Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death (7 page)

He had a picture of Page in his mind, and given the time, he might have been able to pick him out from a group, but in a situation like this there would be no time—he had to presume that men who lived in such a place would be armed. While he could have waited in Page’s room until he returned, he hadn’t the patience. No, he thought, he would take the whole lot of them out.

Grasping hold of the brass knob, he turned it slowly. But the door refused to give. These men were not that trusting. He could, of course, shoot the lock off, but that would alert the room’s occupants, and he didn’t want that to happen.

So, impatient as he was, he decided to bide his time in the expectation that with all the drinking they were doing, sooner or later one of them would come stumbling out to use the bathroom.

It was sooner rather than later. He stood back, against the wall, when he heard the door opening. A stocky man in an open white shirt appeared. Gallant took him wholly by surprise, digging the barrel of the .44 into his enormous stomach.

The man, who was not Page, was so shaken that all he could do was stammer unintelligibly and raise his hands. Gallant prodded him back into the room. He caught a glimpse of three men sitting around a bridge table, with a couple of decks of cards and several empty and half-empty bottles of liquor between them.

Giving them no chance to calculate the odds, he kicked the door shut, then discharged his appropriated weapon at point-blank range into the man’s gut. A ragged bloody stain took form on the white of his shirt as he pitched backwards, overturning the table, and causing a furious clatter as the liquor bottles shattered.

“What the fuck!” one of the men cried as he attempted to take shelter behind the fallen table.

They were all shouting at once. Only Gallant was silent. He dropped to one knee, fired at a second figure who was scrambling in the direction of an adjacent room.

With a piercing scream, he catapulted into the air, and smashed down in a lifeless heap. A moment later, a bullet whistled past Gallant and was impacted in the plaster of the wall directly behind him. He cursed himself for taking too long. There were still two survivors, one of them his intended victim, Page. He was practically certain it was Page who’d managed to get his weapon out in time to return the fire.

In an exposed position himself, Gallant threw himself to the floor just as a second round sped toward him. It opened a hole in the door. Aiming straight at the underside of the bridge table, he fired again. There was never any doubt that the .44 had the strength to penetrate the fragile metal surface of the table and hit the man behind it.

He did not succeed in killing Page, only in wounding him. But the pain must have been fierce for it caused him to jerk up involuntarily so that Gallant had a view of his head. He fired again.

Suddenly, half of his face disappeared. There was just a single eyeball dangling in a welter of red. Then Page dropped out of sight.

One man remained. For a few moments, Gallant couldn’t understand where he had gone. He walked into the other room and discovered him cowering beneath the bed. He lifted the mattress and regarded him, through the springs, with mild amusement.

“No, no, no, please,” the man was mumbling, and Gallant listened to him for only a second. He could begin to make out the distant wail of sirens, which meant someone had summoned the police. He squeezed the tip of the .44 between the springs so that the gun virtually rested in the trapped man’s hair.

Still imploring Gallant for mercy, he attempted to crawl out from under the bed.

Gallant hesitated, allowing the man to get his head into the open, thinking his victim’s predicament was not so much different from what his had been in Sheila Richmond’s apartment a few short hours ago. Then he discharged the gun.

The bullet entered at the base of the man’s spine. He buckled once with a hideous scream, then flopped down. Blood was strewn all over the mattress Gallant was still holding up with one hand. But the man was not dead, he was writhing, still struggling to get out from underneath the bed. Gallant put another bullet into the back of his neck.

As soon as he stepped into the hall again, he found himself facing the same old man in the undershirt who’d directed him to room 322.

The old man looked stupified, partly with booze, partly with astonishment. There was no telling how long he’d been standing in front of the door.

When he saw Gallant, a trickle of urine started to run down his bony legs.

“You going to say something about this, old man?” Gallant asked in a deceptively casual voice.

The old man might have been mute, certainly he was terrified, for he said not a word. He just shook his head emphatically.

