Dirty Harry 09 - The Killing Connection (10 page)

“She’ll attract every male mothering instinct and every female protective instinct in the place within seconds,” McConnell had predicted, and Harry didn’t doubt it. Kim had all the equipment to be instantly lusted after.

“What’s not to like?” he told the vice cop with a shrug, returning to his surveillance.

“Careful, Harry,” she warned in a friendly, bantering tone. “You play-act at being the tough guy, but inside you’re just as soft as anybody else.”

Harry lowered the binoculars for a second. “I wish you were around this morning to tell that to Bender.”

McConnell ignored that. “I know all about you. I’ve heard about the way you rescue rape and assault victims. Hell, I’ve seen it. Only our Kim is a particularly vulnerable specimen who’s hardly had time to recuperate from her experience. You’re ready to blow apart anything that comes near her.”

“Something wrong with that?” Harry said woodenly, McConnell’s two-bit psychoanalysis beginning to bother him.

“Hell, no, Harry,” she countered sincerely, “but don’t let your judgment go out the window. No girl who looks like that can be totally helpless. She hasn’t gone this far without learning how to get what she wants . . .”

“Did she want a rape?” Callahan interrupted incredulously.

“Of course not!” McConnell flaired, and then softened with hurt understanding. “Come on, Harry . . .”

The Inspector waved the rest of her argument away. A small familiar figure had appeared in the doorway of the SAFE house. “She’s signaling,” he told the sergeant.

“Let’s go then,” McConnell said, beginning to open her door.

“No,” Harry stopped her.

“Harry . . . ,” she said like a mother reprimanding a too eager child. He had to admit that annoyed him more than it should have. There was no reason for him to be irritated by her misconception.

“You said it yourself,” he told her. “They all know you in there. We can’t afford to have Byrnes pegged as a police plant.”

“And if anybody sees your .44 . . . ?” she countered.

Callahan was taking it off even before she finished the argument.

“Harry, I didn’t mean . . . ,” she began with regret.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” he interrupted again, laying the holster and gun on her lap. “If there’s any trouble, one of us will signal you and you can come running.”

“And if no one signals?” she inquired. “How long should I wait?”

“Make a discreet reconnaissance after fifteen minutes,” he decided, already getting out of the car. “Look in after half an hour.”

“Will do,” the vice cop said. But he had already begun running across the street to answer the blonde girl’s call. “Damn!” McConnell seethed, slapping her hand on the steering wheel. “Lovers should never work together.”

Sexual relations were far from Harry’s mind as he moved quickly toward the entrance. He was thinking instead about what McConnell had told him about the SAFE set-up. The group was led by M. Peter Steele, a balding, blondish man with a slight Australian accent.

Everything about the guy was artificial except his rugged good looks. His name was fake, having changed it from the less solid sounding Raymond Markovitc. His accent was culled from the movies. But false front or not, Steele was as steadfast as his new name.

The one thing he professed to believing in was equal rights for all people under the law. And as his homosexual faction grew larger and more influential, he became more militant. SAFE, however, found itself being foiled by biased legalities at every turn. Whether it was right or not, it seemed that many from the heterosexual faction felt threatened by SAFE’S existence and would do most anything to undercut it.

And with every setback, Steele became more determined to get a fair shake. But after awhile, the doctrine of peace, goodwill, and fairplay was lost in the fanatical effort to achieve it. Now Steele was collecting and hawking an entirely different ball of wax. One that made him the darling of the cocktail set and muckraking reporters.

Harry heard him shouting even while he was still on the sidewalk in front of the building. The words were muddled but there was no mistaking the fiery conviction behind them. He looked at the sign above the boarded up windows and steel front door. It read The Ying-Yang Bookstore and had the appropriate Oriental circular symbol painted nearby. The place used to hawk volumes on zen and macrobiotic cooking.

Callahan had almost no trouble getting in. Slipping his fingers in the crack between the edge of the metal door and brick building, he was able to pull the obstruction open—a feat that was not lost on the two homosexual guards standing inside the entrance. They both took one look at the tall muscular cop and forgot the disapproval they were about to express.

