Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death (3 page)

It was difficult conducting a love affair on one’s own. Sam’s hours had been erratic, and often he wasn’t around when she wanted him. But with Harry it was ridiculous. Weeks would go by. He’d call and swear to her he’d be over for dinner, only to cancel at the last minute because the investigation he was working on had taken a new twist. Or someone had been shot to death on the corner of Market and 8th. Or had his throat slit in a tenement on Mission.

Downright frustrating was what it was. There were times Sheila was ready to swear off Harry. But it was like swearing off cigarettes for a two-pack-a-day smoker, nearly impossible.

In any case, tonight Harry had assured her would be hers. Anything she wanted: cocktails, dinner, a show—anything. He owed it to her. But would he be able to keep his promise? Well, she would just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, she had to get dressed and ready for work. The sense of foreboding she’d felt earlier had begun to vanish. It was like a brief thundershower on a summer afternoon, quickly forgotten. Gallant was dead, and that was the end of the matter. She discarded the paper and went into the bedroom just in time to answer the phone.

“Hello?”

She could hear street noises, but nothing else. ‘Hello?” she said again, more insistently.

Again nothing. She angrily hung up. The foreboding returned.

Gallant watched the woman descend the stairs from the three-story building. She was prettier than he remembered. The intervening years had been kind to her. She wore her hair differently. It was tied up in back, accentuating the delicacy of her features, the blue-green eyes, the upturned nose, the curve of her lips. Her dress was long, nearly ankle length, but it was slit so that every few paces it was possible to behold a tantalizing view of her legs. There was no doubt in Gallant’s mind this was Sheila Richmond, the wife of the cop he’d gunned down. The phone call would have alarmed her, coming as it did right after news of his purported demise especially if he could be sure she had heard the broadcast.

She wouldn’t know what to think, and that was exactly how he wanted it. Actually he wasn’t sure why he was so anxious to frighten her. Especially when his principal goal was to humiliate and then kill Harry Callahan. But for six years, ever since he’d first laid eyes on her in the courtroom, he had been unable to get her out of his head. He’d been with better looking women. Ones with more flesh to grab onto, but there was something about her that appealed to him. The more he studied her face, even from a distance, the more he found to interest him. And there was another part of it, the perverse and highly erotic thrill of seducing the wife of a man one has killed—even if that seduction must be deceptive and achieved by force.

But right now, he had to confine his pursuit to observing her from afar. After all, he’d been out of prison for only twenty-four hours. He hadn’t gotten really used to the idea yet. What’s more, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he was a dead man. That was an idea that he wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to.

No matter, he had important business to attend to before he could concentrate on either of his intended victims. He needed clothes, money, a car. Last night, after engineering his faked death, he had gone to a men’s shelter not far from the bus terminal on Market Street. It was what the vagrant would have done, and God knows he looked as seedy and wasted as any vagrant. The odor of blood and loose stool that emanated from him was so powerful that the staff of the shelter had instantly stripped him down, given him a shower, and given him a new set of clothes. It was an indignity he suffered without complaint. After so much time in prison, he was accustomed to being treated as a marginal member of society.

The men’s shelter was not where he planned to spend any nights in the future. No, James William Gallant deserved the best. He was prepared to do whatever he had to to get it. The people at the shelter had given him a couple of bucks before sending him on his way. But all he’d needed were just a couple of dimes. One he’d already used. Now he dropped the second into the phone.

The voice on the other end was just as gravelly and suspicious as he remembered it.

“Turner here.”

“Turner, this is Gallant.”

There was a long pause on the other end. It wasn’t every day that one received a call from a dead man.

“Gallant’s dead.” Turner didn’t sound adamant about the point, he was just stating what he thought was true.

“The papers said he was dead, there’s a difference. You don’t believe everything you read in those rags, do you?”

“That may or may not be relevant.”

“Checkerboard would be relevant, wouldn’t it?”

