Dirty Harry 02 - Death on the Docks (22 page)

There were two others right behind but recognizing how futile their initial strategy had been, they withdrew—or tried to anyway—clambering back up the stairs. But to do this successfully they had to turn, and in turning they lost valuable moments. Harry sprang up, with Darlene following right behind him, and raced to the foot of the stairs, firing as he went. One man clumsily stumbled right into the path of a bullet that otherwise would have done no harm. It passed through his head, entering at the tip of his spine and exiting right underneath his left eye. The exit wound was large; it had to be if it was to accommodate the amount of blood, brain tissue, and chips of bone that went flying through it. Much of the bloody material was spewed over his colleague, hitting him smack in the face so that he was temporarily blinded, his eyes misted by the blood and the gelatinous substance that had once done the thinking and dreaming for the man who lay spread-eagled on the stairs. In such circumstances, to be temporarily blinded was to invite permanent blindness. Darlene was much more exhilarated by this firefight than Harry; and being miraculously immune from bullets as some irrationally self-confident people occasionally are, she gave no thought to climbing up the stairs and putting her .38 to the survivor’s head and pulling the trigger. At such close proximity she was almost knocked over by the force of the recoil. The man obligingly flipped over the railing and smashed to the stone floor. Smoke thickened in the air, mixed with the stench of blood and cordite.

The stairs were slick with blood and unidentifiable viscera. Men were coming through the front door now and there were others appearing at the head of the stairs. This placed Harry and Darlene in the particularly unenviable position of being caught between the two groups. No choice but to keep firing—first down, then up.

Harry chose to advance up; retreat was out of the question now. He kept low and Darlene followed his example. The confusion and the smoke lent them a certain advantage. For one thing, the newly arriving security force wasn’t precisely sure what was happening or who their targets were supposed to be.

And by keeping low the way they were doing, Harry and Darlene invited fire from those positioned at the top. One bullet caught Harry in the fleshy part of his right arm but he felt no pain. Another grazed Darlene’s lovely stockinged leg but she too didn’t seem to register its impact. But many of the bullets flew inches above them, continuing on so that they struck a couple of the men who’d just come into the hallway below. The result of this was that now the security men in the hallway began aiming higher up, mistakenly believing that they were under fire from their own allies.

“Aim for their feet!” Harry whispered to Darlene which was what she did because that’s all she could see from where she was. They could see where they’d hit—the blood spurting from the row of anonymous ankles—and they could hear the cries of pain which followed almost immediately.

They succeeded in putting an abrupt end to the opposition from above. By the time they reached the top landing they found themselves in a sea of tangled flailing limbs. Men were crawling in all directions, resembling a colony of ants whose hill has just been flattened by a boot heel. Blood, streaming out of several wounds, collected and oozed in ever larger amounts down the stairs.

While there was still the occasional shot in their direction, whoever was firing seemed to have lost his fervor for the business. In any case, no one was pursuing them up the stairs; the bodies littering the immediate vicinity provided abundant testimony to the folly of doing that.

Ahead of Harry and Darlene was another hallway; this one was shorter and it terminated at a white door with a bronze handle to it.

“He’ll be in there,” Darlene said.

She was pale but unafraid; her eyes were deader than the men who lay at her feet. She was so intent on Braxton that nothing else mattered; not all this mayhem certainly, it might not have made the slightest impression on her.

“You don’t think he might have gotten away?”

She shook her head. Her blonde hair was matted with blood though she was oblivious to this too. “There’s a terrace adjoining the room through there, it’s the only way. You’d have to jump down into the pool. That’s not Matt’s style. Oh no, you’ll see, he won’t run from a personal challenge. From a prison maybe. But not from you. He thinks he can still kill you.”

“And what about you?”

She looked coldly at Harry and shrugged but didn’t answer. Instead she began in the direction of the white door. Harry, more cautiously, trailed along a foot or so in back of her.

Grasping hold of the brass handle, she tugged at it and drew the door open. Harry had expected it to be locked. But as soon as he saw that it wasn’t he threw himself against the nearest wall, preparing for the fire he assumed would come. But there was no fire.

Darlene sauntered in as though she were returning from a shopping excursion, the .38 held dramatically in her hand.

Harry, with his expropriated Baretta, stepped in after her.

It was a large and airy room. To one side was a canopied bed with a mirror overhead so that you could see just what sort of progress you were making under the covers—or on top of them. Directly opposite them was the terrace that Darlene had mentioned. And standing there, looking very uncomfortable, was Robert Nunn. He had a gun in his hand, but from the bewildered, slightly irritated expression on his face Harry could see that he wasn’t anxious to use it—if in fact he knew how. Every so often he glanced down below the terrace to where the haven of the pool was presumably situated. Probably contemplating his chances if he jumped.

To the left was a large walnut desk whose top was strewn with papers and open books—law books in which Braxton had been researching in his quest for loopholes. But then Braxton was always a man on the lookout for loopholes. The man himself was standing right in back of the desk, his face a shade redder than usual perhaps but otherwise no different. He appeared not at all disturbed by the loss of so much of his security force. Nor was he going to allow Harry—or Darlene for that matter—the satisfaction of panicking or pleading for a truce.

Darlene kicked the door shut behind her. Her eyes were locked on Braxton. She was not even remotely conscious of Nunn’s presence.

“This is where it ends, Matt,” she declared.

