Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (7 page)

His first slug hit the balding man at the crown of his head. The flesh erupted and the skull cracked with the sound a coconut makes when it is torn open. The corpse jumped into the air and fell facefirst on the disembarking platform. The second slug caught the bearded man high up his back, sending him colliding with the yacht’s side. He slid down the wall to get caught between a pylon and the hull. The boat rocked on the water, crushing him like a hydraulic compressor.

Harry rolled to his feet just in time to see the lookout man lean around the front windshield with his gun aimed. He jumped back to the cover of the van as the lookout’s shot grazed his ear. He pointed the .44 at the dark blue siding of the vehicle and pulled his cannon’s trigger. The big gun bucked and the bullet passed through the first metal wall across the drugs, diagonally through the front windshield and into the side of the lookout’s head, just in front of his ear. The man swung around as if he had just been punched by a combination of Ali, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano. He unconsciously threw his gun off the opposite side of the wharf, where Harry heard it clatter instead of splash.

Harry raced to the other side of the van around the front to see the brown-haired man running toward the wharf edge away from him.

“Hold it!” shouted the cop, putting his gun out in a classic position—both hands wrapped around the butt, his feet planted wide.

The man responded by leaping off the wharf. A second later, bullets began erupting up from underneath, right through the wharf’s planking. Callahan didn’t wait around for the brown-haired guy to get lucky. He ran to the other side of the pier, where the lookout had inadvertently thrown his gun. He jumped too, landing feet first in a small dinghy, tied to one of the pylons.

The brown-haired guy was across from him, stradling another row boat. He fired at Harry. The bullet ricocheted off the pylon. Harry’s body rocked with the small boat, but his firing arm remained rock steady. He shot the guy in the heart. The guy flew back as if pulled by a wire and did a backward belly flop into the bay.

Harry heard the van’s engine roar into life above him. Doing a quick mental inventory, he figured it had to be the blond leader trying to get away with the goods. As Harry remembered it, the blond must have pulled open the side door and jumped in when the cop had come around the other side of the vehicle. Then, when the brunette was holding Harry’s attention, the blond slid into the front seat and got cracking.

Harry looked up. He wouldn’t be able to climb back up onto the pier in time to stop the van. He looked to his right and jumped. He caught onto the hull of an adjoining sailboat and pulled himself aboard. He raced across its bow and jumped onto the front of a cabin cruiser next door. From that elevated height, he leaped back onto the pier just as the van was roaring by.

Callahan got a glimpse of the blond driver through the passenger’s window just as he thrust the Magnum out and pulled the trigger. Just before the scene sped past, Harry saw a glassy spider web grow out in a radius from the blond’s ear. Taking no chances, Harry then fell to one knee, and with his last round, blew out the left rear tire.

The vehicle swerved crazily across the length of the pier, its front tires caught sideways on the planking, and then the van leaped, spinning, up into the air. It turned over one and a half times before scraping across the pier and leaping again. This time it landed half off the right side of the wharf. It twisted, a metal howl filling the night air, and then catapulted itself off the pier and against the dockside.

The van slammed against the reinforced land fill, then slid down into the water with a steaming hiss. It bobbed up to the surface afterward, a twisted, dead metal boat floating next to a cabin cruiser.

Harry slowly walked over to the scene, surveying the water for any survivors. He could see water bubbling into the van’s cab from the big .44 bullet hole in the passenger’s window. Beyond that he could see floating white pieces of cloth, floating hunks of green and gray plants and a few strands of red-flecked blond hair.

Callahan lowered his gun and was about to go check out the yacht when he heard his car radio crackling in the distance. He went back to his parked vehicle at a flat run. He made it just before dispatch signed off.

“Inspector seventy-one,” he said into the mike, stretching it out the driver’s window.

“Hey, Harry,” came the voice of Sergeant O’Neill, who was handling the early morning calls. “We got something on that van you were looking for. A vehicle answering its description was found abandoned.”

“Where?” Harry asked, breathing heavily.

“Chinatown,” was the one-word answer.

