Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (12 page)

“Including kidnapping a Japanese girl from the West Coast?” Harry wondered aloud. Sergeant Inagaki nodded.

“She must have some connection to one of the gangs somehow,” the Chicago cop figured.

The two fell silent as Callahan considered his situation. It was now fairly clear that Suni was being held hostage. It was unlikely that she was a member of these gangs, so her past—the past she would not share with Harry—had caught up with her. And in order to free her of it, Harry would have to fight his way right into the heart of the Japanese gang war.

Only when Inagaki turned off the highway for one of the suburban exits did Harry speak again. “This isn’t the way to downtown.”

“I think it is best if you stay with me and my wife tonight,” the sergeant replied. “It will be safer for you. Besides, we can do much better together than separately. I hope you will agree.”

Begrudgingly, Harry accepted the offer. He didn’t want to waste any time before searching for Suni, but he had to admit that blundering all over the city wouldn’t help matters. Inagaki offered him a few more hours of information and reconnaissance. He looked over at the gleaming towers of apartments, bank buildings, insurance companies, hotels, and tourist attractions which made up the Chicago skyline. Somewhere amid all the glossy metal and glass was Suni. Harry felt sure of it. And he vowed to find her—dead or alive.

Inagaki lived in Arlington Heights, a residential suburb of Greater Chicago, or Chicagoland as it used to be called. His was a small stone house at the end of a wide, winding street. It was set on a little hill and surrounded by trees and a large, sloping, grassy yard. It was an extremely comfortable-looking place and area—giving Harry a feeling of peace. That unusual feeling made the San Francisco inspector wander along the grounds toward the house as Inagaki went up the curving stone walk, pulling out his door keys.

Around the side of the house, Harry could see a well-cultivated garden, its colorful flowers blowing in the lukewarm spring breeze of early evening in Illinois. Harry turned back to the front just as Inagaki slid his key into the front door lock. Harry looked toward the street, his eyes suddenly focusing on one section of a tree midway down the lawn.

Crucified on the tree was a cat. There was a nail through each of its paws, and its stomach had been sliced open. Its dripping guts hung down below its outstretched legs.

Harry stopped in his tracks, staring at the slaughtered house pet. Inagaki, unable to see the thing from the front steps, twisted the key, turned the knob, and then called to Harry as he pushed the door open. If he hadn’t pivoted to the side of the steps when he did so, the subsequent shotgun blast would have torn out his middle.

As it was, the front door blew outward in a hail of highly concentrated steel pellets, hurling Inagaki to the side and causing Harry to duck instinctively. The boom of the shotgun blast rolled across the lawn and echoed against the neighboring trees.

Callahan raced to where the sergeant had fallen in the bushes covering the right side of the house’s foundation. As he passed the front door he could see a sawed-off shotgun moored just inside through a jagged hole in the center of the wood. It was set up in such a way that pushing the door in would depress its trigger.

Harry grabbed the Japanese cop by the shoulder as Inagaki painfully twisted over. “I’m all right,” he said. Harry immediately left his side and leaped up the steps. “No!” Inagaki warned. “I know these gangs’ methods. I’m one of the detectives assigned to their investigation. Their specialty is traps within traps.”

The Chicago cop struggled to his feet and joined Harry on the porch. Looking through the hole in the door, he pointed to a slack wire that was attached to the shotgun trigger which led deeper into the house.

“You see?” he said. “There’s another surprise waiting.” Inagaki said it with almost glee. He seemed to find the gangs’ cunning fascinating. He called out his wife’s name. “Denise!” There was no answer. Only then did his smooth features bunch up in worry.

Harry had enough of waiting. He moved his hand forward to push the door all the way open and charge in. Inagaki caught his wrist in mid-move. “No,” he repeated. “We must use caution.”

“There’s a time for caution,” Harry growled, remembering the dead cat. “And it’s passed.” He shook off the Oriental’s hand and ran toward the garden. When he rounded the side wall, his worst fears were confirmed. He could see that the back door was still intact. So if the wire running into the house was not attached to another gun to blow out the back door, what was it attached to?

