Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill (6 page)

But he didn’t have to go looking for them. They made themselves known with a sudden burst of fire. At first there were only scattered reports, then a relentless fusillade. The conflict seemed to be going on just up over the hillock and through a cluster of oaks just to Harry’s left. The question he faced was whether to return to his car and alert the station or to risk getting closer to better ascertain the situation—and to do so without somehow stumbling into the middle of the fray.

He decided to return to his car. There were too many men involved for him to handle on his own. The dispatcher recognized Harry’s voice immediately.

“You back with us, Inspector?” he inquired.

“Not exactly. But don’t let technicalities stop you.”

“Course not. I will relay the message. Ten-four.”

Even from this distance the gunfire could be heard. It was not loud enough, however, to cause the few passing cars to stop. Then again when people were shooting one another usually the best thing you could do was to keep right on going. It was only the ones like Harry who felt the pull in the opposite direction. He wasn’t about to stay by his car until help arrived. By then the gunmen might all be gone. Or dead.

Harry ventured in through the oak-strewn landscape, keeping low to avoid the stray bullet that every so often tore away the bark and smaller branches from trees in Harry’s immediate vicinity. As he approached the area that the gunmen had converted into a battlefield the trees grew fewer in number, allowing for an open grassy knoll. There were on the periphery of the knoll smaller boulders, cousins of the big one that had done in the Mercedes, and these were being used by the men for cover. Who was shooting at whom Harry couldn’t say for sure, and which ones had come from the Mercedes and which from the Chevy was a similar mystery. Harry, however, did have one advantage; as far as he was concerned he was against both parties to the conflict, so he really didn’t care who emerged victorious. His only objective here was to put a stop to the fight, though he had no idea just how he was going to go about this.

Hunkered down, he waited for the battle to define itself, for a strategy on the part of one side or the other to become evident. He was certain that this unrewarding exchange of fire couldn’t go on much longer. With everyone dug in and protected as they were, no one stood a chance in hell to hit his enemy. Sooner or later someone was going to move or else they would all have to give up, go home, and think about other ways of passing a Thursday evening in San Francisco.

In his assessment of the situation, Harry proved correct, though this did not necessarily mean anyone would give him any awards for the accuracy of his judgment. When it came to awards, people seemed more interested in taking them away from him.

In any case, someone moved, then someone else joined him. They didn’t risk exposing themselves on the knoll. There were better and less painful ways of committing suicide, after all. Instead they clung to the darkness that was especially friendly on the perimeter of the knoll; there there were the trees and the brambles and brush. Their opponents apparently had failed to see them because they were still aiming in the same general direction as before. One of the men had stayed behind, maintaining an even level of fire so as to give his friends more time in which to skirt around the knoll and spring their little surprise.

Harry couldn’t resist spoiling their fun. It was simply too much of a temptation. He was the wild card in the deck, the X part of the equation. Since he had the two men in view—and the view was growing better all the time since they kept coming closer, having no idea that Harry was monitoring their progress—he decided to wait no longer. He raised his Magnum and fired—but not to hit either of them. That wasn’t his purpose.

Astonished, even a bit incredulous, the two gunmen jumped back, firing wildly since they couldn’t understand where this unexpected assault had originated. Harry fired again. And now, alerted to the two men’s presence, their enemies on the opposite end of the knoll began firing in their direction too. Someone’s aim was good or else he was just lucky. The man who was hit probably wouldn’t spend much time contemplating which it was; the blood was pumping out of his lower back too fast for him to pay much attention to anything else. He lay in a bed of green detritus, but wouldn’t stay still. Instead he thrashed about, screaming words that got drowned out by the increasing fury of the bullets flying every which way over the knoll.

The second man apparently managed to get himself to shelter before he was hit. His flight seemed to encourage the assailants across the knoll because now one of their number emerged, testing the atmosphere, maybe in preparation for a full-scale assault. Could be these jokers were playing at World War II? Harry thought. Summer nights can get boring around town.

