Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill Read online

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company,” the woman said.

  “That’s all right, dear. Captain Haines, meet my wife, Wendy.”

  Haines nodded in acknowledgment, wondering if you needed forty million dollars before a woman like this was a possibility.

  Her smile, he thought, was enchanting.

  “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I have to run and change.”

  With that she was gone.

  Keepnews’ voice brought Haines back from the reverie Wendy Keepnews had just induced. “So you will phone me like you said, sometime tomorrow morning?”

  “Absolutely,” Haines said. But his mind was far from pirated yachts. All he could think about was the aphrodisiacal powers of vast amounts of money.

  Keepnews had no faith in either Haines or the police force he represented; they would only claim that the matter was not in their purview and pass the buck to another ineffectual agency. No, Keepnews decided, unless Haines produced a miracle by tomorrow, he would have to seek another source of help. Very likely somebody who didn’t mind resorting to unconventional, and possibly illegal, methods. Somebody who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty doing it. Somebody like his old friend Harry Callahan.

  C H A P T E R

  T w o

  Just off Union Street, on Fillmore, a new discotheque called Dorthaan’s had opened. With a five-hundred-dollar annual membership fee, the clientele was bound to be well heeled, the kind of fabulous-looking people who photographers kill one another to capture on film. The kind of people you never see until very late at night; what happens to them during the day is anyone’s guess. Just like vampires in that respect.

  Dorthaan’s was not the sort of place that would appeal to Harry Callahan. It wasn’t the sort of place he could afford either. He was drinking at a bar across the street, which was why he happened to be near the place. The bar afforded a nice vantage point from which to watch the parade of guests, the tuxedoed men and the silken women, proceeding up to the top of the stairs and standing underneath the canopied entrance while they produced their credentials to obtain entrance. The two men who stood guard, in uniforms bright with brass buttons, were not giants exactly, but two pygmies placed one on top the other still wouldn’t reach their height.

  Being off-duty, and with nothing in particular to do this sizzling July night, Harry entertained himself with the spectacle across the street. He noticed that the men were almost invariably older than the women, rich, established, and balding. About the only thing they had in common with the women was a deep healthy tan.

  Harry had no reason to believe he’d recognize any of these people. But one, a man about fifty years of age, stuck out of the gathering crowd and not just because he lacked a tan. (It was hard to acquire a tan while you were doing five-to-ten in a federal penitentiary, after all.) He stuck out because Harry had been trying to run him down for the last six months or so. His name was Nicholas Cimentini, though his friends and his enemies—and they were more numerous by far—simply called him Father Nick. A shadowy figure in a shadowy world, he was heavily involved in the heroin trade, though he wouldn’t take any of the drug himself, obeying the dealer’s ancient law: Never do what you push.

  Technically speaking, Father Nick was on probation and subject to such a long imprisonment that by the time he got out he’d be collecting Social Security. But Father Nick had not allowed that prospect to deter him. Couldn’t stay away from temptation, Father Nick. Even the lowliest of low lifes on Mission knew that Father Nick had gone back in operation.

  Now it seemed to Harry, watching Father Nick and his date who looked like she could be a starlet, a model, a high-priced call girl, or maybe all three, that this was a very rich and rare opportunity for him. It would have seemed this way if he hadn’t had a few brews, but no doubt the alcohol heightened his resolve.

  Harry was certain Father Nick was carrying. Maybe a handgun, maybe some coke he was saving for his girlfriend. But he was convinced that the man was too complacent to expect an arrest for a probation violation. And obviously an establishment like Dorthaan’s was the last place he would expect to confront a police officer.

  As soon as Father Nick was inside the club, Harry left the bar and strode across the street, mounting the stairs that led to the canopied entranceway like he’d been doing this for years.

  The two uniformed guards held him with their eyes; they did not care for Harry’s looks nor for the way he dressed. Clearly they didn’t care for his presumption that he had any business here.

  “Can we help you, sir?” Spoken in the patronizing manner of men who delighted in helping people by tossing them back down the stairs.

