Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (6 page)

The country is filled with aquariums, and they are all different shapes and designs. But when one gets to the basement, they really aren’t that different. The exhibits need a fine filtering system, and the cellar is the logical place to put it. So almost all aquarium cellars are thin, low ceiling mazes of pipes, wooden walkways, shimmering pools of lightly vibrating water, and cement shells, painted light blue.

The Steinhart structure was no different. Harry entered an aqua cavern of waving shadows. The liquid reflected everywhere, giving the impression that the whole basement was under water. Things seemed placid. Harry knew it wouldn’t remain that way for long. He pulled an auto-loader out of his pocket to keep it at the ready.

The San Francisco cop sidled lightly down the thin walkway, made all the more narrow by a row of water pools rising three feet off the floor and wild systems of drainage pipes lining the walls, ceiling, and floor. Harry listened intently for any signs of life besides the drip-drip-drip of liquid.

He transversed the whole first hall, discovering nothing. As he rounded the bend he found the floor completely covered by six pipes. A makeshift catwalk had been set up consisting of several boards placed side by side atop some cinder blocks. The area was lit by one, low-hanging, naked white light bulb, so the shadows of waves were more stark than before.

Harry cautiously stepped up on the wooden planking and started down the passage. Halfway he wondered whether or not he had guessed wrong. Even though the cellar looked complicated, there was really very little place to hide. And unless Cunningham was waiting in ambush around the next corner, he wasn’t in the basement at all. But still, it made perfect sense—there was no other place for the bastard to go.

Callahan looked at the cement rectangles that held the draining water along the right wall. He looked at the pipes to the left. His hair was scraping the ceiling. He looked down just in time to see the figure under the boards move.

Two 9mm slugs tore through the planks and slapped off the low cement ceiling as Harry fell sideways into the nearest shallow pool. He couldn’t afford to worry about his pride or his suit. If he had merely hopped aside, he’d still be in sight and the ricochets could do some damage. He had no sooner splashed down than he was pushing himself up and returning fire. The sound of his Magnum was deafening.

The .44 slugs punched out whole sections of the boards and whined off of the underlying pipes. Cunningham had slid down the hall on his back and tumbled out from the catwalk at the far end. He stood and fired another silenced shot at the crouched, soaking wet policeman. The bullet sent up a little fountain to Harry’s right. Harry pulled up his gun and had the wet-suited figure stuck on the end of the barrel for a split second. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

Cunningham ran while Harry cursed. The tall cop saw his auto-loader on the bottom of the pool as he threw himself out of the water and barreled down the hall. Around the next corner was an exit door. It had almost swung closed when Harry reached it. He hurled it open and attacked a short flight of stairs. The stairwell was one of those infuriatingly narrow, short ones that made you turn a corner and move up in the opposite direction every six steps.

Callahan took them two at a time, his soaked, heavy clothing keeping him from going any faster. By the time he rounded the fifth corner, he felt his breath getting heavy, but he also saw Cunningham just turn for the sixth time. As Harry pivoted around the corner and plunged ahead, he saw the door at the top of the stairs. He took the last set of steps while pulling out the second of his three auto-loaders and jamming the rounds in the gun’s cylinder. His shoulder hit the door just as he swung the revolver shut.

The door opened up onto the lobby of the planetarium. And the planetarium was open for business. Already busloads of kids from area churches and playgrounds were filling up the large, long room. Moppets of all kinds were milling apart, herded by counselors of all types. Everybody under the age of thirty seemed to be there, except for a man in the bottom half of a diving outfit.

Harry stalked up and tapped on the first semi-adult shoulder he could find. A bearded, chubby, black-haired young man with glasses turned around.

“You see a guy with rubber pants around here?” Harry asked.

The bearded fellow had the look of any harried babysitter trying to tend more than a dozen monsters at once and was about to abruptly tell Harry off until he saw the gun.

“That way,” the young man said, staring at the Magnum and pointing at a set of eight swinging doors. “Right that way . . . sir.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, already heading in that direction. He ignored the shouting lady at the ticket taker’s counter who was saying something about how the show had already started. Harry opened the door a bit anyway and slipped inside.

