Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (7 page)

The center pane of the bay window exploded outward, revealing what the blinding reflection of the living-room lights had covered before. There was a man in a black suit, his face covered with a dark mask, hanging by a system of cables outside of Patterson’s apartment.

Callahan’s bullet not only destroyed the window, but smashed into the side of the man’s chest as well. The man swung outward first, the silenced Remington .308 calibre rifle falling from his quivering fingers; then he tipped over. The waist harness kept him from falling to the ground, but was unable to keep him upright. Harry saw just a glimmer of movement to the assassin’s right, but, before he could react, the cracked windowpane to the left exploded inward.

It was too much, too late. There was another hanging killer outside the window with a silenced semi-automatic weapon, but, by the time he started firing, Patterson had already fallen back and had ducked under the thick table. His rapid-fire, high-calibre bullets rattled ineffectively into the apartment’s walls.

Callahan threw himself forward, rolled to the left, and came up firing. The .44 bucked twice, but the Magnum slugs failed to silence the chugging weapon outside the window. Its target merely changed from Patterson to Callahan.

Harry fell flat on his face as the enemy’s bullets tore into the television and the couch back. He spun onto his back when he heard the apartment’s own door being smashed open. By the sound of it, whoever was coming in had no thoughts of rescue. The predicament made the cop willing to take a big chance. Simply judging the position of the open door by memory and by the sound, Harry fired a fourth .44 slug through the couch.

He was rewarded by hearing someone grunt and fall back against the wall. Then, the sofa was all but obliterated by the renewed crashing of high-powered automatic weapons.

Harry took the few panicky seconds he had to drop the two remaining rounds in his gun, as well as the spent shells in the chamber, and to jam in six new rounds with a speed loader. He couldn’t risk facing whoever these attackers were with only two live bullets in his gun.

He took advantage of his position by blasting up from the floor toward the doorway. It was easier for him to hit his mark at that angle than it was for the men crowded in the opening to shoot down at him with the furniture in the way.

A moment later, the attackers seemed to realize that, too. They started leaping into the apartment in all directions.

Harry didn’t let the sudden change in approach faze him. He relegated the assault to a target practice level. He forced himself to think of these killers on that level so that he wouldn’t hesitate.

The first man tried to get past the couch and into the kitchen. Hairy quickly shot him in the head as he sped past the side of the sofa. His forward motion was not stopped, but the power of the .44 added a side kick. The man’s skull and brains splashed on the front wall while his body jumped, nearly flipped over, and slid neck first across the living-room floorboards. The spilling blood from his torso left a trail to show his progress.

The second man tried to race along the side wall on the other side of the sofa, laying down a line of fire he hoped would discourage Harry. But, again, the angle was difficult, and his slugs either bit into the floor in front of Harry’s feet, or sizzled over his head.

Callahan’s shot suffered neither eventuality. He shot between his prone, outstretched legs, catching the second assailant in the chest. The man jumped backward into the wall, and then dropped onto the floor, his blood creating a modern art painting in his wake.

The third man came leaping over the back of the perforated couch, screaming. He landed on top of Harry, grabbing his Magnum hand. Harry was quick enough to return the favor, seeing that the weapon was an Iver Johnson Super Enforcer—a .30 calibre machine pistol only for those interested in doing serious damage.

The two men rolled around the floor between the destroyed couch and the devastated television set, with the masked attacker trying to burst Harry’s eardrums with screams and to disembowel him with kicks. Neither man could get his gun within hitting range.

Harry may not have had fire power or savagery on his side, but he did have experience, size, and weight. He was able to hurl the attacker off him.

The man nimbly somersaulted and twisted around, bringing the Super Enforcer to bear. Right behind him, Harry saw the second hanging killer framed in the shattered window, another Iver Johnson death machine cradled in his arms.

He didn’t bother to sit up. He saw his opportunity, and he took it. Lying upside down on his back, Harry pointed the Magnum at the proper angle and pulled the trigger.

