Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (16 page)

He kept pounding Callahan until the cop was swinging back and forth. The crossbar kept creaking, and the burned man kept moaning. What Harry didn’t do was cry out. The super had told him at the outset that the walls were soundproof.

So, if it wouldn’t do him any good, he wasn’t going to let it do the super any good, either. Even in ignominious torture, Callahan maintained a certain stubborn dignity. The bastard could kill him, but nothing would make him cry.

The super wanted him to cry out. The Program enforcement director wanted to make Harry pay for his men’s deaths. Battering or killing wasn’t enough.

The super had to break him. He had to break him the way he had broken dozens of the enemy in Southeast Asia. Already, Harry had withstood abuse half of them had cracked under.

It was the super’s heart that began to race; it was his blood that started to boil. He wanted Callahan to crawl. But Harry wasn’t playing his part. He was taking terrible punishment without a sound.

Callahan might have liked to know how the super felt. It wasn’t a false pride that kept him from reacting, it was an acceptance of the situation.

He had known he was in for it from the moment the super’s knuckles had sunk into his kidneys back at the hotel, so he had spent all of his intervening moments hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Distantly, clinically, almost objectively, Harry mentally examined his damage. His wrists were corded so tightly that the skin was almost gone beneath the ropes, blood oozing down his upraised arms.

His shoulders were almost out of their sockets, the ligaments stretched to the breaking point. He could handle his weight pretty well for a while there, but after the sixth minute, he could feel it. After fifteen minutes, his muscles began to scream.

Each whip stroke actually felt as if the super were using a machete instead of a cane. It wasn’t a little sting. It was a deep, solid wound that numbed the rest of the body, but not the strike point.

Enough of this pain would soon turn his mind into steel wool. The super wouldn’t wait for him. He wanted the lousy cop to howl, to beg for mercy.

The torturer’s strokes became more frequent, his blows harder. Incredibly, the harder he hit, the less pain Harry felt. Without the finesse, the strike points became as shocked as the rest of the numbed area.

Realizing that he was losing it, the super hurled the cane away from him. It clattered against the wall and fell to the thick pile carpet.

The stopping was almost worse than the whipping. Then the crawling anguish was replaced by a stinging buzz which threatened to sweep over Harry’s head and put out his lights—at least for a while.

That was prevented by the super picking up a carton of sodium chloride, pouring the salt into his hand, and rubbing it all over Callahan’s torso.

The effect was like dumping a container of water filled with razor blades on someone to wake him up. It did the trick. Callahan’s mind went into overload for a second. His brain told his blinded eyes that he had died and gone to hell.

“When it rains, it pours,” the super said with vicious whimsy, breathing deeply. “Don’t look so shocked. Salt is good for you. It prevents infection. It stops the bleeding so you don’t mess up my nice new rug.”

Callahan looked down at himself. It wasn’t his body anymore. It was a raw, welt-covered, livid mass of shrieking, pulpy flesh. He looked back up at his blood-coated arms and couldn’t keep the words inside him anymore.

“Don’t you want to know where Patterson is?” he grunted, his voice barely audible. “I’m about ready to discuss it.”

The super barked out a laugh. “You misunderstand, Inspector. I’m not doing this because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to.”

Outwardly, Harry didn’t react. He didn’t have the strength, and he wouldn’t have, anyway. He didn’t let on that he realized the implications of the super’s statement.

If the man didn’t want to know where Patterson was, it could only mean a couple of things. Either he didn’t care anymore, or he didn’t need to know. And either way, it meant that things were even worse than Harry had initially expected.

At first, the defeatist part of his brain said it didn’t matter if he died. He didn’t want to, and he would do everything he could to prevent it, but it really didn’t matter. There was still Patterson, and when she heard about what had happened to him, she’d talk.

But now, her existence was in doubt. Now, it was absolutely crucial that Harry hold on. The super wasn’t going to make it easy. He looked at Harry’s swinging body for a long, silent moment, then started slugging him. Again, the torture was complete with narration.

“Again, notice which areas I avoid,” the super grunted, between punches to the chin, nose, and eyes. “No blows to the temple or forehead. I don’t want to break your skull or damage your great brain.”

