Dirty Harry 07 - Massacre at Russian River

“DIRTY HARRY” CALLAHAN—
HE FIGHTS FOR THE LAW
OF THE LAND, HE LIVES BY
THE RULE OF THE GUN!

A lot of grass—the illegal kind—grows in the hills of Northern California. Where there’s marijuana, there’s money. Where there’s money, there’s murder. And where there’s murder, there’s Dirty Harry. In a wilderness where even the local cops are criminal, Harry must live—and kill—by a law higher than the law of the land: his own.

DEATH RACE

Kilborn surprised Harry by flattening himself out in the path of the oncoming vehicle. Harry couldn’t stop or redirect the van in time and ran right over him. But he heard none of the sounds one would customarily expect running over a body. He guessed that being as thin as he was, Kilborn had managed to position himself in such a way that all four tires had missed him completely.

Harry couldn’t be sure though. He brought the van to a stop, opened the door and peered back.

His supposition was correct. Kilborn was alive and in good health. He was taking aim at Harry and firing . . .

Books by Dane Hartman

Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons
Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks
Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death
Dirty Harry #4: The Mexico Kill
Dirty Harry #5: Family Skeletons
Dirty Harry #6: City of Blood
Dirty Harry #7: Massacre at Russian River
Dirty Harry #8: Hatchet Men
Dirty Harry #9: The Killing Connection
Dirty Harry #10: The Blood of Strangers
Dirty Harry #11: Death in the Air
Dirty Harry #12: The Dealer of Death

Published by
WARNER BOOKS

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-446-30052-7
First Printing: June, 1982

DIRTY HARRY  #7
MASSACRE
AT
RUSSIAN
RIVER

Opening Round

N
orth of San Francisco, Highway 101 runs through Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte counties straight into Oregon. Right across the line separating Mendocino from Humboldt can be found the Old Redwood Highway, a two-lane blacktop characterized by trees that have spent thousands of years reaching for the sky.

Old Redwood yields onto a mud road riddled with potholes which in turn gives way to other roads, steeper, more impenetrable. After a while, if no one puts a stop to one’s progress, one comes to the very heart of marijuana country.

There, among the giant trees and the thick nettled brush, gardens are filled with Guerrero, purple skunk, sinsemilla, Thai, Columbian, and Kauai, pedigree, and hybrid, weed that drives a man crazy and weed that does nothing but make him cough into the night.

People make hundreds of thousands of dollars there, sometimes millions, while remaining perpetually stoned in the process.

That was how Jud Harris went about his life, at least until one afternoon early last autumn.

Harris stands at six-three and has a wired intensity about him, a piercing stare, and a set of thin lips that hold back a smile like a hidden treasure. He favors loose overalls, sports a beard, and wears his hair so long in back that in order to make it manageable he’s knit it into a ponytail. He goes about in hip-high boots, prowling his garden. His plants are all in a row. That way, he thinks, they won’t be so easily spotted from the air.

The thousands of dollars that Jud Harris raked in last year are not in plain sight. The house that he and his old lady Bonnie share is a modest five-room affair, put together on the cheap with materials pillaged from a crumbling barn located down the road a piece. One of those five rooms has a crib in it. No baby, just the crib. The baby is due in mid-November.

Jud has a four-wheel-drive. Just about all the marijuana farmers thereabouts do because there’s no other way of getting around. In addition, he has a pick-up and a car, but they wouldn’t be considered luxuries.

Most of Jud’s money has found its way to San Francisco, where he maintains a beautiful house overlooking the bay. He and Bonnie go to that house whenever they feel like getting away from marijuana country on a vacation.

Even dopesters need vacations. Weed is not always a fun business.

It was a little after four in the afternoon. The sun was out, for the first time in days. Shafts of its radiant light penetrated the outstretched branches of the trees that ringed the electronic fence Jud had constructed. When it had last gone off Jud had rushed from his house, a .22 rifle in his hands, only to discover that a curious deer had triggered it. He and Bonnie had feasted on venison that night.