Harry found out when he looked into the ground-floor bedroom window. Inside there was a woman bound stringently to a chair with a sack over her head and what was obviously a bomb balanced precariously on her knees. From what Harry could see, it had a thin glass shell on one side which, if broken, would detonate the explosive as well as a timer attached to a wire.

The timer had been set in motion when the shotgun’s trigger had been pulled. It too would set off the explosive. Harry immediately tried the window. It was locked. He moved back two feet and dived forward. He smashed through the glass and wood, slamming to the bedroom floor. The noise made the bound woman start, jiggling the bomb. It rocked, slipped and then toppled toward the floor.

Harry rolled and caught it. He rolled back and threw it out the window. As Terry Inagaki came charging into the room from the front, the device exploded in the back yard, leveling one wall of the back porch.

C H A P T E R
F i v e

D
enise Inagaki cried over her dead cat while Harry and her husband plotted out an initial strategy to counter the terror.

With the hood off and her body untied, the wife turned out to be an attractive half-breed in her late twenties wearing a striped top and jeans. If Harry was any judge of exotic good looks, one of her parents must have been American while the other was Japanese.

Her husband marveled again at the gangs’ guile while the local police looked over the damage and took notes.

“Now you see what we are up against, Inspector,” the sergeant said. “The explosive was constructed so that it would detonate either with a shock or by timer. If it fell off my wife’s knees, it would have exploded at her feet. Or it would have gone off in her face seconds after my supposed death by shotgun. We both owe our lives to you.”

“Never mind that.” Harry waved the gratitude away. “What’s the point of killing a cop and his wife? Why get innocent bystanders involved?”

“It is a warning,” Terry explained. “It is not a good sign. And we are not so innocent. The gangs know I am getting close. This means that they want me off their backs bad enough to threaten my loved ones. It means that their own fight is coming to a head. Whatever the final outcome of the Nihonmachi underworld fight, it will happen very soon.”

The whole thing stunk worse than a train wreck of spoiling meat. Harry didn’t feel comfortable fighting a group willing to balance a bomb on a helpless woman’s lap. That torturing was bad enough, but to then slaughter the family cat was the afterthought of practiced sadists. Harry remembered the raped and strangled girl at the wax museum. The sooner he found Suni, he figured, the better he would feel.

“So what can you do about it?” Harry asked the Oriental policeman.

“We,” Inagaki corrected him. “What can
we
do about it. You have proven your worth this night. I think I can trust you with a little information.” The two walked from the ruined back porch to the peaceful garden on the side of the house. Harry’s back was to the wall, but he could see the Japanese’s face illuminated by the living-room lights.

“Our contacts inside the Kozure Ronin organization tell us that the gang will hit the First Union City Bank near the entrance of Wacker Drive tomorrow morning. It seems as if they need more funds to fuel their war. Chicago’s finest will be out there in force, but I think it might be advisable to have you on hand as a backup. What do you say?”

Harry checked his watch. It was seven o’clock, Tuesday evening. He had just enough time to check out the bank area, do some planning, and get some missed sleep. “No offence, Terry,” he said, “but do you think you can get me into town at a speed faster than five miles an hour now?”

The structure of Chicago was magnificent. Dirty Harry Callahan took a long, hard snootful of the city as he left his hotel room at eight-fifteen Wednesday morning. The ten hours of sleep he had taken was just what he needed to reload his mental and physical weapon. And he hoped the four-speed loaders in his two jacket pockets would be enough to keep his literal weapon filled.

He walked out the Sheraton’s entrance to stand at the foot of the Loop’s northwest corner. This downtown business center was locked in by the rectangular-shaped tracks of the elevated train and the bodies of water all around. To the east was Lake Michigan. To the north and west was the Chicago River. Harry stood under Wacker Drive and in the geographic center of Marina City, the Merchandise Mart, the Opera House and Orchestra Hall, and the Chicago City Hall.

