Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons (13 page)

Harry had a perfect shot. He stood straight in one smooth motion, clicking open the Magnum’s cylinder and dumping the shells out with one hand and pulling a speed loader out of his pocket with another. Callahan always carried four speed loaders—plastic holders that enabled him to load six new rounds in one move.

He swung the cylinder closed with a flick of his wrist as he brought the weapon forward. Once more he had the barrel pointed right in the middle of Browne’s back.

And once again, something got in the way. It was the man who had been following him. He had come into the store during the fight and stayed to the side as the bullets flew.

“No!” yelled Tim, putting himself between Browne and the Magnum. “He didn’t do anything!”

Callahan bound over the table, took one long step, and charged at the young man, completely bypassing the step. “The hell he didn’t,” Harry seethed between clenched teeth, bashing the Orenda member out of the way.

Harry raced out into the street again, seeing Browne charge up a stairway one building over. Harry could read a plaque on the stair wall as he approached: “Bishop Hotel: Rooms by the Hour.”

“Oh fuck,” Harry said, knowing that that was exactly what people were doing upstairs. He pounded up the steps, hearing a gravelly voice shouting above him.

“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Hey, Where’re you going! Hey! You can’t go in there! Hey!”

At the top of the stairs was a narrow alcove with a beat-up desk, hole-ridden rugs, and a portable TV with a coat hanger for an antenna. In front of it was an old bald man looking up another stairway. His back was to Callahan, and Harry didn’t have time to be polite. He pushed the man forward as he jumped. The man fell across the first few steps, Harry’s right foot landing on the fifth stair next to the man’s head. As he passed, pulling himself up on a banister that nearly cracked with every tug, the deskman’s yelling started anew.

There would be no special hiding places for Browne here, Harry knew. Hookers’ havens had rooms and that’s all. No elevators, no broom closets, and probably no fire escapes. The Fire Department really couldn’t care if a bunch of whores got fried, so they probably didn’t enforce the regulations much. Only when some crooked chief wanted a payoff did firemen show up at all.

As Harry reached the second level, a door to the left of the hallway smashed open. Harry heard screams as he came up. Inside, he saw Browne barreling through a pile of six women in different costumes. He pushed a nurse aside, tripped a ballerina, knocked over a cheerleader, and jumped across the lying body of a Catholic schoolgirl. A very upset naked man on the bed watched the whole scene.

Harry shot Browne just as he reached a window across the room. The glass was painted black, and it seemed to be part of the wall at first. But when the jacketed semi-wadcutter bore into the bearded man’s shoulder it propelled him head first through the black crystal.

Light streamed into the room as the girl’s screamed and crawled away toward the door. Harry waded through them and looked out the ragged hole. Browne was on his side thirty feet below on a black tar ceiling. He was still alive and moving, though certainly not as fast.

Harry pointed his Magnum again. He centered the barrel this time on Browne’s chest. “Halt,” he shouted.

The word seemed to mean “Go” to the bearded man. He rolled over onto his stomach and feebly tried to crawl away.

“Hold it,” said Harry, tightening his grip on the trigger. Browne kept moving. Callahan nearly shot him again until he remembered what Tim had said. The young man thought Browne was innocent. And he wasn’t a raving lunatic like Morrisson. He had faith in and loyalty to Browne. Even after seeing the dead girl in Browne’s apartment, Tim was sure the bearded man didn’t kill her.

Harry, like everybody else in the Boston Police Department, wanted a fast solution to the case. The chiefs wanted to believe that Morrisson had killed Halliwell and Sherman had killed Morrisson. Harry wanted to believe Collins’ theory that Morrisson and Browne were partners. He wanted to believe it because he wanted an easy end. He wanted to get out of Boston. He didn’t want to be Linda’s confidant or Christine’s savior or Collins’ best boy. He especially didn’t want to be Shanna’s protector . . . or judge.

He pulled the gun up. He wasn’t going to shoot a helpless man, no matter what he was suspected of. He wouldn’t get very far after that fall with a .44 slug in his shoulder. Harry harnessed his Magnum, ignored the bleats of the seven sexually active people around the bed, and went downstairs.

“I called the police!” shouted the deskman as Harry came into view. “I called the police!”

