Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death Read online

  Harry handed the megaphone to the cop nearest him. The cop scurried from the cover of his squad car’s fender, grabbed the horn, and scurried back. Harry turned. Captain Avery was shaking his head furiously and mouthing the word “No.” Harry turned back to the house and stepped over the picket fence.

  He zipped open his cordoroy jacket as he started the long walk to the front steps. He felt the reassuring weight of his Magnum in its shoulder holster as well as the three auto-loaders in his jacket pocket. He saw a variety of details on the house that he hadn’t noticed before. The porch was built from a wooden frame that seemed to attach itself to the front of the place. On either side of the stairs was balsa-wood crosshatching.

  The thick wooden front door was flanked by two medium-sized picture windows consisting of a large central pane and four thinner, smaller, rectangular ones. Above that was the porch ceiling. Above the porch roof were three more regularly sized windows and above that were two gable windows, both made of stained glass.

  Harry made it to the first step. He looked to his left and right. Cops, cops, uniformed and plainclothed behind marked and unmarked cars, as far as the eye seemed to see. Harry made it to the second step. Nothing happened. The silence was deafening and other clichés of that type. Harry’s shoe descended on the third step. Only one more step and a porch that seemed as long as a football field to go. Harry made it to the fourth step.

  He was bringing himself onto the porch when it happened. The simple wood mailbox nailed to the porch column next to Harry’s head exploded into several pieces.

  Harry fell down, instinctively throwing his body to the least exposed area. He fell backward and to the side, hitting the grass to the left of the Uhuru house stairs. The world blew up above him. The simultaneous tightening of so many trigger fingers made a sound that was extremely impressive. The crash of those bullets hitting anything they were pointed at was also humbling. Harry resisted putting his palms over his ears. Instead, he dragged out his .44 and rolled toward the crosshatching of the porch.

  The world continued to sound like an acid rock and roll band as his back slapped the side of the porch. He looked up to see whole hunks of the porch’s floor go spinning off into the yard. It wouldn’t be long before someone hit him, either accidentally or otherwise. Harry pushed himself as hard as he could against the balsa-wood barrier.

  The thin planks gave way, and Callahan was rolling across the dirt under the porch. Little spotlights of sunshine reached from the flooring to the ground, thanks to bullet holes. Harry stopped to look out the hole he had made in the wall section of the porch setup. None of the front-line cops seemed to be paying any attention to him at all. He took the moment to collect his thoughts.

  Where had that first bullet come from? Harry remembered seeing it rip apart out the corner of his eye. He remembered unconsciously listening for the weapon’s report to sound from either inside the house or in the rank and file of the police platoon. He remembered not hearing a report. Any bullet powerful enough to smash that mailbox had to make a noise . . . unless it was silenced. And why would anyone want to use a silenced high-powered weapon?

  Harry scowled deeply and with feeling. The signs of conspiracy were creeping all over the Uhuru house like ivy. But to prove anything, Harry had to get out of his present predicament.

  Rolling over so that he faced the house wall, he saw a small cellar window near the ground. Sure enough, his impression that the porch had been attached whole to the house now seemed to be correct. There was a basement window beneath the wooden structure. Harry straightened himself out and crawled the remaining distance. The glass was caked over with years of grime, but Harry could see through it enough to note that no one was around. He grabbed ahold of the frame and pulled. With a nasty creak, it gave way.

  Harry didn’t stand on ceremony. He immediately pulled it all the way open and tumbled through. He slid down the rough rock wall a few feet and landed on the concrete floor. Across the basement, one young black man was guarding the door to the back yard. He wasn’t expecting a cop to roll out from under the porch, so he wasn’t fast enough. By the time he had started to bring his army surplus rifle around, Harry was pointing the Magnum at his head.

  “It would be a shame to splatter that fine Afro all over the place,” Harry said softly. “Why don’t you put the gun down so I don’t have to.”

  The boy entertained the notion of giving up his life for Uhuru, but then he looked down the .44 barrel and saw his maker in Cinerama. The rifle went down very fast, and the hands went up.