He only offered her a smile in return. “Darlene, Darlene,” he said in a soothing voice that only infuriated her more. “There’s no need to do this. So you’ve fallen for Callahan. It happens. Women do strange things for the men they love. I can understand that.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “What are you talking about, Matt? You think I did it because I was in love with him?” She gave Harry a derisive glance. Which didn’t bother Harry at all. Anyone who took on a lover like Darlene deserved what he got, Harry thought.

Darlene’s hysterical reaction didn’t trouble Braxton at all. His only interest was in disarming her and Harry. “Well then, we’re in agreement. Mr. Callahan can be dispensed with.”

Harry’s fate didn’t concern Darlene at all. “Who the hell cares. You’re the problem, Matt. You fucked with me once too often.”

All this while Harry kept looking down toward Braxton’s hands. Only one was exposed to view, resting on the desk. The other he figured was grasping a gun. An important observation.

Nunn he worried less about. Nunn was more interested in the distance he was going to have to jump than in turning his gun on either Harry or Darlene. Obviously the exchange between Braxton and Darlene was getting on his nerves. Who loved whom, who fucked with whom; what possible difference did it make when you were staring death in the face?

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Matt,” he said.

Braxton shrugged. “You’re telling me.” For the first time he regarded Harry directly. “Got farther than you thought, didn’t you? Got farther than I thought too. Unfortunate. Because we could have made some kind of team, you and me.”

At that moment he brought up his gun—actually it was Harry’s, his .44 Magnum—thinking he had the advantage of surprise. But Harry had already fired two shots into him before he could pull the trigger, by which time it no longer mattered. Blood appeared at two points a couple of inches apart on his blue silk shirt and spread with astonishing speed until the wounds were indistinguishable. Braxton looked down at the blood with great puzzlement. His brow knotted and his hand groped tentalively for where the bullets had penetrated. Only when the blood was in his palm did he seem to understand what had happened. His eyes rolled up in his head and then he slid, slowly, with surprising gentleness, down below the desk.

It was only then that Darlene and Nunn reacted. That Braxton could be proven mortal was such a shock that they each needed time to absorb the event. Darlene whipped around, her eyes blazing, her lips like a red gash on her face. “You fucker! You killed him! You killed him!” Whether she hadn’t wanted Braxton dead in the first place, in spite of all her avowels to the contrary, or whether she felt deprived of the revenge that should have been by rights hers, Harry wasn’t sure—nor was he interested.

Darlene brought her gun around and fired—but as she did so, Harry turned aside, narrowly missing the bullet meant for him. There was another shot—and that, too, had been meant for him. Only Nunn, who had fired it, was not at all proficient with a pistol, and instead of hitting Harry he’d struck Darlene instead.

The look of surprise on her face was wonderous to behold. The bloodstain spread from a point near the sternum. Her breasts heaved with the pain of taking in breath. But the anger hadn’t gone away. She did something that resembled a pirouette and studied Nunn, trying perhaps to make out his reasons for the attack.

Nunn, horrified by what he’d done, tried to back away, though this was impossible since he was already at the terrace’s edge. He dropped his gun as though this gesture would signal his peaceful intentions.

“I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t mean . . .” he began, his face erupting with sweat, his glasses fogging with moisture. “It was for him, Darlene, I swear.”

Such assurances in her dying moments meant nothing to Darlene, and she fired until there was nothing left in the chamber. Nunn’s body vibrated like a tuning fork with each additional shot he took. One bullet shattered his glasses and continued straight on through his eye, putting a certain end to what would have been undoubtedly a promising, if somewhat corrupt, law career. He slumped down after that, having no life left in him to keep himself in anything like a vertical position.

Darlene, had the pain not been what it was, might have thought to save a bullet or two for Harry because certainly she had it in mind to kill him, too. But all she could do was to click the empty .38 over and over again. She nodded with satisfaction at seeing Nunn dead, then gradually turned to face Harry. “Oh, you’re a shit,” she said. With each word she uttered more blood perched on the edge of her lips. She closed her eyes, opened them again, saying, “Light’s all gone, isn’t it?” Then she flopped down at Harry’s feet.

Now Harry heard the sound of men racing down the hall immediately outside the door. “Matt!” they were calling. “Are you in there, Matt?” Even at this point so late in the game they were reluctant to enter the inner sanctum without permission.

Harry had no intention of fighting off yet another regiment of gunmen. Everyone’s luck ran out sometime. So he rushed out to the terrace and looked down. There was the pool all right. Swim to the end of it, clamber up and run, and you’d be lost in a thick undergrowth. Safety beckoned there.

The knocking continued, louder, more insistent. Someone was pulling on the handle. Harry turned, fired twice at the door. There was a loud groan in response. Harry had won himself a few moments’ time. Since he did not share the late Robert Nunn’s compunctions about diving into the pool, Harry balanced himself precariously on the railing and jumped.

A beautifully executed dive into the blue.

D
ANE
H
ARTMAN
was a Warner Books imprint pseudonym used by two American novelists, Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz. "Hartman" was credited as the author of the Dirty Harry action series based on the “Dirty” Harry Callahan character of the popular 1970’s and 1980’s films starring Clint Eastwood.

Following the release of the third Dirty Harry movie, The Enforcer, in 1976, Clint Eastwood made it clear that he did not intend to make any more Dirty Harry movies. In 1981, Warner Books (the publishing arm of Warner Bros., which made the films) began publishing a number of men's adventure series under its now-defunct "Men of Action" line. One such series features the further adventures of Inspector Harry Callahan. The series was brought to an end when Eastwood decided to direct, produce, and star in a fourth Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact, which was released in December 1983.