Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men

by Dane Hartman

  He took Lake Street to the John F. Kennedy Expressway, kept going along the Dan Ryan Expressway until he reached Route 90, and then doubled back along Lake Shore Drive until the campus appeared on his left. The place was a wild combination of soothing ultramodern architecture and awe-inspiring Gothic designs. The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, which served as the university’s centerpiece was a mixture of the two, its bell tower rising more than two hundred feet above the ground.

  Harry walked into the campus proper across Hutchinson Court to the left of the Chapel. The wind coming off of Lake Michigan gave a snap to the sunny day, but it didn’t stop the students with early afternoon classes from wearing tank tops, cutoff jeans, T-shirts, and every other manner of casual clothing. But unlike the students Harry had seen at Berkeley and other California campuses, there was hardly a sign of fadism at the University of Chicago.

  He saw no “punk” clothing, no “Mohican” haircuts, no seethingly indifferent students buzzing to class on roller skates or a motorized skateboard. Here, very few of the students seemed to be silently screaming “look at me!” It was a refreshing change from the starry-eyed West Coast students.

  The inspector walked down the steps and past the fountain in Hutchinson Court. From there he spent about an hour checking out the rest of the area. He circled the Law School with its glass-walled library. He went by the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. He went by Stagg Field, where the first man-made nuclear chain reaction occurred in 1942. He hoped the day’s fireworks would be a little less impressive.

  He checked out the Weather Forecast Research Center, the Food Research Institute, the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital, and the Institute for Computer Research. He was impressed by the length and breadth of the university. Its educational facilities seemed inexhaustible on the surface. Finally he wound his way around to the Oriental Institute. He checked his watch before going in. It was 2:07. He had about fifty-three minutes before the rendezvous to check out the interior geography.

  It was a squat, rectangular building that was light and airy on the inside. He entered through one of three double doors. Before him was an open-topped marble box in which three guards sat. On either side of the box, which had a desklike fixture on its inside rim, were gatelike entrances which people had to push by. These kept them from walking in and out indiscriminately while counting the entrants as well.

  Beyond that was a little open foyer dotted with circles of low, plush seats, where students could sit, read, or stare out the tall, rectangular windows on the walls. Beyond that and to the right were exhibits enclosed in glass-and-wood cases. Surrounding these were book racks, filled with literature on Asian culture.

  Harry’s attention was on none of it. As he entered, essentially ignored by the men in the box, he inwardly groaned at the number of Oriental faces he saw wandering around the floor. Staring into the exhibit cases, browsing through the book racks, sleeping on the chairs, tending to the files, working behind the other desks; there were all Oriental faces. It was as if the entire Oriental population of the school and surrounding communities had turned up today at this time.

  Harry wandered deeper into the building, looking up in aggravation. Around the open first floor was a simple balcony, lined with files and inset display cases. Digging through the former and looking at the latter were more Orientals. Harry could vaguely categorize them. As far as he could see, there were all types of Far Eastern artifacts and all types of Far Easterners looking at them. He thought he recognized Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Philippines, and even a Vietnamese here and there.

  Just to be on the safe side, he found an elevator and went up to the balcony. From that vantage point he could see the general comings and goings of everyone. He moved patiently along the outcropping for forty-five minutes, trying to see which person would be his most likely contact. He followed the progress of anyone looking even vaguely Japanese.

  At three o’clock on the dot, a busload of Oriental children poured into the foyer like maple syrup from a knocked-over bottle. Four harried, young, Anglo teachers, along with two Oriental helpers, did their best to contain the tour group. Harry smiled down at the scene, forgetting, for a moment, why he was there. It was at that moment that the Seppuku Swords attacked.

  Callahan felt the movement before he saw it. Over his many years as a policeman, he had developed a kind of sixth sense—which was simply an acute awareness of displaced air. Sometimes it felt as if he had the cross hairs of a sniper scope on the back of his neck. Sometimes it came to him as a sudden chill. This time it was simply a feeling of movement coming from behind. It was a combination of the slight sound of cloth violently rubbing against skin as well as the sudden, unusual vibrations coming from the carpet below his shoes.

