Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (11 page)

At the entrance to the disco, a fur wrap draped over her flimsy dress giving her protection from the autumn chill, she extended her arm to flag down a taxi, thinking that because the parade had drifted farther south in the city, and with the streets surrounding Union being freer of traffic, she would not have too long to wait.

But when after ten minutes no cab appeared, she gave up and began walking, mixing with noisy, costumed celebrants who thronged the pavement, delighting in the anonymity her costume gave her.

Then she felt a hand on her arm. Jim! she thought angrily. He’d chased her all this way. “I’m not going with you!” she shouted.

But when she turned she saw that it wasn’t Jim at all. It was Teddy. Uncostumed.

He looked mildly surprised, more amused, and he said, “Oh no? Is that your final word on the subject?”

She was heartened to see him. “Teddy! What are you doing here? How did you recognize me?”

She still had not removed her mask. Unless he had followed her out of the discotheque there was no way he could have known who it was.

But all she got from him was his customary smile that suggested he knew the world and the ways people had of dealing with it far better than she. “It must be magic,” he said.

“Magic? Were you watching me all this time?” She did not wish to provoke him by using the word spying. Teddy was not Jim Corona.

“I am always watching you. I find you lovely, in costume or out, and so I see nothing wrong with watching you.”

She drew her wrap tighter around her. “Well, I don’t like it.”

She was thinking: He must have been in the discotheque, disguised, observing me and Jim.

He ignored her last remark. Instead he took her arm and began to guide her up the street. She did not resist. “Where are you taking me?”

“First to my car.”

“And then?”

“Then to a very special place.”

Because of the mask he could not see the dubious expression that had taken hold of her face. “You’re crazy, Teddy,” she said affectionately.

“I am at that,” he agreed quite seriously.

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

H
arry could not find Owens, not on Golden Gate, not on McAllister or Fulton, which ran parallel to it, not on Buchanan, Laguna, Webster, Steiner, or Octavia, which ran perpendicular to it. Among the stragglers who had detached themselves from the parade or had simply never caught up with it in the first place Harry could see no one who vaguely resembled the boozing, shambling derelict that Owens had become. Ghosts and Merlins, Jack the Rippers and Count Draculas, Frankensteins and vampires there were aplenty, even a few genuine bums who dazedly stared at such unusual exhibitionism, probably wondering whether what they were seeing had any basis in reality or was merely a result of hallucinations brought on by alcohol and the d.t.’s.

Harry kept going, having no time to admire the ingenuity of the disguises that greeted his eyes, half-running, half-walking, impatient with those that unwittingly impeded his progress. Every now and then he took out his radio and again attempted to establish communication with his partner. No luck.

Thirty-five minutes had been exhausted in this manner, and yet Harry had no intention of giving up his search even if he was obliged to call out an entire search party to join him in the effort.

Where, he thought, stopping now to catch his breath, where would he go to find trouble if trouble was what he wanted? It did not take him long to find an answer.

Golden Gate Park. There, with the woods and the brush and the dark, a man could commit his crimes, be they minor or major, without fear of discovery.

When he’d first seen him, Owens hadn’t given him a second thought. He was just another man in mufti though his size was formidable. Draped completely in a thick cotton robe all of black, with a skeletal mask blotting out his entire face, he must have measured almost seven feet, but his height alone wasn’t the most distinguishing thing about him. He was massive, and this massiveness was not useless fat and sagging flesh but muscle, sinewy and probably made tougher by rigorous exercise. To be sure, he attracted attention even among a crowd that was partial to eccentric disguises. If his size and weight failed to gain people’s notice, the scythe he carried in his hand certainly did. You could believe that this was Death incarnate, coming to reap his grim harvest this Halloween eve.

Wherever he walked people drew aside to let him pass. Quite reasonably, no one had any wish, no matter how intoxicated they may have been, to provoke him to a quarrel.

On spotting him, Owen’s first thought was: Too obvious. This cannot be our man.

But nonetheless, he proceeded to tail him, staying well behind, which presented no problem as this figure of Death was all too conspicuous.