No road led to the Harris farm. The road was half a mile away; it just sort of dropped off into mud that, for all the sun it got, never quite hardened. But Jud and Bonnie could still hear traffic on the road or what passed as traffic because generally no more than two or three vehicles used it in any one twenty-four-hour period.

Bonnie was a woman of juices and flesh, even before she became pregnant. Her face was pretty, dairy-maidish; the rest of her spread out and blossomed, no angles, no curves, just lots of soft round contours.

“Jud, it’s the Reardons!” she called. She knew the sound of their truck. She didn’t need to see the whites of their eyes to identify her visitors.

The Reardons, Tom and Tom Jr., his son, and Lou, his brother, had been coming around of late, making inquiries, expressing an interest in buying out Jud. Jud didn’t want to be bought out. He was happy, he was rich and getting richer. He liked tending his weed, he liked experimenting with fertilizer and crossbreeding plants, and he didn’t see what else he could do in life that would be nearly so satisfying. Besides, even if he wanted to sell his property and the lucrative plant life that sprang from it, he would not for one moment consider selling to the Reardons.

The Reardons were shit. The Reardons carried the plague in their chromosomes. The Reardons were crazy. But the Reardons were persistent.

Jud had been talking to some of his fellow farmers. He wasn’t the only one the Reardons had approached. No, they’d been around to most of the farms in the area, playing it real casual, sometimes offering to buy out an entire crop, sometimes offering to go in on a deal, sometimes holding out for the whole shooting match, just as they were doing with him.

They came marching, muddy boots, red faces, over the rise in the hill, the three of them single file, Tom Sr., leading the way.

Jud didn’t know why he should be thinking of grabbing hold of his .22. The Reardons had never used force or threatened either him or Bonnie in any way. If there was any danger at all it was in their eyes; you looked into them and you could see fire simmering inside their skulls.

Still, he told Bonnie to head them off, delay them. He would make certain his gun was within easy reach. He had no intention of actually producing it. That might only provoke them, and if there was one thing Jud Harris was it was peaceful. It was just better to have the weapon available.

If Tom had been a tree, he would have been one of the giant redwoods. Physically, he was an impressive sight, towering above Jud, with a frame that was more massive still and limbs bulging with muscle that seemed ready to burst from the protective skin around it. It was unfortunate that his intelligence was nowhere as formidable as his body. Junior year in high school was as far as his education had taken him. That might not have been a handicap necessarily, but he was in possession of an IQ that would never see the other side of 100. He was probably conscious of his below-average intelligence, and it was equally probable that he used his body to compensate for it.

His son was pushing twenty and was a mite smarter but less strapping, more on the thin side. His gaze was insistent but blank, as though he still hadn’t quite figured out what to make of the world. His uncle Lou was built of the same rough-hewn material his brother was, but he hadn’t the sheer brawn and craziness that Tom had.

Bonnie stepped forward, barely allowing her eyes to travel back to the open doorway of the house where her husband remained concealed.

“How are you doing today?” she asked with feigned cheerfulness.

“Fine, just fine,” Tom Sr., said, assuming the role of spokesman.

“You looking for Jud?”

“That’s right.”

“He’s not here right now.”

Tom peered in the direction of the house, clearly unconvinced. “Oh, is that so? His car is here. So’s the truck. He surely couldn’t have gone far.”

Bonnie was improvising fast. “He took a walk over to the Emerson place.”

“The Emerson place,” Tom said. “Funny, we was just over there and we didn’t see any sign of him. You sure you didn’t just lose track of him? It happens, missus can’t find her old man. You know how often my missus can’t find me?” He laughed. His brother laughed. His son laughed. The family that believed in togetherness.

Jud, having overheard this exchange, decided that there was nothing to be gained by staying out of sight.

“What do you want, Tom?”