Harry’s head snapped back with every thrust, his face bouncing back with a new swelling each time. He felt his lips mashed, his nose broken, and his brow bleeding.

“And not too hard,” the super said gently. “We don’t want to snap your neck.”

“Don’t we?” Harry wanted to say, but the man’s knuckles cut him off.

The super lowered his aim to sink his fists into Callahan’s stomach. “Now, the abdomen, lower ribs, and upper back,” he explained. “Have to avoid the chest, neck, and kidneys. Those are killing blows.”

The super was enjoying himself, and Harry let him. He took the blows until the super got wrapped up in the fantasy of being a heavyweight contender working out.

Then Harry swung his leg forward to kick the super in the nuts, with all the strength he had left.

Callahan had misjudged his own power. It wasn’t enough.

The leg connected solidly, but there wasn’t enough behind it. Harry knew it as soon as the super stumbled back, coughing and clutching his balls. His face was red and he was doubled over, but his knees didn’t buckle and he didn’t collapse.

He stood in place, tears rolling out of his eyes, for a minute, then gingerly rose to his full height.

“I’m glad you did that,” he said, with aching relish. “Before, I wanted to break you. I wanted to see your mind snap. Now, I just want to make you die.”

He came forward, a meaty fist raised high. The bullet stopped him.

It didn’t kill him. It didn’t even wound him. It just made him stop and look at the door.

Frank DiGeorgio was standing in it, his smoking police .38 held in both hands. “Hold it right there,” he said.

The super ignored him. He ran right for the corner where the Magnum and Browning lay.

“I said freeze!” DiGeorgio shouted, following him with the gun barrel.

The super kept going.

“Shoot him in the head,” Harry croaked, his voice hardly there.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” the Sergeant said in disbelief as the torturer reached down for the guns.

“Shoot him in the fucking head,” Harry repeated. He couldn’t get any volume, in his condition.

The super wrapped his hand around the Browning. He stood up straight. DiGeorgio shot him in the chest from across the room. The super took one step back to cushion the bullet’s blow, and then fired back.

The nine-millimeter slug ripped into the door frame, showering the surprised Sergeant with wood splinters. DiGeorgio fell back, tripped, and landed on his back in the hallway.

The super moved forward to finish him off. He kept to the side wall so the cop wouldn’t have a shot at him until it was too late. DiGeorgio pointed his gun very deliberately and pulled the trigger.

The bullet missed the super by a mile, but it killed him anyway. The lead tore through the ropes connecting Harry’s wrists to the overhead support beam. Callahan came down, his feet held his weight, he threw himself to the side, twisted, and brought down his arms on either side of the super’s head.

Then, it was only a matter of putting his knee in the middle of the man’s back, and pulling. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The super’s neck stopped where the coarse, thin rope joined Harry’s hands.

The super tried bringing the gun around to shoot behind him. Harry was having none of it. He jerked the fat little super around until he felt like he was inside a washing machine. Between that and the hemp-covered flesh crushing his windpipe, the super couldn’t line up a shot.

He fired anyway, all the rounds that remained in the fourteen-shell clip. They smashed into the floor, walls, ceiling, and furniture. One pumped into the human marshmallow just before both Harry and the torturer fell on top of the cot. It cracked beneath the combined weight, flattening to the floor.

The super’s trigger finger kept contracting, the Browning’s pin kept clicking on an empty barrel, and the burned man sighed.

“That’s enough, Harry,” was the first thing Callahan remembered hearing after that.

He became aware that he was still on top of the super, but the man’s finger wasn’t twitching anymore.

“All right, Harry, that’s enough,” DiGeorgio repeated, gently pulling on the Inspector’s battered arm. “You don’t have to do it anymore. I think he’s dead.”

The Sergeant was correct. Both the super and marshmallow-head were dead. One way or another, Harry had killed them.

Callahan let himself be taken off the corpse. He sat heavily in front of the cot, trying to get his brain to function without hemorrhaging. Only when DiGeorgio got him in the front seat of his car and wrapped in a blanket was he able to put a whole sentence together.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” was the first thing he could come up with, looking at DiGeorgio as if he were a figment of his fevered, dying mind.

