Dirty Harry 02 - Death on the Docks (21 page)

He kept pausing, waiting for Harry to respond, to react in some way. But Harry didn’t. He could barely concentrate on what Braxton was saying; he was too busy trying to fight back the pain that had taken up residence in his head.

“And don’t think you can simply say yes and go back to San Francisco and forget about it. We don’t operate that way. We do a deal we do a deal. But you’re locked into it. We get your signature on a few papers, we make photos, document some transactions. All for our own protection, you understand? If nothing goes wrong you got nothing to fear. We put our records in a very safe place. If not, then, hey, we’re not responsible. The way we work it is first we fuck you, then we kill you. Nothing personal, it’s just the way we work it.”

“I get you,” said Harry, not really interested in the mechanics of this.

“I want you to meet a friend of mine, a fellow who can verify what I’m telling you.” He gestured toward the door behind him. A guard opened it and a man walked in.

Harry knew immediately that this was the visitor who’d been shuttled away from the airport too fast, and under too much protection, for him to get a glimpse of. And he knew that this same man had acted as the broker and rabbi for Braxton back in San Francisco. He’d met him before.

It was the assistant D.A.—Robert Nunn. He looked as smug as ever. He offered a smile to Harry.

“It’s strange,” he said, “how we keep running into each other.”

“Yeah, and in the oddest places, too.”

“You might be confused, Mr. Callahan, seeing my friend, Bob Nunn, here.” To make it clear just what good friends they were, Braxton clapped his hand on the assistant D.A.’s back. “Oh sure, we once were on opposite sides, but things, as you know, change. We used to work with Pritchard, Bob’s boss, but people get old. Pritchard’s on his way out. And frankly, Pritchard was too close to Bull and you know what they say when you add up one shark and one fluke. You get one shark!” He had a good laugh at this. His friends apparently felt that it wouldn’t hurt if they joined in laughing as well. “Pritchard and Bull, they used to spend hours eating together. Places like the Top of the Mark. And you know who paid for all those meals?” Braxton stabbed his chest with a spatulated thumb. “I did. Out of my fucking pocket. Thirty bucks, forty bucks a meal, it ain’t much. But you add it up over the years. Hey, it gets goddamn expensive.” He was really serious about this; the thought of all the money he’d laid out over the years for Bull’s benefit and for Pritchard made him furious. Then he stopped himself, realizing he’d gotten distracted. The smile reappeared. “Sorry. Bull’s a sore subject with me. One of these days, if we ever find the son of a bitch, I’m going to have him sent down here for a little heart-to-heart. So now we come to my friend Mr. Nunn here. Bob, well, he fucked me but good. See, but do I hold it against him?” Another laugh straight up from the belly which had become quite big with all the food he was consuming on Tapaquite. “We get along just like brothers now.” Weirdly, Nunn didn’t look at all embarrassed about this. On the contrary, he seemed almost pleased. “It’s just like what I told you, Mr. Callahan, I don’t hold no grudges. I see talent, I use it. That’s how I got to where I am today. That’s why I’m never down for long. Talent’s for me or against me, makes no difference. I buy it or I dispense with it. That’s how it works with us.”

“That’s what you keep telling me.”

“Harry, he’s right,” Nunn put in, giving his testimonial. “It makes sense in a lot of ways.”

“That’s what they taught you in law school?”

“Don’t turn nasty now,” Braxton said. “I’ve given you an hour.” He looked down at his Seiko. “And we’ve already eaten into that time with our jabbering. So you begin doing some serious thinking and we’ll leave you in peace.”

He signaled his retainers that they were to exit. On the way out Harry called to Nunn. “You know what they say about lawyers, don’t you?”

Nunn shook his head. “No, Harry, what do they say?”

“Comes the revolution they’ll shoot them all first.”

Nunn wouldn’t answer that, and so he turned and went away with all the rest of them. The metal door clanged shut. Then a bolt was flipped into place.

The problem now was—aside from facing a death sentence—Harry had no way to determine when his hour was up; along with everything else his captors had seized, they’d taken his watch.

After thoroughly checking the room, Harry soon ascertained that there was no way he was going to escape, not with the walls a couple of feet thick, as he estimated them, not with no window. Nor was there available any instrument, even the homiest of household objects—a pot, for instance—that he could employ in defending himself. If you had to stay too long in this room, with its bare cold white walls, Harry considered, you were liable to go mad. He had less than an hour. Still it was not the sort of place he would have chosen to await his execution.

