Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (5 page)

Surprisingly, Patterson reacted to the Inspector’s badge with visible relief before returning to her packing. She acted as if DiGeorgio didn’t even exist. It was obvious that Callahan was in control here.

“I didn’t know regulations had allowed your uniforms to get so . . . casual,” she said, taking a satiny, beige nightgown and a dark-green velour robe out of the closet.

The sensuousness of that uniform was not lost on Callahan, who couldn’t help mentally picturing the woman in the outfit.

“I just came off of an undercover assignment,” he told her, as she folded the bedclothes on top of the other stuff. “Patrolling the subways,” he finished, seeing her flinch ever so slightly.

A second later, her stiffened shoulders relaxed, and she continued her actions as if nothing had happened.

“I’ve already told many other officers what happened,” she said, her back to them. “I don’t see how it will help to go over it all again.”

“I came off the undercover assignment just as a girl was run over by a BART train and killed,” Harry interrupted.

When she turned back to them, her face was as pale as the stationmaster’s had been. It could have been that she was so sensitive that the news shocked her, Harry reasoned—or it could be something else entirely.

“Killed?” Patterson breathed. “How horrible.”

“Her name was Martha Murray.” DiGeorgio spoke up for the first time. “She was a high school student taking music lessons at the University. Did you know her?”

“No,” Patterson said, after some thought. “No, I didn’t.”

“I saw a picture of her, back at headquarters,” DiGeorgio continued. “You two looked similar enough to be sisters.”

“Really?” the woman replied. “That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know yet,” Harry said meaningfully, taking in the information. “But we thought we had better see you.”

“Of course,” Patterson agreed. “But I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of Margaret Murray before.”

“Martha,” DiGeorgio corrected.

“Martha, was it?” the woman echoed, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . it’s just such terrible news. Oh, that poor girl . . .”

Harry looked at his partner with concern. When he glanced back at Patterson, he saw that she was preoccupied with blowing on her fingertips. He had just enough time to realize that the chill in the subway wasn’t in evidence here when he heard the distant, popping sounds coming from down the hall.

His head swiveled on his neck like a sensitive radar dish. Anyone else might have disregarded the noises. To Callahan, it was the unmistakable sound of gunfire—distant enough not to have the angry cracking, but not far enough away to be in another building.

“Holy shit,” DiGeorgio said succinctly, realizing the same thing. Without offering any kind of explanation, the two men raced down the hall, trying to trace the sounds to their origin.

By the time they reached the center of the floor, the main nurse’s desk was already in tumultuous activity. Meanwhile, the gunshot sounds continued. Harry grabbed one of the scurrying nurses by the arm. “Where is that noise coming from?” he asked the wide-eyed girl.

“Surgery,” she gasped. “Down in the new wing.”

As the nurse slipped out of Callahan’s grasp, DiGeorgio was already flashing his badge and getting detailed directions from the flustered desk nurse. The two men took the stairs down several flights until they reached a locked basement door. They could hear the gunfire coming clearly from the other side.

“Is it worth it?” DiGeorgio asked.

“It’s worth it,” Harry answered, already backing up.

The Sergeant’s Ruger Police Service Six revolver came out of his belt holster. Standing to the side of the door, he blew the knob and lock off. He did it from the side, because he didn’t want one of his .357 caliber loads accidentally hitting an innocent bystander.

As soon as the metal knob had clattered to the floor, Harry moved forward, drawing his .44 Magnum and pulling at the broken door. Just as he pulled it open, the body of a wounded black intern fell face-first from the other side onto the stairway floor.

“Christ,” DiGeorgio exclaimed in surprise, automatically leaning down to check on the man’s condition.

While he was doing that, Callahan stepped around the bleeding man and plastered himself against the left frame of the open door, his gun up. He hazarded a look around the corner. All he saw was a long, thin hallway made up of reinforced cinder blocks occasionally interrupted by windows. At the far end of the hall, he saw the back of a uniformed patrolman kneeling behind the corner.

Harry looked back at DiGeorgio. “It wasn’t my bullet that did this,” the Sergeant reported. “He was shot high in the back.”

