Dirty Harry 02 - Death on the Docks (10 page)

C H A P T E R
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A
lthough San Franciscans weren’t following the Series with the same avidity they would have had the Giants not snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by losing the pennant, the Baltimore-Pittsburgh rivalry still excited a great deal of interest, especially in the dive that Longlegs favored. Warm as it was, this early October evening in San Francisco, it looked like it was tight-scrotum weather in Pittsburgh. A foul wind was taking the ball and playing around with it before giving it back to the men on the field.

Longlegs was enjoying this spectacle when he was grabbed roughly on the shoulder and spun around on his stool. When he looked up it was to see a cop.

He didn’t know the cop’s name but that wasn’t important. He recognized him all right from the pawn shop. The blond with the 9mm Browning and the reflecting sunglasses.

While he did not know what was coming down, he suspected that it was nothing good. His neighbors in the bar shied away from him, sensing trouble. In his most lawless days, when you couldn’t trust him with a dime, Longlegs had plenty of friends. But ever since the police had started getting on his case, people were staying far away from him. They acted as though he were contagious. Which, in a manner of speaking, maybe he was.

“I want to talk to you outside for a moment,” said Sandy Patel.

“What is this about, man? I’ve been real good the last couple of weeks.”

Patel didn’t want to hear it. He got Longlegs outside and addressed him in a manner that left no doubt as to how serious he was.

“I want you to get in touch with your friend Harry Callahan. Tell him you have found out who the hit men are and set up a meeting.”

“Hey, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know nothing about no hit men.”

Longlegs was shaking, his mouth was so dry he could barely speak.

Patel backed him into a corner, into the shadows outside the bar, then threw him against the trashcans. Groaning with pain, Longlegs sank to his knees. When he attempted to regain his balance Patel slapped him hard, sending him reeling. Patel believed in the preemptive attack.

“We know all about your dealings with Harry. Word gets around, my man. So I don’t want to hear this shit. You refuse me and they are going to have to put you back together like a jigsaw puzzle just to fit you into a grave.”

Wiping his mouth free of the blood that had gathered there, Longlegs cautiously got to his feet, at any moment expecting Patel to strike again and knock him back down.

“When you want me to do this?” Longlegs was hoping for a reprieve, a day or two, to give himself a chance to conveniently disappear.

“Right now. No sense wasting time.”

Longlegs realized that it was useless to protest. Acquiescing to Patel’s demands, he allowed himself to be hustled back into the bar and into the phone booth there. It was hard to hear; the booth was open, there was music pouring out of the jukebox and Howard Cosell’s grating voice booming from the TV. Longlegs looked down at the number Patel had written out for him. His only hope was that Harry would not be in, but Harry was in all right, must have been sitting on top of the phone when he answered.

One look at Patel and he knew that he had no choice but to say what he’d been instructed to.

“Harry, look, I got some information for you. About those hit men you been running down. I got an idea who they might be.”

“Which saloon are you at?”

Harry could hear the music and the sounds of the televised ballgame filtering through the wires.

Longlegs told him. “I’ll meet you right outside,” he said because that was his line and with each passing day he was becoming a better and better actor.

“I trust you are satisfied,” Longlegs said, training his blurry bloodshot eyes on Patel.

“Partially.” Patel smiled, but it was not the kind of smile Longlegs generally appreciated. “You carrying a piece with you?”

After the conflict in the pawnshop a gun was about the last thing Longlegs wanted to be caught dead with. He thought again about the nature of that phrase
caught dead with.

When Longlegs said no, Patel nodded sagely and owned that that was pretty much what he’d suspected. “For that reason I brought along a present.” He led Longlegs back outside again and only when he was certain that no one was anywhere in the vicinity did he reveal a cheap Saturday night special.

The ghost of his long-departed mother couldn’t have terrified Longlegs more. For all at once he understood what Patel wanted him to do.

“Oh no, man. You’re not asking me what I think you’re asking me! You wouldn’t want me to be offing Officer Callahan, would you now?”

