Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (21 page)

There was one door back there, and in front of that door was the black man Harry knew as Fish. The black looked with trepidation in all directions, but he didn’t see Harry until the barrel of the .44 touched his neck.

“You’ve got a big mouth,” Harry told him, then brutally flung him against the wall. He bounced back toward Harry, who pushed him again. He kicked Fish’s legs wide, threw his arms up, and frisked him as Fish pleaded.

“Hey, man, they were going to kill me. I swear, they had my fucking head over a stove. I couldn’t help it, man. What did you want me to do?”

Harry spun him around, pinned his neck to the wall with one hand, and pressed the Magnum against his temple with the other. “Die,” he said.

“No, no wait!” the black man screamed. Harry tapped him lightly on his Adam’s apple. Fish choked on his begging and fell to his knees.

“Keep your voice down,” Harry ordered. He grabbed him by the Afro and pulled him to his feet again. “Now what will you do to stay alive?”

“I can bring you to her, man,” Fish whispered.

“Who?”

“The woman, jack. The boss. The head honcho.”

“And how many others?” Harry snarled.

“No, no, c’mon, man,” the black man pleaded, trying to twist his head out of Harry’s grip. “There’s nobody left. You got them all. It’s just her now, waiting for the ship to come in.”

“Isn’t everybody?” Harry grinned mirthlessly, digging his fingers deeper into the black man’s Afro.

“I swear,” Fish begged. “It’s the slaver’s ship, man! You catch her with that and you’ll have it all wrapped up.”

Harry suddenly let him go. They stood opposite each other at a distance of five feet. Harry held the gun steady on a level with his chest. There wasn’t much more to be made of the situation. Either he killed Fish or he didn’t. If he did, he was back on his own. If he didn’t, even if Fish led him into a trap, he’d be inside. Closer to McConnell.

Harry pictured her face. “All right,” he told the black man. “Let’s go.”

With great relief, Fish easily opened the plain wooden door and walked inside. As Harry followed him he noticed the inside part of the door was solid steel. They entered a deteriorating front parlor, all cracking cement and tarnished marble. The most notable feature of the room was the two marble columns near the center. Columns that stretched from the once sumptuous floor to the ceiling, now peeling, twelve feet above. Flickering candles were all over the place.

Fish walked between the columns to the entrance of a long hallway. There were open rooms to either side of the passage, their doors either hanging off their hinges or gone completely. The pair walked through without incident. But as they walked, Harry noticed the black man’s pace quickening. As if he was tired of the whole affair and anxious to have it end.

At the end of the hall, the way narrowed somewhat. The number of rooms multiplied, and the air was thick with wax smoke from the candles. Harry’s eyes began to smart. In the gloom of the long, winding passageways, Harry thought of another reason they called it the Cave. Moving through the oppressive dimness Harry thought about his long afternoon and evening of trying to find McConnell. He had killed them all to reach her. He thought he had almost found her at the disco, but he let her slip through his fingers. She was down with the other two, the bartender had said.

Two . . . ? Fish had said that only the woman was left!

Harry saw Fish almost ten feet ahead of him. He looked at the walls as he passed them. They were beige plaster, reinforced with intermittent wood beams. Thin, crumbling plaster. He looked ahead. They were coming to a small section of hall up three steps. The walls were even closer together than before. Three people could hardly pass shoulder to shoulder. And Fish was ten feet ahead.

The black man took the steps all in one jump. Harry was right behind him. He heard a scrape to his right and saw the peephole just as he grabbed Fish by the back of the neck. When it happened, it happened fast.

Callahan wrenched Fish in front of him as a machine-gun blast tore through the plaster wall. The black man caught it full in the chest. Harry pushed his Magnum between Fish’s dying torso and arm and shot point-blank into the peephole. Blood sloshed through the tears in the plaster.

But it wasn’t over. Harry heard another peephole slide back behind him and to his left. He hurled Fish down the steps and threw himself back against the wall. Machine-gun bullets poured out of the wall next to him. They tore off the edge of the beam he was behind, but the killer couldn’t bring the gun far enough to the right to peg him.

