Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (20 page)

Owens watched him as he did this and recognized that there was no way he could get out of his line of fire in time. So Owens did the exact opposite, the most unexpected thing—he crawled toward him and confronted him head-on.

Right then, Harry, crouched behind the protective wall, allowed his head to protrude out enough so that he could see into the bedroom and seeing, fired.

The assassin was looking right into Owens’ eyes when the .44 went off. Though the man’s gun was virtually at Owens’ temple, he was so astonished to see his would-be victim at such proximity that he did something he had not in his entire career ever done—hesitate a moment too long.

The round from the .44 took the assassin in his back, shattering his spine and toppling him over so that he sprawled on the floor in a bed of broken mirror glass. Still, he was alive and moving and had not lost hold of his gun, which he fired twice in reaction though this did not accomplish a thing.

Harry, still keeping the wall as a barrier, fired again as the assassin attempted with painful effort to roll out of the way. Luck had not altogether deserted the man, though it was just about to. The .44 sped into the bed, its impact muffled by the mattress stuffing in which it was eventually ensnared.

Despite the enormity of the pain and the certainty of his impending death, for to live would mean enduring life as a cripple from the waist down, the assassin blindly turned his 9mm Short away from Harry, directing it under the bed, hoping to hit Owens and in that way take somebody else with him when he went out.

He managed to get off two more rounds before Harry’s bullet slammed into his chest, plowing through his right lung and out his back, thereby quickening his end. He flopped back, one hand clasped hold of the entry wound, feebly pushing against it as if to stem the tide of blood. Desperately, he made an effort to raise his head but could not. A wind-like sound whistled through him, and as it emerged from his lips he died.

Now Harry drew himself fully erect and entered the bedroom.

“Drake?” he called out, “Drake, are you all right?”

When he received no reply, he grew alarmed and got down on his knees to better look underneath the bed.

Owens was lying there, but he was unmoving. Harry maneuvered the bed out of the way so he could get closer to him.

Blood was seeping out of two wounds that had entered his side, one appeared to have gone into his abdomen, the other into his chest. He was still alive but barely conscious. His eyes followed Harry, but he seemed unable to talk.

“You’ll be all right, goddamn you, you’re going to make it,” Harry kept saying over and over. It was the nearest he ever got to praying.

With sheets he tore from the bed and ripped into smaller pieces, he tightly bound the two wounds to staunch the bleeding. But there wasn’t much blood to be staunched. Far greater was the danger from the internal injuries, and there was no way Harry could determine just how grave these were.

He reached for the phone, fearing that the assassin might have cut the line, but the phone was still in service.

With the terseness of a veteran detective he explained his situation to the police, emphasizing the need for an ambulance and medical assistance.

Perhaps because of his impatience, the police seemed to take an unusually long time in getting to the Ninn residence. In the interval Harry had managed to throw on a shirt and trousers and to discover, as he had expected, that Ninn had been murdered. The television was still going, but the station that was on was broadcasting “The Star Spangled Banner” before signing off.

Harry neglected to turn the TV off though, and even as the ambulance screamed up the street and police officers invaded the house, with guns drawn as though they anticipated a firefight that had gone on and ended without them, the test pattern remained, buzzing like a deranged horde of mosquitoes about to attack.

C H A P T E R
F o u r t e e n

“I
understand that your friend is to be operated on again today,” the solemn-faced man with hair the color of the Antarctic was saying. This was Detective Sergeant Matt Butterfield of the LAPD, and he sat behind his desk with his hands folded rather in the manner of an obedient schoolboy.

Harry was sitting across from him, his face expressive of an exhaustion that is so total it is no longer worth trying to do anything about.

“That’s right. They performed emergency surgery last night. But there’s still another bullet lodged in him. They’re hoping to extract it today.” He looked to his watch. “They should be in surgery right now.”

“What do the doctors say?”

Harry shrugged. “They’re hopeful. Cautiously optimistic, as they say. But they don’t know if he’ll pull out of it. It’s too early to tell.”

