by Dane Hartman
He ducked down in the driver’s seat and concentrated all his effort on avoiding a crack-up. Coming up fast on the port side was a tourist barge lazily drifting past the sights. The deputy saw it, too, and lowered his gun. It would not do for a visitor to get croaked by a cop on the river. That gave Harry a little extra time to think.
The two motorboats rushed past the barge, sending up a double wave in their wake, which doused all the vacationers. Harry also noticed that his wake bounced off the tourist craft and splashed the following boat. It served to blind the deputy for a second. It was only a second, but that might be all he needed.
The deputy wasn’t waiting. He started shooting at Harry as soon as the barge was safely past. Harry still ignored the shots. As long as the lead didn’t hit him, he didn’t mind it. The chance of the deputy finding his mark on the choppy seas that Harry’s engine stirred up was slim. Harry’s chances of escaping were just as slim. By now the wounded deputy had called in. Any second, more police cars would be roaring into the area. Harry had to get off the water.
The fugitive inspector turned a corner in the river, hearing his rotors scrape the shallow bottom. The boat sputtered and drifted for a second, but then found deeper water and surged forward again. The deputy came around the same corner wide, bumping harshly against the concrete siding. His boat waffled as well, righted, and continued the chase.
Up ahead, Harry saw what he was looking for. There was another tour barge, and, a football field beyond that, the end of the line. This section of the Paseo wound up like the shallow end of a swimming pool. The bottom was built up into a concrete landing with stairways on both sides.
Harry turned to see how far the deputy was trailing. He was glad to see he had maintained the same lead. Crouching near the edge of the boat, Harry opened up the throttle as wide as it would go, building up nearly uncontrollable speed. He rocketed by the second barge, sending up an impressive wave.
The water descended on the tourists, accompanied by their unanimous wail. And, again, a section of the wake slapped the barge’s side and swept into the other speedboat’s bow. As soon as Harry saw the deputy disappear into the blue-tan liquid, he slid over the side.
Since his hand was off the clutch, the boat slowed. It slowed enough for the deputy to catch up, but not enough to stop in time for the section’s end. The deputy triumphantly pulled aside the decelerating craft and leveled his pistol at an empty cockpit.
“Halt in the name of the holy fuck!” is what the deputy said as both boats screeched across the sloping end of the line. Harry’s boat swerved sideways, the engine rotors slapped onto dry concrete, and the craft started flipping. The deputy hauled back on his clutch in time to avoid crashing against the embankment. Instead his boat slowed to a scraping, tortuous stop. Harry’s boat kept flipping until it cracked into a stairway and bashed its hull all to hell.
Harry wouldn’t have minded an explosion. The concussion, noise, and flame of one would have made a great cover for the remainder of his escape. As it was, he had to drag himself out of the river, crawl across the sidewalk, drip-dry his Magnum, and avoid the arriving squad cars without one.
It wasn’t as easy, but he did it anyway.
C H A P T E R
S e v e n
The only noise in Boris Tucker’s house was the sound of the cellar door slamming.
It was one of those thick cellar doors with a layer of sheet metal tacked up on both sides. Every once in a while those sheets would swing back lazily, then get pulled forward. There would be a small scrape and a big slam.
It was no big deal. Dotty and the kids weren’t around to hear it. They had gone to stay with Dotty’s mother in New Mexico until the grief passed over. The neighbors didn’t hear it because the nearest one was three acres away. Boris Tucker liked privacy.
Only Harry Callahan heard it, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care because he was dog-tired and frustrated as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Or, to be more precise, a one-armed man at a juggling convention. He was wrapping the handcuff chain around the door bolt and slamming it shut.
And he was only doing that because he had tried everything else. Tucker hadn’t been a handy man, so while Harry did find a rusted hacksaw in the cellar, he couldn’t find a vise to clamp it still in. He tried using a kitchen drawer for the same purpose, but it wasn’t tight enough. He tried wedging it in every hole he could find, but it didn’t work.