  However the feeling was explained, Harry reacted instinctively. His sudden movement saved his life. If there were no one attacking he would have looked foolish, whirling around. But as it was, the incredibly sharp knife blade ripped open the side of his jacket, tore through his shirt, and left a thin, superficial scratch on the skin above one rib. His attacker, an older gentleman, wearing glasses and in a suit, swept by as Harry grabbed onto the banister for balance.

  The two adversaries faced each other for a second, Harry with his back to the banister, the bespectacled Oriental man with his back to the elevator. The attacker was holding a small stiletto, hardly more than a seven-inch, slightly triangular blade which, if plunged to the hilt, would leave an unhealable hole. Harry kept his hands gripping the guard rail. He knew he didn’t have the time to get to his gun before the man attacked again. And he would need both hands to prevent the knife from plunging deep into his neck, chest, stomach, or sides, As yet, no one else on the balcony or below was aware of what was happening.

  Callahan moved slowly to one side. The attacker matched his move, the blade waving slowly back and forth in front of Harry’s face. The attacker was sweating, his glasses already sliding down on his small nose. But the eyes behind the lenses showed the intensity of a person completely committed to what he was doing. Harry felt the warm dribble of his own blood across his sliced side.

  He moved slightly in the other direction. The attacker moved with him, coming slightly closer. Harry crouched slightly, bringing his hands forward. The two men looked like they were about to wrestle. Then the elevator behind the attacker opened.

  Harry saw it coming, a silent “Down” light illuminating the wall. The attacker was taken by surprise and unnerved. He lost his concentration, his expression grew desperate and confused, and he whirled about. Harry mentally debated with himself for a second. He wanted to know about Suni, but this man was a dedicated, purposeful killer who looked about to become unhinged in a library full of students and children. Harry didn’t know what the man would do to whomever was in the elevator.

  A punch would be inaccurate and not completely effective. After a split second, Harry pulled out the Magnum and shot the assassin in the back from close range. To hell with fair play, he found himself thinking, the bastard cut me.

  The attacker flew forward as if hit with a battering ram. He dove in between the two young people in the elevator to smash facefirst into the elevator wall. He then dropped to the elevator floor in a pool of gut-sprinkled blood. The two people inside swept by him and charged Harry.

  Callahan was about to inform them that it was self-defense and they had nothing to fear, when he realized that he still had something to fear. Both people in the elevator had knives as well.

  Before he could react, the one on the left sliced at his empty hand and the one on his right jumped on his gun hand. He felt a prick on his wrist and pulled it away, having to drop the .44 to break the second attacker’s grip. As he swung the empty gun hand through the air, he saw a small hole leaking red fluid on the side of his wrist. Then he brought the fist down into the neck of the first attacker, just below the ear.

  The young, well-dressed Oriental man stumbled away to the side, the blade he was trying to bury in Harr
y’s upper arm stabbing the air. Harry lashed out with his foot just as he became aware of the second man reaching for his gun. His peripheral vision told him that his side kick had connected with the reacher’s head, pushing it right through the plexiglass banister partition.

  He spun back in the other direction just as the first attacker charged again, his knife held high. Harry’s mind simply went back to the Police Academy and “Self-Defense 101.” The first judo flip the rookies had learned was meant to deal with a knife wielder coming from on high. Harry pivoted, one hand wrapping around the attacker’s knife wrist, the other planted solidly just above the elbow. Harry turned and pulled. After all these years, it still worked like a charm. The attacker fell on his back, slid, and somersaulted right over the guard rail. He fell, shouting, and his ass slammed heavily onto the top of a display case. His speed and weight slowly toppled the case over.

  That case crashed into another case. And that case fell sideways across a long information desk. The attacker rolled across both case tops and spun behind the desk, smashing into a chair and slamming into the side of a heavy metal desk.