  Harry walked across the cellar, placing the Magnum barrel on the boy’s forehead. He looked disdainfully at the rifle. “Hungarian sniper rifle,” Callahan commented, “circa 1943.” Then he hit the boy in the jaw with a sharp left. The black kid’s head snapped back and hit the cellar door frame. The combination of the two blows was enough to put him out for the duration of the day.

  Harry didn’t wait for the kid to crumble to the floor. He was already jumping up the basement steps three at a time. He slowed only when he neared the door at the top. He wondered whether he should wait in relative safety until it was all over or risk entering a house he knew almost nothing about, filled with rabid young militants armed to the teeth. Then he pictured Captain Avery’s face. Harry opened the door.

  Immediately three bullets bashed their way through the wood from the other side and slapped into the sloping concrete above Harry’s head. All thought of a cautious approach fled from Harry’s thinking. He ducked, swung himself forward, hit the door with his shoulder, and catapulted into the kitchen. He came up in a crouch with his gun ready.

  The room was empty. The bullet trio had come through the windows from outside. Harry kept down as he moved toward the adjoining room. The chatter of weapon fire remained constant as he steeled himself for entry into the dining room. From his position low to the floor he saw one and a half black backs through the doorway. They, too, were crouched, aiming fairly ancient rifles out breaks in the window boarding.

  Harry put a loose plan of action together. As he remembered from being led to the Steinbrunner corpse in the cellar, the dining room adjoined the living room, which had a staircase leading up. Harry’s brilliantly incisive plan was to somehow get to that stairway alive. It was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  Also, given the situation, Callahan didn’t want to unduly surprise his unknowing hosts. In their state they’d cut him down as a panicky afterthought. So instead of marching or charging into the dining room, Harry continued his crouching crabwalk.

  The dining room was a mess. Tables were overturned. All the glasses were broken. The chairs looked like a giant cat had exercised his claws on them, and the wall looked like a connect-the-dots game in a children’s book. Harry could not clearly recall what had been caused by the shoot-out and what was the way Uhuru normally lived.

  His entrance did not go unnoticed. As soon as he moved in, he saw a Uhuru member to his left, hiding behind an overturned easy chair. The guy had a .22 Saturday Night Special clutched in his hands, which was no good for the long-range fight but perfectly suitable to cause Callahan some internal damage. Still not wanting to take anyone else’s attention away from the torrent of cop bullets that was perforating the place, Harry leaped atop the chair, catching the black man’s gun wrist in one hand and swinging the barrel of the .44 across his scalp. The man screamed in pain so Harry hit him again, coming down with the Magnum butt right in the middle of his head.

  He stayed quiet, but his previous scream had been enough. Harry looked over as one of the men by the window saw him. The man turned completely around and leaped to his feet, his rifle coming up on a level with Harry’s chest at the same time.

  Harry threw himself off the chair and swung his own gun around just as a cop bullet sizzled in from outside and drove halfway through the standing Uhuru’s back. The black man fell face first flat on the floor, the heavy rifle clattering next to him, unfired.

  That got the other me
n to turn around, but they were smart enough not to get up. Harry saw his chance, so he rolled to his feet and ran as fast as he could backward into the living room.

  Pieces of the wall ripped off after him. Whether it was the Uhuru’s shooting or more police lead he never found out. He slipped on some broken crockery on the floor, stepped on an outstretched hand, and slammed into the closet door next to the stairway. He turned around, dazed, as Uhurus across the living room saw him and brought their guns to bear.

  Harry was framed in the entrance to the stairs as a veritable firing squad blasted at him. The closet door, the tattered rug between his feet and the walls were peppered by the shots, sending Callahan back and down. He fired his own gun once between his outstretched legs, then scrambled over a landing and around a corner.

  He stood up on the stairs as a wild-eyed Uhuru came roaring down. The black man stopped five steps up from Harry and tried to bring his rifle around. Harry fell forward, grabbed the guy’s ankle, and pulled. The man slipped and fell heavily backward, bashing his head on the second landing. Harry ran up, grabbed the rifle from the wounded man’s hands, and used it like a golf club to send the Uhuru cartwheeling the rest of the way down.