“Exactly.” Patel’s voice turned soothing but there was a false note to it that Longlegs immediately picked up. “But I’ll see that you escape. There won’t be any problems afterward. You just make sure that you fire before he has a chance to anticipate you. And don’t stop until you’ve emptied the gun.”

Under other circumstances Longlegs would have burst out laughing; knowing Harry’s reputation as he did he would never attempt to go one-on-one with him, with guns, fists, or Bowie knives if it came to that. But these were not laughing circumstances. Glumly, he asked what would happen if he should refuse to comply.

“I’ll blow you the hell away.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say.”

“It won’t be as hard as you expect. Harry doesn’t suspect you.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Officer Callahan, he suspects every mother that moves.”

But Patel was a better judge of the situation than Longlegs had believed. Harry was so tense, so near the biting edge of exhaustion, that he was no longer humanly able to stay on top of things as he should. He materialized out of the San Francisco night like a man who’s just emerged from a couple of months buried in a cave. He looked shot, dazed, but he still had a decisive walk, purposefully straight ahead.

“Over here, Harry!” Longlegs called to him.

The noise and music from the bar could be heard in this half-darkened spot where the bar’s lights and the streetlamp broke off. The top of a garbage can clattered noisily to the pavement. Mice or else a cat was playing.

Longlegs’ chest was heavy with fear; the pressure kept mounting, squeezing his heart until he thought the blood must be getting sucked all the hell out of it. The barrel of the Saturday night special was becoming ever more slippery with the sweat from his palm. Patel had told him to shoot right out of his pocket as soon as Harry came close enough to him. How close was close enough? At this point, a thousand miles for him was close enough.

Patel was in back of him, around the corner, out of sight and out of Harry’s range. Longlegs couldn’t see the glint of his Browning—wouldn’t have dared shift his eyes to look in any case—but he knew it was there all right. If he failed to shoot Harry, Patel would shoot him. But he had the instinctive feeling that he would be blown away no matter what he did. The odds are always with whitey, he mused. Always.

Harry was approaching, closing the distance with some speed. Ten yards remained between them. Longlegs knew damn well he was going to do something quickly. It was one thing when he’d stuck up grocers and gas station attendants; he’d had the advantage and while he was afraid, they were more afraid. But with two cops it was a whole different story. They were professionals and Longlegs was out of their league entirely.

Suddenly Harry stopped. Maybe that sixth sense of his was operating. But he stopped, didn’t do anything else.

Longlegs couldn’t help it or maybe he meant to but right at that point his eyes slid ever so slightly rightward in Patel’s direction and Harry picked up on it. The speed with which he reacted astounded Longlegs.

He went down, providing as small a target as he could, but he still had no idea where or who his enemy was. Out of the corner of his eye Longlegs saw that Patel had shifted just enough to get a view of Harry, but it was not clear what he was going to do. He might still be waiting for Longlegs to act. He surely had a contingency plan though in case Longlegs did not.

Longlegs, almost wholly immobilized, watched these two men who could not see each other as though he were no longer a participant but a spectator, waiting to see how the movie developed. Something in his mind was telling him that this was no fucking movie, but that something did not also inform him as to what precisely he should do about it.

Then Harry, without a word, beckoned Longlegs forward. Longlegs couldn’t move. So Harry decided to. Move he did, back, practically zigzagging, still with his eyes on the unhappy snitch. Patel, rather than risk allowing his victim to escape him, drew himself parallel to the wall, still not exposing himself, and extended his Browning automatic to fire.

But Longlegs realized that Harry couldn’t see his assailant yet. Ah hell, he decided, if he was going to die he might as well earn his death. He turned, facing Patel, expecting his body to become a home for several 9mm rounds within the next several moments. But to his astonishment, Patel, either because he was concentrating too much on Harry or because he was saving Longlegs till later, didn’t react to his sudden movement.

Still with his hand gripping the Saturday night special—actually a 38-caliber Liana Especiala made for seven rounds—Longlegs pulled the trigger. He wasn’t really aiming at any point in particular, just in Patel’s general direction. The gun, when it discharged, bruised his thigh with its recoil, causing him to grunt with pain. A singed hole now appeared in his pocket, partially exposing the pistol.

