Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (16 page)

“You’re crazy!” the black man shouted.

“Wrong answer,” Harry quietly told him. He raised his right hand. In it was a miniature buzz saw, the kind of hand held scalpel medical examiners use to make dissecting easier. There was a button on the side of the thick tube. Harry pressed it. The thin, sharp blade spun around with a grating, whirring sound. The black man’s eyes bulged.

“What are you going to do with that?” he asked, his voice quaking.

“Punctuate our conversation,” Harry said. “You say something right, and there’ll be a period. You say something I don’t like and I’ll draw exclamation points all over your body.”

The black man stared at Harry’s placid face and the electric scalpel. Then he started to laugh. He roared with delight, his head going back between his bound hands.

“Naw, you ain’t gonna do shit with that thing, man,” he told Harry with assurance. “This is police headquarters. You touch me and all bets are off. I’ll never even get to court. You’ll lose your job. Forget it man, you’re bluffing.”

Harry stood stock-still for a moment. The black man was sure he was going to lean over and untie him. Instead Harry turned the saw on and sliced a cut along the black man’s thigh.

The man screamed in surprise, his body bucking against the wire and cloth cords. Harry brought the still-whirring blade next to his face. The black man became very still and very quiet very quickly.

“I’m not going to bring you to court,” Harry informed him. “I’m going to send you to hell. You’re a corpse, remember? You were lying on a slab when I came in. Now all I have to do is find your clothes bunched in one of these lockers and burn them so no one will know the difference. What’s another dead person here or there?”

“Christ, man,” the tied man cried. “You cut me.”

“The coroner cut you when he started your autopsy,” Harry corrected him.

“Nobody’ll buy it,” the black yelled as a last ditch argument. “Tony’ll tell them I was with him!” The black man motioned his head toward the unconscious bald man.

“Tony’ll be out for a long time,” Harry assured him. “Maybe forever. And if he wakes up, who’ll believe him? And even if they do, you won’t be around to see it.” Harry started up the machine and sliced his other leg along the calf.

The black man screamed again, pulling himself left and right in an effort to escape. His heart pounded, creating two red waterfalls down his leg.

“Scream all you want,” Harry said calmly. “The room is soundproof.”

“What do you want?” the man howled, sweat pouring across his body. “Man, you’re killing me!”

“Like you killed Barbara Steinbrunner?”

“Man, I swear I had nothin’ to do with that! On my mother’s grave!”

“Don’t bring your mother into this. You’ll be with her soon enough.”

“Christ! I swear! I swear!” the black man babbled. “It was Tony. Tony did it to her!”

“What about the others?” Harry asked, holding the scalpel over the black man’s head.

“What others?” he asked immediately.

Harry turned the device on. The black began screaming and writhing again. Harry slapped his free hand on the man’s right hip. He brought the sharp, whirring blade close to the man’s penis.

“Please!” the man shrieked. “Please, oh God, no! All right, all right, I’ll tell you everything you want to know! Please don’t!”

Harry kept the blade a centimeter from the organ, looking back up at the black man’s face. “Go on,” he instructed.

“I pointed some chicks out,” the black man gibbered. “Whores, runaways, shit like that. They called me. Had me sit in a Caddy with another girl. That’s all! I swear, that’s all!”

“What girl?”

“I don’t know, man,” said the black, getting bolder. “Some black chick all dressed up.”

“Red dress?”

“No, man, dressed like a boy! All these straps and makeup.”

Harry cut away the very surface of the man’s penis. The black man shrieked in agony, straining at his bonds. He had pulled so hard at the cords that his wrists were beginning to bleed almost as bad as his legs.

“I swear that’s the truth!” he hollered up at the ceiling.

“Where did you take her?”

“Some disco, man. A disco in Emeryville. Off the bridge.”

“I know where Emeryville is,” Harry said warningly.

“It’s right near the bay,” the man hastily added. “Right at the end of a marsh. Near Route 15. Madame’s, it’s called. Madame’s!”