  “Police officer,” Harry said, flashing his identification in their faces. They weren’t remotely impressed.

  “You may well be a police officer,” one agreed, “but that does not entitle you to free entrance to the club. Unless, of course, you are a guest of one of our members.”

  Harry owned that he was no one’s guest.

  “Then would you mind leaving, sir? This is a private club.”

  The guard’s voice carried utter conviction; he evidently assumed that Harry would turn right around and walk away. But Harry had not been this close to Father Nick since he had testified against him in court six years before, and he desperately wanted him back in the slammer. An opportunity like this might never come again. Father Nick had a habit of fading back into obscurity. Following his trail was like following a man through the Sahara during a sandstorm.

  “Problem is I do mind,” Harry said almost apologetically.

  The two men inched closer to each other, prohibiting Harry from advancing farther.

  “Have you a warrant?” the one on the left inquired.

  “No warrant. Just an overriding curiosity.”

  “We would not like to use force.”

  “Neither would I.”

  Saying this, Harry produced his .44 Magnum. He did not direct it at either of the guards. He did not have to. The very sight of the gun was persuasive enough.

  Recognizing that resistance would be futile, the two guards drew aside to permit Harry to pass. “You can anticipate a visit from your colleagues, sir,” one said to him.

  “Give them my best when you call. Tell them it’s Harry Callahan. I don’t like people getting my name wrong.”

  If the police came after Harry, they’d have one hell of a time trying to find him inside of Dorthaan’s. It was so crowded that movement in almost any direction was nearly impossible; you stood a better chance of passage in rush hour on the L.A. freeway. But even though you might be perfectly immobilized you could still see everything that was transpiring in the place. Mirrors were everywhere, on the walls, covering the high ceiling. Dancers, squashed up against one another whether they liked it or not, were reflected in an infinite number of ways; it was a voyeur’s paradise. The only problem was even voyeurs can suffocate if deprived of air for long enough. And the heat was growing worse the longer Harry stood where he was, crushed in toward the bar which he thought the safest—and sanest—place to be. Across from him a grotesquely large neon penis blinked on and off in time to the thunderous disco music that bombarded you from every point on the compass, sending vibrations up your legs, causing your vital organs to gyrate against the walls of your body. It was not hard to figure out the meaning of the red neon object that produced its own mesmerizing rhythm of light from one of the upper tiers. Meanwhile, too high to burn out anyone’s retinas, lasers dispatched narrow shafts of blue and amber over the heads of the writhing couples.

  Five hundred bucks a year for this, Harry thought, you’d be better off blowing it at the races.

  But where in this tumult could he hope to find his quarry? Fighting his way through the mob, he did not allow his attention to wander, although the temptation was considerable. Some extraordinary-looking women dressed in costumes that clung to their bodies by little more than a couple of threads were constantly dancing into his vi
sual field. Hard to avoid staring at them. Where did one meet women like this? Harry wondered.

  At last he caught a glimpse of Father Nick—but in a mirror way over to his right. The dilemma he faced was where on the floor Father Nick was. It could be he was just seeing a reflection of a reflection. But this was better than nothing.

  Father Nick wasn’t dancing. Didn’t look like the type anyway. No, he was standing off to the side (but which side?), conversing with another man whose fat jowly face and bulging belly suggested a life of fervent debauchery. The woman Father Nick had come in with, and the woman the jowly man had come in with, had been left to their own devices and were doing a dance with each other that might have put Salome to shame, though neither of them had a plate with someone’s head on it—so far.

  By the time the two women were sufficiently exhausted by their exertions, their glowing bodies slick with perspiration, Harry had managed to locate Father Nick’s exact whereabouts on the floor. Wasn’t easy. Magellan circumnavigating the globe for the first time couldn’t have had a much harder time of it.

  The two women returned to Father Nick and his melancholy fat friend with a look of anxiousness to them. Something, Harry surmised, was wrong. He shortly discovered what it was. They were hungry. Not for food. But for cocaine. Father Nick obviously was both prepared for the request and happy to please. From out of his pocket he extracted a vial filled to the brim with snow.

