Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (11 page)

Dick Clarke was there, looking about the same as he had for the past three decades, and the set was more or less as Harry remembered it from his teens, but the dancers were completely different. Harry couldn’t help but marvel at the teens and cameramen’s almost total lack of taste and innocence. These kids didn’t want to dance, they wanted to shake whatever they had the most of, and the photographers wanted a close-up of whatever that was.

Harry stared in quiet awe at the bouncing breasts of young girls dissolving into high-heel, ankle-strap stiletto shoes dissolving into thrusting pelvises dissolving into heavily painted faces winking and licking their lips. Harry had to get another beer after a cameraman shot from the floor up a girl’s dress as she spun around in place. Whatever happened to the freshness of Kenny Rossi and Carol Ann Scaldeferri and Frankie Lobis and Arlene Sullivan, he wondered, and the other regular dancers on “AB’s” golden age twenty-five years ago?

The telephone rang in reply. That was the only answer he was going to get for the moment. Lieutenant Bressler was on the other end of the line, and he wasn’t interested in pubescent flesh.

“Harry, get down to Uhuru headquarters,” he demanded without so much as a hello. “All hell has broken loose.”

“What’s the matter?” Harry wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” cried the lieutenant, “but for some reason, Mohamid boarded up all the entrances and opened fire on the reporters.”

“Opened fire?”

“Guns, Callahan! Weapons. The Uhuru headquarters has become an armed camp!”

When Harry got to the Mission District, things were already in full swing. An impressive police cordon was around the Victorian house, and cops were coming out of the woodwork in every dwelling nearby. There were snipers on the roofs across the way, SWAT teams crawling all over the trees, and a platoon of uniformed men behind a fleet of squad cars lining every street on four sides of the Uhuru house.

Mohamid’s place was tightly closed with planks nailed to the inside of the windows and not a soul was to be seen in the yard or garage. For the present, all guns were silent. The area birds and assorted wildlife were taking the opportunity to sing and buzz their heads off, as if absolutely nothing was happening that sunny San Francisco afternoon.

Harry was waved over by a uniformed man. He flashed the cop his badge as he got out and asked where Captain Avery was. Callahan was sent over to the captain, who was holding court behind his big Cutlass Supreme, which was parked in the front yard of the house across from the Uhuru residence.

When Avery saw Harry approaching, he sent the collected officers on their way. He turned to greet Callahan full front, with a satisfied smile on his face.

“Still think Mohamid is an innocent dupe of a frame-up, Callahan?” the captain barked.

“Maybe,” Harry said slowly, deliberately. “What happened?”

“Nothing!” Avery proclaimed. “Everything was exactly as it was. People were coming and going, when, suddenly, for no reason at all, Mohamid shuts the place up and starts firing upon the police guards and members of the press.”

Harry ignored Avery’s dramatic rhetoric for the most part. His flowery regular conversation was born of years facing those very same members of the press. “For no reason at all?” Harry repeated. “Did anyone ask Mohamid?”

“No one can get near Mohamid!” Avery declared. “If anyone goes near the place they’re shot at.”

“From where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Did you actually see a shot from every single window,” Harry asked purposefully, “or are you guessing?”

Avery bristled at that, drawing himself up to his full height, which was still two inches shorter than Harry. “Might I remind you, Inspector, that I’m the captain and not the other way around?”

“No, that’s OK,” said Harry, squinting across the street at the silent Uhuru home. “Don’t go out of your way.”

“I won’t stand for any more of your insubordination, Inspector!” Avery shouted in Harry’s ear. “I only had you called here to show you how wrong you can be. If you had arrested Mohamid when we found the Steinbrunner girl, none of this would have happened!”

“How do you figure?” Harry asked, looking down at the captain’s flushed face.

“Mohamid knew you’d do some more investigating, so he sent three of his men to kill you at the university.”

“What for?” Harry interrupted.

“So you wouldn’t find the link between him and the girl,” Avery contended.

“What link?”

“The link we are sure to find if we look hard enough,” Avery maintained. “And when he failed to kill you, he decided to make a stand here.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry said flatly. “If he was guilty, why not just make a run for it?”