At a certain point, however, as the man proceeded at a slow but steady rate it became apparent to Owens that he was headed straight into the park. Golden Gate was just about empty of pedestrians and traffic at this time of night. Although Death never looked back—and Owens never expected him to—it was no longer so easy to shadow him. After awhile they were the only two walking in the same direction. Owens thought of how ridiculous it must look to an outsider; he imagined a painting entitled “Bum Chases Grim Reaper Who Won’t Have Him.”

Nonetheless, he was still wary and a bit frightened. It might look ridiculous, but he was beginning to think that his instinct had been on target, that whether this was the Mission Street Knifer or not, he was up to some mischief. So that he would run no risk of alerting Death to
his
true identity Owens turned his radio off. It might be simple paranoia on his part. He didn’t know, but he hoped that Harry would understand his apprehension.

As they approached the park—with Owens half a block behind his mark—the lights grew fewer. Death at times seemed to be swallowed up in the gloom, but just when Owens figured he’d lost him he reappeared. He was making more noise now as brambles and fallen leaves crumpled noisily under his feet.

Owens was as quiet as he could be traversing the same terrain, but there was no way of avoiding making some noise. Still, the distance that separated them was such that Death did not notice, or noticing, care to investigate its origin.

Owens lost track of how much time he had invested in this enterprise. All he knew was that he was being led on a tour of the park that took him, improbably, into the Japanese Tea Garden. The two passed over a hand-carved gateway into the garden proper. Below them Owens could make out the reflecting pools, which were dark. Occasionally, their placid water would be disturbed by a fish coming to the surface, but otherwise these smooth bodies of water were like perfect mirrors, waiting for Death, whose form, hideous and immense, extended across the entire length of one pool.

Owens looked and saw that his image, too, was visible upon the water of the same pool. For an instant the two reflections collided and merged, but only for an instant. Then Death vanished, from the pool, from the other side of the graceful humpback bridge. All that Owens could make out on the other side were the dwarf trees and the moss-covered rocks but not Death. He could not see how he could have vanished like that, and so continued across the bridge himself, wondering whether he’d been spotted in spite of his precautions, wondering, too, whether Death wasn’t waiting in ambush for him, ready to put his intimidating instrument to use.

But Owens plodded on, too committed to this venture to allow his fears to deter him. Nowhere was his man Death visible on the bamboo-railed paths, but he felt certain he must be close by. As he kept going, various statues intended to guard the Shinto shrines came into view. And for a moment Owens felt that their sightless eyes were in fact registering his presence just as they had registered Death’s. Farther on, he came to a seated bronze Buddha whose serene countenance intimated at an existence far more secure than that of the average San Francisco cop.

As Owens came nearer the Buddha, Death suddenly, silently materialized and just as silently strolled away. Only the rustle of the manicured bushes that he brushed past told Owens that he was not just a hallucination. The way he seemed to glide, this dark menacing figure, was almost as if he was otherworldly, without substance, though of course he was very much substance, all seven feet and two hundred eighty pounds (Owens guessed) of him.

So he followed him, despairing that he would ever be rewarded for his efforts. Followed him throughout the park, to Stow Lake favored by picknickers and boaters, past the Conservatory, down along Arguello Boulevard, past the Arboretum on South Drive, now onto the archery field . . .

This is getting absurd, Owens realized, he’s just going to keep walking all night, and Harry will think I’m an ass for playing along with him. But it was also possible that Death was acutely conscious someone was stalking him—in tiring, Owens recognized that he might have unwittingly betrayed himself—and was only seeing how far he could take him.

From the archery field Death made his way to the golf course that lay adjacent to it. Because the green was so exposed Owens was obliged to stick close to the woods and shrubbery that extended about a good part of its perimeter. At a certain point though he had no choice but to give up his place of concealment. Otherwise, he would lose sight of Death again.

