Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (6 page)

Even then Harry didn’t call it quits. He raced into the underground garage, jumped into his car, grabbed the police radio at the same time he was jamming the keys from his pants pocket into the ignition, and started everything up. He was putting an All Points Bulletin (APB) out on the van at the same time as he was wrenching his car out from between the two compacts and tearing out onto the street.

As soon as he had dispatched all the pertinent info, he threw the radio mike down and scrambled in his glove compartment for the extra speed loaders he always secreted there. Ever since the corrupt Lieutenant Neil Briggs caught him without extra bullets, Harry had made a point of sticking speed loaders all over the place. As it turned out, he hadn’t needed his .44 to get Briggs—the brain behind the “Magnum Force” of vigilante cops. He had finished him off with the bomb he had taken out of his mailbox.

As Callahan scoured the streets for any sign of the van, he wished he had had another bomb to hurl at the kidnappers. His newly loaded Magnum was certainly doing him no good now. For all intents and purposes, the van had disappeared. As thoroughly as Harry checked and as often as he called in for any news, no one had seen the damn thing. After almost three hours of scouring the streets, Harry had to admit it to himself. The van had gotten away. And with it, the only woman he had allowed himself to care for in more than five years.

Angry and tired, Harry looked around to see exactly where the hell he was. His eyes had gotten bloodshot and dry from staring intently for the van. Although he possessed a rudimentary understanding of the roadways and an inherent navigational sense, Harry hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else.

Glancing out the passenger’s window, he immediately recognized the Maritime Museum sitting just in front of the west basin of Fisherman’s Wharf. Out the window on his side was the impressive ten-story Ghirardelli Square shopping complex. During the day, the place was a phantasmagoria of tourists, shoppers, salesmen, and street performers, but at three o’clock in the morning, it was deathly still.

Looking in his rear-view mirror, Harry caught sight of the fishing fleet—taking off from the east basin on their daily trip under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a picturesque, romantic sight—completely at odds with the way he felt. Harboring no idealistic illusions, Harry looked away from the misty, heroic image—just in time to see a van disappear behind a building on North Point Street across the square.

Callahan stomped on his accelerator, the powerful, pre-emission car engine hurling the vehicle forward. Harry screeched around the corner onto Van Ness and took another hard left on North Point. By then the van was way down the line, all the traffic lights with him. Harry poured on the speed, trying to get close enough to get a good look at the other vehicle. At this distance, he couldn’t be sure if it was the same one which stole Suni.

A red light slowed him just as the van took a left on Stockton, but not for long. Harry simply slowed until he could check down Leavenworth in both directions, then roar forward again. Just let someone try to give him a ticket for running a light. Callahan would punch his ticket permanently.

When he got to Stockton, the van was no longer in sight. Harry raced ahead, checking Beach and Jefferson as he passed. Seeing nothing but a few cars moving, he screeched onto Fisherman’s Wharf proper, his eyes darting back and forth to take in everything. His tenacity paid off. The van was parked down at Pier thirty-five.

It was only then that Harry started to consider why the trio of terrorists had taken Suni. He slowed the car down and approached the pier cautiously. As he passed between the row of piers on the waterfront and the dozens of closed-up seafood shops and stalls, he considered calling in the cavalry, who would bottle the thirty-fifth pier up tighter than a pair of wet designer jeans on Orson Welles. Then he thought better of it. The three men who took Suni were willing to pepper an apartment building with lead—these weren’t the run-of-the-mill crooks who took hostages because they saw it done on Kojak.

One man had a much better chance of slipping in and getting the drop on them without the hostage’s head being put on the block. Harry cut his lights, turned off the car’s engine, and silently rolled toward the motionless van. Holding the wheel with his right hand, he had the Magnum up and ready with his left. The dark van began to take distinct shape in front of him.

Quickly looking to his left, he saw a variety of pleasure crafts, outboards, yachts, and cabin cruisers, bobbing in the early morning waves. With this quick glance, Harry noted that only one ship revealed any life. It was the seaworthy yacht three-quarters of the way down on the right side. There were lights on below deck and the distant sound of music and laughter.