  There was absolutely no containing the visiting children now. The teachers were screaming at them to get down and calm down, but they were happily racing all over the library stacks in some elaborate game of hide and seek, thinking the whole thing was some kind of show played out for their benefit. Harry retrieved his gun from under the motionless hand of the kicked man, then watched in amazement as the Japanese girl behind the information desk reached over to grab the hair of a passing little girl and push a blade against her throat.

  Holding onto the screaming, kicking girl tightly, the Oriental woman looked calmly and purposefully up at Harry. “Come down, Inspector,” she called. “Even aim at me and I’ll slit this girl’s throat. Drop your gun and come on down.”

  Callahan considered trying a shot. It had worked before on the “Scorpio” case. That killer had a P-38 against a boy’s head. Harry had been about twenty feet away on a straight, slightly higher incline. He had lowered his .44, then swept it up, shooting the madman in the shoulder. But that had been an hysterical, desperate-nut case. This girl was calmly hunching behind a desk, a squealing, squirming child held in front of her. The angle was bad. It just wasn’t possible. Harry dropped the gun.

  The Magnum fell to the balcony carpet with a soft thud.

  “Kick it down,” the girl instructed.

  Harry swept the .44 off the balcony with his foot. The gun spun out from under the broken plexiglass, dropped quickly through the air, and bounced twice on the Oriental Institute’s ground floor.

  “Now you follow, if you please,” the girl demanded. Callahan pressed both hands down on the top of the guard rail, as if to vault over. “In the elevator,” the woman quickly added, holding her knife even tighter against the throat of the little girl.

  Reluctantly, Harry followed orders. He had to press the “Down” button and wait for the blood-coated box to come up from the ground floor. The door opened to reveal his first attacker’s corpse still lying within. Harry stepped in, unmindful of all the blood. The door closed behind him and the elevator slowly descended.

  The door remained closed on the ground floor for seconds longer than usual. The woman got impatient, screaming for Harry to appear and inadvertently cutting the little girl’s skin. The confused child screamed in pain and literally ripped herself out of the woman’s grip. She tumbled forward and then ran into the arms of one of the teachers.

  At that moment the elevator doors opened and Harry appeared. A hush had fallen over the room. All the excited children had suddenly become quiet and frightened. They huddled in their hiding places, like the school kids rolled into balls in the halls during the atomic-war rehearsals of the sixties. Those adults who still remained in the hall were pressed back in their seats or against the walls.

  Harry took the moment to step out of the elevator. Keeping his eyes directly on the woman behind the information desk, he deliberately took off his blood-soaked shoes. He stood in the midst of a bad dream that suddenly turned into a nightmare. As the woman with the blade came around the desk, she was unexpectedly joined by many other people in the room. One student across the way rose from his chair and pulled a knife out of his knapsack. One of the guards in the box at the door vaulted the side, a knife, which he had used to cut the phone wires, in his hand. From the book racks came another student, arm raised, blade flashing. Finally, even one of the “teachers” got up and pulled a knife from a scabbard under his pants leg.

  There were five Seppuku Sword members, either disguised or actually working within the Oriental Institute. They were placed in such a way that they controlled the room. One at the door, one in the foyer, one in the racks, one behind the desk, and one at large. But now they were all moving inexorably toward Callahan, holding what he recognized as a “knuckle dagger.”

  It was one step down from the samurai sword. Made famous during World War I, it was essentially a knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Only these had some slight variations. First, the clean, shiny blades were leaf-shaped and double-edged. The scabbard was made of sheet steel. The rounded finger holes ended with little triangular stubs, which would dig into the skin and rip muscles if a punch connected. Finally, on the bottom of the hilt was another, longer stub—a butt spike. If the weapon were used like a club, this half-inch metal tooth would puncture the skin like a cleat.

  It was a three-sided weapon, used to punch, stab, and bludgeon. All five gang members held them professionally and moved in on Harry slowly. He moved to his right, toward the kid who was coming from the book racks. The kid feinted with his blade, then pulled back when Harry failed to react. The teacher and the guard moved in to block the inspector’s way back to the elevator. Harry kept his hands out and his feet wide.

