Dirty Harry 07 - Massacre at Russian River (16 page)

He worked his way to the bottom of the staircase. Then, flattening himself against the wall, he brought his hand up to the switch and depressed it.

The intruders weren’t nearby, but they could not help noticing the sudden diffusion of light from the hallway.

“Hey, what’s that?” a man asked, violating the silence they’d ordained for themselves.

“Shhhhhhh!” came the rejoinder.

Too late, Harry thought.

There were no more voices, no sound of movement for a time. The intruders were undoubtedly attempting to figure out what the light meant.

Perhaps a minute passed before one of them spoke. “We have to do something, damn it.”

“I’m thinking,” his companion answered him. He didn’t sound particularly pleased to have to be doing this.

At last the man seemed to have reached a decision.

“Tom, you go out and see what it is.”

“Wait a minute, why me?” This protest was delivered with great vehemence and volume.

“Get out there, asshole. Keep low and get out and see what’s happening. You’re a kid. Nobody’s going to shoot you.”

Ah-hah, Harry thought, what we seem to have here is the disreputable Reardon clan.

Tom Sr., was right about one thing. Harry was not about to shoot the kid if he could help it.

Tom Jr. appeared within moments and poked his head into the hallway. He didn’t linger longer than he had to, just gave the premises a cursory glance and quickly retired. Unless he had ventured out into the middle of the hallway, there was no way he could have spotted Harry.

“You didn’t look hard enough,” was what Harry heard now.

“I told you, Pa, it’s clear.”

“What turned on the fucking light then?”

“Tom, don’t badger the kid. He didn’t see anything, he didn’t see anything. What’re you going to do?”

Another voice. Who could that be? Harry wondered.

“Fuck all, I’ll go check it out.”

This, Harry decided, should be a happy surprise.

But Tom Sr. wasn’t going this alone, not at all. He wanted his son and the man Harry couldn’t identify to accompany him.

As soon as they showed themselves, Harry swiveled about, thrusting out his .44. “Freeze right there,” he ordered.

The way in which he’d positioned himself all they could glimpse of him was the gun and the hand that held the gun.

This did not deter the elder Reardon who fired his .45 Enforcer unhesitatingly, and never mind that he knew he couldn’t hit anything.

Harry, not able to see much of anything, got a round off to drive them back. But he was luckier than he’d anticipated.

The third member of the Reardon family, with whom Harry had yet to make acquaintance, sustained a minor but bloody leg wound that sent him howling into the hallway. He sprawled in the middle of the floor clutching his right leg below the knee.

“Lou!” Tom Jr. called. “Lou!”

It took the man several moments before he looked up and saw Harry looming over him. In his pain he seemed to have forgotten about Harry altogether. Instinctively, he reached for the Remington revolver he’d dropped.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Harry advised him, keeping the .44 targeted on him.

Lou apparently agreed with him, for he made no further move toward his gun.

In the meantime, Tom Sr. and his son had fled into the recesses of the house. Obviously, they felt that there was no sense in battling Harry where he had the advantage.

Cautiously, Harry proceeded down the hallway. Recovering the Remington Colt, he left the injured Lou where he was and stepped into the adjoining room. It was cold and empty and dark.

They were there somewhere, if not in this room, then in the next. A vague light was visible in the far window which looked out onto the street but that, and what light there was from the hall, was all Harry had to navigate himself by.

He reached up, switched on yet another light.

Nothing. No one.

He could see into the kitchen. Father and son must have managed to locate some cranny to hunker down in, Harry suspected, because there was no evidence of them. And they were being very quiet. From time to time, Lou would mutter and rant in his pain, but that was it. There were no other sounds.

This could go on all night, Harry realized, this waiting game. He had exposed himself now and had sacrificed some of his advantage. But, on the other hand, he was aware of just how impatient these Reardons happened to be. And from everything he’d seen, it appeared that none of them was too bright. Given the right circumstances, they were apt to do something crazy. Harry wouldn’t have wanted to stake his life on it, but it wasn’t an impossible thing to hope for.