Harry crouched, leaned out, and shot up into the wall. The bullets stopped coming from that section. Harry glanced to his right. There was another peephole two beams down from the first one. Harry had the system now. Four assassins, two on either side of the hall, staggered in rooms behind the wall so they wouldn’t catch each other in crossfires. The rooms must have been built in the heyday of the gold rush to discourage thieves and swindlers.

Harry rolled down the passage and came up to the left of the peephole in the right wall. He saw another hole and heard a gun bolt click back right in front of him. He fired at the center of the left wall just as bullets spat out of the right wall beside him. Harry pressed the .44 barrel against the right wall, right over the peephole, and fired his last bullet.

He ran to the end of the hall and down the other steps, dumping his empty shells and reloading in two seconds flat. There was a door on either side. He kicked the left one open first. There was one dead man with a gaping wound in his chin and another crawling around the room on his back, trying to hold his intestines in. Harry ran across to the other door and shouldered it open. Two more corpses. A Magnum slug in one chest and another in a forehead. The flies had already set up housekeeping.

Harry stood at the end of the hallway, looking at the beige plaster flecked with red and the torn-up corpse of the black man known as Fish. He turned when he heard the scream.

The hall emptied out onto a circular room with a domed ceiling. The scream’s echo seemed to come from everywhere. It sounded again, narrowing the field to a large wooden door set deep in the stone wall of the room. Harry grabbed the heavy metal ring set in the middle of the portal and pulled. Slowly, the thick door swung back with a painful creak. Inside was a descending staircase of stone steps.

At first, Harry’s weariness and the flickering candlelight combined to make him feel as if he had stumbled back into history or onto a film set. The winding stairwell finished up in a subterranean dungeon. There were shackles set in rings on the walls. A broken rack in a heap in the corner. A gibbet, used for displaying dead bodies, hung from the ceiling. It was the ancient equivalent of the hostage room at the disco.

And in the center of the antiquated torture chamber was a woman. A naked woman locked in a fetal position on her back by one of the rusted metal instruments. It was all one piece, a long metal bar that wrapped around the back of her neck then moved down between her legs. Another two bands were attached to the outside of the bar, clamping her wrists to the main bar, then moving down on the outside of her legs. Each bar ended with a circle of iron so another, shorter bar could be thrust through the holes to keep the bonds in place. Finally, two horseshoe-shaped shackles were attached to the short bar to keep the ankles trapped and the thighs pressed against the stomach.

The archaic device was keeping the woman in agony. She screamed again. Harry noticed the loose kerchief around her neck and the wet rolled-up handkerchief lying next to her head. By the looks of it, she had been able to loosen her gag and cry for help.

“Take it easy,” Harry told her, holding his hand over her mouth. “We can’t have anyone else rushing in.” He saw the one padlock holding the short and the two long bars together. Knowing it was the only way, Harry put his gun as close as he could to the lock and shot it off.

The woman hissed as the Magnum’s flash and recoil sizzled against her calves. But within seconds, Harry had loosened the device and pulled the woman free. She grabbed him around the neck and sobbed.

The woman’s weight was keeping him off balance. He tried to get up, but her hysterical grip was surprisingly strong. He had to let go off his gun to gently unwrap her arms from his neck. As soon as he had gotten free, the woman had fallen over on her side, away from him, still sobbing.

Harry stood, marveling at the viciousness of the case. He leaned on a chopping block next to him, fingering an iron mask, wondering how a woman could do such nasty things to other women. He wondered where the woman—the head honcho the late Fish had called her—was.

Then all of a sudden, he knew. And it was the woman’s inexperience with the Magnum and Harry’s immediate reaction that saved his life.

He twisted around the chopping block just as the naked woman fired. The bullet sliced across Harry’s ear, deafening him for a second. The big gun bucked in her hand, pointing at the ceiling. Despite a loud ringing in his ears, Harry managed to swing the iron mask around and bat the revolver out of her hand. The Magnum soared across the room, bounced across the floor, and clattered against the wall.