Patel was clearly taken by surprise. He still had his Browning up, aimed at Harry, but when he fired the bullet went awry. Longlegs’ shot had caught him in the groin and, upon entry, torn up much of his intestines. The expression on his face, beheld more easily now as he fell towards the light, was one of surprise more than pain.

But the shot he fired panicked Longlegs who had no idea that he’d been lucky in his shooting; he flattened himself out on the ground, waiting for his death which he felt sure must be imminent.

Harry, spotting Patel for the first time, had excellently positioned himself and had his Magnum leveled directly at his antagonist. But he withheld his fire for a moment, being reluctant to inflict harm on another cop, albeit a cop who had a decidedly unfriendly attitude toward him. Also, he knew he would have to answer to Bressler if he did so, and that could prove more than a little bit awkward.

And, in any case, from where Harry was crouched, behind the rear of a parked Ford LTD, he was not in any immediate jeopardy.

Patel staggered forward, propelled by the pain that, now having made itself felt, began to blossom, coiling through his vitals with venomous fury. His eyes were glazing over. No longer able to see Harry or place him with any degree of certainty, he looked for a more convenient target. Blood, in the meantime, was spreading copiously over his uniform and leaking down his legs.

Longlegs was doing his best to crawl away, but he could not avoid Patel’s attention. “Motherfucking son of a bitch,” Patel mumbled, cursing both Longlegs’ betrayal and his own miserable luck.

With the choice of lying there and simply doing nothing or expending another round from his .38 Especiala, Longlegs decided that the latter made more sense. Patel shot at him, putting all his energies into the task, but Longlegs scrambled out of the way. Finding a great deal of difficulty in extricating the gun from his ruptured pocket, he kept it where it was and fired from thigh-level again and again. And yet again. He was firing like crazy, ignoring the constant slam of the butt against his hand and leg, not at all sure where all these bullets were going.

Where they were all going with deadly but inadvertent accuracy was into Sandy Patel. He would jump involuntarily but otherwise he seemed incapable of responding. The last thing that he expected to happen was to meet his death at the hands of this spade, and so he resisted its coming for a few moments more than he would have had it been a white man perforating him with bullets. But Sandy Patel was only human after all, and at a certain point, no matter how much will he had, there was no way he had of resisting the inevitable. Blood no longer oozed from the wounds, it positively erupted, and deprived of his strength, his ambition, his concentration, even his rage, deprived of everything in fact but an awful gathering pain, he succumbed, allowed the darkness to sweep over him, and collapsed, dead before his body pitched forward to greet the awaiting pavement.

Longlegs did not move. He kept expecting Patel to arise and continue in his quest to kill him. He could not believe that he had been responsible for ending his life. Actually, he didn’t want to believe that he’d done this because whatever else Sandy Patel was he was still a cop and murdering a cop, especially if you were black, was something you couldn’t readily dismiss. Longlegs began to wonder whether it might not have been better had he been the one shot and destined for a secure place in the earth six feet under.

“You can get up now,” Harry said, approaching him.

Longlegs saw that a number of the bar’s patrons had forsaken the game on television for the more violent spectacle on their doorstep. They were curious but puzzled, as yet uncertain as to exactly what had happened.

Longlegs got to his feet, unthinkingly still holding onto the Especiala that Patel had given him to kill Harry. Without offering any resistance, he allowed Harry to lead him to his car. This is it, he thought with characteristic fatalism, this is where it ends for you.

A police cruiser, its red beacon flinging swaths of light along the darkened streets as it raced toward the bar, could be discerned in Harry’s rearview mirror. But Harry paid no attention to it. He already had his car moving.

Finally Longlegs spoke, his voice filled with remorse. “Officer Callahan, man, you gotta know this was not my doing. I swear to you on my mother’s grave—”

Harry cut him off. “You don’t have to explain.” He brought the car to a halt in a vacated area not far from where the railroad tracks ran parallel to the Embarcadero. “You know a place you can disappear to?”