Then he heard a movement—not much, a rat scuttling from one side of the room to the other would have made more noise—but it was enough to alert him as to where at least one of the uninjured Reardons might be: to the extreme left of the kitchen, behind the antiquated coal stove.

Harry decided to fire directly at the side of the stove, see what kind of response this brought.

The shot caused an enormous amount of noise, a shriek of metal, and a vast eruption of coal dust that rose into a black cloud and nearly filled the whole of the kitchen. Harry heard more movement and considerable coughing.

He thought he saw someone. Or was it a shadow? He had no idea. He fired again in any case, trying to keep them off balance and draw them out at the same time.

In both these objectives, he appeared to have succeeded.

Someone—Tom Sr.? Tom Jr.?—responded with two shots, discharged in rapid succession. They were badly aimed, impacting against the wall beyond him, causing plaster to rain down on the handwoven rugs that were among Elsie’s most valuable possessions.

This display of inaccuracy emboldened Harry to advance farther. He bobbed and weaved in doing so. The blood pounded in his temples, he was alive again. He had gotten a second wind, and he intended to use it to the maximum. He doubted that there’d be a third.

At the threshold of the kitchen Harry dropped down, just in time to avoid another barrage that streaked across the room and into the windows. More glass ruptured with enough noise to arouse the neighbors. Maybe they’d summon the police, maybe not. Harry hoped they would resist the temptation. Russian River’s police force would not look upon Harry with great favor.

When Harry raised his eyes, all he saw was a room full of coal dust and smoke, a mingling of poisonous gases. Once more the Reardons had managed to elude him. Wherever they were, they weren’t in the kitchen any longer.

Harry raced into the pantry, where two old white refrigerators hummed in unison. Two means of exit were available from there: the cellar on his left and the back door. It made more sense for them to retreat into the yard than risk the cellar, where they might be trapped.

Nonetheless, Harry kicked the door open to be sure, and threw on the light at the top of the stairs. He found himself peering into a cavernous stone space, part of which had been converted for the storage of crates and trunks, while another part had been given over to what looked like hundreds of jars of jams and preserves.

Having no opportunity to invesigate more fully, Harry turned around and made his way into the yard that stretched all the way back to a grove of alders and pines. There was no sign of them in the yard. They’d probably concealed themselves among the trees and the dark.

Reasonably convinced that he had at least succeeded in expelling the two armed Reardons from the house, Harry went back in. It was important that he see to Elsie, get her to more secure surroundings if possible.

But when he reached the hallway Lou Reardon was missing. A small pool of blood attested to the fact that he’d been there only minutes before. A trail from the pool gave a definitive answer to the question of where he’d gone.

It was like following a spore. Lou hadn’t crawled out of the house through the front door, as Harry would have expected under the circumstances. It seemed instead that he had begun climbing the stairs. Apparently, he’d improvised a tourniquet, for there was little blood deposited on the stairs. But there was always a drop or two; he hadn’t been able to staunch it completely.

Harry now had all three Reardons to contend with. This tribe didn’t give up easily. They might not be smart, but they sure were dogged.

To his alarm, the trail of blood continued up the second stairway, which would bring Lou close to Elsie. That she was armed and that, as far as Harry knew, Lou wasn’t, did not do much to reassure him. He wasn’t certain how she would respond if this lunatic rushed her with his bare hands.

A scream rent the stillness of the house.

Harry accelerated his pace, attaining the landing on the third floor in time to see Lou, propped up on his one good leg, standing in the doorway of the bedroom. Elsie was hidden from view.

Hearing footsteps behind him, Lou swiftly glanced around. Then shut the door, locking himself and Elsie inside.

Giving little thought to his own safety, Harry threw his entire weight against the door and ripped it open.

Lou was on the bed, his body atop Elsie. At first glance, it looked as though he was raping her, his body heaving and thrashing in an effort to restrain her. But then Harry saw Lou’s hands tightened about her neck. He either was so suicidally intent on strangling her that he failed to register Harry’s dramatic entry or else he simply didn’t give a damn.