It could have been just a couple of minutes that had passed for all Harry knew. Seemed in any case like a whole lot longer. In this sensory deprivation environment, minutes had a way of taking hours to go by. But whatever time had elapsed it was obvious to Harry that his hour was not up. Nonetheless, there was a terrible racket at the door. It didn’t last long. Sounded like chalk being scraped against a blackboard. Whatever it was it sent chills up Harry’s back.

The bolt now was being unlatched. He positioned himself by the side of the door—the right side—waiting to grab hold of whomever came in and throw him to the floor. It was, he felt, his only chance. Undoubtedly, he’d confront a regiment of armed men but better to take that risk than to allow himself to be dragged away unresisting and garroted, then hurled into the shimmering waters of the Caribbean.

The door came open and as it did so a man came with it. There was no need for Harry to try to subdue him. Someone had already done it for him. The guard collapsed at Harry’s feet, his gun pitching from him at the same time. At first it was difficult to account for his condition until Harry noticed the small, perfectly round red hole that appeared in the middle of his forehead.

The dead man was followed into the room by the person who’d made him that way. Another old friend from the past. Looking frazzled maybe, a bit more haggard, but easily identifiable: Darlene Farley.

She entered the room, a .38 in her hand, ignoring the body lying at her feet. Baffled, she looked around for Harry, clearly unaware he was standing directly behind her. Harry was a bit puzzled, too, speculating on this crazy lady’s motives—had she come to kill him? Well, that didn’t make any sense. No reason to go out of her way to do that with his being condemned already.

Still, he took no chances and, grabbing her from behind, gripped her arms so that she was incapable of using her gun. She let out a small cry of surprise, twisted her neck to get a glimpse of Harry, muttered first, “Hey, you’re hurting me,” then, “I was looking for you. I came to help you.”

Harry loosened but did not relinquish his grip. “And why’s that?”

“We don’t have much time. They’ll come down here in a minute. Let me go. We’ve got to go find him.”

She was talking a mile a minute; she talked like she smoked actually, starting a new word when she hadn’t finished with the one before.

Harry moved her away from the door, then leaned down to retrieve the Baretta that had belonged to the guard. Only when he was armed did he allow her to go free.

The hallway, which he caught sight of for the first time, was empty as far as the eye could see. Empty and soundless.

“Calm down. Now who do we have to find?”

There was no way on earth this woman was going to calm down. No, she was flushed; her rage was a wonder to behold, the way it inflamed her eyes and set her lips trembling.

“Braxton, the fucker,” she answered, spitting out his name. “I got a telegram from him three days ago. He told me he wanted me back. I came back and what do you suppose he did?”

Harry could guess. But he didn’t have to.

“Soon as I got down here he treated me like shit. Wouldn’t let me out of this goddamn place. Took off to town with his whores and his flunkies, wouldn’t let me go with them. Just wanted to teach me a lesson, he said. Well, OK, he wants to play it that way. I’ll teach
him
a lesson!”

So this is how it is, Harry thought. Every time the girl gets pissed at her old man she comes to my rescue. This is one hell of a way to break a case.

In her fury she seemed almost to have forgotten Harry nor did she show any sign that she was now worried about the danger they faced.

“Where is Braxton?”

“Upstairs. They’re all upstairs except for the bastards on the grounds. They told me you were down here. I said to myself, ‘Shit, damned if old Matt ain’t gonna be surprised to see Harry walking free.’ ” She giggled like a little girl. An insane little girl. And here Harry had thought he’d merely been dealing with a neurotic; well, it appeared that instead she was really quite far gone.

As she turned to continue her vendetta against her erstwhile lover, she tripped against the guard’s corpse. In anger she kicked him irrelevantly in the ribs. Then she regained her composure. With a certain tinge of sadness to her voice she said, “I wasn’t going to kill him. I don’t want to kill anybody. Just was going to scare him a little. He didn’t want to scare, that’s all.” She shrugged.

“It happens,” Harry said, putting his hand on her shoulder, gently so as not to disconcert her further, and guided her out the door. The hallway, with its surface of flat white stone lit by shots of light pouring in through rows of windows, still remained empty. But no longer soundless. Footsteps echoed loudly off the stucco walls. Nonetheless, Harry and Darlene continued a bit farther; by tacit agreement they kept their steps quiet.

They’d scarcely progressed down the hallway when the shadow of a man—and judging by the shadow, a very tall man—fell across the foyer. Harry held back, flattening himself against the wall, but he was not in time to restrain Darlene, who in her headlong rush to get to Braxton had failed to notice the threat. When Harry threw his hand against her lips and attempted to plant her against the wall alongside him she bit into his palm and gave a small shriek of surprise. She wasn’t very good at getting hints.