Gallant shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t believe you.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the old man while he brought up the .44 and shot him in the groin. He was hurtled back against the opposite wall and crumpled up with a sad shudder. He’d had such a tenuous hold on life in the first place, that it did not require even this much for him to abandon it completely.

There was a commotion coming from far down the hallway, and up from the floors below. Gallant was unconcerned. He took the stairs down at an easy pace. Someone might have observed him, a fleeting figure with flecks of blood on his clothing, but he doubted anyone would have obtained a good look at him. Even if a witness did step forward to give the police a description of a suspect, no one would link it to James William Gallant. James William Gallant was dead.

It was now getting early in the morning, but the skies were as black as they’d been at midnight. A scattering of gray clouds hinted at another day of little sun and sudden fog. The hour and the weather were of little importance to Gallant. It was difficult for him to believe he had achieved so much since his escape from prison. He couldn’t quite remember exactly how many people he had killed during that time, but it seemed to him eight was the correct figure.

To that number there now had to be added one more—unless other people got in the way as they had the habit of doing. This was a man named Marc Torio. Gallant recalled he lived in Oakland, in one of those anonymous towering apartment blocks not far from Lake Merritt. He had a piece of paper with the exact address written down on it that he dug out of his jacket pocket. It was soaked through with someone’s blood and because it was, he had a problem deciphering the writing.

He got lost a couple of times. Somehow, in spite of the maps he consulted, he couldn’t find the Oakland Bay Bridge. He kept missing a turn-off or going too far. It was growing patently obvious to him how really exhausted he was, and that he was pressing his luck by continuing his campaign of vengeance. If he had any sense he’d quit, find a place to sleep, and resume tomorrow. But now that he had a momentum going, he could not bear to suspend operations, even for a few hours’ rest. Besides, he reasoned, there was just this one person left, this Marc Torio, before he could move onto other things.

The truth was he couldn’t recollect why he had chosen Torio as a victim while he was in prison. Unquestionably, the man was an avowed enemy of Harry’s, and it seemed to Gallant he had done some time, and that he had managed, even more cunningly than Page had, to evade the machinery of justice. But all the details of Torio’s case had slipped his mind. He wasn’t thinking straight. The gray clouds in the sky might just as well have been in his head. His vision wasn’t much better. When he gazed out his windshield toward the lights of Oakland, which he’d finally located, more by pure chance than following the directions he’d determined from his maps, all he could see was a dull haze of pink and amber.

When he got to Oakland, he found an all-night diner and stopped for some coffee. There were only a few other patrons at the counter, and only one girl behind it. They all stared at him and then quickly averted their eyes in embarrassment. It was only then Gallant realized what a grotesque sight he must be presenting, with so much blood spattered on him. He didn’t care to imagine how he smelled. He decided not to stay, but bolted up and returned to his car.

The sky was smudged gray, but it was finally getting light, signaling the arrival of the new day. Gallant was standing in the middle of an asphalt lot. Towering above him, on every side, were massive apartment buildings, one resembling the other. There was hardly any sound except for an occasional abrasive honk. He had read or been told somewhere that Lake Merritt was a refuge for wild ducks. He reasoned that was what he was hearing. Once in awhile, he’d look up in the sky and see a bird swoop down.

He could find no one to ask for the location of the building he was searching for, so he wandered from one doorway to the other, trying to match the address to what was scrawled on the bloodstained paper he held in his hand. He saw his hand was shaking. How the hell was he going to shoot Marc Torio, assuming he could find him, with his hand shaking?

Eventually, he came upon the building he was hunting for. The apartment number, 8C, indicated that a N. Raphael lived there. It could be his information was erroneous. Either Torio had moved away or else had never lived here to begin with.

Well, he would have to discover for himself. The door to the inside hallway was locked. There was a buzzer to the left.

Gallant rang one apartment after another, avoiding only the apartment marked N. Raphael. As he expected, someone buzzed him in.