Harry didn’t even look at him. He just kept going down the stairs. “No, you didn’t,” he said as he loped down the remaining steps. The deskman didn’t disagree.

Callahan was out on the Combat Zone street for the third time. There was no alley next to the Bishop Hotel, only a strip joint called the Pussy Cat Lounge. Porno men didn’t have to think of original names. No one who bought drinks there cared what it was called. Harry went in to find the rear entrance so he could collect Browne. Although it was not yet five o’clock, the place was jumping, at least with music and strippers. “Beautiful, Beautiful Girls Twenty-Four Hours A Day!” the sign in the anteroom promised. The double “Beautiful” may have been an exaggeration, but they weren’t kidding about the twenty-four-hour schedule.

As Harry entered the main room, he was assailed by the classic sights of a strip bar. The burly man behind the rectangular bar that filled the foreground. Miserable, stubble-faced men hunching over half-empty glasses. Blaring unidentifiable music, harsh red lighting, and a nearly naked woman who gave new meaning to the word “cellulite.”

She was grinding her heels into a runway that stretched back to a door-sized curtain in the rear wall. Harry motioned to the bar man. “Got a rear door in this place?” he yelled over the deep brass and percussion noises.

“Wife after you?” the bartender answered with a slack grin.

Harry pulled out his badge. “That’s a Frisco shield!” the barman complained. Harry was impressed with his quick eyes, but didn’t want to bandy about jurisdiction. He pulled open his jacket to reveal the Magnum in its holster.

“Right through the curtains at the back,” the brawny bar man said immediately. Harry nodded and started in that direction.

The stripper had finished her set. She was making a big deal about her exit. She was building up to a great finish. Just his luck, Harry thought. By the time he got back there, she would be blocking him. He’d either have to wait until she got off or chance touching her. The things he did for a living, he marveled. He held back a bit. Browne would keep. There was no place he could go. The chase was over.

As the thought passed through his mind, someone backstage screamed. Before Harry could act, the stripper about to take the dancer’s place fell out from behind the curtains. Browne was holding on to her just to stay up.

The effect was incredible. The spotlights had blasted on to pinion the exiting dancer at the rear portal. They had turned to hot white so the patrons could get a good view of her ripping off her G-string. Instead they spotlighted a frenzied, sweating, bleeding man who was clawing at two girls. Browne lumbered forward like a dying mummy, drooling, crying, and grabbing whatever he could use as a crutch. The strippers tried to pull away, but his fingers had sunk into their arms. When he saw Harry moving up from the side, he kicked the naked woman off the ramp and held the second stripper in front of him.

Harry pulled out his gun. Browne pulled out a knife. Callahan froze when the bearded man jammed it under the stripper’s breast. Only a thin Victorian corset separated the steel from her skin.

“Go away, Callahan,” Browne hissed slowly. “Can’t you see you’re making it worse!”

Harry heard the man’s words above the roar of the jukebox and the clamor of the customers to get out the door. He glanced in the direction of the noise. He saw the bartender motionless behind the counter, holding a sawed-off shotgun in both hands. He was waiting for his chance. If Harry didn’t get the guy, he would.

Callahan looked back at Browne who was painfully edging toward the front door. He couldn’t help but feel that he was looking at the real murderer of Judy Halliwell, John Monahan, and Thomas Morrisson. Only a man this obsessive, this possessed, and this driven could have implemented a murder plan like the Orenda one.

“Give up,” Harry said tiredly, almost plaintively. “There’s nowhere else you can go.”

Browne laughed. The laughter cost him. He grimaced in pain, pushing the knife even harder against the stripper’s torso. Harry saw the slight material rip. He saw a small stream of blood. “I cut her, didn’t I?” said Browne hoarsely. “I cut all the others, too, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

His voice was rising to a scream. The stripper knew the right moment when she heard it. She grabbed the knife hand with both of her own, then slammed her stileto heel on Browne’s instep. The bearded man howled in pain. The hardened, experienced girl took the extra second to drive her elbow back right under Browne’s septum.

Browne fell off the runway. Harry jumped forward, but the girl, in her panic, was looking back at the bearded man while hurling herself in the opposite direction. She fell right against Harry. It delayed him for a few seconds while the bartender vaulted over the counter.