The Magnum bucked and smacked against the floor, nearly jarring out of Harry’s hands. But the bullet flew true, going right through the kneeling man’s neck and into the chest of the hanging man outside the window.

Suddenly, the chaos-strewn apartment turned deathly silent. Harry stayed where he was for a second, simply listening. The only things he could hear were the hiss of the heating system, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and a knocking sound somewhere in the distance.

Something was wrong. After a full-scale attack on the fourth floor of an apartment building, he should have at least heard the outraged or terrified cries of the other occupants. Instead, nothing.

Harry quickly got to his feet. Three men were lying in the living room, and three more were around the dining area—two hanging dead outside, replacing most of the plants which had been blown away. The only thing missing besides irate tenants was Denise Patterson.

The cop suddenly identified the distant knocking—the sound of receding footsteps. The woman must’ve broken from behind the table, when Harry was jumped, and skittered out of the apartment. Either that, or she had been totally annihilated by gunfire.

Harry quickly checked the adjoining apartment rooms: empty. He was just coming back into the main area, looking for a phone to call HQ, when he heard the sound of a car engine outside. He quickly ran to the broken windows, and looked beyond the hanging corpses, where a Continental was pulling out from the apartment’s underground garage. As it turned left onto the street, he saw the unmistakable profile of Patterson who was in the driver’s seat.

A desperate panic gripped Harry Callahan’s brain. Whatever she was involved in, and the reason Martha Murray was killed, went completely beyond some sick pusher’s kicks in the subway. He just couldn’t let Patterson get away that easily.

Harry knew his and his .44’s limitations. To hit the car at this distance would be a matter of luck, not skill. The Magnum was best at short range.

But the Iver Johnson Super Enforcer was another ball of bullets. It, too, was better at short range, but it had thirty rounds in its long magazine which could be spat out at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute.

Harry scooped the weapon out of a pool of blood on the floor and aimed it at the speeding car. The first bullet burst tore up the asphalt a few feet short of its goal. That gave him the range. The next burst was right on the money. He jerked the coughing gun so that the bullets ran right alongside the rear bumper and then dug into the white-walled radial tire.

The Continental jerked, jumped, and then the right rear scraped along the road, twisting the car to the side before it reached the corner. Callahan didn’t wait to see Patterson’s reaction. He ran back into the bedroom, leaving the semi-automatic on the floor, and jumped onto the fire escape right outside that window.

Only then did he see the woman pull herself out of the car and look at the flat. She glanced at him leaping down the metal steps, and then ran toward the intersection. Her still-stockinged feet slowed her down, or Harry wouldn’t have had a chance of catching her.

As it was, he vaulted midway down the second-floor ladder, falling twenty feet into the apartment house’s yard. As he landed and rolled, he glanced back at the lower floors. Lights were on inside the apartments, but all the drapes were closed, and there were no silhouettes.

Ignoring that incongruity, Harry pushed himself to his feet, and vaulted over the nine-foot-high wrought-iron fence which encircled the yard. He landed on the sidewalk and ran into the nearly deserted street. Empty, save for parked cars and Patterson’s crippled Continental.

The Inspector raced down the street, to see the woman turn to the right on Kirkham Street. He made it to the corner in record time, only to glimpse her getting on a bus halfway down the block. There was no way he could reach the bus in time, and, with all the other traffic, he didn’t dare try to blow out its tires.

But Harry Callahan refused to give up. As he prayed for a little luck, he saw the bus pull out into late traffic, but get stopped a few hundred feet beyond by a stoplight. Harry silently thanked the powers that be for that extra one minute edge, and ran through the traffic with abandon.

He kept twisting and dodging between autos, then leaped on the back of the next car in front of him and started running across the tops of the parked cars.

He jumped from roof to roof until he was in the line behind the bus, and then he leaped from hood to trunk, suffering the curses of outrage from the surprised drivers.

But luck wasn’t with him the entire trip. Just as he got within fifty yards of the bus, the light changed. Oblivious to the chase, the transport took off, leaving Harry behind in a cloud of noxious fumes.