  As the group got closer to the racks, the teacher and the guard suddenly charged, screaming. Harry’s foot went out, catching the guard in the stomach while his fist went back, catching the kid in the nose. The guard’s knife swept down and the kid’s knife swept up. Both blades missed Harry’s limbs.

  As Harry pulled back, the teacher was almost upon him. He wrenched his torso to the side to avoid the knife thrust and dug his thumbs into his attacker’s eyes. It was a quick, angry thrust. The teacher’s blow just missed Harry’s body, the knife’s hilt sliding along his side. He stuck his forefingers in the teachers’ ears, then pushed his thumbs into each of his eyes. He pushed in, like an opener into a can top.

  Instead of soda fizzing out, Harry felt the gelatinous mass try to squeeze past his thumbs, only to end up against the rear of the eye cavity and burst. The jellylike “vitreous humor” splattered out of the gouged socket, splashing Harry’s shirt front. He felt his thumbs sink all the way in, completely immersed in gunky blood. The teacher screamed as Harry abruptly pushed him back. The cop’s hands left the ruined face and clamped down on the teacher’s knife wrist.

  Unimpeded by the destruction of the teacher’s eyes, the information woman jumped into the melee, slicing down at Harry’s already wounded wrist to prevent him from getting the teacher’s blade. Callahan released the wrist and moved back as the woman’s knife dug into the teacher’s skin. Blinded, the latter didn’t know what was happening and screamed in pain and fear—much like the little girl whom the woman had previously used as a shield.

  The teacher’s knife fell to the floor, useless to Harry. The woman pushed the battered teacher aside and came at Callahan. Harry quickly reached over and grabbed the groggy kid. He pulled the boy’s body in front of him just as the woman thrust. Her blade sunk into the kid’s chest. Before she could respond, Harry pushed him forward, his wounded body smashing into the woman and throwing them both to the floor.

  From there, Callahan immediately ran into the rows of book stacks. The guard and student followed him. As he reached the end of one row, he used the “Red Sea” approach. His pursuers had been too angered and shocked at Harry’s thumb-and-blocking defense to t
hink, so when he reached the end of the line, he simply turned around, grabbed the side of the racks to the left and the right, and pulled in.

  Like Samson pulling down the Philistine temple’s columns, Harry heaved and the heavy wooden bookcases came slamming down on top of his two pursuers. The rack tops met in the middle, momentarily creating a makeshift pyramid, then the heavy books fell off the shelves onto the attackers’ heads as the bookcase bases slid away from each other. The whole structure slammed down on the two Seppuku Sword members.

  Harry jumped onto the pile, making a point of walking heavily across the prone bodies. But as he quickly moved back out into the open, he could see no sign of the knuckle knives buried under the books. He came out to meet the last attacker—the woman from the information desk. Normally, the match-up would have been ludicrous. Harry was a foot taller than she was and probably a hundred pounds heavier. But he was tired, with a wound in his side and on his wrist. And the woman had a sharp, nasty weapon.

  Harry moved back toward the foyer, his arms loose, his eyes blinking. Suddenly he realized that he was a lot more tired than he should have been. His efforts had been fast and vicious, but they should not have left him as winded as he was. He shook his head, but failed to clear the cobwebs there. He reached down toward his torn shirt, and his fingers came away dabbed with crimson. Since his loss of blood couldn’t have been that extreme, Harry told himself, his grogginess had to be caused by something else.

  He suddenly remembered looking at the dead man’s knife in the elevator. Up close, he had seen that the edges were discolored, as if already smeared with blood. Initially, he had assumed it was a combination of his and the attacker’s. Now he realized that it was some kind of poison.

  His rushing adrenaline had fought the drug in his system for a few minutes, but now it was finally taking effect. His vision clouded. Through misty, unfocused eyes he could see the woman grinning. She was standing in an offense position twenty feet in front of him, her feet wide, her arms out, and the knife in her right fist. She could see him losing control. She was simply waiting for him to drop his guard completely so she could move in for the kill.