Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men (19 page)

Making sure the Nambu was secure in his waistband—reloaded with extra 9mm rounds from the destroyed submachine guns—Harry ventured into the in-service hospital hall. The large establishment was too crowded and too busy for anyone to really notice a doctor with no name tag, pushing an Oriental patient with no room, no chart, no I.D. bracelet and no illness. Harry headed for the Emergency Department, hoping things would be too hectic there for anyone to question his bringing an unconscious woman home with him.

As he moved smoothly down the halls, pushing Suni in front of him, he noticed the angle of the light coming through the windows. It was late afternoon—almost time for the Nihonmachi summit meeting to start. It was also getting close to rush hour on a Friday, the worst driving period of the week. If they got caught in traffic, there would still be a chance of an alarm going out.

Callahan picked up his speed toward the emergency-arrivals lounge. As he turned the corner, he saw Dr. Izo Gosha leaning over a burn victim. To stop now would draw more attention, so Harry plowed on, almost positive that Gosha would not notice another doctor, especially since the Oriental was sure the cop was still imprisoned in the dead wing. Just to make sure, Harry casually flipped the sheet over Suni’s face. He walked right by the crime boss without Gosha lifting an eyebrow.

Harry had almost gotten to the door when his cover was blown by a black nurse.

“Doctor, are you mad?” she asked from behind her desk in a strident voice. “Get that thing out of here. These are emergency patients!”

Immediately all the patients forgot their own wounds and wanted to know why it was so important to get “that thing out”. An instantaneous, concentrated babble went on with Harry right in the middle of it. He was about to push the stretcher out the glass door when he was blocked by a well-meaning intern.

“You need any help, Doctor?”

“No thank you,” said Harry quietly, hardly moving his lips off his teeth. “I was just leaving.”

“Not that way, you’re not!” the strident nurse called out, seemingly possessed of superhearing. “I’m surprised at you, Doctor, bringing a cadaver through emergency and trying to move it out the arrival door.”

The stupid nurse set the fuse, lit it, and then, for good measure, pushed the plunger. The emergency room went into an immediate uproar on top of its usual chaos. The shocked patients had no way of knowing that even a real corpse could not hurt them unless it was a bubonic-plague carrier. It was hardly explainable now. Gosha was practically forced to look up.

The Oriental did a double take on the back of Callahan’s head. He looked at the “doctor’s” feet, then excused himself, and hastily moved toward the hospital’s interior. Harry glanced over his shoulder at Gosha’s retreating figure.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Doctor?” the intern asked again.

“Yes,” said Harry sweetly, and then grabbed the man’s lapels. With a single sweeping throw, Harry hurled the intern right into the black nurse’s midsection. The man fell on his ass, but the woman was knocked back into her wheeled deck chair. She rolled back three feet, hit the side of a desk, and toppled over backward.

Callahan didn’t see her slapstick tumble. His mind working and his stomach twisting, he pushed Suni’s stretcher out the double doors and right into the back of a parked ambulance. As he secured her inside, the ambulance’s driver came running from the wall, a cup of coffee sloshing in his hand.

“Hey!” he yelled. “We just dropped somebody off. We don’t do pickups!”

Harry pulled out the 9mm automatic with one hand and grabbed the guy’s shirt front with the other. “The keys,” he said, no question involved.

“In the ignition,” the driver replied in a small voice, his styrofoam cup dropping to the ground.

Harry raced to the driver’s side, pulled open the door, threw the gun on the passenger’s seat and twisted the key. The sleek, low Cadillac ambulance started up and Harry jammed it into gear. The vehicle screeched out the hospital lane and roared up Columbus Drive.

Harry checked his watch. It had stopped sometime last night. He checked the open sky. It was about three-thirty. If he was lucky, he just might beat the traffic and make it clear sailing to the airport.

He was not lucky. As soon as he got on the open road, the ambulance radio crackled. “Car seven-one-niner,” came a voice. “Car seven-one-niner. See the woman Madison and Clark.”

Harry pulled the mike up to his lips while keeping an eye in the rear-view mirror. “No can do, dispatch,” he said. “Have an emergency at the airport.”

“God damn it. Cletus,” the radio voice barked back. “You don’t make the assignments, I do!”

