Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (16 page)

He spun back in the other direction just as the first attacker charged again, his knife held high. Harry’s mind simply went back to the Police Academy and “Self-Defense 101.” The first judo flip the rookies had learned was meant to deal with a knife wielder coming from on high. Harry pivoted, one hand wrapping around the attacker’s knife wrist, the other planted solidly just above the elbow. Harry turned and pulled. After all these years, it still worked like a charm. The attacker fell on his back, slid, and somersaulted right over the guard rail. He fell, shouting, and his ass slammed heavily onto the top of a display case. His speed and weight slowly toppled the case over.

That case crashed into another case. And that case fell sideways across a long information desk. The attacker rolled across both case tops and spun behind the desk, smashing into a chair and slamming into the side of a heavy metal desk.

There was absolutely no containing the visiting children now. The teachers were screaming at them to get down and calm down, but they were happily racing all over the library stacks in some elaborate game of hide and seek, thinking the whole thing was some kind of show played out for their benefit. Harry retrieved his gun from under the motionless hand of the kicked man, then watched in amazement as the Japanese girl behind the information desk reached over to grab the hair of a passing little girl and push a blade against her throat.

Holding onto the screaming, kicking girl tightly, the Oriental woman looked calmly and purposefully up at Harry. “Come down, Inspector,” she called. “Even aim at me and I’ll slit this girl’s throat. Drop your gun and come on down.”

Callahan considered trying a shot. It had worked before on the “Scorpio” case. That killer had a P-38 against a boy’s head. Harry had been about twenty feet away on a straight, slightly higher incline. He had lowered his .44, then swept it up, shooting the madman in the shoulder. But that had been an hysterical, desperate-nut case. This girl was calmly hunching behind a desk, a squealing, squirming child held in front of her. The angle was bad. It just wasn’t possible. Harry dropped the gun.

The Magnum fell to the balcony carpet with a soft thud.

“Kick it down,” the girl instructed.

Harry swept the .44 off the balcony with his foot. The gun spun out from under the broken plexiglass, dropped quickly through the air, and bounced twice on the Oriental Institute’s ground floor.

“Now you follow, if you please,” the girl demanded. Callahan pressed both hands down on the top of the guard rail, as if to vault over. “In the elevator,” the woman quickly added, holding her knife even tighter against the throat of the little girl.

Reluctantly, Harry followed orders. He had to press the “Down” button and wait for the blood-coated box to come up from the ground floor. The door opened to reveal his first attacker’s corpse still lying within. Harry stepped in, unmindful of all the blood. The door closed behind him and the elevator slowly descended.

The door remained closed on the ground floor for seconds longer than usual. The woman got impatient, screaming for Harry to appear and inadvertently cutting the little girl’s skin. The confused child screamed in pain and literally ripped herself out of the woman’s grip. She tumbled forward and then ran into the arms of one of the teachers.

At that moment the elevator doors opened and Harry appeared. A hush had fallen over the room. All the excited children had suddenly become quiet and frightened. They huddled in their hiding places, like the school kids rolled into balls in the halls during the atomic-war rehearsals of the sixties. Those adults who still remained in the hall were pressed back in their seats or against the walls.

Harry took the moment to step out of the elevator. Keeping his eyes directly on the woman behind the information desk, he deliberately took off his blood-soaked shoes. He stood in the midst of a bad dream that suddenly turned into a nightmare. As the woman with the blade came around the desk, she was unexpectedly joined by many other people in the room. One student across the way rose from his chair and pulled a knife out of his knapsack. One of the guards in the box at the door vaulted the side, a knife, which he had used to cut the phone wires, in his hand. From the book racks came another student, arm raised, blade flashing. Finally, even one of the “teachers” got up and pulled a knife from a scabbard under his pants leg.

There were five Seppuku Sword members, either disguised or actually working within the Oriental Institute. They were placed in such a way that they controlled the room. One at the door, one in the foyer, one in the racks, one behind the desk, and one at large. But now they were all moving inexorably toward Callahan, holding what he recognized as a “knuckle dagger.”