“Thank you,” snapped Harry, bringing the electric scalpel up, then down toward the man’s throat. The black stiffened, gritted his teeth, and screwed his eyes shut. Harry just kept bringing the saw down until it cut away the wire binding the black’s wrists to his ankles. The man opened his eyes in astonishment. “Get dressed,” Harry advised him, cutting away the rest of the bondage.

Harry pulled the plug out and brought the scalpel back to the coroner’s desk. The man watched until the cop had turned back to him and pulled out his Magnum. The black hastened to a locker near the table and pulled out his clothes. Callahan waited until the man’s pants were painfully drawn on over his bleeding legs and crotch. He then took him by the arm and led him toward the door.

Harry pulled the door open, nearly dropping Fatso Devlin on his back. The Irish cop stumbled backward, his arms windmilling to keep his balance. When he had regained his equilibrium, Harry hooked a thumb toward the back of the room.

“A little package for Captain Avery,” Harry said, “telling him how much I appreciated his moving Mohamid.”

“Big Ed is beyond caring,” Fatso informed him.

Harry didn’t say anything. The black man took it as a silent indictment.

“I didn’t do it,” he swore. “I was just look out for Tony.”

“Shut up,” Harry snapped. Devlin glanced questionably at the black man wearing just his pants. “You didn’t see him,” Harry demanded of his partner.

“Right,” Devlin agreed, walking back toward the bleeding Tony.

Harry hauled the black around the corner and down the hall to the basement exit. He pushed the door open, and they walked outside. “Where’s your car?” Harry asked his prisoner.

“Down the alley,” the man motioned behind them. The pair hustled down the way until they came to a dark blue Oldsmobile.

“The keys,” Harry demanded, putting his hand out.

The black man reached painfully into his pocket and brought out a key chain with three keys on one end and the astrological sign of Pisces on the other. Harry took the whole thing and unlocked the passenger door. “All right, Fish,” Harry said, coining a nickname for him from the horoscope figure. “Get lost.”

“Say what?” said the surprised Fish.

“You heard me,” Harry said threateningly. “Get out of town, get out of state, get off the planet if you think that’ll get you far enough away from me. Because if I ever see you again, I
will
kill you. And believe me, it’ll hurt a lot worse and take a lot longer than what I did in there.”

The look on Callahan’s face stopped whatever doubting words the black man might have uttered. Without a sound, he scrambled across the car’s front seat. Harry threw the keys after him. Within ten seconds the auto with the black man was speeding down the street.

Harry watched him go. You were right, he was thinking. There would have been no way to get him into court without self-destructing his police career. Cops all over the country were learning the same lesson in less extreme circumstances. It was easier and cheaper to administer backstreet justice than haul every asshole up on charges. The police do one thing wrong, and they find themselves hung on a lawsuit.

Harry probably could’ve been sued, but he would have been up on departmental charges for sure if someone like Avery knew what he had done. Thankfully, with a partner like Devlin, there was little chance of it. Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if Fatso had already cleaned up the blood stains left by the black’s wounds on the hallway floor.

Callahan got back inside just as Big Ed Mohamid’s body was being carried down the hall to the morgue. Devlin wandered over to stand by Harry in the brightly lit cellar passage.

“I guess we’ll never know whether he was guilty or not,” Fatso said about the late black leader.

Harry considered telling Devlin everything. Just as quickly he decided not to. Harry had learned the hard way not to divulge dangerous information unless the listener was directly threatened by the danger. He had lost his fourth partner that way. Inspector Early Smith had been blown to kingdom come by a mailbox bomb after Harry filled him in on a vigilante force inside the police department.

“I guess not,” he said to Devlin.

The black man Harry had called Fish tore around his North Beach apartment, hurling things into an open suitcase on his living room floor. He wanted to take along only his necessities, but he couldn’t find them. The checkbook, the bank book, and his clothes were all there, but he couldn’t find his .32. The snubnose he usually kept behind the refrigerator was gone. The black man had stopped to think where he might have put it when the bathroom door opened.

Two of his brothers, who both had been in the Cadillac that night, burst out from the doorway and grabbed the black man by the sink. The gentle white man with the hair and cheekbones followed at a more leisurely pace.