He was just in time to veer dangerously near a glowing nebula. The audience, seated in a circle and staring up at the dome above them, gasped as Harry slid along the circular wall. Their faces glowed as they neared the bright, shimmering collection of stars. Harry took in each of the faces as best he could. As far as he could tell, Cunningham was not sitting down.

Then Harry spied a security guard a little farther down the wall. The thin, unarmed, uniformed man was staring up in as much rapture as the seated kids. Harry took up a position close to the fellow’s ear.

“Is there another exit in here?” he asked, motioning his head at the doors he had just entered from.

“Naw,” whispered the security guard. “We don’t want anyone to sneak in.”

“Uh-huh,” said Harry. “Enjoy the show.”

“I never get tired of this stuff,” said the guard, even after Harry had moved away from him. “Have a nice day.”

Harry started checking out all the aisles. The place wasn’t sold out so early in the morning so there was plenty of room to search.

“There are millions of nebulas throughout our galaxy,” a sonorous voice boomed down from the projected heaven as Harry stalked his prey in the semi-circular rows. “Just as there are millions of stars and planets, there are billions of these beautiful masses of gases throughout the universe. And among the stars, there are thousands growing old and going nova every single second of every single day . . .”

As the omnipresent voice spoke, the picture on the curved ceiling changed again to a pulsating red sun which seemed to burn down the very walls. The crowd gasped again, and the entire place looked like the inside of a photographer’s developing studio. And just as the picture changed, a hunk of the seat that Harry had laid a hand on, spun off into his stomach.

The cop fell flat on his face. Now he knew Cunningham was in the planetarium and still had a loaded automatic with a silencer.

The picture above him changed again as the bodiless voice explained, “Dying suns come in two categories; the red giant and the white dwarf . . .”

As the white dwarf was given shape, Harry risked sticking his head up and checking the chair’s damage. The missing piece was knocked off from across the room and to the right, if Harry was any judge of bullet trajectory. But by now Cunningham would have changed his position. The bastard could spend the whole show shooting from the cover of an unknowing kid in the audience until he finally pegged Callahan. Harry decided not to risk it.

It was getting to the security guard’s favorite part when he felt the tug at his pant leg. He looked down, expecting to see a lost little girl or boy. Instead, he saw a big, craggy-faced man in a damp tweed jacket lying on his back. Smiling pleasantly, the man motioned the guard to lean down.

Ted Cunningham looked over the top of a seat across the theater and saw only the back of a tourist’s head. He scrutinized the entire area, looking for any sign of Harry Callahan. All he saw was the security guard slowly leaving the dome room through one of the eight doors on the opposite wall. Cunningham wondered whether it was possible his one shot had caught the homocide inspector after all. He remembered seeing the chair back break off and Harry go down. With the strength of his automatic, it was possible that the bullet went through the wood and into the cop’s stomach. God knew the silenced weapon was heavy enough. Maybe the security guard had discovered Callahan’s body and was going to report it without raising a general alarm.

The criminal took a second to look down at the long dark weapon in his hand. The Browning automatic looked like a miniature Howitzer in his hand. The fourteen 9mm rounds in its clip weren’t incredibly accurate, especially with the silencer which added almost three inches to its snout, but what it lacked in aim, it made up for in power and intimidation. With it, he had made a few of his pre-teen “charges” wet their BVDs and cream in their Sergio Valentes.

Cunningham looked up again and smiled. If the bullet had hit Callahan anywhere on his torso, the cop would be down for the count. And with Harry out of the way, it would not make any difference how many cops were surrounding the place or how many would charge the planetarium to back him up. Good old Ted would be long gone. If anybody asked, all the regular help would say that there was only one way to enter or exit the theater. But Cunningham worked there. Only he and the planetarium director knew about the director’s booth.