All three were standing at the rear of the one room store, its length stretching at least sixty feet, almost all of which was packed with buzzing, angry humanity. The last few rows, as everywhere, had a life of its own. Just like in school, church, and theaters, those in the last row usually had an attitude slightly bent from the rest of the establishment. Even in the SAFE house it was no different.

“What can I do for you, handsome?” said the man to Harry’s left, getting an elbow in his ribs from his male date as a reward.

“Looking for a friend,” Harry answered almost truthfully, scanning the crowd for any sign of Kim Byrnes.

“There, you see?” said the first man’s friend. “Mind your own business, Kenny.”

“Later, pal,” the first man said quietly to Harry.

“Sure,” he replied. Not wanting a confrontation of any kind, Harry moved deeper into the throng, hearing more clearly Steele’s shouted words.

The well-built man with the thinning blond hair and the oval head was standing on a small, wooden platform at the very back of the store, flanked by tiny round coffee tables and thin metal chairs. On one of these tables was a java dispenser, on another was a tray of donuts. Around the remainder were people, mostly couples.

Seated at the farthest table to the right was a boney thin-lipped girl with close cut, unkempt red hair. She wore a white T-shirt and tight black pants. She had her arm around the white fuzzy-sweatered shoulders of Kim Byrnes. The smaller, better built girl was holding both hands of the girl on her left, her eyes intently watching Steele as he whipped his lecture to the boiling point.

“The truth is finally coming out!” the man was booming, his voice sonorous. “Finally, you can see what I’ve been saying all along is true! There is a plot abroad in the land . . . There is . . . a conspiracy!”

At this point, most of those in front echoed the speaker’s sentiment, their fists upraised. “Conspiracy!” they cried.

Harry looked closer, pushing his way through the group on the right. Coming around near the coffee machine, he saw Steele’s cheering section, his own personal peanut gallery. The dozen or more men and women who sat there were all of a ruddy type, dressed in a makeshift uniform.

Black berets were worn by the men at a jaunty angle, while the ladies had little leather caps with narrow brims, They all had leathery jackets that came down to their thighs, on which they wore dark pants tucked into black boots. Harry caught glimpses of shiny things on their belts below turtleneck sweaters—some he recognized as chain links, while others were more esoterically unfathomable.

“Yes!” Steele continued. “A conspiracy. A conspiracy to rid you of your rights, your homes, your friends, and finally . . . !”

As he rattled off the list, his front row backers started chanting with him, their fisted arms punching at the air. As they struck upward, their sleeves receded, revealing what looked like something combining the sadistic with the medieval. Alternating strips of leather were attached to strips of copper steel. They were long, reaching from the wrist to almost their elbows from what Harry could tell.

“Yes!” Steele repeated what seemed to be a favorite word, then his manner and voice grew prophetically quiet. “Finally your lives.”

The whole place added to the uproar this time. Callahan stayed off to the side where things were a bit more quiet. He watched the choppy-haired redhead with her arm around Byrnes whisper something in the girl’s ear. He saw Kim turn at the suggestion and shake her head.

“It’s happening already,” Steele warned. “You’ve read about it! You’ve heard about it! They’re digging our sisters out of the ground. The bodies have been piling up there for years! How many were buried there? How many more graveyards filled with our murdered brothers and sisters are there? You’ve seen it yourself, you know what I’m talking about.

“Each one of you,” he said intently, pointing at the gathered mass. “Each one of you has had a friend. A friend you met one day, but when you went to find them the next, they were gone. Disappeared. Admit it! You’ve all had something like that happen to you. I have. Where did they go? Well, I can tell you. They went underground! Six feet underground. Down, down into the San Francisco dirt!”

Steele tried to continue, but the crowd was getting unruly. Things were finally brought back to a semblance of order by the peanut gallery who started to chant, “Tell us more.”

Soon everyone joined the chant, so they were ready to quiet down when Steele raised his hands. “How could this happen?” he asked them, “I’ll tell you how. Because for years there’s been a conspiracy. An extermination plot fostered by the fathers of this city to get rid of one thorn in their side—the homosexual community. Like the blacks in the Civil War . . . like the Jews in the Second World War . . . we are the oppressed minority that the killers in the government think they can wipe out! Well, I say no!”