Then he tried prying one of the links loose. It didn’t work. He tried hammering the cuffs open by hitting things. It didn’t work. He even seriously considered melting them open over the stove but he didn’t relish char-broiled hands.
At this point, however, he didn’t see how his palms could get any rawer. They were already cut, filthy, and bleeding. As a matter of fact, most of him was cut, filthy, and bleeding.
His leg had scabbed up once, only to be cut and scabbed again. It was not a pretty sight. Considering the fact that the cuts were red, his leg was white and the scabs were bluish, his left lower limb looked like the American flag. His clothes looked like they belonged to the Incredible Hulk’s wardrobe after a particularly bad night. Knees and elbows torn, water and dirt combined to make his outfit look like a giant raisin ready for harvest.
As soon as he got the handcuffs broken, Harry decided he would ransack Tucker’s son’s room. The boy was away at college, but he was bound to have at least a pair of jeans and a work shirt Harry could use. But only after he got the fucking handcuffs off.
Harry’s face was bathed in sweat. Harry was chewing his lower lip. Harry’s brain was in a turmoil. Harry’s existence was in a mess. His exhaustion and helplessness were getting a little much to bear.
Summing up what was left of his anger-driven strength, he wrapped the chain around the bolt again and pulled with all his might. He pulled so hard that the chain popped off the bolt before the door closed and Harry fell flat on his back on the kitchen floor.
His skull slapped the bright floor tile, sending a starblaze across his eyes. He stared at the multicolored firework display of his mind while cringing on the floor. When his vision cleared, he was lying with his legs almost in the lotus position. He sat up without moving his legs. His vision clouded again and a little knife stabbed his brain a couple of times, but then the pain and the purple haze went away.
Harry found himself staring at his shoes. With his vision slightly doubled, he saw the soles of his shoes facing each other. He blinked and shook his head. His eyes then saw single again. He got to thinking about the soles of his shoes. Especially about the way they sloped inward and met the edge of the shoe heel. Then he got up and started rummaging through every kitchen drawer.
He stopped searching when he found a long piece of string. He took the string over to the kitchen table where his Magnum lay. He tied one end of the string to the trigger. He took the other end of the string and put it in his mouth. Then he took the gun and sat down on the kitchen floor, facing the cellar door.
Harry splayed his knees out until the soles of his shoes were facing each other. Held flat against each other that way, there was only a space right after the heels met. It was a triangular space that was closed off the other side by the toes of his shoe meeting. It was a space almost perfectly proportioned to a gun butt.
Harry pulled back the hammer until it clicked into place. Then he put the gun butt in between his shoes. Tightening his leg muscles effectively locked the pistol in a rubber vise. The barrel was pointing away from him, roughly centered toward the top of the cellar door. Harry stretched his hands apart as far as they would go. He reached forward until the handcuff chain was in front of the magnum barrel. Then he started eating the string.
He was sweating worse than ever now. His legs began to vibrate with the effort of keeping the gun perfectly still. He was afraid his arms would start shaking as well, making the whole proposition risky. He decided to do it as fast as possible.
The string grew taut between his teeth and the trigger. He l
eaned back as far as he could without moving his hands. He felt the pressure of the gun between his feet. If his feet, the gun, or his hands moved at all, he might succeed in creating the most complicated suicide ever.
His whole body was as tight as a teetotaler four vodkas later. His lips were completely off his teeth. He looked like a wolf about to devour its prey. He closed his eyes. He jerked his head back.
There was an explosion of sound. It was the intermingling of the gunshot, his own shout, and the noise of his torso and arms slamming down onto the tile. Afterwards, he heard the gun clatter to the floor as well. His legs stretched out.
He opened his eyes. He saw his right hand. It was stretched out above his head. It was still attached to his arm but it was no longer attached to his other wrist. He had done it. He had shot the chain between the cuffs.
He closed his eyes and slept.