It didn’t stop the woman for a second. She reached behind her and pulled a huge, two-pronged boat hook off its ring on the wall. She swung it at Harry with a speed that rivaled any man he had faced. Harry parried with the iron mask. One thick point rang off the heavy effigy, sending up sparks. She swung back. Harry dodged and swung his own weapon. It glanced off her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

The two antagonists separated and faced each other warily from across the torture chamber. When she wasn’t bent double, Harry could see that she was a tall, muscular woman with streaked hair that came to just below her ears. In her bare feet, in her bare body, she still looked to be close to six feet tall. She had no breasts to speak of and while all women were supposed to have ten percent more adipose tissue than men, Harry couldn’t find it on her. She was all coiled hemp muscles, coarse hair, and glistening sweat.

“Madame, I presume?” Harry asked.

The woman guardedly nodded, letting a grim smile spread her lips. She moved back toward the gun.

Harry ran around to block her. She feinted to the right, moved in, and swung the hook in a fast, vicious arc. Harry almost fell for it again. The hook smashed into the iron mask that Harry hastily raised, split it open, and wrested it from his grasp. Callahan spun, grabbed the bars the woman had been trapped in and held those up as a shield.

“And you’re Dirty Harry,” the naked woman said, not even breathing heavily. “You’re not very smart, Inspector.”

“But I’m very hard to kill,” he answered, moving back.

“What?” the woman asked. “Afraid of a woman?”

“Wouldn’t you be?” Harry said, still moving back. “Looked in the mirror lately?” He stepped forward, swinging the bar down over his head. The woman parried by lifting the hook effortlessly, pulling the bar out of Harry’s still-burned hands. The bar clanged into the hanging gibbet, setting it rocking back and forth with an ugly creak.

Harry backed up to the wall, and the woman moved in with the hook up over her shoulder. She brought it down to sink into his face, but Harry slid down the wall and grabbed the hooks right behind the points. He straightened and pushed back. He underestimated the woman’s strength. She held firm, then tried to knee him in the groin. He blocked that with his thigh, but then the woman pulled up on the hook with all her might, wrenching it from Harry’s weak grip and catching him under the chin.

Harry looked through the purple splotches that colored his vision for a second, put his foot in her stomach, and kicked out. She dropped the hook and fell over the chopping block. Harry picked up the hook in one hand. The naked woman got to her feet with a headman’s axe. It had been under the block all the time.

The adversaries stood facing each other.

“What do you get out of it?” Harry asked.

“I love it!” the woman roared. “Do you have any idea how easy it is? Out of the hundreds of millions of people in this country alone, do you know how many pretty girls there are? And out of them, how many with loose parental ties and no steady boyfriends? Do you know how many could simply disappear without anyone really noticing?”

“And the computer finds them,” Harry filled in.

“My husband is an expert,” she bragged. “He calls the different machines up, plays a different code to each one over the phone, sets a hook-up, and these things just spill their guts!”

“Your husband?”

“The Gentleman,” the woman elaborated, “as the girls are wont to call him. No names, please. We gave ours up seven years ago.”

Harry was legitimately stunned. “How many girls have you taken?”

“Not many,” the woman shrugged. “Eight, maybe ten a year. After a while we filled specific orders. Once the oil crisis and U.S. auto sales plummeted, the Arab and Oriental nations were eager to buy what we were selling. We supply only the best to the best.”

“That your motto?” Harry suggested sarcastically.

“Shame, shame, Inspector Callahan,” the woman admonished. “Our girls are treated very well by their owners. They are rich enough and powerful enough to keep them very happy or very quiet. It is the girl’s choice.”

“Not here. Not tonight.”

“Well, that is all your fault, Inspector. We had the situation well in hand until you became involved. And after you are gone, we’ll relax for a while with our accumulated wealth.”

“It couldn’t buy you better security,” Harry reminded her, motioning his head upstairs to the fly-ridden corpses in the ambush hallway.

“We get by,” the woman sniffed. “We never utilize a large staff. The less mouths, the better security. We only use as many as we need to control the supply. Tonight is our biggest shipment in some years. Five million dollars worth.”

Harry’s mind raced furiously. It was tonight. Fish hadn’t lied about that. But how many more guards were there? And where were they? “Five million!” Harry exclaimed aloud, letting a look of surprise flash over his features. “How many girls do you have now?”