Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (13 page)

As it was, the second car couldn’t brake with its rear tire flattened, so it slammed broadside against the two patrol cars, which had stopped nose to nose. Even so, Callahan quickly learned that the Chicago force’s good plan was not good enough. From both the crippled car and the other escape auto came the sound of combined machine-gun firepower. At one end of the street, the flat-tire car annihilated the side windows of the patrol cars blocking it, while at the other end the stalled auto blasted in the two front windshields in
its
path, with a rain of 9mm bullets.

All the windows just blew out as the four cop cars were decorated with black holes. Harry could see the cops who were not quick enough to duck jiggle in their seats as the lead was pumped into their bodies.

The crooks in the crippled car jumped out the opposite windows from the riddled cop vehicles as the other auto squealed into reverse. It rammed a parked car at the curb as Harry ran to the cover of a thick, green street sign. The moving escape car tried to ram the blocking cop vehicles out of the way, as Harry emptied his .44 cylinder at the scrambling masked men pouring out of the crippled car.

He hit one of the masked crooks just as the man’s feet touched asphalt. The Magnum’s power hurled the robber right back into the rear seat. The driver ducked as he slipped out behind the wheel, Harry’s last bullet smashing off a hunk of the dashboard. The driver laid down a cover of 9mm rounds from his Japanese-made SCK Model 65 as the last of three robbers ran behind him.

The street sign absorbed most of the more important slugs as Harry flipped open his cylinder with one hand and jammed another six rounds into place before the upended shells had even hit the ground.

Another pair of police cars came screeching onto the scene as Harry was reloading. They appeared behind the other four patrol vehicles as backups. Their sudden arrival forced the driver of the crippled car to stop firing and hightail it after the other crook. That gave Harry time to pivot toward the running man and cut him down with another blast from the .44.

It hit the crook in the shoulder and sent him skittering into the gutter. The driver behind him, meanwhile, was trying to shoot at the newly arrived cops while heading for the ramming car. He became the target of two cops with shotguns and Harry’s .44. The policemen’s blasts reached the hapless wheelman first, ripping out entire sections of his torso. Harry’s Magnum round rearranged his facial features. The man dropped like a rag doll dipped into a food processor.

Just as the final man in the crippled car fell, the other vehicle managed to nudge aside and squeeze through the two cop cars blocking it. The backup patrol car and the dark getaway sedan traded shots as it sped past, but it didn’t stop. It turned the corner just as a seventh patrol car came barreling toward it.

The escape vehicle hardly slowed down. It kept turning until it wasn’t merely going around the corner, but was rather leaping up onto the sidewalk. Terrified pedestrians scrambled out of the way as the getaway auto smashed over a garbage bin, knocked down a street lamp and struggled back onto the bank’s block, heading in the direction of the crippled car.

As it roared past him, Harry searched for a human target, but could find none. All the crooks in the first car had ducked down, including the driver. They were speeding toward the four stopped cars at the other end of the street. Harry pointed his .44 at the front tire and was just about to shoot when a petrified pedestrian bumped into him in a desperate attempt to leave the crash site.

Harry’s aim was thrown off, and he loosened his trigger finger in time not to peg an old lady who had wandered in front of his wavering Magnum barrel. All the innocent bystanders charged toward the bank, away from the crippled getaway car, as it looked certain that the other getaway vehicle would plow right into the smoking, bullet-ridden automotive roadblock.

But at the last possible moment, the getaway car swerved toward the left-hand sidewalk, leaping up onto the curb again and squealing around the obstruction, its hub caps getting ripped off by the building fronts. It dodged right in front of the backup patrol car, ripping off its headlights and bumper, and then zoomed onto the entrance to the express level of Wacker Drive. The two patrol cars from the other end of the street combined with the auto that was “shaved” to give chase. Harry surveyed the street’s damage as the cop-car trio screamed up the Wacker Drive express entrance after their quarry.