At that moment, Tim came running in. He shouted, “No!” His hand went up in supplication. In one fist he was holding the empty Bulldog .44 that Browne must have dropped.

The barkeep didn’t know the situation. All he saw was another kid waving a gun at him. He swung the shotgun around and let Tim have it with both barrels.

At close range, the scattershot tore right through Tim’s chest. His guts splattered against the jukebox a second before his hollow body caught up. His lifeless form smashed through the glass, tearing at the records as he slid down the front. An ear-rending screech filled the room as the tone arm and needle were ripped across the record. Then there was no sound.

Harry moved the stripper out of his way and stepped up onto the runway. The barkeep looked from Tim’s corpse to his smoking gun to where Harry stood. The stripper slowly moved around the edge of the stage to look at the spot Browne had fallen. The bartender followed her gaze. They all looked at the place Browne had fallen.

He wasn’t there. While Tim was being shot, Browne had crawled to the other side of the bar and gotten away.

C H A P T E R
S e v e n

“T
his is her car. This is where she was hit on the head. See? That little dent? That little stain? That’s where Browne must have slammed her head against the car.”

Harry was wondering if Browne hadn’t indeed caught him with one of the knives or swords or bullets he threw at him in the porno shop. Because if Callahan had died and gone to hell, this is what Hades would look, sound, and feel like—a gray concrete place with a jolly coroner lecturing while he had a splitting headache.

Callahan nodded, hoping the medical examiner would be magically whisked away by Satan. Instead, the M.E.’s voice was replaced by Collins’ cultured, practiced tones.

“Her name was Cathy Bryant. She came from Florida to go to acting school. Her parents said she didn’t get into USC or UCLA, and between Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh or Boston University, she chose the lesser of two evils.”

“She’d get lung cancer from the smog in Pittsburgh,” the coroner mentioned. “She got murdered here.” The man tsked-tsked as if it was a hard choice.

“Get him the fuck out of here, will you?” Callahan suggested to the black detective.

“Thanks, Chuck,” Collins called to the coroner. “I think we can take it from here.”

“All right,” the M.E. said a trifle indignantly. Harry figured he had thus been dismissed on many previous occasions. “All right, already, I’m going. I’ve got her remains waiting to be examined back at the O.R. anyway. Not that there’s much remaining to be examined in the first place . . .” The coroner’s mutter trailed off, echoing in the underground garage.

“I can say this much for him,” Collins commented after the M.E. had gone. “He sure loves his work.”

“May he become a part of it real soon,” Harry blessed him. “This Bryant girl. She wasn’t a Unitarian?”

“Never signed up, never helped out, never been there,” Collins said. “We showed her picture around the Beacon Street offices. No one remembers her. Besides, her parents said she was Old World Christian.”

“Not an Emerson student?”

“BU through and through. Spent her freshman year in the lighting booth. Got some bit parts as a sophomore. Did some repertory work in the chorus. She doesn’t even have a friend who goes to Emerson listed in her address book.”

Harry looked at the yellow Volvo and the tiny stained dent and realized that was all there was left of a human being. A Boston detective was pouring out all the intimate secrets of her young life, but that stain was all that was really left.

“So why her?” the inspector asked aloud.

It was not the question he really wanted to ask. He really wanted to know “Why not Christine?” And in the very back of his mind he formed the words, “Why not Shanna?” But Collins answered his first query.

“Come on, Harry,” the black man said affably. “You know how it is. A guy comes to the end of his rope. Any little thing can set him off. He forgets all about morality. He sees something he wants, and he takes it. All the rules are off. No rhyme. No reason.”

It wasn’t good enough for Callahan. Something was very wrong. He still couldn’t convince himself that Browne had a good enough reason to break the chain. “You show the police sketch in the restaurant?”

Collins sluffed that off. “Sure, but you know how many people come into a restaurant’s bar on a busy night. And it had to be at least yesterday when he came in since the girl was snatched this afternoon. Maybe he sat at a table, and she was the only one who really took any notice of him.”

“In other words,” Callahan translated succinctly, “no one recognizes Browne’s picture.”