Harry brought up his Magnum and was about to fire when he heard a muffled report. Then a second one. Lou reared up, his hands lost their grip, and then, with one convulsive movement, he rolled over and lay still. His mouth was slack, his eyes seemed to be struggling to escape their sockets. In his stomach, and further down in his groin, two bloody wounds could be made out.

Sobbing, her face gone quite pale, Elsie gave a final push, and Lou’s abused body tumbled off the bed. In her trembling hand she gripped the .22 Harry had given her. It was clear that she still could not believe she had actually fired it and killed a man, no matter that that man had been on the verge of taking her life.

Harry stepped to the side of the bed and tried comforting her as best he could. She cried for several moments against his shoulder. She said something Harry couldn’t comprehend at first but which she kept repeating over and over. “It shouldn’t have to be this way,” was what she was saying. “It shouldn’t have to be this way.”

At that instant there were three shots, all in quick succession. One, from Tom Jr.’s gun, struck a pillow stuffed with duck down. The sudden flurry of feathers gave the illusion that it was snowing inside the room.

The other two shots, from his father’s Enforcer, were more skillfully aimed. The first entered Elsie’s back, below her left shoulder, and traveled at a slightly upward trajectory, severing the main artery leading from the heart. The second hit the fleshy portion of her left arm, which was partially extended around Harry’s neck.

The fatal bullet had injured Harry as well, tearing a hole in his side, but it had lost much of its momentum during its passage through Elsie. The wound was much less grievous than it otherwise would have been, and at first Harry felt no pain.

He hadn’t even realized, in those critical moments, that Elsie had been hit. He’d heard the shots, but they were so unexpected that he didn’t immediately understand where they were coming from. Then Elsie gasped, her eyes widening. Her hands clawed at Harry’s back and then her head drooped, her auburn hair spilling down into his lap. Copious amounts of blood pulsed out of her breast, soaking Harry.

“Elsie!” he cried out, knowing that she was lost and not wanting to believe it possible.

Her body had fallen against Harry in such a way that when the Reardons opened up again, she was protecting him. Since Elsie and Harry were saturated with so much blood, the father and son held their fire for a short interval, assuming that they had killed both their intended victims.

In that interval Harry reached his hand far enough to get hold of the Magnum that he had briefly put down.

Neither Tom Sr. nor Tom Jr. appeared to notice this.

“They got Lou, Pa,” the young man was saying. He did not sound grief-stricken so much as surprised.

“It happens like that sometimes, boy. But we got them good. Now let’s blow this mother.”

“Too late,” Harry said, raising himself up.

They both gazed stupidly at him as though this were Lazarus they were seeing, come back from the dead.

Tom Jr. actually had quicker reflexes than his father. But he wasn’t much good when it came to shooting on target. He fired just as Harry did.

Then he dropped his gun and looked down to where the blood was coming. He was astounded to find that he’d been hurtled up against the wall and was now sprawled out with a big hole in his chest. He looked up to his father as though his father might be able to get him out of this mess, just like he’d gotten him out of others.

But his father wasn’t going to be of a damn bit of help. His father wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He had decided to let his son take the punishment for him, and this time he wasn’t about to rescue him. Actually, this time no one was about to rescue him.

Tom Jr. watched Harry get out of the bed. Harry was something to behold, a grotesque figure streaked with blood and hundreds of tiny white duck feathers, which were clinging to the blood, everywhere over his body.

Harry loomed over him, the Magnum posited at Tom Jr.’s head.

“Don’t . . . ,” the youth pleaded.

Harry gave him a cruel smile. “I don’t think I will. It won’t be necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re going to die anyway.”

Tom Jr. still wasn’t feeling the pain. Numbness, yes, but little pain. True, the hemorrhaging from the wound looked awfully bad, but he was so cocksure of his invincibility that he figured the worst that could happen was a long stay in the hospital.

“I ain’t gonna die,” he insisted and then did.

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

T
om Sr. was long gone. A brief survey of the house yielded neither hide nor hair of the man. It was only after he assured himself that he was alone, that Harry turned his attention to the bullet wound that lay midway between two lower ribs. The wound appeared to be clean. The bullet had sped its way into the bedboard. Harry dressed and bandaged it, merely going through the motions because he was devastated by what had happened.