Checkerboard was a little scheme he and Turner had run down eight years back. It involved hijacking meat belonging to the Checker Produce Company which is where the code name had been derived. Not many people knew about Checkerboard.

“Maybe you are who you say you are. Maybe you would care to come around to my office and have a little talk. Just so as I could get a look at you.”

“I want you to know right off, I’m going to need a few things.”

“Like money?”

“That’s a good start.”

“Well, everything’s possible. Of course, you might have to do some work for us in payment—that is if you are who you claim to be.”

“I’m prepared for that. You still where you always were?”

“That’s right. Some things never change, do they?”

C H A P T E R
T w o

I
t was approaching five o’clock. That meant if some disaster didn’t strike between now and six, Harry would be able to finally make Sheila’s on time. Something like that hadn’t happened in so many months she might consider it a miracle. Punctuality was a virtue that Harry kept trying to cultivate, but he couldn’t seem to get the hang of the thing.

He should not have been thinking about the possibility of a disaster occurring. It was bad luck, and he should have known by now that disasters never scheduled themselves for his convenience.

Dispatchers seldom allowed their personal feelings to intrude on their broadcasts. They delivered the facts—at least what shreds of information they had available to them—with a monotone that gave no hint as to how perilous a situation might be. The numbered codes sometimes made them sound as if they were announcing the day’s closing stock quotations; but this time it was different.

“Victor Two, Victor Two . . .”

“This is Victor Two, what is it?”

“You’re never going to believe this.”

“What have you got for me?”

“We’ve got a report somebody is hijacking the ferry to Tiburon.”

“Nobody hijacks the Tiburon ferry,” Harry said. “Where the hell would they go to? Alameda?”

“I know, I know it sounds crazy, but there it is. We got a call into the station at four-fifty-seven reporting a disturbance at Pier 43½. A second call was recorded at a minute before the hour saying that a man with a weapon was in the process of seizing the ferry.”

“I’m on my way.”

To Harry it sounded like a weirdo, one of those demented souls who in a desperate attempt to gain attention pulls a stunt that is sure to achieve front-page coverage. He just might also find a place in the back of the paper—on the obituary page.

But all Harry could think about was how he was going to disarm and apprehend this asshole, book him, and get to Sheila’s before it got so late he had to cancel another evening. She’d never forgive him, not even if it was for the sake of two or three dozen commuters and sightseers who were getting more than they bargained for when they purchased their tickets for the Red and White ferry.

Two patrol cars were already on the scene when Harry pulled up to the pier. But there was little activity on the part of the officers gathered there. They seemed to be waiting for someone with more authority before they committed themselves to a course of action.

Harry supposed that he was that authority.

“What we’ve got here, Inspector, is confusion,” said one of the cops.

“How is that?” he said, hoping for a more enlightening explanation.

“Well, the ferry’s out there, maybe twenty, thirty yards, but it’s stalled. We can hear the motors running, but it’s not moving. There’s been a lot of screaming from the boat, but it’s hard to tell what’s happening.” There was a man, Harry saw, at the end of the pier and he was shouting toward the boat through a bullhorn, but he’d evidently been doing this on and off for the last fifteen minutes without being rewarded with a response.

“Have you heard any gunshots?”

“Nothing. No shots. Just people screaming like I said. They’re supposed to be getting a chopper into the air any time now to see if a view from overhead can provide us with more information. And the Coast Guard is sending over a launch. Should be here any minute. The problem is we don’t want to panic the asshole on board. Were waiting for him to say something to us, tell us he wants to go to Cuba, or some shit.”

“Cuba,” said Harry. “You could do worse than Cuba.”

The cop didn’t seem to know what to make of this last remark.

Just then there was a burst of gunfire followed immediately by a roar of voices that reminded Harry of the reaction generated in the stands when Oakland scored a touchdown.

“I didn’t like the sound of that,” one cop noted glumly.

“Neither did I,” Harry said. “Is there some kind of motor launch I can use?”