Callahan brought his attention back to the van. He just saw its dark side out the windshield as the car slowed to a crawl. Harry pulled it even closer to the water and let it slow completely to a stop without touching the brake. Then, not even wanting to betray himself with the noise of his door opening and closing, he pulled himself out the open window.

Harry headed toward the van on foot, the .44 held up like a beacon, his body tensed and ready for action. He was within twenty feet of the thing when he noticed the window on the back doors. It was a small, curtained glass section, positioned high up on the left-hand rear door of the vehicle. Harry straightened, lowered his weapon, and walked farther to the right.

He saw that the license plate was attached under the back bumper and unobstructed. It was not the same van. Unless, by some phenominal stroke of luck, the terrorists had transferred Suni to another, nearly identical, van, Harry had stalked a couple of guys going to a yacht-side party.

Leaving nothing to chance, he went over to the vehicle and checked it close up. Looking through the rear window, he saw that it was a simple, stripped-down affair, consisting only of a single front seat which could hold three and an empty, uncarpeted, uncushioned flat bed in the back. Harry walked around to the passenger side and with irritation, shoved the Magnum back into its holster. He pulled the jacket back into place and turned to go back to his car.

He stopped halfway around and slowly returned to his previous stance. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye as he was turning. It was something unusual happening on the lighted boat. Just as Harry was turning, a blond man with a mustache had clubbed a chubby, dark-haired man on the deck. As he looked back, he could just make out a cut-off high-pitched scream over the thumping rock music. If he had not seen the man get hit up top, he would have assumed the screech was part of the music. Instead, he stood by the van and paid careful attention to the rocking, lit-up yacht.

The blond man with the mustache looked down at the man he had just slugged. The guy was facedown on the highly polished deck, a small pool of blood forming under his face. He must have broken his nose when he fell flat on the deck, the blond figured. There was also a stream of blood oozing from the cut on his scalp where the blond had hit him with the butt of his Colt .45 automatic.

Smugly satisfied that the chubby troublemaker would be out for some time to come, the blond told an aide to keep watch and casually went below deck. In the main cabin he found the group as he left them. Two men were beating the young “captain” of the ship while the third had his girlfriend. The captain looked to be in his early thirties and would have been rakishly good-looking if not for all the bruises and cuts the beating duo had splashed his face with. He was rocking back and forth on his wheeled desk chair as the two men took turns punching him with their fists and handguns.

The girl was a streaked blond in her middle twenties who filled out a one-piece bathing suit admirably. Her captor had her left arm wrenched high up her back and kept his other arm locked around her windpipe. She struggled, choked, and mewed to the delight of her attacker.

“That’s enough,” said the blond with the .45, holding it up. “For the moment.” The two men beating the yacht’s owner immediately stopped and pressed the man’s arms to the arms of his chair, which were already cruelly bound there with strands of his own clothing. The blond leaned into the bleeding, purple, puffy face of the tortured captain.

“Now I told you before,” he said quietly, “before we were so rudely interrupted by your ‘first mate,’ that you’re carrying a load for me. You picked it up in the Caribbean and hid it aboard ship. I want to know where it is.”

“And I’ve told you,” the beaten man breathed through swollen, cracked lips, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The blond swung the .45 across the captain’s jaw in a vicious arc. The resulting sound was so sharp and painful even to hear that the girl gasped in shock. Somehow, the captain managed to remain conscious although he moaned and cried.

“All right,” he finally managed to gasp. “But it isn’t yours. I swore to my father that I wouldn’t . . .”

The blond interrupted him by shoving the barrel of the .45 into his mouth, cracking three teeth in the process.

“Look,” he said. “This could be a little easier or a lot harder. You can tell us where the stuff is or you can watch us gang rape your girlfriend before I blow off the back of your head and we pull this fucking boat apart. Now what is it going to be?”