That was the core of the entire dome show. That was where the experts worked up and controlled the action on the computers. That was where the sound and lighting equipment was. And that was where an ample air-conditioning duct was. Cunningham knew he could slip in the theater door to the director’s booth, make some excuse to the controller, and make good his getaway. Even if Harry wasn’t dead, he couldn’t stop Cunningham now. He wouldn’t know how. The air-conditioning pipes were big enough to let Cunningham slide and crawl to the outside. He would get out a second exit no one knew about.

As Cunningham hitched up his rubber slacks and crawled for the other side of the room, Harry Callahan stuck his head up a third exit. He had snaked out the theater on his back and sat down with the custodian just outside the theater. Fatso Devlin had showed up, and Harry, explaining the situation, had him place a small army outside the main doors.

“He’s in there with a weapon and several dozen kids. I don’t want the whole thing to turn into a shooting gallery.”

“OK, Harry,” Devlin had agreed. “We’ll surround him.”

“I don’t want a hostage thing on my hands either,” Harry had countered. “I just want the place secure so if I don’t luck out at least you have him boxed in.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Me and Max here,” Harry explained, nodding toward the smiling custodian, “have an observation post picked out for me. If I see Cunningham I’ll bring him down. If not, good luck.”

“Thanks,” Devlin had said laconically.

“Least I could do,” said Harry, motioning that Max should lead the way.

“Harry . . . ?” Fatso called after him.

Harry turned.

“Don’t make too much of a mess. You know how I hate cleaning up after you.”

So Max led the inspector to the long, flat room of electronic machinery under the dome theater. He had brought Harry beneath the pit where the $140,000 projector was hung. Max had silently pulled open the bottom of the pit so Harry could stick his torso up directly under the dumbell-shaped device. Harry was just tall enough that his eyes looked over the crest of the pit. The bottom section of the projector was just above his head, its concentrated light masking him from the crowd. But while they couldn’t see him, he could see them just fine.

“Soaring throughout our galaxy are packs of comets,” intoned the show’s continuing narration. “These interplanetary hoboes range in size from the smallest of specks to the most incredible of satellites. Many are even bigger than the Earth . . .”

On that word, Harry saw Cunningham. The man was crawling from the end of one row, across a carpeted aisle and into the same row on the other side. Harry looked in front of the creeping crook to guess his destination. It was easy. Besides the entrance, there was only one other door. Harry pulled his Magnum out.

“These gigantic hunks of compressed ore speed throughout the heavens,” continued the melodic voice from the theater’s speakers, “always moving in the same long orbits. As we see them through our telescopes in the night sky, they are cold and grey. We call them comets . . .”

Callahan propped the barrel of his .44 on the lip of the pit. He sighted it along the row of chairs Cunningham was worming behind. He moved it along the lip at the speed he guessed his target was moving at. The barrel passed several innocent sitting figures looking happily up at the increasingly dazzling show.

“But when any of these hurtling stones reach our atmosphere,” the narration continued, “and start to flame and burn from the air around them, we call them meteors . . . !”

And the planetarium theater lit up with the blaze of projected falling meteors. The audience cried with delight. Cunningham took it as a cue to make a break for the director’s room door. He hopped up with his back to Harry and started climbing over the three sets of rows in front of his goal. Callahan quickly realigned his aim and checked to see that no innocent person was close to his field of fire.

The Magnum barrel was pointed right at the middle of Cunningham’s back as the man scrambled over the final row of chairs.

“Many meteors have struck the Earth during recorded history,” the disembodied voice above Harry stated. “Incredibly, the daily count often reaches close to one hundred million. Most of these burn up harmlessly . . . but some . . . some have, and some will, strike the Earth with the force of fifty atom bombs! What will happen then?”

The audience held its breath in anticipation. Even Cunningham hesitated, pivoted, and looked up. Harry heard a fiery, crackling whooshing sound above him and felt a slight heat on the back of his neck. The projector was getting hot. Above him, a five-mile-wide meteor was coursing toward a fragile-looking blue marble. When the marble became the Earth and the meteor an orange ball of molten fury, Callahan barked out his order.