“An emergency, boss,” Harry retorted. “A cop pulled me over and told me to follow him.”

“That’s a likely excuse, you miserable goldbricker,” the radio voice wailed. “You get to Madison and Clark on the double!”

“No can do,” said Harry.

“I’ll call the fucking cops on you!”

‘You do that,” Harry concluded. “Take this job and shove it.” He threw the mike onto the floor, the dispatcher’s voice crackling on.

As Callahan looked back to the road with a slight grin, he saw a dark sedan coming up fast from behind. All his humor left him. Old Doc Gosha must’ve done some fast talking. With the summit meeting set, the town was probably crammed with Nihonmachi soldiers from all over. And these guys knew Chicago a lot better than Harry did.

Harry picked up speed and set the lights to flashing and the siren to wailing. Sure enough, even though he couldn’t see what nationality the occupants were, the dark sedan behind him picked up an equal amount of speed. Just as the ambulance passed the Natural History Museum on the right, another car screeched onto Columbus from Lake Shore Drive. As it squealed behind the other sedan in a cloud of dust, Harry could see its CB antennae waving at him from the trunk.

The bastards were communicating, Harry realized, and working to cut him off at the pass. The most likely route to O’Hare was to Eisenhower Expressway, which connected to the John F. Kennedy route that went right through the airport. Harry saw no way he could pull that off now. It was the direction all the soldiers expected him to go in.

Soaring by Grant Park, Harry suddenly wrenched the wheel all the way over to the left, sending the ambulance skidding across the length of the road and wavering like a jelly bean on a table’s ledge. The tires burned rubber, and Harry fought the wheel like a sea captain in a storm until the vehicle righted itself and shot down the left-hand street.

The two sedans were not so skilled. The first one took the left, braking as it turned. The second car tried to make the turn at full speed, smashing into the first car’s side head-on. The first car pushed off the road and rolled across the brush end over end. The second car hardly paused. It stalled slightly, but its momentum kept it going to the left until its engine caught again and it picked up steam.

Harry crossed the Michigan and Wabash intersections with little trouble because of his siren. The second car had neither the siren nor the lights on its side. It tried to run a red light only to have a taxi shave off its rear end. Both autos screamed in wrenching, twisting rage. The taxi swerved completely around in the intersection—the cars behind stopping just in time—as the Nihonmachi pursuers swerved, but didn’t straighten, only to smash into the side of a bus idling at the curb.

Callahan took another quick left on State Street, then pulled the wheel right just as two more cars, ones that matched the First Union City getaway vehicles perfectly, leaped onto his tail. Harry didn’t like the looks of this. These two cars were sticking to his bumper like bears to honey. There was a lot more horsepower under their hoods than it first appeared.

As the ambulance streaked across the Dearborn and Clark intersections, the new pair of pursuers made their move. Each one tried pulling up beside the long, low Cadillac. Harry pulled the wheel back and forth, weaving in front of the chase cars, cutting off their roadways. As the three cars crossed LaSalle, one started ramming and the other squeezed in between the ambulance’s right side and the curb.

Harry pulled to the left, then cut right viciously, trying to squash the parallel vehicle. He heard the squeal of bending metal and burning rubber, then was hit from behind again. The ambulance practically vaulted through the Wells Street intersection and headed for the narrow bridge which crossed over the Chicago River.

The rear car leaped forward to flank the ambulance’s left side as the caravan left solid ground. Callahan was now sandwiched between the two pace cars. He glanced out his window as the left car crept up alongside. He was astonished to see Izo Gosha in the passenger seat of the chase car, pleading with him through the closed window to give Suni back.

Gosha was screaming something about it “being our only hope,” and “Inagaki will kill.” Callahan couldn’t believe the desperation which led the man to make such a foolhardy move. But then he realized that Gosha’s fate would be sealed if he ran the ambulance off the road or tried any other kind of force. He needed Suni alive, so all he could do was work on Harry’s sense of “honor and control.”

In response, the inspector pushed the accelerator to the floor. He looked ahead in time to see two police cars heading for them from the opposite direction. There was no way out other than braking or ramming the cop cars head-on. Harry ripped his foot off the accelerator and slammed down on the brake.