“These aren’t rational people!” Avery exclaimed. “These are people who’d kidnap, gang-rape, and murder a beautiful blond girl!”

Avery looked up at Callahan in triumph, as if his logic was unimpeachable. Harry looked down, pasting an expression that said “Why didn’t
I
think of that” on his face. He waited until after the captain had turned to face the Uhuru house to shake and hit the side of his head as if there were water in his ear.

“Hand me that megaphone,” Avery told a subordinate. “I’m going to give Mohamid an ultimatum.”

“Uh, excuse me, Captain,” Harry said as the bullhorn was handed up to his blond boss. “But may I try to talk to Mohamid before we do anything final?”

Avery smiled at the inspector. “Know when to admit your mistakes, eh, Callahan?” he smirked. Harry looked at him through narrowed lids, as if the sun were in his eyes. His top lip curled up. “Well,” Avery continued, “you two go back a ways.” He handed Harry the megaphone. “Go ahead. Give it a shot.”

Callahan took the device and walked slowly toward the picket fence around the Victorian. He stopped when the top of the barrier touched his thighs. The rest of the cops watched and waited. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut.

“Mohamid,” Harry called through the speaker. “This is Harry Callahan. I don’t know what’s the matter, but this is only making it worse. You know you’re not going to get out of this alive the way things are. If you force them these guys will rip you up like so much paper. I don’t care how many guns you have or how many men you have. I don’t care if you have a box of grenades in there. There’ll be no fighting your way out.

“A couple of guys might die out here, maybe, but all you guys will die in there for sure. You start it . . . you even look like you’re
gonna
start it and these boys will be ready to send you to hell. And if you think that’s going to make you a martyr to the cause, forget it. All these reporters out here will be happy to film every second of the destruction in slow motion and from twelve angles and it won’t change a goddamn thing. They’ll put it on the six o’clock news tonight, and nobody’ll give a shit. You’ll be sandwiched between a Charmin commercial and a report about talking parrots and none of your brothers or sisters will even care.”

Harry lowered the bullhorn for a second, licked his lips, and went back to it. “I’m going to come in now, Big Ed. I’m going to walk to the front door and get in any way I can. I would appreciate it if you would meet me there. I give you my personal guarantee of protection.”

Harry handed the megaphone to the cop nearest him. The cop scurried from the cover of his squad car’s fender, grabbed the horn, and scurried back. Harry turned. Captain Avery was shaking his head furiously and mouthing the word “No.” Harry turned back to the house and stepped over the picket fence.

He zipped open his cordoroy jacket as he started the long walk to the front steps. He felt the reassuring weight of his Magnum in its shoulder holster as well as the three auto-loaders in his jacket pocket. He saw a variety of details on the house that he hadn’t noticed before. The porch was built from a wooden frame that seemed to attach itself to the front of the place. On either side of the stairs was balsa-wood crosshatching.

The thick wooden front door was flanked by two medium-sized picture windows consisting of a large central pane and four thinner, smaller, rectangular ones. Above that was the porch ceiling. Above the porch roof were three more regularly sized windows and above that were two gable windows, both made of stained glass.

Harry made it to the first step. He looked to his left and right. Cops, cops, uniformed and plainclothed behind marked and unmarked cars, as far as the eye seemed to see. Harry made it to the second step. Nothing happened. The silence was deafening and other clichés of that type. Harry’s shoe descended on the third step. Only one more step and a porch that seemed as long as a football field to go. Harry made it to the fourth step.

He was bringing himself onto the porch when it happened. The simple wood mailbox nailed to the porch column next to Harry’s head exploded into several pieces.

Harry fell down, instinctively throwing his body to the least exposed area. He fell backward and to the side, hitting the grass to the left of the Uhuru house stairs. The world blew up above him. The simultaneous tightening of so many trigger fingers made a sound that was extremely impressive. The crash of those bullets hitting anything they were pointed at was also humbling. Harry resisted putting his palms over his ears. Instead, he dragged out his .44 and rolled toward the crosshatching of the porch.

