Dirty Harry 07 - Massacre at Russian River (2 page)

“Ah, there you are. And I was just saying to the pretty mama here that I thought you was lost. You wasn’t lost, after all.”

Jud wasn’t interested in pursuing this. “I told you before, I’m not selling. You want to invest in my harvest then that’s different. Maybe we can work something out.”

Jud was thinking there was no sense riling the man, better to appease him, compromise.

“Maybe we can at that. But the truth of the matter is I want to buy what you have here. I’m willing to pay good money. Ain’t that right, Lou?”

Lou obediently nodded. “That’s the truth. You’re passing up a good deal, Jud, if you refuse.”

“Ten thousand dollars cash.” Tom was fishing the money from his jacket pocket and starting to count out the bills, slowly, as though he were really quite certain that Jud would accept them.

Jud had never heard Tom cite a definite figure before and was so positively astounded that for a moment his jaw hung open, struck dumb. Even Bonnie, who rarely expressed surprise, remaining tranquil under the most bizarre circumstances (possibly because she was so stoned), could not resist laughing.

“You must be joking,” Jud said upon recovering his voice. “Do you have any idea what my crop is worth? Let alone the farm itself.”

“I most certainly do. I study my investments before I make them, indeed I do.”

“There’s nothing further to discuss. Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy.”

Jud turned around and began walking back toward the house. Bonnie was about to do the same when Tom called to her.

“Hey, pretty mama, wait here.”

She had no intention of lingering and continued on. Tom then reached out and gripped hold of her arm.

She shrieked. This made no impression on Tom, who pulled her to him and then laid his hand against her swelling belly, his fingers digging through the fabric of her crinoline dress into her flesh.

Seeing this, Jud wheeled about. “Take your hands off her,” he commanded.

Bonnie was trying to free herself from the hold Tom had on her, but she hadn’t the strength. Tom continued to knead her stomach. “Hey,” he said, “I can feel him kicking in there.”

Jud lunged for Tom but his intervention did little good; he had Tom Jr., and Lou Reardon to contend with. As if on signal the pair seized Jud and kept him squirming in their grip.

In desperation Bonnie, in a motion too quick for Tom to observe in time, brought her left leg up and kneed him in the groin. He howled in pain and nearly doubled over. Bonnie took advantage of his momentary incapacitation and began to flee.

Tom didn’t run after her. Instead he reached into his jacket and extracted a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.

“No!”

Tom looked at Jud with surprise. It was as though he’d forgotten about Jud’s existence. “No?” He shrugged almost as if to say that it really made no significant difference to him one way or another.

Then he readjusted his arm, training the gun not on Bonnie but on the man who was trapped by his brother and son.

An expression of horror and disbelief came over Jud Harris’ face. He struggled more furiously to escape, but Lou and Tom Jr., would not think of releasing him unless Tom commanded them to do so.

Tom delighted in the power of determining a man’s fate.

Jud heard the cock of the gun and cried out in desperation. There were no neighbors to hear him, no one within miles who could come to his rescue. There was no phone.

Bonnie had reached the doorway but remained there, rooted to the spot, sobbing uncontrollably.

“You should’ve taken the cash and run,” Tom declared, shaking his head sadly. “Some people, they just never learn.”

Then he fired.

The bullet punched out a hole directly between Jud’s eyebrows, just at the ridge of the nose.

A bright crimson spot took form. The back of the head—what was left of it—looked a great deal worse. Jud’s body pitched back and would have been hurled some distance away were it not for the grip his captors maintained on him.

But now, suddenly, Lou let him go. Jud just sort of sagged. Then Tom Jr., let go, and Jud sank soundlessly to the ground.

“Look what you did, Tom,” said his brother, pointing to the blood and viscous material on his shirt. “You got it all over me.”

“I’ll buy you a new shirt, Lou, don’t you worry,” Tom said. He seemed truly apologetic about the mishap.

Right then there was a loud report. The three men turned to see what had caused it.

The answer was immediately apparent: Bonnie was standing in the doorway, the .22 in her arms. But she was shaking so much that the bullet she’d just fired at Jud’s murderers had gone far astray of its mark.

“Shit, and I’d forgotten all about her,” Tom remarked. He appeared to be amused by this turn of events.

Bonnie was aiming again. The three men, not trusting too much to luck, dropped to the ground. The second bullet whistled over their heads and sank into a tree some distance beyond them.

“Nobody taught that pretty mama how to shoot,” said Lou.

“Don’t seem like it, does it?” Tom agreed, carefully sighting his Magnum and firing.

Somebody had damn well taught Tom how to shoot. His bullet went into Bonnie’s abdomen, killing the seven-month-old fetus and causing massive hemorrhaging. The .22 flew from her hands, and she fell across the threshold of her home. There she lay, her twitching legs and muffled screams indicating that she was still alive.

“Here you go, Tom,” the father said, giving his son the Magnum. “Why don’t you finish it for us?”

Tom Jr., gazed at his father uncertainly. He had a great tolerance for bloodletting. He hadn’t recoiled when Jud was shot nor felt particularly saddened when Bonnie’s full stomach burst open. Hadn’t the woman been shooting at them, after all? But this was something else again, administering the
coup de grâce
, though of course, Tom Jr., would not have used such a phrase to describe what his father was urging him to do.

“Come on, take it, Tom.”

Tom Jr., grasped hold of the weapon. Bonnie’s screams were getting louder.

“Finish it, Tom Jr.,” his uncle was saying. “Shut her the hell up.”

Tom Jr., reluctantly advanced across the overgrown lawn. His father and uncle watched him impassively as he stepped up to Bonnie. For several moments he did nothing. He had the gun correctly positioned, but he still wasn’t doing anything.

