation which had just occurred.

  “I don’t know, Harry,” DiGeorgio said in amazement. “Checked out, I suppose. Gone.”

  “Well, check it out,” Callahan said irritably. “I want to know where she lives and works.”

  The Sergeant let the harsh words roll off his back. He had known Harry too long to be surprised by anything. “While I’m doing that,” he recommended, “I suggest you get checked out by Doctor Rogers back at headquarters.” With that parting advice, DiGeorgio left to do what Callahan had told him to.

  Harry followed shortly after, but not before he had turned to the surgeon, who was toiling quickly over patient MacCurdy. “He’ll live,” the doctor announced.

  “He won’t,” a security guard said of Maggin.

  Harry shook his head and walked to the operating-room door. He took a last look at the smoky chaos and shook his head again.

  “Better dying through science,” he muttered.

  C H A P T E R

  F i v e

  “Amazing, really amazing.”

  Doctor Steve Rogers was spending more time marveling at Callahan’s wounds than repairing them. Finally, Harry had stripped off the decrepit Salvation Army jacket and shirt to find that each had a perfect, thin slice in the sleeve. Just beneath that was an equally thin, perfect slice in Harry’s right arm.

  “You’re incredibly lucky, Inspector,” the black police doctor commented as he looked at the surgical cut from almost every direction.

  “So what else is new?” Harry said, with drawled impatience. It was hard for him to take Rogers’s comment seriously, considering the number of wounds his battered body had already sustained in his career—not to mention the fact that he had stared down a laser to get his latest marking.

  “Really, I mean it, Harry,” Rogers continued, not picking up the cop’s sardonic tone. “Since the condensed light hit your arm, it was no worse than getting a shallow knife slice. But if it had hit any part of your upper torso or face, forget it.”

  “All right, already, enough with the examination,” Harry declared. “Just wrap the thing up and get out of my way. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Not so fast, Inspector,” Lieutenant Bressler said from the door of the first-aid cubicle on the seventh floor of the Justice Building. “I think you deserve a little R and R after your performance at the hospital today.”

  Harry looked from Rogers, who was rummaging around a standing medicine cabinet for some gauze, a bandage, and Mercurochrome, to the dark-haired, ruddy-faced Bressler, who stood in front of DiGeorgio in the door opening.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said, “but something smells about this whole Murray murder, and I don’t think I could sleep very well with the stench still in my nostrils.”

  “Death,” Bressler hastily corrected. “The Murray death, Harry. And if there was any foul play involved, I think you tied that up neat and clean back at the laser operating room.”

  Rogers concerned himself with wrapping the Inspector’s arm while Harry cocked a suspicious eye at his superior. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just this,” Bressler said easily, coming into the room. “What reason would Maggin have for suddenly going crazy? The way we figure it is that he knew that he pushed the Murray girl . . . and maybe the two other girls as well.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Harry asked cautiously.

  The Lieutenant’s face became an expressionless mask. “The San Francisco Police Department,” he said blankly.

  “How do you figure?” Harry pressed skeptically.

  “All right,” Bressler admitted affably. “So maybe he didn’t push the Murray girl. Maybe he was trying to snatch her purse and she fought back too hard. Maybe, in the scuffle, she slipped and fell.”

  “Petrillo . . .” Harry began. “The late Patrolman Petrillo interviewed many of the witnesses,” Harry continued. “No one mentioned a scuffle of any kind.”

  “They also made descriptions of everyone from a black man with a ghetto blaster to a sinister Oriental with a scar, standing behind the girl,” DiGeorgio said uncomfortably.

  “You must know from experience that we can’t depend on eyewitness descriptions, Harry,” Bressler contended. “The only thing that makes any sense is that Maggin figured he had nothing to l
ose when he went berserk in the hospital. He figured that it was only a matter of time before we nailed him on the Murray thing.”

  “And what about the other two pushing incidents?” Callahan inquired as Rogers finished up on his arm.

  “We’re looking into that,” Bressler said, his eyes veiled. “But you know as well as we do, Harry, that those incidents could be totally unrelated to this one. And this one is the most important. This one resulted in a death.”

  “Ahem,” interrupted Doctor Bogers. Everyone looked at him. “I’m all through here,” he reported. Turning toward Harry, he continued, “I wouldn’t recommend you do any shot-putting with that arm for the next few days.” Turning toward Bressler, he finished up. “If you require my services any further, I’ll be down in the lab. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Bressler waited until the doctor had left the room before turning back to Harry and slapping, then rubbing, his hands together. “Well,” he exhaled. “You heard what the doctor said, Inspector. Why don’t you take the rest of the week off and go home for some much-needed rest until we need you on this Goldfarb thing, eh?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Bressler left the room, his desires known. Harry looked pointedly at DiGeorgio, who looked back with worried skepticism. Both had worked under the Lieutenant long enough to read him like a mediocre police-procedural novel.

  “The Lieutenant’s sphincter seems tighter than usual,” Harry commented, still sitting shirtless on the first-aid table.

  “Um,” DiGeorgio agreed. “Lots of the editorial ‘we’ in that speech.”

  “Sounds like he’s been getting some pressure from on high,” Harry surmised.

  “That’s the bad word going around the office, all right,” the Sergeant agreed.

  “Well,” Harry concluded, “if I’m going to get all this bed rest, I suppose I’ll need to get dressed.”

  DiGeorgio was way ahead of him. Holding up a finger, he stepped outside and started producing clothing from atop a file cabinet. “A seven ninety-nine dress-shirt special from Penney’s from your left, bottom drawer,” he narrated, throwing Harry the light-blue shirt still heavily pinned and in its plastic wrapping. “A sleeveless, red V-necked sweater from your locker downstairs,” he continued, while tossing, “and your well-worn, light-beige corduroy jacket from the hat rack in your office. What the well-dressed police punching bag is wearing today.”