Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill (24 page)

Harry could not decide whether he was hurt or hurt so badly that he could not count on his body. The old pain in his leg was reawakened, he knew that much, but he could still work it. Blood was slipping down from his scalp, but the injury did not seem substantial. It was difficult to determine the situation with any precision, especially when he was being hurled this way and that while seawater assaulted him on all sides.

Max! He suddenly remembered that Max was down in the master stateroom. He could not allow him to drown. After all, he’d promised Wendy he’d save the bastard’s ass and he meant to do so—particularly since he truly felt an obligation to Max, Wendy or no Wendy.

There was no further shelling. The mountain above the coast highway went silent, and gradually the water surrounding the
Confrontation
grew more tranquil.

Nothing remained to be seen of the stern-half of the yacht; of the bow-half only the pilothouse remained partially above water.

There were other boats visible, but they had, wisely, withdrawn as fast as possible, their captains fearing that they too would be shelled if they lingered too long in the neighborhood.

So it would be a while before Harry could expect any help. With no other option left to him, he swam, not certain where exactly he was destined but hoping that he had the general direction down right. Underwater, the yacht’s configuration was a shadowy, spectral thing; nothing seemed substantial. He located a hatch and tugged hard until he forced it open.

There, gripping the teakwood supports upon which the hatch rested, was Max. Blood had welled up in such profusion that at first it was almost impossible to see him.

Harry seized hold of him, dragging him up toward the surface, his only thought to get some air into his lungs before the pain overwhelmed him. At last he broke through, his arms locked about Max’s jaw. As he continued laboriously to swim toward shore, a trail of blood spread in the water behind him. All of it, or most of it anyhow, was coming from Max. “You’re going to live, goddamnit,” Harry muttered to him, though it was doubtful Max could hear. “I’m not doing all this for nothing.” He was angry, raging, and it was the anger, more than anything else, that propelled him onward.

Struggling against the currents, in water that was—despite the atmospheric temperature—unusally cold, Harry managed finally to attain a small beachhead that was completely empty: a forlorn stretch of sand in the shadow of jutting rocks. He pulled Max onto the dry surface and for the first time looked closely at his face. His eyes were open, so was his mouth, but the eyes were vacant and the mouth engorged with seawater.

Then Harry allowed his eyes to continue their inspection; where, he wondered, was the source of all this blood? He did not need to search too far for an answer.

The blood was still pulsing out but at a diminished rate. One did not require an extensive medical background to see why this was so. The truth of the matter was that there was very little blood left to drain out of Max; for directly below his knee, in a terrible even line, something big and sharp, dislodged by the blast, had sheared off his extremities. Max had been dead, or nearly so, when Harry had found him. His rescue effort had been in vain.

C H A P T E R
E i g h t e e n

H
arold Keepnews was a shattered man. When Harry appeared before him he was scarcely able to recognize him. He sat in the living room, with the curtains drawn against the intrusion of light, a drink in his trembling hand and Rossini playing on the turntable. He seemed to have aged prematurely. His eyes hinted at a protracted period of insomnia compounded by heavy drinking, perhaps pills. There were no servants about, no gardener. And above all, no wife.

When Harry sat down beside him and briefed him on what had happened, sparing nothing in his account of the Mexican adventure and the fiasco upon his return, Keepnews scarcely seemed interested. That he had lost his skipper and a second yacht that had cost him nearly a quarter of a million dollars apparently made little difference to him.

“I am glad that you got out alive,” Keepnews said, though the fact was he didn’t appear to be glad about anything whatsoever. “I saw in the papers that all were thought lost.”

That was fine with Harry. The fewer questions he had to answer the better. As far as he knew, no one had been aware he was on the yacht in the first place. No one except for the men who wished to see him dead.