Harry ignored the shocked men, crying women, and excited children to focus his eyes on a beautiful new motorcycle parked at the far end of the street. Harry ran for it, his gun going back into his holster. He recognized it fully as he approached. It was the Kawasaki GPz 1100, a bike about which one of the highway patrolmen Harry knew was nearly masturbating in the squad room. “It is the only production bike that can do a ten-second quarter mile!” the guy practically used to foam. Harry figured that that meant the expensive little sucker could go fast.

He saw that it was attached to a railing by a thick metal chain. Hunching over, he put the barrel of his Magnum against one of the links.

“Hey!” came an angry voice behind him. “That’s my bike!”

Harry turned, his Magnum pointed out front “And this is my gun,” he told the bearded complainer in the leather jacket.

“You want the keys?” the bearded guy immediately asked in a much more polite voice.

Harry took the offered keys, unlocked the chain guard and revved the light, powerful mother up. “You’ll find this at the police station in a day or two,” Harry yelled to the owner over the engine’s roar. “Make them pay for any damages.”

Then the San Francisco inspector did a squealing hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and sped off toward the Wacker Drive entrance. He did a wheelie on the ramp, pulling the sleek Kawasaki onto the local level. The highway was just as crowded as he expected it to be, but it was no problem for the cycle. When Harry couldn’t speed along the shoulder, he weaved among the backed-up autos, getting a lot of curses and horn honking as he went.

It made no difference to him. He figured that the express level was about as bad at this time of the morning, especially with the abysmal transit problems the city was having. He could see no way that the getaway car could get very far, particularly with three cop cars in pursuit. He felt certain that the express level would become a shooting gallery in a matter of seconds—with the commuters getting the worst of it.

Harry stopped the bike midway around the southward curve of the Chicago River. He locked the heavy chain guard of the bike together and put it around his neck. Then he grabbed on to the upper-level guard rail and twisted over the side. From below he heard gunfire and shouts. It was just as he had feared. The crooks had left their stationary vehicle and were proceeding on foot, using every innocent passenger along the drive as hostages.

Callahan lowered himself down, wrapping his legs around a wide support beam. He crawled down like a monkey until he could clearly see the lower level. It was completely packed with motionless cars. The only human movement come from the four masked crooks who were weaving northward between the vehicles and the two cops who were trailing them. For the moment, it was an absurd Mexican standoff. The cops couldn’t really return any fire without endangering the lives of the captive motorists. All the police wanted to do was keep the crook quartet busy until both ends of the drive could be bottled up by other officers. What these blockers would do when the crooks threatened to murder one driver every hour on the hour until they were released was anybody’s guess.

But Callahan wasn’t going to allow it to get that far. As long as none of the petrified drivers started pointing at him, he had the element of surprise on his side. He was lowering himself behind the crooks. Otherwise, he was in the same situation as the other law-enforcement officials. His .44 was powerful enough to pump a bullet through an engine block, let alone a human body. Even if he had the crook dead to rights, there were very few directions he could shoot without a nongetaway car being in the vicinity. Even his Smith and Wesson light .44 loads were strong enough to go through a stomach, then a window or door and into an innocent bystander—especially at this close range.

Harry kept lowering himself as the crooks kept backing toward him. As he neared the lower-level guard rail, one of the cops saw him. Thinking he was just a curious nut, the cop shouted at him. A crook on the outside of the right lane, practically below Harry, turned in response.

Callahan acted immediately. He let go of the rail, swinging himself in, and pulled the heavy chain circle off his neck. As he landed he swung the heavy metal links as the crook was bringing his American-made Foote MP970 up to fire. The chain smashed across the crook’s masked face, knocking him away from the outside car to tumble onto the metal walkway at Harry’s feet. The inspector then pulled his Magnum out and pointed it at the lying man’s nose.

The masked man’s eyes blinked inside the ski mask and the Foote sub-machine gun jerked up as Harry pulled the trigger and spread the guy’s head across the walk like breaking open an egg. But instead of a yellow yolk and clear liquid spreading out from it, the man’s brains served as the center from which a bubbling flow of lavalike crimson shot out and spread.