“There is . . .” the cop said, “but you’re not going to take it out, are you? Not until we coordinate our strategy.”

“The coordination will just have to wait.”

Several police officers were scrambling down to the edge of the pier, brandishing their weapons. But there really wasn’t anything they could do. The sight of their guns could hardly have inspired much confidence among the beleaguered passengers on board the ferry.

Although he made no attempt to hide what he was doing, neither did Harry make himself conspicuous. He located a small motor launch tied up to the end of the pier and slipped down into it. It smelled strongly of gas, and Harry prayed that it hadn’t been abandoned here because something was wrong with it. But though it sputtered when he started it up, it eventually did respond. Harry began to navigate into the bay. He kept to the minimum speed, not in excess of five knots per hour, steering the craft in a northwesterly direction, at an angle the ferry had taken just before coming to its unscheduled stop. He assumed the hijacker—and for all anyone knew there could be more than one—would be on watch for any approaching vessels. He had no intention of alerting him until the last possible moment.

In the meantime, the long-promised helicopter appeared, hovering above the ferry, dipping as low as the pilot dared take it, before breaking off its reconnaissance mission.

Hoping the presence of the chopper would be a sufficient distraction to divert attention from himself, Harry abruptly swung the launch to the left so he was now running a collision course with the ferry. He kept down although the boat was so small he was afforded little protection.

He anticipated a response from the gunman. Yet until he’d closed nearly all the remaining distance between him and the ferry, nothing happened. Harry knew there’d be a reception, and there was. It was exactly the kind he’d figured on. It certainly wasn’t very hospitable.

The V-shaped window exploded with the first discharge of gunfire. Then the hull of the small craft was riddled with a sustained fusillade that must have damaged something vital inside because when Harry tried to steer nothing happened. He turned the wheel to the right, to the left, but the boat held to the course Harry had chosen for it earlier. In a few moments he would slam right into the stern of the ferry.

The only thing he could do was to cut the motor. But the momentum of the launch was so great, and the distance separating one craft from the other so small, that simply shutting down the motor was not enough to forestall the collision.

Harry thought of jumping, but didn’t. He was going to end up in the water in any case, only he trusted it would be in one piece.

The impact sent the motor launch up into the air so that for an instant it resembled an odd-looking porpoise surfacing. Then, with its fiberglass hull squashed and twisted, it dropped back into the bay. The ferry, however, didn’t escape injury. It listed way to the starboard side, throwing the passengers and their captors to the deck.

Battered as he was, Harry clung on to the tangle of wreckage. He was wet and bloody, but still functioning. Functional, too, was his .44 Magnum, which was perhaps more to the point.

He found himself drifting closer toward the ferry until he was directly opposite the stern. To his surprise, he saw a part of the lower deck had become exposed and here water was flowing in at a slow, but inexorable rate.

Using his arms to paddle, Harry managed to draw himself up flush with the ferry. His movements went unnoticed; or so he assumed from the absence of gunfire directed toward him.

On all sides of the bay, launches and cutters, many with machine guns mounted on their bows, were beginning to materialize. Harry could hear loud, but indistinct voices booming out of megaphones. They were no doubt demanding the hijackers surrender. In answer, there was another rattle of gunfire.

The opening was narrow, but Harry struggled to squeeze through it, and at last succeeded. It was unnaturally dark. The lights seemed to have gone out. Until his eyes could adjust, the only thing he was conscious of was the water he was standing in up to his knees.

He advanced cautiously, bumped up against an object. He reached down so he could determine what it was. A fender of a car. He was in the hold where the passengers parked their vehicles. Little by little, he could make them out, rows of Chryslers, Fords, Chevys, four-wheel-drives and U-Haul vans.

Way in the distance, he discerned the steps leading up to the passenger deck. He trusted he’d sowed enough confusion so no one would notice when he finally made his appearance on deck.

Slogging through the gathering water he found the steps. Mounting them as quickly as possible, he pushed against the door he found waiting at the top of the steps. It refused to give.