Butterfield nodded. He then unfolded his hands and thrust forward a collection of photographs, most of them taken in a precinct house. They were all of the same man, who wore a look of detachment so pronounced he could have been posing for his wedding picture rather than for a booking on attempted murder charges.

Harry had no trouble identifying the man in these photographs. He was the man he had killed the night before.

“His name’s Tom Loving. Otherwise known as ‘Pigeon.’ ”

“Pigeon?”

“People thought he resembled one. A rat with wings, you know? Turns out he also raised pigeons, racing them for a while. Weird fellow, could never keep him locked up for longer than a couple of years. Best we could stick him with was assault and battery or attempted armed robbery, shit like that. Always managed to beat the system, got out the last time because the probation board noted his good behavior.” Butterfield released a bitter laugh. “Good behavior, that fucker probably didn’t know the meaning of good behavior when he was at his mother’s tit.”

“Mafia?”

“No, free-lance. A good reliable asshole like him, he gets calls from all over the state. Last I heard he was operating in San Diego, which was why I was surprised he turned up here.”

“He known for arson?”

“Arson?” Butterfield shrugged. “He’s never been charged with that particular crime, but I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. He’s very innovative in the way he carries out his hits. Try anything once, see if it works.” He indicated the chonta that overnight had been transformed from a murder weapon to state’s evidence. “Imported from South America. Very effective. Our pathologist tells us that Mr. Ninn must have been dead within seconds.”

Harry nodded unhappily.

“You think that he could have been responsible for the slayings we’ve had in San Francisco?” Harry asked, observing the weapon. It was his sense that the hit man could not have been, but he wanted to see what Butterfield had to say.

Butterfield agreed with him. “From what I’ve read and heard about those beheadings, I’d have to say no. They sound to me like a man gone off the deep end. Pathological, you know? And Pigeon was pathological all right, but he wouldn’t go about killing people in the same way. Not with so much blood. With him everything was, well, I guess the word for it is discreet.”

He now thrust forward a slip of paper so that Harry could inspect it. All it said was “X801.”

“We found it on Pigeon when we did a thorough search of his body. You have any idea what it might mean?”

Harry shook his head.

“I thought it might be a license plate or something like that. We’re checking it out with the Registry of Motor Vehicles here and in San Francisco, but I’m not really hopeful anything’ll come of it.”

As Harry was rising to leave, for all the necessary information had been exchanged between the two men, Butterfield urged him to stay in touch. “I have a feeling we’re going to see a development in this case real soon.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

Harry drove immediately to the hospital where Owens was being cared for. The case had become secondary in his mind because of his concern for his partner. All he could think of was that the miserable luck that had stalked all his previous partners still persisted, like some demon that he could not, whatever prayers and potions he tried, be exorcised.

Last night, in his confrontation with Pigeon, he had been afraid. There was always fear there, there was no way to escape it, and in most instances he found the fear was a healthy thing, like pain. Better than indifference, better by far than numbness. But that fear had been nothing compared to the dread he felt hours later when he had had to telephone Mary Beth and tell her what had happened to her husband.

Because he felt both responsible and guilty, because he kept going back over the shooting in his mind, wondering whether he could have done something sooner, or differently, to prevent harm from coming to Owens, he was prepared for an angry, reproachful response from Mary Beth.

She had been sleeping when he’d called but came instantly awake. And far from being in any way accusatory, she accepted the news as calmly as she could, telling him that she would be on the next available shuttle flight to Los Angeles.

Harry found her in the waiting room that adjoined the emergency area. It was getting on toward noon, and the area was alive with activity. There were a great many more people seeking emergency aid than usual because of the fires, and for hours, as Mary Beth waited for her husband to come out of surgery, men and women, bruised and battered and burned, paraded before her, some of them silent, their lips pursed in defiance of their pain, others crying out in protest and agony. The atmosphere was far from soothing, and in Harry’s eyes it could only heighten her tension and fear.