  Harry raced around the second stairway corner to three more steps and a thin hall leading to four rooms. Light was streaming in a destroyed window frame at the other end of the hall. Figures would dart in and out of this light flood like ghosts, racing from one room to another. The accumulated heat was so great that steam seemed to be rising from the floorboards.

  Two Uhurus from the nearest room ran out toward the stairs. Just as they saw the cop, Harry buried the rifle butt in the face of one and shot the other in the stomach. The hit one fell backward like a board and the shot one spun back into the room he came from.

  Harry didn’t wait for reinforcements. He raced up the last three steps and charged down the hallway. He had passed two of the rooms on the floor when a big black man, bald as a billiard ball, slammed into him from the side. Harry saw an army .45 in his hand so he grabbed it. He felt the other man do the same with his .44 wrist.

  They spun farther down the hall, slamming against the walls as they went. Their faces were no more than three inches away from each other as they struggled. The Uhuru tried to knee Callahan in the balls. Harry blocked it with one leg and tried to keep the black man’s back facing the broken window at all times.

  The bald man screamed in frustrated rage and shot off his .45. The gun sounded unnaturally loud in the enclosed space and seemed to bring a flurry of new police activity through the window. A bullet ground a hole in the wall next to Harry’s nose. He heard another shot thunk into the black man’s leg. The Uhuru shouted again. Harry threw all his weight forward. The two crashed down into the corner, Harry on top.

  The cop wrenched himself from the bald man’s grip and stood. The wounded Uhuru kept shouting and tried to sit up and aim his .45 at the same time. Harry tromped on the man’s neck. The shouting stopped and the man went down for good. Harry spun, seeing another stairway at the end of the hall just as another Uhuru ran out of the fourth room. Before the man could react, Harry grabbed the barrel of his rifle, spun him around toward the window, and kicked him as hard as he could in the stomach. The Uhuru flew backward out of what was left of the dormer.

  Harry didn’t stay to watch the man dive backward down, smash face first into an abutment, and land on his side in the yard. He was up the second stairway as fast as he could go. The light was much less there, and there were only two doorways cut out of the sloping roof line. There was a small landing between these two doors upon which another Uhuru was waiting. He didn’t blast Harry as soon as he showed because he wasn’t expecting a white cop yet. By the time he brought his gun to bear, Harry had swiped it aside with his gun hand and smashed the Uhuru as hard as possible in the face.

  The black man stumbled back, his nose a crushed and bloody mess, but he didn’t go down. He fired his gun into the floor. Harry saw the bullet hit between two rafters off the landing. The lead went right through. Harry realized that the attic consisted only of these two rooms and the small landing. All the rest was insulated rafters. Harry threw subtlety to the wind and leaped into the air. He grabbed one sloping roof rafter in each his hands, swung, and kicked the last Uhuru in the chest with both feet.

  The black man flew backward off the landing, landed on the orange padding between two horizontal ceiling rafters and kept going. He slammed into the ceiling of the second floor and crashed through. In a shower of plaster, concrete and insulation, he smashed into two of his brothers in the first room next to the staircase.

  Harry kicked open the door to his left. The room was empty. He heard steps on the stairway. He shot down it without looking. He rammed the right doorway with his shoulder. It broke open, Harry fell and rolled. He came up with his Magnum pointed between Big Ed Mohamid’s eyes.

  The tiny attic room was like an oven. The only opening to the outside was a small stained-glass window, and no one was about to open that. Big Ed sat on a crate in the corner farthest away from the window. His eyes were downcast, and he was unarmed. His sweaty black face was colored in blues, greens, and reds. He looked calmly at Harry’s Magnum.

  Three black men charged into the room. They, stopped when they saw Callahan’s target. Harry looked at them, then returned his gaze to Mohamid.

  “Leave us,” Mohamid told his men.

  “But,” said a nervous one, “the cops . . . they’re all around us . . .”