With great passion everyone inside the room agreed with him. Even Kim’s comrade let go of her long enough to lean forward and raucously agree with the man. He basked in their energy for a few moments, his arms out, then he started shouting over their cheers.

“When you kill a brother, it’s called fratri-cide! When you kill an entire racial group, it’s called geno-cide! In San Francisco, it’s called homo-cide!”

The room shook with madness. Harry thought, this guy was a bad combination of a television reporter and evangelist. He took unsubstantiated reports and whipped his followers into a false froth, leading them to drink the stuff before they knew what was in it. He could understand now why Kim had signaled him in. M. Peter Steele was only making matters more difficult for the police.

Harry decided to have a discreet little talk with the man. By the looks of it, he had the power to do the gay community either serious harm or good. If he could mobilize his task force effectively, they might work together with the police to run the killer to ground. Otherwise they’d be nothing better than a lynch mob.

Having finished his speech, Steele left his low podium to move among his people on the floor. He stepped off to his left first, walking right up to Kim and her partner, taking one of each of their hands in both of his. After a quick firm handshake, he moved on, clasping hands with many others.

There was a sea of people between Harry and the SAFE leader so the cop moved forward as the crowd surged around Steele. Judging by his rate of progress, Harry could catch up to the man halfway toward the door. Both men kept pushing their way through the mass, each intent on a different purpose. Steele was smiling, waving, and handshaking like a winning politician, while Harry was only intent on catching up.

He didn’t worry about Byrnes. She had gotten decent instructions from Wu on how to act. She’d be friendly and open, but reluctant to go further than that. Her story was she had just broken up with a lover and wasn’t ready to get into anything serious. If the partner became too insistent, Byrnes could tell them about the death of her best friend. That would cool anybody’s ardor.

Callahan turned his head to take a last look at Byrnes before he approached Steele. Over the bobbing heads of the others pressing to reach their leader, he could see their table was now empty. Harry’s head whirled around, but he couldn’t spot Kim or her companion anywhere. It was possible that he had lost them among the masses in the smokey interior.

Suddenly worried, Harry pressed harder to reach his quarry. He was able to break through the general audience, but then he came up against a circle of Steele’s cheerleaders, who acted, in this case, like Secret Service men. They weren’t professional guards, however, so Harry was able to move around toward the front to circumvent them. He was just a few heads away from Steele, his hand already outstretched, when he heard a gasp coming from the left.

He looked in that direction just as Steele was about to clasp his hand. “Oh my God! It’s him!” he heard a strident voice say. “It’s Harry Callahan!” He saw the words emitting from the mouth of an overweight bearded young man with glasses. As the words reached his ears, he thought he vaguely recognized the boy.

That made no difference to Steele, who automatically gripped Harry’s fingers, not comprehending the meaning of the bearded man’s words. But when the kid saw that, he jumped forward, shouting “No!” He pushed their two hands apart and stood protectively in front of his leader, pointing at the undercover cop as if he had the plague.

“Don’t you understand?” he all but shrieked. “That’s Callahan! Inspector Harry Callahan. He’s the one who shot our four brothers.”

The cop recognized him now. The bearded man was one of the many people who crowded the Justice Department steps, camera or tape recorder in hand. He was a reporter. His shout and push was enough to stop Steele’s parade right in its tracks. Callahan saw that when the SAFE leader heard the word “police,” he went deathly white.

The scene remained frozen that way for what seemed like minutes. But then the reporter put a more potent cap on his interruption by saying, “Watch out! He might have a gun!”

Steele was suddenly pulled back, his protectors surging toward the surprised policeman.

Harry moved quickly. He certainly wasn’t interested in taking on the entire San Francisco chapter of SAFE. He turned and charged toward the door.

His way was blocked by four beret-topped SAFE men. Just as quickly as he tried to run, Harry spun back and opened his coat to show them that he carried no weapon. No sooner had he revealed that than somebody punched him in the stomach.