Harry did his best to cast a favorable light on the operation even so, emphasizing the destruction of the heroin lab in the Villa Corona, but he did this mostly to buoy Keepnews’s spirits. He realized that whatever damage he had inflicted on the operation managed by the late Señors Virgilio and Ignacio Mendoza, it would only be a temporary irritant to the drug dealers, not a major setback. There were too many Ignacios and Virgilios in the world ready to replace the ones who lay moldering in the jungle.

Harold did not seem to be listening to him. “You tried,” he said, practically inaudibly, “I suppose that’s what counts.” He did not sound the least bit convinced. Then, abruptly, he threw his head back, and tears sprang to his eyes. “She’s gone!” he cried out in such pain that Harry winced and turned away. “She’s gone,” he repeated. “For good.”

“Wendy?” It was the first time he dared mention her name.

“Wendy, yes.” He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, suddenly embarrassed at this uncustomary display of emotion. He breathed hard in an effort to compose himself. “What is maddening, what is absolutely infuriating, is that we had just had a reconciliation. Only a week ago. Less than a week actually—six days. She’d moved out, but then, Sunday night, she called me and said she wanted to see if we could make a go of it again.” He was talking as though he were in a trance—his recitation had a practiced, lifeless ring to it.

Six days ago, Harry reckoned, he was on his way out of Carangas. He wondered at how close and how far away Carangas and Sunday were to him.

“And then?” Harry prodded him.

“And then when I woke up Thursday morning I found her gone. All her belongings, what she hadn’t taken before, all were gone. There was no note, nothing. It would appear she doesn’t even want the house anymore.”

It was on Thursday that the
Confrontation
had been attacked. Harry had gone underground for a day, hoping to recuperate sufficiently so that he could finally face Keepnews. He began to think that possibly Wendy’s timing and the fate of the
Confrontation
might be somehow linked, but he decided to say nothing.

“Harry, I don’t believe there’s any chance of seeing her again. I am enough of a realist to know that. But with her gone, I no longer have any ambition. I sit here, I have been sitting here since she left, except for going to the bathroom. I have sent all the staff away. Their presence was a humiliation for me. I never realized that one person could exert such a hold over another. Does this sound melodramatic to you? It must, coming from me.” He let out a bitter laugh. “But I swear to you it is the truth. I would never have believed that she would leave me finally. That she would take on other lovers, like that Max—” He spat out the name in contempt. “Well, I could tolerate that. I didn’t like it but I could tolerate it so long as she stayed with me, came back to me in the end. But this!” He shook his head in bewilderment.

“Tell me,” Harry put in gently, “have you any idea where she went?”

Slowly, almost grudgingly, Keepnews answered. “Yes, yes, I have an idea. I am not without resources. She is right now in Sausalito. I have the address.”

“A house she rented? Friends she moved in with?”

“Not friends. Friend, singular.”

“A man?”

“A man I think you know. A man who Wendy knew represented all I despised, all I have spent my life fighting against. She chose him deliberately. He has a rather high-spirited life-style. It was not difficult for her to arrange an ‘accidental’ encounter. Wendy seldom exhibits any ambition. Only when something, or rather someone, interests her enough will she bring her full talents to bear on the situation. Generally she gets who and what she wants.”

Thinking of her ardent pursuit of him, Harry could do nothing but agree with her demoralized husband.

“And the name of the man?” Harry had a feeling he already knew but wanted the confirmation.

“The name of the man is Nicholas Cimentini.”

Harry spent all of Saturday afternoon, following his interview with Keepnews, wandering through downtown Sausalito, surveying the docks where yachts less endangered than the
Confrontation
and the
Hyacinth
were coming into berth, lingering in the restaurants and cafés on Main Street, strolling into the boutiques, galleries, and antique stores where he thought it likely Wendy might come, but there was no sign of her or of Father Nick. Presumably, they remained secluded in Father Nick’s house nestled farther up on the wooded hillside.