“A long, long time ago,” the Sergeant said disgustedly, “in a galaxy far, far away, you put in a call for assistance. Four cops were killed answering that call, and then we find out that one of the cars those guys drove was parked in the fucking lobby of the Fairlawn hotel. I figured wherever the other car was was where you’d be.”

Harry tried to put it together, but it was too much for his battered brain to bear. “Where was the car?” he had to ask.

“Whoever that guy was,” DiGeorgio answered, “he was in such a rush to kill you slowly that he parked it inside the apartment’s parking lot. The dumb bastard.”

Callahan still couldn’t understand. If it was in the parking lot underneath the apartment house, then it couldn’t be seen from the street.

“Then how did you see it?” he asked, knowing the answer, but unable to put his finger on it.

“When I came back to Patterson’s apartment,” DiGeorgio said. “Looking for you.”

Callahan leaned back and closed his eyes. His brain slowly cleared, revealing a simple memory. Harry had once thought he could be an island; that he could exist without friends and be a man alone. He forgot about that pretentious stupidity.

Without his friends on this one, he would have been dead twice over. For some stupid reason, there were a couple of people in this city who cared about him.

DiGeorgio had had it with the comfortable silence. “Where to, massah?” he asked, hoping Harry would say the hospital.

He was disappointed, but not surprised, by the answer. “My place.”

Not only did Harry ignore all of DiGeorgio’s protests about going up himself, he walked up all three flights with gun in hand. Only after Harry had checked all of the rooms was the Sergeant able to get him into the lav.

Together, they did the best they could with his facial and torso wounds. By the time he came back into the main area to dress, Harry looked like a one-eyed pirate. A gauze bandage was taped over one eye, there were Band-aid patches on his nose and chin, and his chest was wrapped like a mummy’s.

He pulled on a loose shirt and slacks while slipping into some sneakers. Even with the huge welts across his shoulders and under his arms, Harry insisted on painfully pulling on his shoulder holster.

He came back downstairs gingerly, pulling on a warm-up jacket over everything. But, even then, he wouldn’t let his partner get him to the emergency room.

“We’ve got one more stop,” he told him, easing himself back in the car. “Besides,” he grimaced. “The salt stopped the bleeding and prevented infection.”

Harry went up the stairs of the run-down apartment as if he had no wounds. DiGeorgio had to struggle to keep up, but they both made it to the second-floor door at the same time. Harry checked the padlocks. They were still in place. Somehow, that made him feel worse than if the door had been smashed open.

Seized by doubt, and desperate to burn off a little frustration, Harry blasted the two locks out of working condition. A moment later, he wished he hadn’t. Both his arms and his torso did a stirring version of the Death March in three-part painful harmony.

DiGeorgio jumped back in surprise, but then backed up his partner by kicking in the door. The two cops piled into the room. As Harry had dreaded, it was empty.

The Sergeant checked the bathroom while Harry took a beer out of the icebox, leaned against the wall, and tried to unscrew the cap. He had reason to regret the latter two actions as the still-raw welts complained across his upper body.

“Patterson?” DiGeorgio asked, as he came back into the room.

“Patterson,” Harry said, handing him the bottle.

“Shit,” the Sergeant said while easily opening the beer. He handed it back.

Harry considered the bottle, wondering whether Carr would go so far as to poison it. He took a long pull on it anyway, one part of him thinking he might welcome poisoning at this point.

“So what now?” DiGeorgio asked.

The effect of moving his head back to swallow the brew nearly knocked Harry over. His body hadn’t begun to recover from the brutality of his beating. He hadn’t let it, up to now. But, with the confirmation of Patterson’s disappearance, Callahan had let everything catch up with him.

“Now, the hospital,” he said, none too steadily. The beer fell out of his hand, the bottle smashing on the floor.

DiGeorgio helped his partner on a flight of stairs for the second time in his career. “Tough luck about the girl, Harry,” he commiserated. “And today of all days, too.”

Harry was in bad shape, but now he reacted to something that had been bothering him all night. “There it is again,” he complained. “When Bressler calls me for the bust, he apologizes for the time. When Dobbin gives me the lowdown, he apologizes for the hour. What’s so damn special about it all of a sudden?”