Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill (7 page)

“Can’t say as I do.”

“Some help you are. Where are you going?”

“I got an appointment to keep.”

“Oh yeah, what does she look like? You can’t always be doing this sort of shit, not all the time.”

Harry ignored him. “One thing, Bob. When you file your report I wish you’d neglect to mention my name.”

Togan laughed. “Hey, what’s wrong, don’t want the glory that’s coming to you?”

“You know what you can do with your glory, Bob.”

“I got an idea.” He was still laughing. Harry was merging with the dark; that’s one thing Harry did terrifically, fading out of sight so you’d never know he was there to begin with.

C H A P T E R
F i v e

B
ill Evans was on the radio now; a lulling ballad for lovers you’ll never see again. The music was soothing after the sound and light show in Golden Gate Park. Something like a headache was at work in Harry’s skull, a dull throb that hadn’t decided whether it wanted to become a full-fledged headache or fade away entirely.

Bill Evans gave way to a news commentator with a voice that went well with a final beer at the end of the night. Only it wasn’t the end of the night. It was, in fact, just shy of ten o’clock. The events of the last hour had sufficiently drained Harry so that he considered putting off his visit to the
Hyacinth
or
The Sojourner
or whatever the hell they were calling it tonight. He had an idea of taking in a movie or else of going to bed. But he knew very well that he would find his way to the hijacked yacht—that is if Keepnews was correct in surmising that it was hijacked. Harry had this thing about obligation; it was his personal code. It didn’t much coincide with the way the department thought about how people should behave. Actually, it didn’t much coincide with the way his friends thought either, which may have explained why he had very few friends. But whether they were friends or enemies they held the same opinion when it came to Harry: one day his sense of obligation was going to kill him.

As he drove back toward the marina he was subjected to no further distractions such as the one that had gotten him off on the road into Golden Gate Park. Had there been any he might have foregone the temptation and continued on anyway; he’d had enough for one night.

And that may have explained why he failed to notice he was being followed. There was someone way in back of him in a BMW; it had a clean cocoa color to it and was not the kind of vehicle people ordinarily employ for the purposes of tailing a person.

But it didn’t matter. The BMW was way in back of Harry, proceeding at a very leisurely speed. Harry was in no hurry, neither was the tail.

Harry parked his car a couple of blocks from the marina. He wanted to walk. He also didn’t wish to make his interest in the marina known without doing some preliminary reconnaissance. All the documents and photographs relating to the structure and design of the craft in question were hidden under the car seat. Harry didn’t need them anymore, the significant particulars were in his throbbing head.

The BMW pulled up about a block farther from where Harry had parked. Its occupant—and there was only one occupant—waited for a couple of minutes before getting out and having a look around.

Like a restless nighttime stroller, Harry wandered past the marina, casually observing the yachts on the other side of the fence. In the lights that demarcated the mooring slips he could make out the flybridge of one boat, the pilothouse of another, the empty masts of another. In the dark water that lapped against their hulls the reflections of these boats shimmered magically.

But what struck Harry as odd was that there was no sign of life, none on the boats, none on the docks. There should be some security presence here, he thought, at least a bored watchman doing the rounds. But if he was anywhere nearby he wasn’t bothering to make himself known. Maybe nodded out somewhere, dreaming dreams of the big bucks that could make boats like these happen.

But where among them was the rechristened
Hyacinth?
From the outside he couldn’t tell. No way to identify these yachts at this distance. He decided he would have to climb over for a better look. He located a portion of the fence that was unexposed by light and maneuvered himself up and over with little difficulty. Didn’t make much noise doing this, but when he was down he looked sharply in all directions, prepared to confront someone who would want to know why he’d chosen to enter the marina in such an unorthodox fashion. But if anyone had noticed Harry he wasn’t troubling himself to step out and talk to him.