“Get to a phone and make sure police back-up is coming,” Harry instructed. “I don’t want hospital security handling this alone.”

He didn’t wait for a reply before turning the corner and running down the hall. He kneeled down next to the patrolman, who reacted to his appearance with a start. Harry looked into the face of a surprised, sweating Jim Petrillo. The next thing he noticed was that the cop’s holster was empty, and that the gun wasn’t in his hand.

“What happened?” Callahan demanded.

“I don’t know!” Petrillo practically wailed. “One minute he’s got the shakes—he can’t walk, he can hardly talk—the next minute he’s running around like Tarzan!”

Callahan looked around the left-hand corner to see another long corridor with two hospital workers huddled behind a vending machine while a security guard lay motionless, face down. The gun was missing from his holster, too.

“Explain,” Harry said tersely.

Petrillo calmed himself with an effort. He breathed deeply several times and swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “I carry Maggin to the emergency ward. He’s so bad off he can’t even stand. They stick him into an examining room with a bunch of doctors, nurses, and interns, and they ask me to wait outside. I figure that’s all right, because the junkie wouldn’t get five feet in his condition. Inspector, I’ve seen addicts before. I know faking when I see it, and Maggin wasn’t faking. He was gone!”

Harry had seen addicts, too, and he had to agree with the patrolman. Either Harry was more tired than he thought, or Maggin was a superb actor.

“All right,” he concurred. “What happened then?”

“So all of a sudden, he comes tearing out of the examining room like a banshee, slugs me, grabs my gun, and goes running. I took off after him, but now he’s moving like O. J. Simpson. I get him cornered down here and he starts shooting.”

Harry looked around the corner again. The hall was beginning to fill up with thin, white smoke, and the gunfire had ceased. Replacing the shots, however, was a crackling hum.

“What’s that?” Harry wanted to know.

“You got me,” Petrillo answered.

“Stay here,” Callahan commanded. “Wait for the cavalry. I’m going to get those people out of there.”

Again not waiting for a reply, Harry moved down the hall in a crouch, his Magnum up and ready. The thin plumes of smoke stung his eyes and nostrils, but he made it to a position behind the vending machines without incident. But when he placed a hand on the shoulder of a kneeling nurse, he was rewarded with a shriek. The doctor in front of the girl turned at the sound.

“Oh, my God,” he said.

“Police,” Harry told the terrified duo, cursing his misleading disguise. “Get back around the corner. I’ll cover you.”

“We can’t leave him in there,” the doctor said stridently.

“We’re not going to,” Harry promised. “But we can’t have any more injuries. Now get going.”

The nurse was more than pleased to slink out of the way, but the doctor wouldn’t budge. “You don’t understand . . .” he said. He was interrupted by the appearance of Marshall Maggin two doorways down, brandishing two revolvers.

“I saw that!” Maggin screamed, pushing the guns out before him and pulling the triggers. The bullets whined off the cement walls and slammed into the candy and beverage machines, putting holes in eight packages of Doritos and springing a leak in the Welch’s grape-soda tank.

As the beverage dispenser began spitting carbonated water and bleeding purple syrup, the nurse cried in shock and fell in the hall. Petrillo grabbed her arms and dragged her around the corner as Maggin disappeared back into the room.

“Get the hell out of the way,” Harry warned the doctor as he moved forward.

“Wait!” the doctor cried, as Callahan silently hopped over the guard’s prone body and flattened himself against the opposite wall. “Please,” the doctor pleaded.

Harry looked back at the man’s desperate face. “He’s in our most technically modern operating room,” the doctor stressed. “There are literally millions of dollars of delicate equipment in there.”

“That’s not going to buy these men’s lives back,” Harry said, motioning to the still security guard.

“But it can buy many others’ lives back,” the doctor countered. “Please, please be careful.”

Callahan continued through the smoke, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Petrillo was moving forward to collect the distraught surgeon. Harry slid along the opposite wall until he was right outside the operating room Maggin had holed up in.

“Come on, Marshall,” Harry called. “You’re only making things worse.”

He was answered by several bullets slamming off the door frame. But the junkie was cunning enough not to show himself so that Harry could bring him down.