Harry didn’t take the time to examine his handiwork. He was already hunched over and racing between the cars to confront the three other men he had seen, hiding from his vantage point on the beam. He felt like one of those innocuous little “Pac Man” video games in which a moving yellow ball tries to accumulate as many points on a geometric board as possible before four monsters—coming at him from different directions—destroy him. Here, the cars stood for the geometric playing field, and the Japanese terrorists were the monsters. Only this time the yellow ball was armed, dangerous, and after the monsters instead of points.

The three sets of adversaries weaved among the cars, the only witnesses to their progress being the silent, terrified drivers and passengers. Harry swept behind a Ford Escort to spot another masked man crab walking between lanes with his back toward the San Francisco cop. Taking only a second to crouch on one knee, Harry shot him in the middle of his back.

The second crook dove forward and lay still as Harry moved toward where he thought the third man was. His sense of direction was perfect, but this crook was faster than he had hoped. Callahan appeared between cars where he thought the man would be, only to find that he had doubled back when he heard Harry’s first booming shot. Instead of being in front, with his back to Harry, he was in back, with his machine gun aimed.

Harry heard the bolt go back. He leaped as the bullets began whipping up the roadway. He felt a slug nick the back of his shoe as he dove up and to the side, sliding across the roof of a Mercury Zephyr. As soon as everyone heard his big body slam on the car’s ceiling, it was open season on San Francisco inspectors. Everybody jumped up and fired at the sound.

It was their mistake. Almost all the bullets went wild, but this enabled Harry to see where the cops and the last crook were. He dropped down to the other side of the car, looking through the window to make sure the passengers were all right. He saw a well-dressed woman on the floor beneath the dashboard, her eyes screwed shut and her hands over her ears. He looked up from her to see the third crook out the opposite window, pulling the trigger on his gun. Harry fell as the driver’s and passenger’s windows blew out from the force of the point-blank onslaught. He heard the woman scream as he pushed his Magnum under the car and pulled the trigger, ripping the crook’s ankle from between his shin and foot.

The crook fell, screaming, blood pumping out of his leg like water from a garden hose. Harry adjusted his aim as the man’s crying head dropped to the road, then blew it apart with his third bullet. The crying and screaming stopped, replaced instead with a noxious oozing sound.

Harry was already on his hands and knees, heading toward the spot where he had seen the last crook. He remained low, checking under the cars for the remaining positions. It was a madder scramble now, as the cops realized they outnumbered the final crook. Harry, however, was intent on getting to the man first.

He finally stopped as he saw the crook’s feet slowly sliding on the other side of a Cutlass Supreme. Harry planted his feet firmly under him, slipped the Magnum back into its holster, wrapped one hand around the door handle and held the chain loop loosely in his other hand—like a rope lasso.

Waiting until he felt the crook was directly opposite him, on the other side of the Oldsmobile, Callahan straightened his legs and propelled himself over the car’s roof. As he flew through the air, he hurled the chain forward, neatly wrapping it around the crook’s neck. He landed on the opposite side of the car and twisted. The chain was locked tightly under the crook’s chin. The man choked and tried to pull his gun up, but Harry wrenched it out of his grip with his own free hand.

For a second, they were both almost upright, their heads showing over the car roofs. The cops took advantage of the moment, firing their .38 and .357 rounds, not caring which man they hit. Harry dragged the crook down, increasing the pressure on the chain and grabbing the bulging sack out of the strangling man’s hand. The inspector sat heavily on the roadway and dumped the bag’s contents onto the asphalt. A pile of paper, plain white paper, fell on the broken white line and then was swept up by the wind coming off the river.

“It was all a diversion, wasn’t it?” Harry hissed into the crook’s ear. “Fucking kamikaze bank robbers, right?” Harry pulled the man’s head back. “Well, no noble death for you this time. You’re coming with me.” Then he hit him with the business end of his Magnum. As the crook slumped, dazed, Harry called out, “It’s all over! I got the last one! You can come collect these guys now!”

To show his good faith, Harry stood up with his hands raised. Slowly, cautiously, the two pursuing cops emerged from their hiding places and approached. Soon they were standing in front of him, their guns still drawn and pointed at the tall man’s middle.