Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (15 page)

“If the Uhuru massacre didn’t set it off, I don’t think this will. After all, it was a sister telling on a brother. Not like some white cop shooting him in the back. We expect some peaceful demonstrations, but that’s about all.”

“Maybe Bob Dylan will write a song about him,” Devlin suggested.

“Hope it’ll do Big Ed more good than it did Hurricane Carter,” Harry answered back. “You got an extra tape of the Rose news conference?” he asked Bressler.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said, reaching into his bottom drawer. “What do you want it for?”

“I’d like to get Mohamid’s reaction. Maybe he’s seen the lawyer around somewhere.”

Bressler handed the tape cassette over the desk. Harry took it and got up to leave.

“Hey, listen, Harry,” Bressler called to him. He turned back from the door. “Mohamid’s no longer at the hospital.”

“What?” Harry exploded.

“The captain moved him to a maximum-security police Surgery area right after the news conference this morning.”

Harry was out of the office and running toward the elevators before Bressler even stopped speaking. Devlin raced out of the lieutenant’s room in hot pursuit. The fat Irishman caught his partner between the elevators and the stairs.

“What’s the matter?” he huffed.

“After the girl accused him, there’s no more reason to keep him alive,” Harry yelled, brushing by Fatso toward the emergency exit.

“You’re not making any sense,” Devlin called after him.

“Just get some men down to the cellar to back me up!” Harry shouted back, already flying down the steps. A jumbled set of points came together in his head as he hurtled down toward the basement. The slavers had completed their frame of Mohamid. They didn’t need the black man to cry innocent on deaf ears anymore. In fact, it would be better if he wasn’t around to defend himself at all. That way the package would be complete, and there’d be no one to question it or raise a fuss. Basically, they needed Ed to commit suicide.

In the hospital, it would have been hard. Any policeman worth his salt would have questioned a doctor he hadn’t seen before. But what cop is going to question an orderly in the police station? Harry slammed open the emergency door on the bottom floor, The emergency alarm automatically went off. The cop kept going, ignoring the quizzical faces that appeared in the doorways he passed. Instead he barreled into the coroner’s office and grabbed the first arm he could find. It happened to belong to an Oriental girl.

Harry pulled her away from her microscope and pushed his badge in front of her face. “Callahan,” he said, “from upstairs. How long have you worked here?”

“Ahob, ahob, two years,” the shocked girl replied.

“Come on then,” Harry said, pulling her out of the room and down the hall. He saw Steve Rogers walking toward him. The doctor smiled and opened his mouth to greet his friend.

“Where’s Mohamid?” Harry barked.

Rogers blinked in surprise, snapped his mouth shut, and pointed the way he had come. “Room B-14,” he answered.

Harry went right by him without slowing, holding the girl’s hand. She had to run to keep up with his fast walk. “Thanks,” he told the doctor in passing.

Harry turned the corner along the B-14 hall just as a stocky bald man walked out of one of the rooms. “Do you know him?” Callahan asked the girl.

“N-not really,” the girl said with doubt.

“Have you seen him around at all?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Harry spied B-17 to his right. It wasn’t the room the bald man had left. “Quick,” he instructed the girl, “go in B-17 and tell me who’s there.”

The Oriental, happy to get out of Harry’s clutches, hurried over and pushed open the door. “Nobody,” she said, not understanding a thing.

“Get inside and stay down!” he yelled at her before he bellowed after the bald man. “Hold it!”

The bald man didn’t even turn around. Without flinching, he simply jumped through the door of the room at the end of the hall. Harry raced to the room that the man had last left.

He slammed against it with his shoulder. It was locked. He shot away the lock and kicked it open. Big Ed Mohamid hung from an overhead pipe by a police belt notched around his neck.

Harry brought his Magnum up and blasted. The bullet went right through the center of the leather belt, sending pieces in every direction and sending Mohamid to the floor. Harry didn’t have time to check his condition. He ran from the room to the last door on the right. On the front were the neatly stenciled letters, “A-U-T-O-P-S-Y.”

“Oh Christ,” Harry breathed as Fatso rounded the corner with four other men. “Stay there,” Harry called to him. “There’s a maniac in here I want to talk to.”