All Harry could hear was water lapping the hulls and the rumble of cars passing back and forth on Marina Boulevard. Once or twice he thought he heard the docks creak, but if that’s what they were doing it was on their own volition. No human feet were causing those sounds. No human feet, no human anything.

Harry proceeded farther, drawing closer to the yachts, comparing each one of them to the picture he carried in his head. The cutter he was seeking was not such a unique model that it would easily stand out among the others. But there were certain idiosyncrasies that he’d been instructed by Keepnews to look for. And presumably there was only one boat with the name
The Sojourner
spelled out on its bow.

It took him a while, but he found it. Whatever its name, it was a beautiful specimen all right. The
Hyacinth
had been painted white with a trimming on its decks that bore the color of its name. But it wasn’t white any longer. Instead it was a dark blue, the color of sky just before it fades to night. The trimming was submerged under the blue as well. So, Harry thought, probably was the blood.

He stared at the boat for a minute, maybe a bit longer, not sure exactly what he was going to do. In truth, he hadn’t really thought about just how he would obtain the proof Keepnews wanted. He figured it would come to him once he got here: this is called the art of the improviser. But for this short interval his mind was a blank. He seemed to be in neutral. Goddamn motor needs cranking up again, Harry concluded, then went about the business of clambering on board.

With a pocketknife, one of those intricate items of Swiss manufacture equipped with can opener and toothpick, Harry stooped down and began to run the blade along the surface of the deck. One lone light atop the pilothouse provided the only available illumination, but Harry was not exposed by it. In an atmosphere of nearly total silence the scraping blade as it fought against metal sounded much too loud. At intervals Harry would stop and listen closely, but he could only hear the bay water eddying about the boats. His efforts at digging up paint off the deck proved futile. He turned his attention to the railing that ran alongside the stern, probing it with the knife to see if any paint came off.

He was immediately rewarded. Chips of blue flew off as soon as he sank the blade in. Only two coats at most had been applied; what lay beneath was another color, which Harry couldn’t make out with certainty because of the dimness. But he was reasonably sure that it would be purplish in hue—hyacinth.

That might or might not constitute definitive proof. In any case, he wanted to see more. He decided to go below deck. The door to the cabin offered little resistance when he tugged at it; the boat’s most recent owners had been careless about securing it. Darkness greeted him, and a series of steps was barely discernible. Though Harry’s hand found a toggle switch on the wall to his right, one which would probably give him light to see by, he resisted using it. The last thing he needed was to attract unnecessary attention if there were a guard patrolling the slips.

Carefully, to keep from tripping and tumbling into the murk, Harry proceeded down the steps. When he reached bottom his shoes became partially submerged in a soft carpet. He advanced another few paces and promptly bumped into something sharp that caused him to wince and mutter a curse against inanimate objects. Turned out it was a table with metal corners that could prove lethal. God knows what else awaited him in his reconnaissance, but sooner or later he was going to have to risk a light. Otherwise this whole expedition would be futile.

Now the substance underfoot changed consistency. No longer was it carpet, rather it was dirt, sod. Something leafy brushed against his face, something else with nettles attached raked his arms. For all he knew he could be back in Golden Gate Park again. What the hell was he doing amidst this vegetation? Keepnews, he recalled, liked rare tropical plants and gardening, but he hadn’t told Harry to expect a small jungle—must have slipped his mind.

Harry drew back, finding surer footing on the carpet again. He turned and moved in the other direction, his arms in front of him to give him a sense of what came next. There was, on his left side, a long narrow couch with lots of cushions stacked on it. He kept going and plowed right into something hard. “Shit,” he said pronouncing judgment on this exploration.

What he’d come up against was a bulkhead. Directly below it was a passageway intended for people who needed another four inches or so before they reached Harry’s height. Kneading his bruised forehead, he stooped and made his way through the passageway. He now found himself in the kitchen. There was a small oval window here. It looked out upon the Pacific, not the docks. If a light was possible any place it would be here. All he had to do was find it. After some substantial groping he located the switch. A lamp above the counter eagerly responded, bathing the area in a warm, faintly amber light.