“Come on, boy, get it over with! We haven’t got all day.”

Another second passed. Then there was an explosion. The screams stopped.

Tom Sr., cast a sidelong glance at his brother. He smiled in satisfaction. “I knew the boy had it in him,” he said.

C H A P T E R
O n e

H
is name was John Raven, but everybody referred to him as Turk. There was some Turkish ancestry in him but it went way back. He didn’t seem to like being referred to as Turk, but he just never knew exactly how to convince people to refer to him by any other name.

What Turk did had to be one of the most hopeless jobs ever to be conceived of in any police department in the nation. Turk was in command of the local narcotics squad that worked out of a county-seat courthouse located maybe forty miles from the Harris farm (though that was forty miles as a crow flies, and no four-wheel-drive vehicle enjoyed the freedom a crow did).

There were no windows in Turk’s office. This was a source of constant complaint for him. He would have given anything for a view. The walls were adorned with photographs of marijuana plants torn out of
High Times
magazine and Polaroid shots of Turk and various sheriffs posing with bales of confiscated weed. A map of the county was home to several dozen multicolored pins that designated the locations of known and likely marijuana farms. Atop the bookcase were bongs and roach clips, hookahs and hash pipes, lab scales and cookers once used to increase potency of whatever drug had been stuffed inside.

To amuse himself—and his visitors—Turk kept a record player on which he spun old jazz records with such tunes as “Reefer Man,” “Whacky Dust,” “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” and “I’m Feeling High and Happy.”

If there was one thing that Turk was not though it was high and happy. Too many obstacles were in his way to happiness.

For instance, he had only one man to help him. This was a fellow by the name of Frank Davenport. Unlike Turk, whose beard and wire-rim glasses gave him a vaguely academic air, Davenport was the classical image of an undercover agent, a man who in his attempt to fit in anywhere stood out like a sore thumb. Only one look at the conservative cut of his hair, the shades he wore on even the cloudiest days, and his perpetually polished shoes identified him as some kind of cop.

But Davenport was efficient if unimaginative; his plodding style was not equal to the ambition he harbored for better assignments.

The problem was with the hundreds of people squirreled away in the hills beyond the walls of Turk’s office. How could two men hope to stop them all? Catching three or four small timers every month might earn them a citation from the narcotics boys in Washington but it would do nothing to eradicate the marijuana traffic; it wouldn’t do a goddamn thing to slow it down for that matter.

There was another problem too: Turk was a crusader. No matter that the situation was an impossible one, he was resolved to conquer the marijuana trade. He had even given himself a deadline, working out a schedule full of one-year and five-year plans. Like a general, he would wander over to his pin-infested map and plot strategy.

Davenport viewed his superior as something of a fanatic. All Davenport wanted really was out. He did not feel like it was his mission on earth to root out all the dealers and growers from the hills of Humboldt and Mendocino counties.

But now, the twentieth day of October, Turk himself was uncertain as to the feasibility of his two-man crusade. His program had been dealt a major setback.

He strode over to the map. He removed a pink pin from it.

“Jud Harris,” he said, giving a name to the pin. “Jud Harris and Bonnie Nutting were found dead yesterday. Both shot with a revolver.”

Davenport looked up from his desk. He was not familiar with Jud Harris and Bonnie Nutting. Turk, on the other hand, assumed that his colleague was every bit as acquainted with the hundreds of weed farmers as he was.

“Who shot him?”

“I don’t know. You know Ham? Ham Kelso? He’s with the sheriff’s office. He was up there, at the Harris place. He was the one who told me. Said they looked like the worms had enjoyed a good dinner. The Nutting woman was pregnant.” For an instant Turk seemed ready to go into detail and Davenport was relieved when he didn’t.

“Drug wars,” was Turk’s verdict. “There’s no other explanation.”

“So where do we come in?”

“Where we always come in. At the end of the line. The sheriff is convinced that there’s an MO developing here. You remember Chapman?”

“The speed freak?”

The very same. Someone blew him away, buried him, stripped his farm, took every fucking thing, the weed, the tools, the machinery, even the goddamn pool table. Same thing happened with Harris. Ham tells me his farm looks like the Mongol hordes rode through. Just mud and shit left, nothing else. And that’s not all.”

“No?”

“No. Our sheriff is convinced that we’ve got something like a massacre going on in these hills. Nobody wants to say shit, we’re pariahs as far as they’re concerned. Everyone’s protecting their own turf. But Ham tells me that they’ve found other bodies up there, buried so long you can’t identify them any longer.”

“We would have heard something like that. Your friend Ham’s been misled.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Ham’s been reliable in the past. My feeling is that there’s more to these killings than we’re getting back here. And just this morning, I hear they’re recruiting homicide boys from all over the state, pulling them in here to carry on the investigation.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am. And you know what it’s going to look like when two dozen outside cops start trampling on state’s evidence? We’ll be back to square one when they get finished. And I guarantee you they’re not about to find the killers. I’ll lay odds the dopers end up wasting one another, and the only thing left for these cops to do is take up their shovels and bury all the stiffs.”

“You’d better hope that there’s someone left when the shooting’s over,” Davenport said.

“And why’s that?”

“If they’re all going to be dead, you and me will be out of a job.”

“You got a point there.” For the first time that morning, Turk permitted himself a smile. “Say, Frank, you want to do me a favor? Get Washington on the phone.”

“What do you want to say to Washington?”

Turk’s smile had a way of turning mysterious. “You’ll see, Frank, you’ll see. Just go ahead and dial.”

Russian River was like every other town in the region, a collection of unimportant-looking houses, a church, several stores, and two bars. The Russian River from which the town derived its name was two miles away and waiting impatiently for the fall rains so that it could run loose over its banks, flooding the area just like it did every year at this time.