It was one step down from the samurai sword. Made famous during World War I, it was essentially a knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Only these had some slight variations. First, the clean, shiny blades were leaf-shaped and double-edged. The scabbard was made of sheet steel. The rounded finger holes ended with little triangular stubs, which would dig into the skin and rip muscles if a punch connected. Finally, on the bottom of the hilt was another, longer stub—a butt spike. If the weapon were used like a club, this half-inch metal tooth would puncture the skin like a cleat.

It was a three-sided weapon, used to punch, stab, and bludgeon. All five gang members held them professionally and moved in on Harry slowly. He moved to his right, toward the kid who was coming from the book racks. The kid feinted with his blade, then pulled back when Harry failed to react. The teacher and the guard moved in to block the inspector’s way back to the elevator. Harry kept his hands out and his feet wide.

As the group got closer to the racks, the teacher and the guard suddenly charged, screaming. Harry’s foot went out, catching the guard in the stomach while his fist went back, catching the kid in the nose. The guard’s knife swept down and the kid’s knife swept up. Both blades missed Harry’s limbs.

As Harry pulled back, the teacher was almost upon him. He wrenched his torso to the side to avoid the knife thrust and dug his thumbs into his attacker’s eyes. It was a quick, angry thrust. The teacher’s blow just missed Harry’s body, the knife’s hilt sliding along his side. He stuck his forefingers in the teachers’ ears, then pushed his thumbs into each of his eyes. He pushed in, like an opener into a can top.

Instead of soda fizzing out, Harry felt the gelatinous mass try to squeeze past his thumbs, only to end up against the rear of the eye cavity and burst. The jellylike “vitreous humor” splattered out of the gouged socket, splashing Harry’s shirt front. He felt his thumbs sink all the way in, completely immersed in gunky blood. The teacher screamed as Harry abruptly pushed him back. The cop’s hands left the ruined face and clamped down on the teacher’s knife wrist.

Unimpeded by the destruction of the teacher’s eyes, the information woman jumped into the melee, slicing down at Harry’s already wounded wrist to prevent him from getting the teacher’s blade. Callahan released the wrist and moved back as the woman’s knife dug into the teacher’s skin. Blinded, the latter didn’t know what was happening and screamed in pain and fear—much like the little girl whom the woman had previously used as a shield.

The teacher’s knife fell to the floor, useless to Harry. The woman pushed the battered teacher aside and came at Callahan. Harry quickly reached over and grabbed the groggy kid. He pulled the boy’s body in front of him just as the woman thrust. Her blade sunk into the kid’s chest. Before she could respond, Harry pushed him forward, his wounded body smashing into the woman and throwing them both to the floor.

From there, Callahan immediately ran into the rows of book stacks. The guard and student followed him. As he reached the end of one row, he used the “Red Sea” approach. His pursuers had been too angered and shocked at Harry’s thumb-and-blocking defense to think, so when he reached the end of the line, he simply turned around, grabbed the side of the racks to the left and the right, and pulled in.

Like Samson pulling down the Philistine temple’s columns, Harry heaved and the heavy wooden bookcases came slamming down on top of his two pursuers. The rack tops met in the middle, momentarily creating a makeshift pyramid, then the heavy books fell off the shelves onto the attackers’ heads as the bookcase bases slid away from each other. The whole structure slammed down on the two Seppuku Sword members.

Harry jumped onto the pile, making a point of walking heavily across the prone bodies. But as he quickly moved back out into the open, he could see no sign of the knuckle knives buried under the books. He came out to meet the last attacker—the woman from the information desk. Normally, the match-up would have been ludicrous. Harry was a foot taller than she was and probably a hundred pounds heavier. But he was tired, with a wound in his side and on his wrist. And the woman had a sharp, nasty weapon.

Harry moved back toward the foyer, his arms loose, his eyes blinking. Suddenly he realized that he was a lot more tired than he should have been. His efforts had been fast and vicious, but they should not have left him as winded as he was. He shook his head, but failed to clear the cobwebs there. He reached down toward his torn shirt, and his fingers came away dabbed with crimson. Since his loss of blood couldn’t have been that extreme, Harry told himself, his grogginess had to be caused by something else.