Harry awoke. He wasn’t captured. He wasn’t dead. He wondered why.
Maybe Striker thought Tucker’s house would be the last place Callahan would go. Maybe Sheriff Strughold was in the hospital and the regular cops didn’t know Harry’s connection to Tucker. Whatever the reason, Harry wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’d examine the rest of it, maybe, but he’d leave the mouth alone.
Speaking of horses’ mouths, the inside of his own felt like one. Now that the rest had cleared the cobwebs from his mind, he needed a little nourishment to clear the cobwebs from his stomach. Harry got to his feet as sprightly as he could and investigated the cupboards. He found a can of cheese ravioli, a can of ham, a quart of milk, and a bottle of orange juice. He opened them, cooked them, sliced them, poured them, drank them, and ate them all.
He was feeling better so he wandered into the son Fred’s room. Fred had wanted to get away from it all, so he went to M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was lucky for his family that he was a brilliant statistician, and it was lucky for Harry that he was tall. The inspector found a pair of straight-leg jeans that had their cuffs rolled up in a popular 1950s style that had come back into fashion. With the cuffs rolled all the way back down, they fit Harry.
Harry checked the rest of his clothes. Only the shirt was salvageable. The jacket and shoes were shot to shit. Harry discovered that a pair of Boris’ old boots fit, and one of Fred’s lived-in light corduroy jackets was just what the doctor ordered. Not only did it mask his shoulder holster and gun effectively, the sleeves were slightly long on him, covering the still-locked remnants of the handcuffs. On anything but close-up examination, Harry would look like he was wearing a watch on one wrist and a matching bracelet on the other.
He completed the outfit with a Western belt he found in Fred’s closet. Afterwards, he searched through Boris’ closet until he found a gun-cleaning kit. He brought it to the kitchen table and started working over the Magnum.
Harry had just got all the sludge out of it when the phone rang. For two rings he thought about not answering it. On the third ring he figured that not answering might be just as incriminating as answering it. On the fourth ring, he wondered how he could have thought that. On the fifth ring he decided that he needed more sleep and picked up the phone.
He didn’t say hello. A breathy female voice on the other end did. He thought it must be a wrong number or a hooker doing a telethon until he recognized that the breathiness didn’t come from sex appeal but a lack of air from crying.
“Carol?” he asked.
“Harry?” was the tearful reply. “Oh God, Harry!” Carol Nash moaned.
She really didn’t have to say anything after that. Callahan had already filled in the picture for himself. Peter had disappeared. She had called everyone she knew to try and find out where he was. When that didn’t work she got desperate enough to search for and find his personal book of numbers. She started at “A.” It wasn’t until “T” that she made connection with Harry.
He soothed her, feeling the depression he had felt before. Pretty ladies shouldn’t marry cops. Pretty ladies shouldn’t meet cops. Pretty ladies shouldn’t need cops. But somehow, some way pretty ladies had become the prime target for the twentieth century. Whenever one got hurt, kidnapped, raped, or killed, it was front-page, indepth news. And all the coverage seemed to promote her anguish. In the 1980s, hurting pretty ladies had become a form of self-expression.
So Carol Nash was lucky. All she had was a missing husband who was probably dead. Harry’s depression was displaced by dark anger; the kind Harry used to fuel his life. It was a quiet, painless rage at all the injustices of civilization rolled together. It was a dark sense of realism. A feeling of reckless capability. Harry knew he had to do something.
The game was over, the playing had stopped, no more fooling around. Dirty Harry was taking over now.
“I want him,” Harry said.
Hannibal Striker was immediately struck by Callahan’s similarity to Sweetboy Williams. Their approach was the same, their physicality was the same, and their capabilities were the same. The businessman was about to discover that the threat they both posed to him was the same.
Regaining a modicum of his composure, Striker tried to take control of the conversation.
“Ah, Inspector Callahan!” he said to the conference phone speaker on his desk. “It’s so good to know you’re still within the confines of our fair city and in one piece!”