The inspector pushed open the barrier and dove in. The slick floor was perfect for sliding. Harry skimmed almost all the way to the side wall. He stopped right behind a locker as a bullet whined off its metal front.

Harry checked his position. He was on the right side of a long room lined with lockers and dotted with tables. On the tables were bodies. They were blue and looked cold. From where he was standing, he could see a completely naked old woman and a middle-aged man. Pulling his gaze away from the motionless corpses, Harry concentrated on not becoming one of them.

“Come on,” he called. “There’s no other way out. You know you don’t stand a chance.” Harry waited, but there was no answer. The bald man didn’t want to give away his position by shouting back, and he didn’t want to waste his ammo by shooting again.

Well, Harry figured, if you want anything done, you’ve got to do it yourself. The cop jumped from his locker cover to behind the table with the dead old woman on it. The dead old woman’s stomach ripped open and a fountain of blood and other liquid gouted up. Harry heard the gun report right afterward. He fired back in the general direction as the woman’s fluid flecked the side of his face. He heard the smashing of glass in front of him.

Callahan dodged behind the middle-aged man’s table. Another bullet tore up some tile by his right foot. Harry dropped to his knees, seeing the bald man between the legs of a table all the way down the room. His adversary threw himself flat as Harry blasted away. The cop heard a satisfying yell of pain as one of his slugs gouged across the bald man’s upright back. His other bullets tore away at the underside of the table and one of its legs.

Harry stood as the bald man pulled himself upright. The villain staggered back and crashed against some more lockers. He used them for leverage as he tried to get a bead on Harry. Callahan zigzagged toward him, keeping behind another set of tables. In panic, the bald man fired twice more, tearing off the top of a hippie corpse’s head and punching a third nostril in the young man’s nose.

Harry directed himself to the right, but the hippie’s guts got in the way. He felt his shoe connect with something slick, and he fell. The bald man took advantage of the situation by running between tables and aiming at Harry’s prone chest. Callahan grabbed the table and pulled it over just as the bald man fired.

Flesh and wood fell into the path of the bald man’s bullet. The lead tore through the hippie’s ribs and dug its way into the wood. It cracked through and sped over Harry’s chest and under his arm to clatter on the tile. The corpse flopped down on its side, a large crack echoing through the room, as Harry hurled the table out of his way with a powerful kick. He pulled himself to his feet to confront the bald man.

The bald man stared angrily at the rising cop. He held his weapon on a level with Harry’s chest. Callahan recognized the gun. It was a 380 ACP-caliber F.I. Model D manufactured in America by Astra. It carried six rounds in the clip and one in the chamber. The bald man was out of ammunition. Harry, on the other hand, had two bullets left. He brought his Magnum up to the same level as the other man’s Astra.

Facing the cop’s big gun, the bald man seemed to panic. He backed away slowly, his tense face showing signs of fear. Harry moved forward, pacing him, holding the .44 steady and straight. The man passed between the last two tables. Out of the corner of his eyes, Harry saw two black men on the tops. The bald man kept moving back. He veered off to Harry’s right, his gun hand getting shaky.

Finally there was no more room to move. The bald man had backed into a corner. He lifted his gun up toward Harry’s face. Harry lifted his toward his opponent. They looked down each other’s barrels. Two seconds passed and the bald man let his Astra droop. He lowered his head and pulled the gun’s trigger. The room echoed with an empty click. Harry smiled.

Then the black corpse behind him sat up.

If Harry had seen it, his first thought would be muscle spasm. He had seen dead bodies in the morgue bend their arms and legs from involuntary muscle spasms. But he didn’t see the black man rise behind him. And he didn’t see him open his eyes. Harry only felt the black man’s big fists smash into his kidneys.

The cop stumbled forward, the Magnum erupting harmlessly to the left. The bald man reared up and slugged the off-balance inspector in the face. Harry’s head snapped back into the black man’s grip. Two muscular arms wrapped around his head and neck in a hammer-lock. The bald man grabbed his gun wrist in both hands.

Harry felt the black man’s nudity against his back. He felt the thick limbs crushing down on his windpipe and pushing against the back of his head. He tried to pull the Magnum back, but the bald man held it forward. The trio staggered around the back of the autopsy room in a struggling clump.