This was sufficient for him to see into the rest of the cabin beyond the passageway. The table was much larger than he’d imagined, the artificial garden, situated midway across the room, much smaller.

He began methodically to open up everything there was to be opened, cabinets, bulkheads, drawers, not certain of exactly what he expected to find but expecting to find something.

What he found, at first, was the sort of paraphernalia he’d have figured a boat like this would be stocked with: utensils, heaters, life preservers, blankets, a weather chart recorder, cans of biochemical gel, a digital depth sounder, a refrigerator cluttered with beer and champagne, tins of coffee. But nothing that could convince a judge that all these things had once belonged to Keepnews. You could fingerprint them of course, but you’d need a warrant simply to get onto the boat. And a warrant would require grounds for reasonable suspicion. Keepnews didn’t have those grounds. Harry had yet to find them.

He abandoned the kitchen, then the cabin because they refused to yield anything useful. He did, however, discover another passageway he hadn’t seen before. This led to what seemed to be a utility area. Here he also lacked more than a trickle of light and ended up stepping on something rubber. It was a dinghy with webbing for seats, with both hand and foot pumps to inflate the thing. What it was doing smack in the middle of the floor Harry couldn’t imagine. It seemed careless to have left it here. Then it came to him. When his foot had inadvertently pressed down on it, the dinghy hadn’t responded the way a hollow rubber object ordinarily would have. Too hard.

Snapping open his knife, he dug the tip of it into the dinghy. There was a slight hiss of air but nothing else. The knife was meeting resistence. It wasn’t air that the rubber tubing contained.

Applying greater pressure to the knife, he worked a fairly extensive hole into the dinghy, worrying it until he could get his hands into it. He caught hold of something, pulled it out. It wasn’t necessary to look for better lighting to determine what it was. Harry knew by the feel of it alone. It was a glassine envelope, presumably one of many thousands tucked within the dinghy. Nothing in it, however: no heroin.

It was possible, Harry considered, that elsewhere in the dinghy the heroin itself might be found. Or possibly it was hidden in another crevice of the yacht, awaiting unloading. Harry assumed though that it had been carted off before, maybe as early as the first night in port. But there was always the chance that the hijackers had not found their opportunity and that the drug was still on board. Harry could not resist the temptation to look farther.

No longer so scrupulous about perforating the dinghy he set about gouging great tears in it, but all he revealed were more glassine envelopes. He was about to give up on the dinghy and see what other peculiar treasures this utility area had to offer when he heard a noise behind him. Not much of a noise—an asthmatic’s muffled wheeze would have been more obtrusive. But still it alerted him. His gaze shifted to the side. His ears were cocked, acutely sensitive now. The noise was not repeated.

All at once Harry felt trapped, for there was no exit from the utility area except the way he’d come in. The air was too warm, too dense and stale. He rose, deciding to forgo further exploration for the time being. Sliding a glassine envelope into his pocket, he began down the passageway, his Magnum in hand.

The interior of the cabin was as quiet as before. In the poor light streaming through the passageway from the kitchen nothing unusual presented itself. Harry wasn’t comforted. He felt that he was no longer alone, that his movements were being watched. But there was no visual cue to corroborate this sensation.

Just as he started up the steps he heard another noise. This one was louder and more penetrating than the last. The noise coincided with a vast amount of pain that sprang up suddenly from the base of his neck and in an instant monopolized every nerve fiber his head possessed. Only before his consciousness vanished completely did he identify the noise. It was the sound of a club slamming against his skull.

C H A P T E R
S i x

T
wo men stood over him. One had just emerged from the garden Keepnews had built to remind him what green looked like while he plied the seas in search of tuna. The other was positioned on the steps, having come down just in time to see Harry collapse. He didn’t look comfortable, sprawled out there on the floor. But it didn’t particularly matter.