“Can the bullshit,” Harry said into the pay phone receiver. “It won’t matter if you trace this call, I’ll be gone by the time anyone gets here.”
“Causing you difficulty is the last thing on my mind,” Striker said smoothly, inwardly cursing. “I only want what’s best for both of us.”
“Then release Peter Nash,” Harry instructed, keeping a watch all around the phone booth.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I said no bullshit,” the inspector flatly stated. “Neither of us have time.”
“What makes you think I—?”
“He isn’t dead yet for two reasons. You need to find out how much he knows about your operation and who else knows and you need him to bait me.”
“Bait you?” Striker said with the most innocence he could muster. “Why would I want to bait you?”
“Christ,” Harry said angrily. “Once a wetback, always a wetback.”
Striker’s manner immediately changed.
“Look, you bastard, I’ll make a deal—”
“I don’t have to make deals with you,” countered Callahan, switching ears.
“I said I was willing to make a deal!” Striker shouted into the speaker, his hands gripping the desk.
“Who gives a shit,” Harry replied calmly. “You miss the point. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ve already gone too far.”
“I could get the charges dropped,” Striker yelled defensively.
“I’m going to trust you?” Harry asked incredulously. “Forget it, Edd. I’ll make you a deal.”
Striker was on his feet, hollering down at the desk speaker as if it were a naughty child. “Who the hell do you think you are? This is my town! What could you possibly offer me?”
“You let Nash go and I won’t kill you.”
Striker’s mouth dropped open. He flopped down into his seat heavily. “I don’t believe this,” he said plaintively.
“You’ve got to come out sometime,” Harry said pleasantly. “I’ll be there.”
“You’re crazy,” said Striker.
“Yes, I am,” Harry agreed.
Callahan waited for the inevitable. Striker would either hang up or start negotiating. Either way, Harry was still in a fight for his life.
“All right,” the Mexican businessman finally said. “All right. I’ll let Nash go.”
“Fine,” said Harry.
“But I won’t let you go!” Striker exploded.
“Fine,” Harry repeated.
The businessman was again taken aback by Harry’s manner. He had to sit in his big brown chair and breath deeply a few times before he was able to continue.
Harry didn’t mind. He expected the Mexican to be a hothead. It gave him that secure feeling that he knew with whom he was dealing. That feeling might be the difference between life and death when it came down to the inevitable confrontation.
“That means you will be brought up on charges for your full range of crimes,” Striker said, trying to make Harry a bit more humble.
“Fine,” Harry answered, tiredly closing his eyes. He felt like laughing. Hannibal Striker talking about crime prosecution. It was like David Dukes joining the NAACP. “I’ll take my chances,” he told the businessman.
“We’ll meet at the Tucker house for the switch,” Striker continued, becoming more decisive.
“The Tucker house?” It was Harry’s turn to be taken aback.
“Don’t worry,” Striker told him smugly. “It’s empty.”
“You sure?” Harry asked cautiously. He didn’t want to tip his hand, but he was interested in any details he could get to adorn Striker’s statement.
Thankfully, Striker took the question as another dig at this competence. “Don’t be stupid!” he shouted. “I’ve had it checked.”
Harry nodded to himself. “Forget it,” he said. “We’ll meet at Brackenridge Park. The Oriental Sunken Gardens at 8:00.”
“I said the Tucker house!” Striker exploded, simply trying to force his superiority on the upstart inspector.
“Meet in an empty house? Just me and your army?” Harry asked incredulously. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he concluded and hung up.
Striker reacted to Harry’s disconnection with remarkable poise, given his reactions during the conversation. The businessman closed his mouth, leaned back, and laid the flat of his hands on the beautifully polished desk top. There was a look of calculated bemusement on his face. He was thinking.
Harry, too, was thinking. He was thinking about how Tucker’s house could have been reported empty. He was lying flat out on the kitchen floor for hours. No one could have missed that.