One of the black man’s hands grabbed a fistfull of Harry’s hair. The bald man let go with his right and started pummeling Callahan in the stomach. Harry knew what they were planning to do. Once he had weakened sufficiency, the black man would snap his head to the side and hopefully break his neck. As the rumbling pain from his stomach and the lack of air reached his brain, Harry had to admit it was possible.

He went limp. His weight pulled the black man forward and made the bald man step back. Then Harry put all his muscles into overdrive. He pulled his gun arm back while throwing the other hand forward. The bottom of his palm slammed in the bald man’s nose. A circle of blood splattered out onto his face. He swung the gun back into the black man’s head. He heard a meaty thunk, and the grip relaxed around his neck.

Harry himself spun about, having to fall halfway across the empty autopsy table to catch his breath. He heard a noise behind and to his right. He swung the Magnum around as hard as he could. It slammed into the black’s forehead. The man fell flat on his back.

Harry pivoted toward the bald man. He was on his knees, jamming some new shells into his weapon’s magazine as blood continued to stream out of his nose. As soon as he realized that Harry was turning toward him, he tried pushing the clip back into the gun and firing it at the same time. But before the magazine had even clipped into place, Harry fired his last bullet point blank into the bald man’s hand.

The man’s hand was hurled backward, entire fingers literally being blown off. Two columns of blood foamed out of the hand like a bottle of champagne that had just been opened. The bald man fell on his destroyed nose, his ruined hand outstretched. The black man began to come to, his eyes blinking and his head shaking. Harry heard the door open behind him.

He whirled to see Fatso Devlin at the other end of the room. “Get out of here!” Harry shouted. His partner simply closed the door and told the other cops that it was a false alarm. Nothing to worry about. Then he stood against the autopsy room door from the outside, looking nonchalantly at his fingernails.

Inside Harry went over to the groggy nude black man, put a hand on his nodding forehead and hammered his head on the floor. Then he ran over to the writhing bald man, who was pushing his mangled hand into his other, trying to stem the flow of blood. He looked up as Harry approached. Harry kicked him in the jaw. The bald man flew back, his hands flung behind him.

He landed spread-eagled on his back, the torrent of blood from his shot-off fingers having left a double-banded trail of his fall. Harry dodged the slopping liquid as it splashed on the tile, then leaned down to rip off a strip from the bald man’s lab coat. He tore it from the hem to the man’s arm, then ripped it off sideways. He quickly tied a tourniquet around the man’s upper arm. The blood flow diminished, then slowed to a thin stream.

Harry reached back and took out a pair of handcuffs from under his belt. He cuffed the bald man’s good left hand to his left ankle. He then started going through the lockers. He pulled out two lab coats and a syringe. Harry laid those on the empty table and went to the coroner’s desk. He pulled the reading lamp out of its socket and tore the wire out the back. He went through the drawers and found an extension cord. With these in hand, he approached the unconscious black man.

The naked man was awakened by some sharp slaps on his face. He looked up to see Harry’s smiling face framed by an operating lamp. He tried to smash the face, but his arms and legs were twisted back behind him. He looked at himself. He was lying on the table he had been on before, only this time his arms were bent back over his head and over the edge of the table. They were tied by wire and lab-coat cloth, which stretched under the table to his ankles, which were tied similarly. The cording was tight, keeping his big black body taut across the slab top.

The black man looked around. Behind Harry he saw the bald man half hog-tied by the one pair of handcuffs. Blood still leaked from his stumpy palm.

“Just a minute,” said Harry, picking up the syringe, which was filled with a clear liquid. Harry walked over, reached down and roughly pulled the bald man’s pants down, exposing his ass. Harry injected the fluid just above his right cheek. “That ought to do it,” Harry remarked, returning to the table.

“Hey, man, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the black man boomed. “You can’t do this, man.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry agreed, plugging something into the handy socket on the leg of the table. “You know,” he commented, “it may not look like it, but this room is really very well designed.” Harry pointed up. “It has water jets in the ceiling.” Harry pointed down. “It has gratings in the floor. I bet you could kill a herd of elephants in here and still have the place spotless in an hour. What do you say?”