C H A P T E R
T h r e e

T
he captain and his girl were extremely grateful. In return for untying them and promising police protection, the beaten young man gave Harry the run of the ship. As the shaken girl tended to her lover’s wounds with a first-aid kit, Harry quickly rummaged through their sleeping quarters. Although the “captain” was shorter and slimmer than he, Callahan managed to find a brown corduroy jacket with black suede patches over the elbows which fit him. Maybe it was owned by the young man’s father, whom the captain kept babbling about.

The pair had just returned from a two-week vacation after picking up a shipment of wrapped goods for the man’s father—which had been secreted in the hull as per the pater’s instructions. Given the contents of those wrappings, Harry hoped the jacket was the captain’s dad. He wouldn’t be needing it for a long time. Harry emerged, the .44 Magnum stuck in his belt.

“You’ll be all right?” he asked the pair—the girl kneeling and dabbing the battered face of the seated young man.

The girl, looking little the worse for wear, nodded. “We’ll be ok now. Thanks to you. Those men were going to kill us.”

Harry thought about the five young corpses littered all over the east basin. “That’s nice to know,” he said under his breath. “I’ll get some uniformed men down here fast. Don’t go anywhere, all right?”

The girl nodded again. The man moaned. Harry went above deck, jumped off the yacht and trotted back up to his car. As he reached the throng of curious onlookers, two patrolmen were already working their way through the throng from the other side.

“I’m Inspector Callahan of the homicide office,” Harry told them as they broke on through. “There’s two witnesses in the yacht with the lights on, two D.O.A.’s on the pier and three more in the water. The corpses were pirates.”

“Christ!” the first officer breathed, seeing the blood on the planking and the crumpled van in the water. “You got any idea what killed them?”

“I did,” Callahan said, moving toward his car.

“Shit!” he heard the second man call after him. “You must be Dirty Harry!”

He did not deign to reply to the correct guess. Nowadays it seemed as if he needed only to wave his gun and not his badge for identification. Leaving the messy scene to the rest of Frisco’s finest, Harry pushed his auto into gear and shot off toward Chinatown. He took Jefferson to Hyde to Beach and then onto Columbus, which led him right to the east side of the Oriental center.

The streets were relatively clear, given that it was four-thirty in the morning. There was a bit more activity outside the Chinatown Wax Museum on Grant and California streets. As soon as he got into visual range, his car was stopped by some officers manning a police barricade. Harry saw the van parked in front of the museum, but he had to spend ten minutes convincing the boys in blue that he was one of them. His wallet, badge, and driver’s license were back in his apartment, along with his jacket and speed loaders.

Finally, it got to the point that the patrolmen weren’t sure whether to arrest him for carrying a cannon without proper I.D., driving without a license, or going on police business without a shield. Instead of doing any of these, they let him through. As they rationalized later, anyone looking like Harry who carried a .44 Magnum had to be either a cop or a very curious gunfighter.

Callahan approached the scene slowly, the hanging lanterns giving the misty street a wet glow in the early morning light. Sudden flashes of red and blue danced across his face from the silent, spinning turrets of the cop cars. The whole scene disquieted Harry. There were much too many officers at the scene to make it just an ordinary abandoned car. He got the sinking feeling that Suni might have been abandoned with the vehicle—both lifeless.

Cops were crawling all over the van and the museum entrance. As Harry grew near, the van’s back doors suddenly flew open. The cop was taken by surprise, freezing in his tracks. He relaxed when he realized that the van was empty and dry, while the men bursting out were fingerprint specialists.

As soon as he assimilated this, the doors of the museum swung wide and two teams of paramedics wheeled out two covered bodies. Harry moved away from the van to catch the people just before they hauled the corpses into the waiting ambulance. Harry placed a hand on the first paramedic’s shoulder.

“What have you got?” he asked blandly, his stomach boiling.

“Two Orientals,” the medico replied. “A boy and a girl. The male had enough lead in him to make a set of barbells. As near as I can tell, the girl was raped and suffocated.”