The world continued to sound like an acid rock and roll band as his back slapped the side of the porch. He looked up to see whole hunks of the porch’s floor go spinning off into the yard. It wouldn’t be long before someone hit him, either accidentally or otherwise. Harry pushed himself as hard as he could against the balsa-wood barrier.

The thin planks gave way, and Callahan was rolling across the dirt under the porch. Little spotlights of sunshine reached from the flooring to the ground, thanks to bullet holes. Harry stopped to look out the hole he had made in the wall section of the porch setup. None of the front-line cops seemed to be paying any attention to him at all. He took the moment to collect his thoughts.

Where had that first bullet come from? Harry remembered seeing it rip apart out the corner of his eye. He remembered unconsciously listening for the weapon’s report to sound from either inside the house or in the rank and file of the police platoon. He remembered not hearing a report. Any bullet powerful enough to smash that mailbox had to make a noise . . . unless it was silenced. And why would anyone want to use a silenced high-powered weapon?

Harry scowled deeply and with feeling. The signs of conspiracy were creeping all over the Uhuru house like ivy. But to prove anything, Harry had to get out of his present predicament.

Rolling over so that he faced the house wall, he saw a small cellar window near the ground. Sure enough, his impression that the porch had been attached whole to the house now seemed to be correct. There was a basement window beneath the wooden structure. Harry straightened himself out and crawled the remaining distance. The glass was caked over with years of grime, but Harry could see through it enough to note that no one was around. He grabbed ahold of the frame and pulled. With a nasty creak, it gave way.

Harry didn’t stand on ceremony. He immediately pulled it all the way open and tumbled through. He slid down the rough rock wall a few feet and landed on the concrete floor. Across the basement, one young black man was guarding the door to the back yard. He wasn’t expecting a cop to roll out from under the porch, so he wasn’t fast enough. By the time he had started to bring his army surplus rifle around, Harry was pointing the Magnum at his head.

“It would be a shame to splatter that fine Afro all over the place,” Harry said softly. “Why don’t you put the gun down so I don’t have to.”

The boy entertained the notion of giving up his life for Uhuru, but then he looked down the .44 barrel and saw his maker in Cinerama. The rifle went down very fast, and the hands went up.

Harry walked across the cellar, placing the Magnum barrel on the boy’s forehead. He looked disdainfully at the rifle. “Hungarian sniper rifle,” Callahan commented, “circa 1943.” Then he hit the boy in the jaw with a sharp left. The black kid’s head snapped back and hit the cellar door frame. The combination of the two blows was enough to put him out for the duration of the day.

Harry didn’t wait for the kid to crumble to the floor. He was already jumping up the basement steps three at a time. He slowed only when he neared the door at the top. He wondered whether he should wait in relative safety until it was all over or risk entering a house he knew almost nothing about, filled with rabid young militants armed to the teeth. Then he pictured Captain Avery’s face. Harry opened the door.

Immediately three bullets bashed their way through the wood from the other side and slapped into the sloping concrete above Harry’s head. All thought of a cautious approach fled from Harry’s thinking. He ducked, swung himself forward, hit the door with his shoulder, and catapulted into the kitchen. He came up in a crouch with his gun ready.

The room was empty. The bullet trio had come through the windows from outside. Harry kept down as he moved toward the adjoining room. The chatter of weapon fire remained constant as he steeled himself for entry into the dining room. From his position low to the floor he saw one and a half black backs through the doorway. They, too, were crouched, aiming fairly ancient rifles out breaks in the window boarding.

Harry put a loose plan of action together. As he remembered from being led to the Steinbrunner corpse in the cellar, the dining room adjoined the living room, which had a staircase leading up. Harry’s brilliantly incisive plan was to somehow get to that stairway alive. It was the best he could do under the circumstances.

Also, given the situation, Callahan didn’t want to unduly surprise his unknowing hosts. In their state they’d cut him down as a panicky afterthought. So instead of marching or charging into the dining room, Harry continued his crouching crabwalk.

The dining room was a mess. Tables were overturned. All the glasses were broken. The chairs looked like a giant cat had exercised his claws on them, and the wall looked like a connect-the-dots game in a children’s book. Harry could not clearly recall what had been caused by the shoot-out and what was the way Uhuru normally lived.