It was a bustling, shiny area in the middle of the morning’s scurry to get to work. It was the worst possible time for a bank robbery. Harry considered the situation as he walked toward the bank, his Magnum heavy, solid, and somehow comforting under his left arm. He looked up at the double-decked Wacker Drive—with the local traffic crawling on the upper section and the express lanes filling up on the lower.

He looked over at the elevated trains, which only crossed the drive in two places, as the roadway moved alongside the river. Then he checked the city streets to and from the bank itself. These were relatively clear, but the sidewalks were full of innocent workers straggling along, trying to get to their offices. Their presence would make it dangerous for the cops to move in or fight back if the robbers started anything.

The First Union City Bank was in the middle of the right-hand section of the block. Harry hung back in the doorway of a shoe store down and across the street. He scanned the area for any police giveaways, but there was not a cop car or motorcycle in sight. Undercover men could be crawling all over the place, but Harry couldn’t pick them out. The sidewalk vendors, window cleaners, and panhandlers all looked authentic. Either the Chicago force had the world’s best actors or something was very, very wrong.

Harry didn’t have time to double check. The criminal festivities began early. As he started out from his vantage point, two nondescript vehicles turned the corners onto the block from different directions. One was hightailing it down Harry’s side of the two-way street, and the other was moving away from the San Francisco cop, on the bank’s side. Both cars screeched to a halt in front of the bank, across the street from each other, one pointing north, the other pointing south.

The cop tried peering through the windshield, but it was tinted and the morning sunlight glared off the glass, further obstructing his view. Harry reached into his jacket, expecting a double team of robbers to leap out of the cars any second. However, the moment his fingers touched the .44 butt, the bank doors exploded outward.

It was completely unexpected and completely effective. The metal twisted and the glass spun out, cutting down a swath of pedestrians where they walked. A makeshift path from the entrance to the street was created by stunned, cut, falling innocents. Harry stepped forward, his hand frozen on his gun, his eyes squinting, and his jaw nearly dropping open. His teeth ground against each other as six masked men—dressed the same way as Suni’s kidnappers—came leaping out of the smoking hole in the bank’s doors.

They had been inside all along, he realized. Somehow they had gotten in from the back, sides, or top, rifled the safe, and then blown their way out front where not one, but two cars waited for them. As the half-dozen robbers split into two groups, Harry looked around wildly for any sign of the police. As near as he could see, he was the only nonrobber standing on the street. The rest of the pedestrians had dropped to the cement like dominoes.

The block was a smoking, glass-strewn mess with a soundtrack of screaming voices, screeching tires, and roaring engines. As Harry hauled out his Magnum and stepped onto the sidewalk, three masked men tumbled into the car nearest the bank, and the other trio ran across the street toward the other car. Harry saw that each man carried a bulging sack in one hand and a shiny new submachine gun in the other.

Callahan brought the .44 up to eye level and blasted the last of the three street-crossers without so much as a “Halt!” The man flew back, the bag soaring in one direction and the machine gun going in another. The other two kept running and twisting past other cars, but took a second to blast back at the single man.

Harry fell to the ground as the front of the shoe store seemed to be eaten up by billions of supertermites. The glass disintegrated and hunks of wood framing, plastic display cases, and leather shoes were thrown into the air and ripped apart. Little frisbees of concrete were thrown off the sidewalk and into Harry’s face as he crouched. Thankfully, no prone pedestrian was hit.

The surviving pair in the second team dived through the second car’s open window as the first car squealed off north. Harry rolled away from the shoe-store entrance, his gun out and pointing as the second car jumped away from the curb in a southerly direction. Harry shot at it as it passed. He saw his bullets slam into the side fender, the passenger door, and then into the top of the left rear tire.

The wheel blew right off the rim, the car’s rear jumped, and then slammed back onto the street, its trunk slewing sideways across the road. Harry jumped to his feet, Magnum at the ready as two patrol cars came screeching around each of the street’s corners—creating a roadblock that sealed the area.

Harry cursed himself. The cops had planned to seal the crooks up after they had made their getaway, so no early-morning worker would get hurt. Harry was just lucky his shooting hadn’t inadvertently wounded anyone.