Harry pulled back the first sheet. What used to be a young Chinese face looked back up at him. Miraculously, the eyes were open and untouched. But the rest of the face looked like moldy red apple sauce. Someone had done a dance on this boy’s face with a machine gun. Harry waved that one on, and had the second sheet-covered body served to him like a picky gourmet at a royal meal.

He pictured Suni’s face underneath the covering and then pulled the sheet back. His fantasy and what he saw did not match. This was a young Chinese girl, whose normally pretty features were distorted by purple mounds of puffed-up skin. As if someone had inserted an air pump into her head.

The sight of the viciously murdered girl did a strange thing to Harry. Before he took the sheet off her face, he felt his tensed muscles loosen in fear, his eyes cloud in resignation, and his brain go slightly soggy with regret. As soon as he saw the young Chinese whom he didn’t recognize, however, the adrenaline started throbbing through his veins once again. It wasn’t over yet. Suni was still around somewhere. And hopefully, she was still alive.

Callahan dropped the white cover back down on the face. Requiring no other words, the medicos loaded the two stretchers up in one ambulance, making it look as if the two bodies were best pals staying overnight in bunk beds. As they closed the doors, leaving the pair’s fate in the hands of the coroner, Harry felt an overwhelming desire for a woman.

Another Chinese girl, he decided. One that was a little older and a lot more experienced than the dead girl. A painted, curvaceous Chinese girl, skilled in the art of love-making. That’s what he needed. And he knew just where to get it. He trotted back to his car, his mind set on a new plan of action.

Harry drove through and past the Chinatown that the tourist saw. He left the Americanized sections behind. After the great shake and bake of 1906, much of the Chinatown corruption had been wiped out, but some things always made a lot of money and always would. And no matter how well intentioned the revivalists, the redesigners, and the rebuilders were, vice would always have a comfortable home in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The pleasures of Grant Avenue were left behind. The dim, dismal back streets of the section had different pleasures to offer. These joys were not lit up by hanging lanterns and were not awash with souvenirs or kindly smiling Buddhas. No neon sign announced the attractions. No eager round-eyed tourists lined the streets, decked out in blue jeans and holding cans of cola.

Harry parked his car at the end of a thin, winding street crammed with tiny shops—one not catering to the tourist trade. Unlike the ornately decorated buildings along Chinatown’s main drags, these stores were hardly more than glass-fronted boxes. And Harry knew that the Chinese characters stating their purposes on their windows—“shoe repair,” “periodicals,” “pharmacy”—were not truly detailing the source of their real income.

The cop found the mouth of an alley halfway down on the right side of the street. It was positioned in such a way that it seemed a permanent optical illusion. You could hardly see it unless you were right on top of it. With a casual look, it seemed to be no more than a regular, thin dead-end alley, ending with a plain, seemingly corroded wooden door on the left side of the far wall.

Harry knew better. He shifted his Magnum from his belt in front to his waistband in the small of his back. Then he moved cautiously down the thin pathway, remaining aware of the black, closed windows above him. He made it to the door without stopping, then knocked three times. When the partition opened a cloud of queasy-smelling smoke came with it. Through the slight crack made by the door opening, Harry could only see an ocean of glowing red light.

He saw nothing human in the crimson sea, but he heard a crackling high-pitched Chinese voice yapping at him. He jammed his foot in the door crack and pushed back with both hands. The door flew inward with very little effort. Its sweep disturbed the billowing clouds of smoke in the scarlet haze. Harry was a tall, glowing silhouette in the open doorway.

Callahan picked out some movement from within the bowels of the smoky room, but most of his attention was focused on the old, bent Chinaman weaving back and forth in front of him. The codger spat a few more sharp words in his native tongue, and then recognized Harry partly for what he was.

“American, eh?” he cackled. “It’s late, American. Go away.”

“I was sent here,” said Harry. “They said I could find some fun.”

The old Chinaman sized Harry up. “You must want it badly,” he concluded. “Its very dangerous to be out on the city streets so late at night. Why you not come back later?”

“The streets are dangerous all the time,” Harry said with a conviction born of experience. “I’m here now.”

“So I see,” the Oriental cackled, then suddenly grew serious and brittle. “No fun here, American. Only work. Expensive work.”