Tears streamed out of the captain’s eyes, while blood streamed out of his mouth and around the dark automatic barrel. He couldn’t make words around the obstruction of the gun, but finally he shook his head from side to side.

“All right, asshole,” said the blond. He turned to his fellows. “Let’s go, boys,” he continued. “It’s party time.”

The blond took the gun out of the captain’s mouth just as the girl was thrown to the floor, and the three men set upon her like wolves on a banquet.

“Stop it!” the captain yelled. “Stop it! It’s in the hold. It’s in a space between the wall and the hull. Now please, stop it.”

The blond was satisfied. He pulled a kerchief out of his back pocket and stuffed it in the captain’s ruined mouth. He turned to the pile of people on the floor who seemed to have no intention of stopping.

“Come on,” hissed the blond. “That’s enough. We’ve got to get the stuff and get out of here. Tie her up and gag her, then get into the hold and get working. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

One of the men looked up as the other two began binding the girl with wire and tape. “I’m not going to make it with some corpse!” he complained. “Aren’t we supposed to kill these guys?”

“Of course, stupid!” said the blond. “But not here. We’ve got to put them someplace where they’ll never be found. Hurry up.”

The blond turned toward the door as the three men wrestled the girl onto the daybed, her wrists already bound behind her. The blond climbed the ladder to the deck and called to the lookout he had stationed there. “Bring the van down, would ya? We’ve got to load up now.”

The guard turned, nodded, then headed off down the wide wharf to their dark, empty vehicle. He slipped into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine, and slowly drove the van to the calmly bobbing boat. He parked it in such a way that its rear doors faced the yacht door leading below deck. Inside, the four men were ripping out the inside wall to find brick after brick of hashish and marijuana. Outside, the lookout got out of the van and opened the back doors in anticipation.

Under the van, Harry Callahan loosened his grip on the hot undercarriage of the vehicle and silently lowered himself to the wharf. With the guard surveying the scene on deck there was no way he could sneak down the pier. So, he crawled under the van as the guy approached and let him unknowingly chauffeur him to the scene of the crime.

It only took an hour to load the relatively small amount of drugs into the van under the cover of night, but even that amount was worth a fortune on the street. While they worked, Harry patiently calculated the opposition. Unless one was on guard with the hostages below deck, there were five guys—all young, all armed with high-powered handguns. In addition to the blond leader and the sandy-haired lookout man, there was a brown-haired guy, a balding man with a mustache, and a black-haired man with a beard. All very able-looking and all readily identifiable. Harry pulled the Magnum out of his holster with hardly a sound.

“Right on schedule,” said the blond man. “The restaurant owners’ll be showing up here to get their fish for the day pretty soon. So let’s get the others and get out of here.”

Harry knew a cue when he heard one. He had to break up the modern-day pirates before they got the cover of innocent bystanders. He looked between his feet out the rear of the van. Four of the men were already wandering in an uncertain formation back toward the boat. He looked over his shoulder. One man was staying by the van, next to the driver’s side. Harry saw no way he could get out from under so that he’d have the drop on all of them. And he sincerely doubted that they would take kindly to a homicide inspector who suddenly slithered into their midst.

But he couldn’t just roll out and start shooting. He had no evidence that these smugglers were any worse than roughnecks looking to get rich quick on the ultimate high. From his vantage point at the end of the pier, he couldn’t see inside the boat and after the first scream, he didn’t hear anything more over the rock music. Harry would have to let the five smugglers name the tune he would play.

Harry slid to his right, pulling his body until it was completely clear of the van’s underside. He pushed his .44 out in front of him, pointing it at the men trudging toward the yacht.

“Police!” he shouted. “Freeze.”

As Harry expected, the name of the game suddenly became “kill the cop,” then “cut and run.” The quartet reacted to his voice like a flock of nuns meeting Jack the Ripper. Two raced at the yacht. Two others dived back for the other side of the van. All four started blasting at the spot they thought they heard the voice come from. Their only mistake was that they thought he would be standing. The bullets whipped over Harry’s head as he shot the two men stampeding toward the yacht one after the other.