Harry set out with the intention of circling around the knoll, laying down a barrage that wasn’t meant to hit anyone but rather to confuse them. And confuse them it did. They fired at Harry, they fired at each other, they went through one clip after another, trying like hell to achieve something significant for all their trouble.

Way in the distance, sounding more like cows bellowing than anything else, you could make out the sirens of the squad cars. High time help arrived, Harry thought. But help was a mixed blessing. The appearance of the police might panic these gun-wielding gentlemen and result in considerably more bloodshed. Not that Harry cared about these characters, but he feared for the lives of the men he served with—or used to serve with before a D.A. named Nolan began reciting Supreme Court decisions to him.

It seemed to him that he was at a point midway between the two groups of gunmen. But for the moment he had no way of knowing since the fire had subsided, maybe because they wanted to be absolutely certain it was sirens they were hearing. But the imminent coming of the police evidently didn’t quite put the fear of God into them because in half a minute they resumed, though their bullets were doing little more than scooping up dirt and thudding into tree trunks.

Then one of the men downrange from Harry allowed his head to appear above the craggy rock formation behind which he’d been hiding; he was obviously inspecting the territory, looking for a way out. The sirens were growing louder. The police were a factor to take into consideration right about this time.

Harry risked breaking his own cover, possessed by a compulsion to put a stop to this man’s flight. He had a sudden vision of himself standing in the middle of the knoll explaining to his colleagues just what had happened and where in hell everyone had gone to and why he couldn’t save one for questioning—because he suspected that the man flattened out in the dirt back there had long since given up any notion of surviving.

The man Harry had elected to take in saw him, couldn’t help but see him with the noise he was producing. Not much noise maybe but enough—crackling twigs underfoot, scraping past bushes that refused to let anyone go by without announcing their passage—but there was nothing Harry could do about it, not if he wanted to maintain his speed.

The man and a friend of his who’d secreted himself among the fossilized crevices of the rock directed their fire at Harry, assuming he was leading some kind of attack. Their shots made the going treacherous but Harry, by zigzagging and dodging, escaped them, sustaining only rough scratches from the brambles and thorns that assaulted him in the dark, scraping skin from his face and hands.

Across the knoll, surprised and probably incredibly confused by this unexpected onslaught, the opposition opened fire—not at Harry but at the rock formation. The men they were targeting were now so preoccupied with bringing down Harry they had thrown caution to the wind.

One of the two shooting at Harry cried out. He then cried out again as if to reaffirm his pain. A .38 had caught him in the side of the face, gone right through one cheek, clipping off a good bit of bridgework, then gone out the other, leaving this great big bloody hole through which even the slight steady breeze off the bay could whistle. Though the wound was ugly it wasn’t lethal, but that did not make any difference to the gunman insofar as the pain was concerned. He dropped his weapon and pressed both hands to his injuries. His friend had to go it alone.

The friend did not much like proceeding with the solo act since his only intention had been to escape from the field in the first place. But with gunfire plaguing him from across the knoll and now with Harry diving onto a steeply angled moss-covered rock, threatening with his Magnum, escape was out of the question.

Harry, taking advantage of his distraction, gained ground, flattened himself out, then rushed him again. The rounds he got off forced his target to lower himself back into his Ice Age souvenir. “Shut the fuck up,” Harry could hear him urging his bleeding friend who was able to release just a sad whimper, a sob caught perpetually in the throat. A sound like that could set a man on edge.

At last the poor trapped bastard couldn’t take it any longer. He decided he might as well chance crawling out of his lair in hope nobody would notice or noticing, give a damn.

But as he did so, two rounds—neither of them Harry’s because Harry wasn’t in any position to hit him—struck him from the side. One was supposed to. It broke a few ribs in its journey, then got stuck somewhere in the right lung. The other had ricocheted up from a stone and caught him in the groin. You couldn’t say that one killed him and the other didn’t; he might have lived with just one of the injuries, but they had acted in concert and sucked the life right out of him. It seemed like going through a lot of trouble to die.