Gosha’s car did not do likewise. It slammed right into the cop cars, one headlight burying itself into each engine. The patrol cars spun out, making the top part of a giant “Y.” Harry’s vehicle skidded to the right, its superior weight smashing the other chase car off the road. Only this time there was no shoulder to roll on. The right chase car vaulted over the bridge’s guard rail and plunged hood-first into the river.

The ambulance rammed the guard rail, but it had braked enough to stop. Harry was thrown against the dashboard and then dropped between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. All the wounds he had accumulated in the last day started yelling for attention. His side, his wrist, and his legs were all sending lancing pains up to his mind’s reception center. It felt like a master musician was playing his body with ice picks.

The front of the car was suddenly illuminated by flames. Seconds later, Harry heard a whoosh coming from his left. He cautiously pulled himself halfway up to see Gosha’s and the cop cars engulfed in flames. Then he became aware of more light behind him. He whirled around to see that the rear door of the ambulance was open and Suni was gone from the stretcher.

He was immediately up on his feet. He wrenched down the handle and kicked open the door. He dropped to the road to find himself staring down the business end of Sergeant Terry Inagaki’s regulation .357 Python.

“It was child’s play to find you.” Inagaki gloated in his bedroom. “We always survey the CB channels. Poor Gosha was so rattled by your escape that he blabbed your escape route all over the airways. Poor, poor man. He must have thought no one would understand the significance of his directions. I, of course, understood perfectly. And then, when the regular police channels reported an ambulance stolen, it was just a matter of putting two and two together.”

Suni was lying, still blessedly unconscious, on the bed. Harry was standing in the corner, his hands cuffed in front of him. For extra protection, Denise Inagaki kept the Nambu automatic trained on his chest. She looked like she knew exactly how to use it. Tetsuya Inagaki was standing by his closet, slowly donning ceremonial garb. He already had on the baggy gray pants and pointed shoulder jacket bearing his family crests over his kimono.

“I had, of course, suspected that they were holding my dear sister at the hospital, but I couldn’t do a thing about it,” Inagaki rattled on. “One move in that direction and they would have killed her. But thanks to you, she is free, and the Gosha clan with their Seppuku Swords are doomed.” Inagaki stopped dressing for a moment and thought about it. “The good doctor must have realized that at the end. It is the only reason he rammed the police cars. He knew his shame and disgrace would lead to hari-kiri, so he took the easy way out.”

Harry grimaced. As if getting into a head-on collision was easy, he thought. He also thought about the dozens of Kozure Ronin outside the house. They were not allowed inside while their leader and master prepared himself, so they waited to accompany him to the summit meeting.

“Why don’t you take the easy way out?” Harry asked. “Why go to the meeting at all? Gosha’s dead. Suni is free. You have no more opposition.”

“There is always opposition,” Inagaki professed. “I will go to the meeting to show my power, to show my dedication, and to show my conviction.” He turned toward Harry. “You, unfortunately, will not be there to see it.” He reached into the closet and threw out a few things. “You’ll be needing these to meet your Christian God,” Inagaki said sardonically.

Harry’s shoes and .44 Magnum fell to the carpet. “After your little party at the Oriental Institute,” Inagaki explained, “the police were called to the scene. Naturally they chose me to go. And naturally I confiscated these. The bullets are downtown unfortunately.”

“When do I die?” Harry inquired evenly.

“When we leave,” Tetsuya answered, pulling his set of samurai swords out of the closet.

“And Suni?” Harry softly asked.

The Inagakis looked at Harry at the same time. “So you know,” Denise whispered.

“It only makes sense,” Harry replied indifferently. “I asked myself over and over why you didn’t just let the girl die and eradicate the Seppukus anyway. The answer was that if she died by the hands of the enemy or even in the enemy camp, it would bring your family such shame that your peers would no longer respect you. They would not follow you.

“But if she was freed, you could not take the chance of her falling into enemy hands again. Like you said, there’s always opposition. And what better way to display your ‘dedication and conviction’ than bring to the summit meeting the head of your sister.”

Inagaki smiled and stood straight up, looking at Harry with new respect. He nodded. It was a royal decree. Callahan was allowed to continue.