  Even as Harry made his approach no one in the party happened to notice him. The sight of the coke was so inspiring to the four of them that nothing short of the mirrored ceiling falling in could have distracted them. Even the fat man seemed delighted.

  For the fee these people were paying they expected that their privacy would be absolute, that the force of the law would be kept well out of the Dorthaan’s precincts. As a result, they did not feel that they had to retreat to the rest rooms for their indulgence. Indulgence was what Dorthaan’s was all about in any case.

  Harry couldn’t have cared less about the coke, or about its open display. The only thing that mattered was that it was in Father Nick’s possession and that he was freely distributing it.

  Only when he stepped into the small circle, interrupting their ritual, did his presence register. Not because of his deliberate intrusion so much as the fact that he was dressed so strangely—strangely in so far as the clientele that frequented Dorthaan’s was concerned. No tux, no outrageous leather, no jumpsuit unzippered to the navel, just ordinary, drab streetclothes.

  Nicholas Cimentini gazed at him with puzzlement, his brow knitted as he sought to recollect where on earth he’d seen this man before.

  Harry decided to spare him the trouble. He told him his name, told him then what he did for a living, amplifying the announcement with a display of his credentials.

  Father Nick still held the vial in his hand. It was impossible for him to deny that he was in possession of an illicit substance or that he was allowing others to use it. He was a man in his fifties, endowed with the kind of dignity you ordinarily expect in elder statesmen, the ones who divide up continents and peoples with a few quick strokes of the pen. His voice had a gravelly quality to it, like he’d gotten something perpetually stuck in his throat. “And so what can I do for you, Officer?” He didn’t sound the least bit intimidated or worried, though the two women backed away from the cocaine right away, snorting quickly so that none of the precious flakes would slip out of their nostrils. The fat man by his side looked melancholy again.

  “What you can do for me is accompany me to the police station.”

  Father Nick didn’t have to ask on what charge.

  Instead he said, “This is a farce. Do you have a warrant?”

  “That seems to be a common question tonight. But it’s not what I’d call relevant.”

  “This is a private club in case you haven’t noticed. You need a warrant.” He turned away from Harry, dismissing him.

  Harry grabbed hold of him so violently that Father Nick’s grip on his cocaine loosened. Much of it spilled to the floor, causing expressions of horror to appear on the faces of the onlookers. You felt that the women in particular could barely restrain themselves from diving down to sink their noses in the stuff.

  “I’m taking you in, Father Nick.”

  Father Nick evidently didn’t like being called Father Nick, not in this company anyway.

  The fat man came to life, reacting with speed you wouldn’t have anticipated from somebody of his bulk. A .38 stuck out of his right hand. Harry noticed it out of the corner of his eye, but refused to let it influence him. Instead, keeping his hand on Father Nick’s arm, he pulled him toward him, a fisherman reeling in his catch. His action caught Father Nick off guard while at the same time putting him right in the line of fire. The fat man had to duck around to line Harry up again.

  Though their female companions were loathe to stick around and watch how all this was going to turn out, they were either too panic-stricken or too high to move an inch.

  You could tell that the fat man was reluctant to fire his weapon in such a crowded public place, but he was beginning to run out of options. Most of his intelligence was buried in his cumbersome flesh so Harry didn’t anticipate anything very clever from him.

  Father Nick’s face had knitted itself into a permanent grimace. Because he was so unprepared for this he was still trying to figure out just what he should do. Mostly, he contented himself with expressing his outrage. “You fuck, what do you think you’re doing?” The idea that he should be busted and sent away for the rest of his life, simply for a gram or so of cocaine, was so ludicrous that he was having difficulty taking it seriously.