The man heard her. He wasn’t alarmed, merely curious. He peered down the hallway but what he saw first was the absence of any guard outside the door. Only then did he spot Darlene and Harry, but this had necessitated venturing farther down the hallway. By this point he was facing two guns whereas his hands were empty.

“Drop,” Harry commanded him.

The man seemed not to know what he was talking about.

“To the floor. Down on the floor.”

The man was paralyzed. He looked from Darlene to Harry and back again, then he bolted, hoping that they wouldn’t fire or that he’d reach the staircase before they did.

“Oh no you don’t!” Darlene cried, raising her .38 with both hands and firing it with astonishing precision before Harry could stop her.

The man kept going; you might have thought Darlene had missed. But it was only sheer momentum that carried him forward. Suddenly he seemed to realize that he’d been mortally wounded and so he simply stretched out his arms and keeled over, reluctantly obeying Harry’s instruction.

It was at this point that Harry recognized exactly what kind of liability Darlene presented. No way to control her. No way to persuade her that the better part of wisdom was to escape the compound here at Boca de la Sierpe and live to fight another day. No, she was hellbent on exacting revenge against Braxton for all the real and imagined grievances she’d suffered at his hands and nothing was going to stop her.

As for Harry, his first priority was to get away, recoup, and consider his next strategy. But it became readily apparent that he was going to be denied that opportunity. Darlene, having neglected to use a gun equipped with a silencer, had by shooting this man alerted others upstairs. The guard she’d shot at close quarters and the sound of the shot had been muffled. But not this time. The report would have been heard throughout the villa.

There were footsteps coming down the stairs, and voices, and Harry knew now that there would be no escape without a struggle. Roughly, he pushed Darlene back out of the line of fire. He did not especially like the gun he had to work with, but in situations like this you took what was available.

It was not as easy for him to maneuver as it usually was; the drug still hadn’t altogether worn off and there was a persistent fuzziness in his brain that wouldn’t go away. He had to concentrate when he sighted his gun; it didn’t come as natural to him as it usually did.

But even so he achieved his mark. The security man who first appeared took a round in his chest; it knocked him off-balance but not down and he tottered several moments, his own gun discharging ineffectually, puncturing out holes in the ceiling and dislodging chunks of plaster which rained down on him. But the time he took in dying gave the others behind him a chance to descend the stairway in safety—Harry couldn’t get a line on them to fire.

Darlene was directly behind him, but rather than cowering under the hail of bullets, she enthusiastically threw herself into the battle, loosing a steady barrage in the direction of the attackers although to what effect it was hard to say. Harry had no opportunity to see to her, being as preoccupied as he was, but he hoped that when she’d exhausted her supply of ammunition she would drop back and withdraw from the conflict. No such luck. She’d been far-sighted enough, even in her madness—perhaps because of it—to carry additional cartridges, which she dug out of her handbag.

Because Braxton’s men could not fall back without sacrificing their advantage, they decided that their only real alternative was to rush Harry and Darlene, assuming that by their very number they would overwhelm them.

In their forefront Harry noticed the man who’d brought him down with the blowgun. In this instance, however, he had discarded his favorite weapon for an FN automatic which with his good hand he aimed at Harry. But he was moving so fast that his shot went awry, gouging out a thick wad of stucco. Whether it was Darlene’s shot or Harry’s was less significant than the fact that someone managed to hit him, driving him back in the direction the bullet had taken. The FN clattered to the floor. He couldn’t hold it when he had his open stomach to attend to. His mouth opened, he seemed to be trying to speak though no words emerged. Then, with a darkening look on his face, he sank to his knees. He didn’t go down any farther, just stayed that way, on his knees like a penitent, clutching his stomach, waiting to see whether or not he would die. A second man—Harry recognized him from the airport—had a better aim and his rounds were digging up patches of stone mere inches from where Darlene and Harry were spread out. But again he was exposed, and in his attempt to close the distance between them he threw aside his caution with the result that he was hurled back, like his friend the blowgunner, taken off his feet by a bullet—probably fired by Darlene—that shattered his kneecap and in its upward trajectory lodged somewhere in the muscles of his thigh. As he fell he jostled another assailant, causing him to lose his momentum; before he could recover Harry took him out with a round that, impacting above his heart, spun him around twice before dropping him to the ground.