The odyssey was growing endless. Death had sufficient stamina to endure what constituted a grand tour of Golden Gate. Owens no longer had much of a sense of where they were anymore. He could not orient himself by any landmark. Here was a baseball field, here a football field, here a tennis court, over there a checker pavilion. Now the smell of horse manure told him he was nearing a stable; now he found himself in the shadow of a bandstand that at this late hour looked particularly desolate. There are twenty-seven miles of footpaths in Golden Gate Park, and by one in the morning Owens had the feeling that he and Death had traversed them all.

Then, in a thickly wooded area that bordered on a baseball diamond, Owens looked up to see that Death had vanished again. Was he not paying enough attention? How could he have slipped so easily out of view? Owens peered into the gloom, thinking that maybe in his dark robe Death had managed to camouflage himself.

Owens started towards the woods, deciding that he would draw out his gun. He was more nervous now than he had been any time since he had begun this surveillance, though he could not say why. After all, Death had dematerialized before, in the Japanese garden, and nothing had happened.

Owens stopped, listening, straining his eyes to detect a pattern in the darkness, but everything was submerged and ambiguous in the absence of any light. Even the moon was uncooperative, having sunk out of sight hours ago.

Cicadas he heard, the disturbance of low-lying brush as some animal, possibly a squirrel, darted through it, that he heard. But otherwise nothing.

Until a moment later, when the unmistakable sound of footsteps, soft but firm and purposeful, reached his ears from behind him. He turned, quickly, no longer bothering to maintain the pretense of a drunken derelict lost in the park, his gun trained on the direction from which the footsteps were coming.

It was Death all right, looming up in front of him, seeming taller, more formidable than he had ever appeared in the distance. How he had gotten in back of Owens Owens couldn’t possibly imagine, but that was hardly worth worrying about now.

The sight of a .356 Magnum did not seem to intimidate Death. It was difficult to tell whether he even noticed it. And while Owens struggled to announce that he was a police officer, he wondered on just what charges he could engineer an arrest. Despite his terrifying aspect and his penchant for straying for hours through the precincts of Golden Gate Park armed with a scythe, Death had not committed anything that could remotely be considered a crime.

Nonetheless, Owens had been a cop long enough to know that even without rational grounds for suspicion, this was a dangerous character who, with each step he took closer to Owens, seemed to get progressively more dangerous.

“Police officer, stay where you are.” Owens wondered whether he’d made himself heard, his voice sounded so feeble. Compared to this, last night’s confrontation with a surly white asshole and a drug-crazed black was child’s play. He regretted that he’d gone so far in tracking this man down.

There was nothing to indicate that Death had heard him. The skeletal mask he wore made it impossible for Owens to determine if there’d been any reaction. He repeated himself, more loudly.

Still didn’t make any difference. Death kept coming, inexorably closing the distance that separated them until they were no more than five or six feet apart. Owens realized that he ought to stand his ground, but he could not help backing away. Besides, if Death got right up on top of him he would have no room to maneuver or to fire his gun if he was forced to do so.

Death produced a sound that might have been laughter, but whatever it was it was obscured by the blockage of the mask. He now leaped forward, mocking Owens’ efforts to retreat, and as he did this he raised his fearsome weapon above his head and swung it so that it described an arc, which if completed would take a substantial chunk out of Owens’ neck.

Owens instinctively shifted his body to the left, discharging his gun at the same time. But because he did not shift quite enough, the blade grazed his shoulder. A savage burning pain caused him to cry out, but he retained his balance and ignored the blood that welled quickly from the wound.

There was no question, given his aim and their proximity, that he had hit Death. The blood that now appeared on the black robe, right where his pelvis should be, indicated to Owens that the bullet had penetrated. The sight of it also reassured Owens that his antagonist was human, something he was almost ready to doubt.

But while he might have been a mortal, Death surely did not act like one. The wound might not have been there at all, for he continued to advance on Owens, swinging his scythe back and forth, almost in a leisurely manner, without any aim of striking Owens. He seemed to be enjoying the swishing sound it made through the air as though he was trying to terrify Owens further before dealing him a decisive blow.