Without pausing, he dropped to the street next to the driver’s window of the last car he had landed upon. Brandishing his badge and his gun, he all but wrested the man from behind the wheel of his Toyota.

“Police business,” he assured him through clenched teeth.

“But, my car” the bearded, bespectacled man complained. “How am I going to get home?”

“Go to the nearest police station,” Harry told him quickly, getting behind the wheel and closing the door on the driver. “Tell them Inspector 71 took your car.” Keeping a thumb on the horn, he awkwardly shifted into second when it sounded as if the engine would rip itself apart, causing the auto to jerk its way across the nearly empty sidewalk.

It was slow going, since he had to stop for everyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, but he was still covering more ground than those drivers on the congested streets. He stayed on the sidewalk until he reached the corner, and then, horn still blaring, he tore out into the four-way intersection. He managed to slip in between two lanes of traffic, but an oblivious driver, taking a right turn, clipped the Toyota across the back, pushing the Japanese car into the parked vehicles at the side of the street.

Callahan was thrown to the passenger seat by the small crash, but he pulled himself upright immediately. The engine had died when the car had slowed while in third gear, so Harry slammed down the clutch and twisted the key viciously to get the thing going again.

The car was instantly revived and lurched forward, the back of the bus looming in the windshield. But, once he reached the bus’s rear, he was stuck there. The right lane was completely jammed, and two lanes of cars were streaking by in the opposite direction on his left.

The thought of all those dead men in Patterson’s apartment inspired him to even greater heights of reckless, furious courage. Harry pulled the car to the left, trying to find a hole in the oncoming traffic big enough for him to swerve ahead of the bus.

He tried once, nearly getting into a head-on collision with a Mustang. He weaved again, but the Toyota’s pickup wasn’t fast enough. He had to brake and slip back behind the bus before a Ford station wagon plowed into him.

The one good thing about his crazy driving, however, was that everyone around him gave him plenty of room. No other driver wanted to be part of the massive pileup Callahan’s car seemed to be promoting.

And it wasn’t long before the bus driver noticed his insane antics. The bus driver’s reaction, however, was to speed up. Almost beside himself with frustrated anger, Harry pounded the Toyota wheel and grunted in pain. He had to stop the damn bus without killing everybody within range, and hit upon an audacious method.

He floored the Toyota’s gas pedal, then reached down to grab the hand brake. As soon as he felt enough speed and saw the back of the bus blotting out everything else, he pulled up on the brake lever, and ducked.

The Toyota’s wheels locked and squealed in smoking torture as the car smashed into the back of the bus.

Harry was thrown tightly against the front seat, but he had prepared himself well. The seat back held him without snapping any delicate bones. And it stopped the bus. No municipal driver in his right mind was going to roll away from an accident.

Sure enough, when Harry kicked open the car door and dragged himself out, he saw the bus braking and the front door opening. But instead of the driver, out came Denise Patterson.

She took off between cars, as Harry got to his feet to give chase. Only then did the livid bus driver appear and clamp his meaty hands around the back of Callahan’s neck.

“You miserable son of a bitch,” the driver seethed, surprising Harry with the strength of his grip. “What the shit do you think you’re doing? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The driver had Harry at a disadvantage, to say the least. The cop was intent on where Patterson was heading, but the driver had him in a choking grip. Harry’s hands were useless for grabbing the man behind him, so Harry brought all his weight down on the driver’s foot.

The man screeched and the neck hold loosened. Harry spun, letting the turn give extra speed to his right fist, which slammed across the driver’s jaw. The meaty transportation man went down like a sack of potatoes.

That didn’t sit very well with the rest of his passengers. Some street people started getting off the bus with lynching in their eyes. Harry stopped the forward flow by dragging out his Magnum.

“Police business,” he spat. “Take care of him,” he continued, motioning to the felled driver as he turned. There was an angry buzzing in his ears. He looked up in time to see a low-flying helicopter. Ignoring it, he turned in the direction he had last seen the woman.