  The fat man decided to intervene forcibly, and he stepped right in between Father Nick, to whom he evidently owed his allegiance, and Harry. It was obvious what he intended to do. He raised his gun preparatory to bringing it down on Harry’s arm and breaking his grip. He did not realize that Harry was one step ahead of him. With his free hand Harry brought out his Magnum and sighted it on the fat man. The fat man thought the better of his plan and didn’t do anything at all. For a few moments, while dancers gyrated obliviously around them, the men were at a standoff.

  Abruptly, Father Nick conceded. “All right, enough of this shit. I’ll go with you.” His announcement caused a look of great perplexity to come onto the fat man’s face. Harry was just as baffled as he was. He had a feeling that this surrender was mostly for show and the coldness in Father Nick’s eyes convinced him he was right. Father Nick very casually nodded to the fat man. “You be good, girls,” he told his female companions, all at once very jocular as though this was a little business trip he was off on.

  Father Nick hadn’t reckoned on the mirrors. He was watching Harry, even trying to make conversation, as they walked away. But Harry was too preoccupied with keeping the fat man in view to listen. Nothing Father Nick had to say much interested him anyway.

  He wasn’t surprised to see the fat man’s image grow larger instead of receding in the tinted mirror directly ahead of him. Nor was he surprised to see the fat man bring his gun up. Without waiting for him to take proper aim—no sense giving him the benefit of the doubt—he pushed Father Nick to one side, almost straight into the arms of a bewildered redhead in a bright silver dress that could have put the lights in Times Square to shame.

  The fat man fired. His bullet managed to shatter a stretch of the mirror that had betrayed him, sending slivers flying in all directions. This naturally provoked a good deal of screaming in the immediate vicinity, but you had to go only a few yards in any direction and you wouldn’t have noticed a thing, not with the music—a numbing little time from Grace Jones—as loud as it was.

  Harry wanted to withhold his fire for fear of hitting some hapless innocent who had come to Dorthaan’s to dance, not to get shot at. But the fat man, flustered because Harry had outmaneuvered him, was not so scrupulous. He fired again. This time he struck something other than the mirror. The girl in the silver dre
ss, having danced into the way of the oncoming bullet—being too self-absorbed in her dancing to pay attention to such things—found herself suddenly sprawled out on the floor. She dazedly picked herself up, not knowing what had propelled her through the air so unexpectedly. Then she lowered her cloudy eyes to her dress and noticed the silver was turning a bright crimson at her stomach. The pain took a while, maybe longer than usual with the drugs in her system, to make itself felt, but when it did she shrieked and collapsed, sobbing, her hands making a futile effort to collect the blood flowing from the hole in her abdomen.

  By this time, Harry recognized that the fat man was so obsessed about stopping him from taking Father Nick that he would keep right on shooting. Dancers had begun to understand this too, and they were all making for an exit, many of them only barely cognizant of what the danger was—all they knew was that they better get the hell out of there.

  The fat man struggled through the panicking hordes, determined to overtake Harry. Harry was at a disadvantage in that he had Father Nick to look after.

  And no question, Father Nick wasn’t the most cooperative person in the world. He kept trying to loosen Harry’s grip and get himself swept away in the crowd. But Harry hadn’t gone this far, and risked so much, to sacrifice his prey now. Each time Father Nick would attempt to free himself, Harry wrenched his arm, hard enough to practically pull it right out of its socket. The intense pain that this caused Father Nick was sufficient to subdue him for a brief interval.

  Though it was possible for Harry to keep just ahead of the fat man he could not count on maintaining the distance between them for long, not with so many people pushing one another into an ever smaller space. Penetrating farther soon became impossible. The crowd formed a barrier that was not about to give way any time soon.

  Now the fat man caught sight of Harry. He aimed, he fired, but just as he did so he was jostled from the right so that the bullet went off to the right as well. It impacted at the base of a real estate dealer’s spine, his white tuxedo affording no protection at all. He was driven by the force of the bullet into a couple ahead of him, but because they couldn’t go forward he ended up tumbling backward. He looked startled but not especially hurt; that was because the bullet had severed his spinal cord, cutting off all feeling below the waist—for good.