From the trees across the knoll flashlight beams shone, prying apart the darkness, separating the shadows of vegetation from the shadows of men with guns. Dogs barked furiously, enraged at having been dragged from the comfort of their kennels for this sort of outing where people were as liable to shoot them as their masters. And shoot they did, disregarding warnings that it was the police they were dealing with now and not just another bunch of hoodlums looking for new ways to die.

Harry found himself, uncharacteristically, isolated from the action. Didn’t like it one bit. Leaving the cheekless man where he was, sponging up the copious flow of blood with hands caked by dirt, Harry scrambled across the knoll. It wasn’t completely safe—bullets that hadn’t found a home yet had a tendency to puncture holes in the grassy stretch of land—but no one was firing at Harry. No one seemed to remember him or realize he was there.

Harry got a rhythm going; the energy that propelled him could have gotten a funeral limousine through the Indianopolis 500 in record time, and he had within the span of a minute gotten across the open space. But even so the battle, between the surviving gunmen and the police, seemed to be drifting away from him. He couldn’t quite close in on it.

For a few moments everything was chaos—dogs were howling and men were shouting orders and abusing God, mother, and country. Flashlights went on and off in a weird progression. At intervals Harry thought he could see what was happening, only to have the visual blotted out completely, leaving behind a confused audio of hoarse voices and gun reports.

When the lights fell his way Harry sometimes caught a glimpse of a man or rather a shadow that looked and moved like a man. Harry held his fire, not wishing to shoot one of his own men. That was the last thing he needed to do, given how precarious his situation was already down at headquarters.

From deep within the cluster of trees to his right came a booming voice, amplified by a bullhorn: “This is the San Francisco Police Department. We order you to throw down your weapons and give yourselves up.” Despite the authority invested in the command, the only response was a noisy burst of fire.

Now the man Harry’d seen before was thrown in sharp relief by a flashlight beam. To escape the incriminating light he raced downhill, panicking before a hail of bullets could catch up with him.

He had a mistaken idea of where safety lay.

“That’s it right there,” Harry called to him. his Magnum ready to tear a hole through the man’s chest.

The man wanted to stop, but the momentum of his flight prevented him. He finally skittered to a halt, casting aside his gun and raising his hands in surrender. He was a smart fellow, Harry thought, to recognize when the odds no longer favored him.

Up close, the gunman looked like an overworked bank teller. He could have used a bit more sun. There was no fear on his face though, only deep disgruntlement that things should have worked out this way.

There were a few more gunshots, then nothing, just the cicadas who obviously weren’t about to let human beings upset their nightly songfest.

A number of uniformed men sprang into view, their faces still hidden in shadows so that Harry couldn’t yet distinguish one from another. Gradually they were close enough for Harry to identify them. They advanced cautiously, fearful that the danger wasn’t over.

Bob Togan, a sergeant who’d traded vice for this sort of circus, took one look at Harry and shook his head. “You,” he said simply. It wasn’t that he had expected Harry—the dispatcher hadn’t mentioned Harry’s name in the report—it was just that somehow seeing Harry didn’t really surprise him. Harry had this odd habit of turning up in odd places. Places where there was likely to be a good deal of blood in the vicinity.

“That’s right. How are you doing, Bob?”

“Well as can be expected.” He gave the prisoner a derisory glance. “You read him his rights?”

“I’m not exactly on the force now.”

“Oh no? Could have had me fooled.” Togan knew very well what was happening with Harry; he just enjoyed feigning ignorance. The prisoner meanwhile was looking from one man to the other, confused over this exchange.

Across the knoll a couple of officers were inspecting the damage around the rock formation. The cicadas were experiencing some competition now from ambulance sirens, which made a mockery of the pleasant quiet you expect from a park at night.

Togan ordered the prisoner led off. He wanted him out of his sight quickly. “You have any idea what this was all about, Harry?”