It seemed clear to Harry, as clear as things ever got anyway, that Wendy had stage-managed the reconciliation at Father Nick’s behest so that she could ascertain what was happening to the
Confrontation
in its journey back to the States. How she had obtained her information, by spying on her husband or simply turning an attentive ear to him when he confided the facts in the warmth of post-coital affection, was of secondary importance. The point was it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to learn what she wanted. It was possible, even likely, that she’d been the one responsible for betraying them in Carangas. She always seemed to know every detail of her husband’s business—there was no reason she wouldn’t have learned of Harry’s radio transmission. Just the fact that he had survived was evidence enough that the plot conceived in Carangas had failed to materialize. By mentioning that three crewmen had been lost, Harry had unwittingly provided further confirmation that Booth and Vincent were dead and that the heroin they were taking back with them was destroyed. That was sufficient information to set Father Nick’s plan in motion to blow the
Confrontation
—and with it Harry and Max—out of the water.

It was Wendy’s motives that Harry could not quite fathom. Was her hatred of her husband so pronounced that she was willing to go to such lengths simply to humiliate and finally destroy him? Was she seeking revenge against Harry, in addition, because she felt he had run out on her? Did she harbor some unarticulated grievance against Max as well that could only be assuaged by having him killed? Or had she, improbably, truly fallen in love with Father Nick—such things did happen, after all—and in the blindness that that love had induced had followed his instructions unthinkingly, mindless of the cost?

Harry might never know. He might not even want to know. But there was no question in his mind that she had long ago overstepped those bounds of forgiveness.

At dusk, when the sky had turned from a faint amber to a smudged gray-blue, Harry got into his car and headed on the winding road that led up into the hillside. He stopped only when he came to the house whose address Keepnews had provided him with.

“It’ll be well guarded,” Keepnews had told him, and from the looks of it, he’d been right.

The house was set into the hill, propped up over the reach by stilts. A wall of pink stucco fronted on the road and except for four shuttered windows on the second floor, the wall was unbroken, in keeping with the need for security. To gain access it was necessary to go around to the side and there, casually positioned in the shadows, Harry could make out the form of a man. He was leaning indolently against the door, from time to time exchanging remarks with another guard who could not be detected from the street.

In the surrounding bushes, all of which were beautifully manicured and shaped, Harry guessed that there would be other men, armed and awaiting any threat to Father Nick.

Now that Harry was here, he had really no idea what he could do. No plan presented itself to him. He decided that he would merely watch and see what, if anything, happened inside the house or out. Maybe an inspiration would come to him, maybe this whole enterprise was futile and he’d be sensible enough to turn around and go home and forget it. Though the one thing he couldn’t see himself doing was forgetting.

Past eleven o’clock, after hours of inaction, a gray Mercedes appeared in Harry’s rearview mirror. Instead of passing him it pulled off the road and stopped. If Harry had had any doubts about the car there was no question about the identity of its owner. It was Harold Keepnews.

He must have noticed Harry’s car parked ahead of his but if he did he gave no indication of it. Harry had a good notion of what Keepnews was up to, and he didn’t like it at all. Keepnews had decided to employ the same strategy with Father Nick that he had with the burglar who’d once invaded his house. He was going to meet the challenger head on and if necessary, kill him or else die himself. In his state of mind, it probably made very little difference. Love can kill a man more easily than hatred.

That he had given Harry the address of Father Nick’s Sausalito hideaway, however, implied that he hadn’t lost all reason. It might just be that he wanted back-up, that he expected Harry to be around when he arrived. More than that, he was undoubtedly shrewd enough to realize that Harry was the sort of man who would be unable to stay out of something like this, no matter what his reservations.

Harry cursed Keepnews silently. He did not like others choosing his battleground for him. But it seemed that people were always doing that regardless.

Now he could not imagine Keepnews simply going up to the door and demanding admission. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine him creeping silently among the shadows and ambushing his foes either. But, as he watched with growing shock, that was exactly what Keepnews appeared to have in mind.

As soon as he got within sight of the house he slipped out a .45-caliber combat pistol with a Teflon finish, equipped with a silencer. It was possible that he had already reconnoitered the site, for he seemed to know exactly where to find the guards—the first few at least.