He tried to stop shaking, but couldn’t. By the time he stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor, his whole body was trembling. He was feverish, and his skin was drenched in sweat.

Standing in front of 8C, he put his ear to the door and listened. He thought he could make out a person’s voice, but it was muffled, and indecipherable.

For almost three minutes, he struggled with the lock to get it open. It was a simple lock, and if he was less anxious, he could have had it open in half the time. At last it snapped, and he pushed against the door.

It wouldn’t yield all the way. A brass chain was pulled taut in the gap between the door and wall.

It was a one-room apartment as far as Gallant could tell. The bed was situated along the opposite wall and there was a man and a woman in it, the sheets tangled about their naked bodies. A lamp in the far corner of the room was on, and Gallant had a fairly good view of the woman, though not of the man. The man might have been asleep, for he was partially obscured in darkness. But the woman was awake. It was possible she’d heard him opening the door because she was propped up on her arms, her eyes riveted on him, a very dazed expression on her face.

Gallant noticed she was not very pretty, but her body was a pleasing enough sight. One large breast was visible above the thicket of sheets.

“Marc, Marc, wake up,” she was saying.

This was all that he needed to know. He assumed it was Marc Torio she was attempting to rouse, and not some other.

Swiftly he raised the .44 above the level of the chain and shouted, “This one’s for Harry Callahan,” he fired at the sleeping figure.

The woman screamed. The man jerked out of bed, and for a second Gallant was certain he’d missed. But then he saw all the blood spilling from the man. He’d been thrown partways out of the bed and it appeared he was attempting to get himself erect. Gallant fired a second time, though his hand trembled uncontrollably. His shot struck the man in the chest and travelled through his body, hitting the woman in the ankle. Rather than continue shooting, he shut the door and ran for the elevator. It was unlikely the woman—the single witness he’d left alive this night—had gotten more than a fleeting glimpse of him. He wanted someone left alive to remember hearing the name Harry Callahan.

C H A P T E R
S i x

“Y
ou’ve seen the papers this morning?” Bressler was walking back and forth across the length of his office, his hands behind his back. Harry wouldn’t say he looked angry so much as apoplectic. People about to collapse of a stroke might resemble his superior officer at this particular moment.

“I’ve seen the papers.”

“And that’s all you have to say?”

Harry nodded.

“In the space of six or seven hours, eight people were killed and one wounded, all with the same weapon. A .44 Magnum we fished out of Lake Merritt. One of the victims lived in Oakland, the rest were here in San Francisco, even so they lived in different parts of town which leads one to believe that our killer was doing a lot of travelling last night.”

Harry allowed that this was the conclusion one could draw.

Bressler wasn’t at all pleased by the lack of response from Harry. He expected a reasonable explanation. Frustrated, he went on, “Now, what connects all these victims, including a distinguished judge and his wife? Well, it turns out that at least a few of them were acquainted with you. I mean Marc Torio. I mean Judge Gallagher. I mean Morris Page. Do you deny that?”

Harry couldn’t, and didn’t.

“Now I am not for a moment suggesting that you are in any way responsible for these murders.”

“That’s good of you.”

“No sarcasm. If there’s one thing I can’t tolerate, it’s sarcasm from you.”

“I sympathize.”

Bressler gave him a malevolent look, but decided it best to continue. “All right, what we seem to have is a set-up. We even have a victim who says the murderer shouted your name. That’s as obvious a set-up as I’ve ever encountered. It’s a goddamn embarrassment. Especially with this asshole running around using a .44 just like yours.”

“It isn’t just like mine.”

“What do you mean, it’s a .44 Magnum, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. But it isn’t
like
mine. It is mine.” Harry figured he might as well admit it, because once the lab tests were run, they’d know soon enough in any case. “It was stolen from me last night while I was asleep.”

“Shit.”

“That was what I said exactly.”

“You’re certain it’s your gun?”

“Pretty certain, yes. You run a ballistics check, but I’m sure it’ll match up.”

“Christ.”