“You’re running out of bullets, Maggin,” Harry continued, undaunted. “It’s only a matter of time.”

This time, the answer was a hysterical laugh. “You think so?” Maggin’s screeching voice asked. “Then come get me, pig. I’ve got something waiting for you.”

Harry mentally counted the rounds the creep had used so far. He and DiGeorgio had heard at least four. The one that felled the intern made five. The security guard made six. The vending machines took at least three more. The operating room entrance took two additional bullets. And, as far as Harry knew, Maggin only had Petrillo’s and the security guard’s six-chambered revolvers.

That left the junkie with either one slug left, or possibly none, if Harry hadn’t counted right. It was worth a small risk to nail the obviously crazy guy.

Harry steeled himself, and then jumped into the operating room doorway on one knee, his Magnum thrust out in front of him. He had just enough time to see Maggin standing over a naked body on an operating table and fooling around with some sort of crane, before he was knocked aside.

The Inspector fell over to the left, regaining his balance a second later. He spun to see that Petrillo had, for some reason, dived forward and pushed him out of the way. The patrolman remained crouched in the doorway for a moment, saying, “It’s a—”

Then his arm flew up and his legs straightened, throwing him back against the wall. He smashed into it solidly, then slid down to sit on the floor, looking like a thrown rag doll. His eyes were open, and he had a stupid, open-mouthed grin.

But while Harry watched, a thin, red line appeared in the middle of his face—as if an artist had drawn a vertical line from his brow to his lower lip. Then the line started to drool red ink. It wasn’t long before the blood was bubbling from behind the razor-thin cut, making a pool inside his shirt.

“It’s a laser!” The doctor completed the message for the dead Petrillo from the other side of the hall. “We use it for cataracts and cancer operations.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place, you asshole!” Callahan shouted angrily from the other end of the corridor. “I don’t give a fuck about million-dollar equipment, but this is a killing machine!”

“No it’s a lifesaving machine,” the doctor wailed. “It’s only powerful enough to make a shallow incision—no deeper than a scalpel!”

“Deep enough,” Harry yelled, waving his Magnum at the patrolman’s corpse. “Can you pull the plug on it?”

“It has its own power supply,” the doctor admitted.

“Wonderful,” Harry said to himself. And who knew when that power supply would run out? At close range, Maggin might be able to make confetti out of them all for days to come. “Who is that in there with him?” Callahan asked the doctor.

“That’s Mr. MacCurdy,” the surgeon replied. “We were removing some nodes from his vocal cords when this crazy man burst in. If we don’t get back in there soon, he’ll die from choking on his own blood.”

There seemed no way around it. Harry would have to race into the face of a death-ray if he didn’t want a drawn-out hostage negotiation process. By then, MacCurdy would already be dead, anyway. Harry tightened his grip on his Magnum and prepared himself.

“What are you going to—!” said the doctor, just as Harry ran forward into the operating room.

His timing couldn’t have been better. Maggin, in his maddened state, had been listening to the hallway conversation closely, so when Callahan moved in the middle of the doctor’s question, the junkie wasn’t prepared to act. Harry twisted to the side, trying to get a clear shot at the nut without hitting the overheating laser scalpel or the prone patient.

That gave Maggin enough time to grab the cranelike laser barrel and swing it over at Harry. The Inspector didn’t see anything, but he felt a slicing pain across his right arm. That wasn’t enough to make him drop his gun, but it was enough to throw off his aim.

When his finger pulled the Magnum’s trigger, the bullet smashed into the right side of Maggin’s pelvis, folding the junkie in two. Maggin collapsed, his scream of pain drowned out by the .44’s roar. A moment later, both were cut off.

When Maggin fell, he didn’t release his grip on the laser. He had pulled the device right across the top of his own head. The hardly visible beam of concentrated light sliced through his skull bone as if it were rice paper, and through his brain as if it were bread pudding.

Harry stayed exactly where he was, and yelled for the doctor. “Get the hell in here and turn this fucking thing off!”

The nurse and the surgeon ran into the room and tended to their patient and to the machinery. Quickly following was a small army of security guards and police, including DiGeorgio. Callahan was nursing his cut arm by moving it around.