He suddenly remembered looking at the dead man’s knife in the elevator. Up close, he had seen that the edges were discolored, as if already smeared with blood. Initially, he had assumed it was a combination of his and the attacker’s. Now he realized that it was some kind of poison.

His rushing adrenaline had fought the drug in his system for a few minutes, but now it was finally taking effect. His vision clouded. Through misty, unfocused eyes he could see the woman grinning. She was standing in an offense position twenty feet in front of him, her feet wide, her arms out, and the knife in her right fist. She could see him losing control. She was simply waiting for him to drop his guard completely so she could move in for the kill.

Desperately, he scanned the floor for his Magnum. It was nowhere in sight. He looked for someone to help him. All the children were scattered around the floor, watching in horror. He hoped the campus security forces would arrive in time, but he didn’t count on it.

“The girl,” he heard himself say to the knife woman in a hoarse whisper. “Suni. Where is she?”

The knife woman smiled even wider. “You’ll never know,” she swore.

Harry charged her. But his body would not respond properly. His legs wouldn’t go where he told them to, and they buckled at the knees with his first awkward steps. Nearly blind now and desperate, his arms flailed out for protection. He swerved to the side and slammed against the information desk counter.

His hands grabbed the lip to keep him upright. It was important to him not to die on his knees or on his face. All thoughts of possible defense were gone. He couldn’t think straight. He didn’t even look as the woman slowly, triumphantly, approached him, her knife raised.

Harry held on for dear life, blinking, and as he blinked, his fading vision began to clear somewhat. He saw a fleshy form on the other side of the desk. He saw that figure moving in a jerky, intense fashion.

He stopped blinking and tried to focus his eyes. Dimly he saw the outline of a little girl take shape. It was the same little girl the information woman had used as a shield. The child who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, had a look of purpose on the angry little face above her neck, which was still dripping a little blood. Below her neck were her thrusting hands. She was beneath the desk lip, out of the attacking woman’s vision, pushing something big and unwieldy at Harry. It was his .44 Magnum.

The Seppuku Sword woman stopped just behind Harry’s bent back. Her hand was high above her head, holding the knife in an almost ceremonial, sacrificial fashion. She looked at Harry’s helpless form with a savage satisfaction, then opened her mouth to scream and plunge the knife downward.

She managed to get out the scream, but the knife stayed where it was. At the last second, Callahan whirled around, the huge revolver held close to his chest, the barrel pointing right between the woman’s eyes.

Her yell of triumph switched to one of surprise and horror. It masked the sound of Harry pulling the trigger back once. The last thing the woman saw was the barrel of the .44 growing huge, like a broiling black sun spreading out to engulf the entire sky.

Only Harry saw the flash in the middle of her head and her face suddenly turn into a mockery of symmetry. It looked like a realistic portrait suddenly hit with a can of red and gray paint. The colors splashed out from the head, ripping off hunks of flesh and bone as they spread. Finally there seemed to be a hole in the portrait, which had suddenly seemed to jump far, far away to leave a smoking, dripping gap, as if the canvas had been doused with corrosive acid.

Harry felt pools of liquid and drops of tissue on his own face. He imagined it looked like a piece of modern art and found that very, very funny. He fell to the floor, laughing. He laughed until he couldn’t do anything anymore.

C H A P T E R
S e v e n

G
od winked at Harry Callahan. This was done by disrupting his unconsciousness with clear glimpses of what was happening to him. At first he heard crying and felt himself being lifted. He heard a clear voice say, “Take his gun, take his gun.”

His head fell to the side, and he thought he opened his eyes immediately, but he saw he was in an ambulance along with the little girl who had saved him. She was sitting next to his stretcher while faceless men—their backs to Harry—tended to her cut neck. There were tears on her cheeks, but she smiled bravely at him.

He tried to smile back, but his facial muscles were having none of it. The darkness descended again, accompanied by more crying, coughing, sneezing, grunting, and the general hubbub of activity. The one clear voice he heard this time said, “You can’t bring him in here. We don’t have the facilities. Its too crowded already.”