  “Leave us!” Mohamid demanded. The men slowly, reluctantly, left. They closed the door after them.

  The noise of the bullets sounded very far away now. Harry felt like he had entered a mausoleum of a patriarch not yet dead. The atmosphere was stifling, the room was claustrophobic, the smell was nauseating, and the place was bathed with otherworldly colors.

  Mohamid ignored the gun in front of his face. He looked back down and frowned.

  “Nothing has changed,” he said, his voice empty in the strange place.

  “Now is not the time to discuss it,” Harry said. “Men are being killed downstairs.”

  “How could I stop it?” Mohamid asked.

  “Give up,” Harry seethed. “Surrender.”

  “They would kill us anyway,” Mohamid said sadly. “That’s why they’re here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Harry demanded. “What am I doing here, then?”

  “Committing suicide,” Mohamid decided. “We did not fire the first shot.”

  “Neither did they,” Harry revealed. “Someone’s playing us both for assholes.”

  Big Ed Mohamid looked up then, a dawning light in the back of his black eyes. “You know, then?”

  Callahan pushed his .44 back into its shoulder holster under the scuffed jacket. “I know something’s definitely fucked, and we’re both doing our best cunt impersonations.”

  “I didn’t think anyone would believe me,” Mohamid marveled.

  “No one will,” Harry said. “But me. If you want something done about it, though, you’ve got to stop this mess.”

  Mohamid seemed about to agree when the smoke began curling from under the door. It was a thick white smoke intermingled with curls of black. It certainly wasn’t more steam heat.

  “Ah shit,” Harry said. “The place is on fire. Is there any other way out of here?”

  “No,” Mohamid said.

  “Come on,” said Harry, hauling Big Ed up by the arm. Callahan pushed him toward the door. Mohamid got it open, and the pair stood on the landing with smoke and little licks of flame belching out from the hole in the second floor ceiling.

  “It’s coming from the front,” Mohamid realized.

  “And any second that insulation is going to blow or start giving off poison fumes,” Harry shouted, already pounding down the back stairs. “Move it!”

  The Uhuru leader ran down after Harry, and the two turned the corner at the bottom to face a wall of crackling yellow. Mohamid started coughing o
n the back of Harry’s neck.

  “Miserable fuckers probably didn’t take time off from target practice to call the fire department,” Harry growled, trying to spot a way out.

  “Out the window!” Mohamid yelled above the roar of the flames, pointing to the opening Harry had kicked the other Uhuru man out of. Harry grabbed Mohamid by the collar and threw him out the portal. A second later, the garage blew up.

  The blast sent Harry smashing onto the attic stairs as debris hurled in from the window. Glass shards and wood slivers splashed onto his back as he lay dazed. The explosion only served to fan the flames higher. When Harry’s mind cleared, his shoe was smoldering.

  He stamped out the small flame with his other shoe and retreated quickly up the steps, the fire covering the broken window. He kept low to the ground, but he couldn’t keep from hacking because of the noxious cloud. He crawled into the right-hand room. Still lying stomach down, he shot out the small stained-glass window. He dragged himself over and looked out. It was a sixty-foot drop, straight down.

  Harry rolled over onto his back and looked out the open door. A sheet of flame had leaped up between the two rooms. He took a deep breath, got up, ran over, and shot away both door jams. The door fell on his foot. His teeth gritted, his head pounding, and his lungs entirely closed off, Harry shoved his gun back, grabbed the door on both sides and charged out of the room.

  He felt all the hair on his hands crisp up and blow away. An astonishing pain ripped through each finger and clamped onto his brain. He heard a horrible scream, but he couldn’t tell if it was him or the devastating fire. He closed his eyes and ran until the door became too heavy and his legs wouldn’t move anymore.

  He fell forward into the other room. The door landed on its bottom corner and leaped against the wall. Harry’s knees gave way and he slammed into the hot wood floor on his face. The first thing he saw when he came to seven seconds later were the backs of his hands stretched out in front of him. They looked like two teriyaki steaks well done. He was almost sorry he woke up. The pain and the heat started again.