The black brothers grabbed one arm each and pinned Fish to the front of his gas stove.

“Anthony did not report within his allotted time,” the gentleman said quietly. “We began to worry.”

The gentleman civilly reached down and turned on the gas for the burner directly below Fish’s head. The black man smelled the fumes as they rolled across his face.

The captor to his right grabbed his hair and pushed his face inches from the burner. The gentleman, meanwhile, had pulled out a pipe from his jacket pocket. He slowly packed it and damped it down while Fish choked and coughed. Finally he pulled out a boxed kitchen match. He lit it as well as his pipe. But he did not shake it out. The message was clear.

“Give me a reason not to kill you,” the gentleman requested.

C H A P T E R
S i x

L
ynne McConnell was feeling good about herself. The way she should, about herself. She had signed up for five courses, including Independent Filmmakers’ Spectrum, went to five different apartment interviews, spent some time touring the campus, and just generally shook her bootie all over the place. It was what, in her experience, one might call a “Pepsi day.”

It was a good beginning to what looked to be a long stake-out. Although she had played the vivacious country girl, outgoing and guileless, during continuous conversations with whoever was around, she figured it wouldn’t be until she started taking the classes that Hinkle would notice her. But when he did, he only had to ask around or check her registration to get the fake story.

In the meantime, she had gotten a room at the Berkeley Inn Hotel until she heard from the landlords about the various available apartments. The handsome red brick building was a couple of blocks away from the campus. It was pretty drab but clean. It had telephones in the rooms but not a john. One had to go down the hall for that.

McConnell changed from her sweater and jeans to a slightly more revealing combination of a light plaid skirt and an elastic tube top with shoulder straps. She slipped on some medium-heeled cork sandals and prepared to go downstairs for dinner. She sat on the edge of the bed and wondered whether she should report in before or after she ate.

She looked around the room. No TV and hardly enough room to play solitaire. It was going to be a long night, she decided. She’d save her phone calls for later. She hopped off the sagging bed, pulled a light jacket out of her open suitcase on the chair, and left the room.

She passed an old washwoman halfway down the hall. The lady was toiling on the floor outside the ladies room. It made quite a picture. Lynne felt positively gothic in the declining hotel’s graying hall way lit by fading yellow bulbs. The old woman toiling on her hands and knees completed the image. She was suddenly very eager to get out, but figured she’d better visit the bathroom.

“Excuse me,” McConnell said to the maid as she skipped around her, pushed open the door, and entered the white tiled bath. She got a glimpse of streaked hair and looped earrings under the washwoman’s kerchief before she took in the rustic charm of the washroom. It was fairly classic. Two sinks on the right wall. Two enclosed toilets on the left wall. An old, pull-down window on the far wall, complete with chain, and a table behind the entrance door, outfitted with special makeup mirrors.

McConnell went into the bathroom, washed her hands, and sat down in front of the mirror to touch up her face. There was not much to do. Her mascara and eye liner had made it through the day. Perhaps just a touch more highlight on her cheeks and some lip gloss. She set about her work, just as the door opened and the washwoman pulled her pail, brush, and mop in. Without turning around, she too set about her work.

McConnell smiled mirthlessly at the washwoman’s back, comparing their respective duties. Well, she thought, turning back to the mirror, there, but for the grace of God, go I. As she touched up her cheeks, there was movement in the corner of her eye. Her peripheral vision picked it up, but McConnell didn’t see the washwoman lean down and pull a sponge out of a plastic bag next to her pail. She didn’t redly notice the washwoman mopping the front section of the floor so that she wound up directly behind her.

No, McConnell was too involved in making herself the most attractive target possible to feel the cross hairs on her. She stood up, pushing back the chair, and leaned over a few inches from the mirror to apply the lip gloss. She dipped the wand in the holder. She held the applicator up. And the washwoman pushed her forehead into the glass.

A sharp crack sounded in the washroom. A sharp crack broke across the mirror. A thunder clap and a lightning bolt of pain rifled into her brain. Her reflection disappeared under a heavy red curtain. She felt her legs give out. She felt her hands grab the edge of the makeup table. She tried to turn and fight.