He greeted her and sat down beside her. Though her eyes were red, she was no longer crying, and she seemed composed though abstracted.

“There’s a coffee shop in this hospital, it might be better to wait there. I’ll come with you if you want.”

“No, I want to be here when the operation’s over. I want to be here.”

She asked him in detail how Owens had sustained his injuries, and Harry gave her as accurate an account as he could, omitting some of the more sordid particulars.

“Poor Mac,” she kept saying. “Poor Mac. You say he died instantly? I suppose then that it was better than suffering.” Her knuckles were white, and to stop her hands from trembling she knitted them together in her lap.

After sitting together like this for a few minutes in an uncomfortable silence, Harry decided that he would have to leave. He promised he would call in an hour, when the procedure was expected to end, and stood there for a moment, uncertain as to whether there was anything else to say, any assurance or consolation he could give. He realized there was nothing.

Mary Beth raised her eyes to him. “Thank you, Harry. For all you’ve done, thank you. And don’t blame yourself for what’s happened. That would be terrible.”

It was like a priest absolving him of sin. But the truth was that even Mary Beth, even Owens if he recovered, could not do that. Only he himself could, and he didn’t know if that was possible.

He now went back to Ocean Boulevard. Where the house belonging to Eloise Cummings and Patience Bell had stood there was only a smoldering ruin. The remaining walls had gone from white to black; the bedroom on the second floor, charred and still wet from all the water that had been used to douse the flames, was exposed to view. Harry could see the closets, now just more rubble and ash, where the two extravagant ladies had stocked their lavish collection of clothing.

As he stood there, staring at the house, he noticed another woman who was standing on the adjacent lawn. She was probably close to thirty, with brown hair that was let loose down her back and wearing a long blue dress. She looked as if she hadn’t quite gotten over the Sixties. She had the style and manner of a veteran of Haight-Ashbury who was aging gracefully but aging all the same.

“Do you live next door?” Harry asked.

She nodded, hastening to add so Harry would not get any ideas, “With my husband.”

Harry strode toward her. “Quite a fire last night,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “I happened to see it.”

“It almost got out of control. For a while there I thought we might lose our house, too. We had all our things packed and were ready to evacuate. Thank God, that wasn’t necessary.”

The woman introduced herself as Alice David. Harry mentioned that he was a police officer and showed her his identification. Either she did not see or did not care that he represented the San Francisco force.

“You investigating the fire? There were men here all this morning, sifting through the rubble. They say it was arson that did it.”

“Not exactly the fire. More like the house itself. And the women who occupied it. Did you know them?”

“You mean Patience and Eloise? I used to see them if that’s what you mean. I don’t think anyone really knew them except for the men that’d keep marching in and out of the house. They didn’t have other girlfriends. And most of the men friends weren’t exactly friends, if you catch my meaning.”

Harry caught it all right.

“Would you say that they made their living from prostitution?”

“I don’t think you’d be jumping to any conclusion. That would be my guess. They must have paid a mint for their clothes.”

“They did indeed.”

“Mmmmm,” she said as though a hunch had just been confirmed. “I think though that basically they weren’t straight at all. I have a feeling they were lezies. Gay, you know? You’d never see one without the other. They were inseparable, and they were both good-looking, more than good-looking actually, and probably they had a package deal going for the men. Two for the price of one, you know? But I’d say they were contemptuous of the men, of all men.”

“Ever see a repeat, I mean one man in particular who kept coming back?”

“Let’s see.” Alice turned thoughtful for a few moments. “Yes, there was one. Middle-aged. Handsome if you like them like that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, big-boned, businessman type. Austere. Probably a jock in college. Gray-haired, carefully cut and styled. He stood out because he looked so wealthy, so much in command of the situation. What I remember most was that once he came he used to stay as long as he liked. Sometimes through the night, at least for several hours, usually during the afternoons. And that was a privilege none of the other men ever got. I suppose he was just paying so much more, and it was undoubtedly easier on the girls, handling one guy instead of a dozen.”