Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons (21 page)

Harry’s head had slammed against the side window and the steering wheel. He could barely see the flames once the car caught fire. He tried to clear his head. He tried to move. He could do neither.

He was at least able to see. He found himself looking at Dr. Richard Gerrold, holding Harry’s Magnum in his good hand. “Now that we’ve talked,” Gerrold said affably, the engine flames flickering in back of his head, “I feel it might be a good idea if you were dead.”

At point-blank range, with Harry unable to do anything about it, the slight, blond doctor pulled the Magnum’s trigger with his left forefinger.

By that time his aim was already off. The .44 Magnum is a cannon. A great deal of strength is needed to shoot and control it. Gerrold didn’t have it.

By the time the hammer came down on the shell, the barrel was pointing two inches from Harry’s head. When the lead was blasted out, the resulting report nearly broke Gerrold’s wrist. The gun bucked up right into the doctor’s face, slashing one of his eyes.

The bullet shattered the cracked glass behind Harry’s head. It deafened and nearly blinded him. When he could hear again, he heard the crackle of the car flames getting stronger. He heard the wails of Gerrold as he tried to push his torn eye back into its socket.

Callahan groped forward like a blind man. He found the Magnum on the dashboard. With his other hand he felt for Gerrold’s face. His finger sunk into the ruined eye. Gerrold contorted in excruciating pain, his mouth wide open. Harry stuck his hand in the mouth. He pulled the writhing doctor back to the seat. By touch only he shoved the Magnum barrel deep into Gerrold’s mouth.

He pulled the trigger, only hearing the doctor’s perverted brains splashing onto the back seat.

Harry turned his head toward the sound of the ocean. Light was coming through. He crawled out of the broken window and onto the sand. He pulled himself up and ran for the sound of the waves. When the BMW’s gas tank exploded, he had run far enough away so he wasn’t killed.

But he was thrown forward by the shock wave. When he rose to his elbows again and opened his eyes, he could see clearly. He looked behind him to see the burning structure of the fancy car and a bunch of cops bearing down on him, led by Christopher Collins.

“Where’s Shanna?” he shouted angrily at Harry.

“Isn’t she here?” he asked, getting up.

“No,” Collins said, coming right up in front of the San Francisco inspector. “What the hell did you do with her?”

“Did you check all the apartments?” was Harry’s answer.

“Everyone,” Collins answered angrily. “Peter Donovan is in the hospital. He’ll live, but he won’t cooperate.” The black man’s anger left him. “Harry, what happened?” he said desperately. “Where is she?”

Callahan went through his mind as he had gone through the files of Gerrold’s office. He went back to his very first conversation with Linda in almost ten years.

“Almost finished an apartment house in Revere,” she had said.

Harry asked Collins. Collins knew. It was a retirement hotel that Donovan’s company had only been able to complete the shell of. Because the incoming residents were going to be on fixed incomes, it was constructed of the cheapest materials. Even so, the money had run out. It had floors and ceilings on most floors, but many of the walls were missing.

The black detective got there in record time, Harry explaining on the way. By the time they arrived at the locked outside gate, Collins was sick with remorseful grief.

“She’s dead,” he said bitterly. “I’ve killed her.” Harry ignored him. He leaned out the window of the car and blew the lock off the chain holding the gate closed. The gate swung out on its own accord. Collins drove right to the open-ended basement.

It was sunset. The red, purple, and yellow sky made up the structure’s walls with light. They illuminated the small, torn body of Linda Donovan among the rubble of the basement. She lay with her eyes open, staring at the unfinished basement ceiling as the blood from her knife wounds painted the concrete floor.

She had tried. She thought she had come up with a clever place to be safe. But it was the one place Christine knew all too well. She had met Peter here constantly during their affair.

Harry saw two staircases, one on each side of the building. He pointed Collins toward the far one. He moved up the steps closest to Linda’s body.

He found the two girls on the eighth floor. They were in a kitchen with the outside wall missing. Shanna was on her back on the floor. Christine was holding the hunting knife against Shanna’s freckled neck as she drove inside the Donovan girl again and again.

It was a mockery of sex. The artificial sexual organ was strapped around the waist of the big coat Christine was wearing. She felt nothing through it, so she just kept jamming it between Shanna’s legs with continuous thrusts of her hips. Shanna’s neck was already marked with cuts from the unsteady knife.

Linda had saved her daughter after all. Christine had spent all her homicidal fury on the mother. She was merely expending her sexual frustrations on Shanna.

The redhead saw Harry first. She said his name in a pained hush. Christine stopped at the sound of the voice. She got up slowly and turned around. Harry was never so sickened. He futilely wished that Gerrold was still alive so he could torture him for as long as he had tortured the brunette.

Christine looked through Harry at first, then she recognized him and smiled. “So you’ve come,” she said. She opened her arms and walked toward him.

Then she realized that she was not in her apartment. She looked around the room in bewilderment. Then she looked down at the blood-streaked dildo tied between her legs. She saw the stained knife in her hand. She looked back at Shanna, who was crying in a fetal position while a thin stream of blood ran across her thigh. That’s all it took. Gerrold’s mental blocks were weaker than the doctor had thought.

Christine’s mouth opened. She moved back, away from both Harry and Shanna. Her face tried for an expression, but she couldn’t find one. The disorientation had devastated all the Gerrold-built blocks. Suddenly, in her mind, the fantasy became reality again. The movie she had acted in for Director Gerrold was her real life. She had tortured. She had murdered. She had raped.

Her face was the most tragic Harry had ever seen. The beauty that had been there was ravaged, ruined, razed away.

“Kill me,” she begged.

Harry raised the Magnum.

He had only killed people in self-defense or people who deserved it. The problem was did Christine deserve it? She had done it, but she was not to blame. The murder was inside her, but someone had brought out that murder that is inside everyone.

Harry hesitated still. Collins came rushing into the room, his gun out.

“No!” Harry shouted. “Get out! I don’t want you here. I don’t want you anywhere near Shanna again. I don’t want to see you or hear about you. Get out and get the rest of the men.”

The black detective saw that Shanna was still alive, so he did what he was told.

Harry and Christine faced each other for a few moments longer. Both were desperately looking for a way out. She came up with the solution first.

“Kill me,” she said, “or I’ll kill this girl.” She said it softly, imploringly. She said it with peaceful conviction.

Harry pulled the trigger. Christine’s body was thrown back and out the open wall. There was no scream as she fell. She had no lungs left to scream with. She landed ten feet from Linda’s body.

Shanna got up and ran to Harry’s arms. She shook silently in his embrace. Harry looked out at the sunset.

He never knew if Collins tried to see Shanna again. All he knew is that Collins never saw him again. He never knew whether Peter and Shanna got together again. He never knew what kind of funeral Linda had.

Dirty Harry Callahan left Boston the next morning and never went back.

D
ANE
H
ARTMAN
was a Warner Books imprint pseudonym used by two American novelists, Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz. "Hartman" was credited as the author of the Dirty Harry action series based on the “Dirty” Harry Callahan character of the popular 1970’s and 1980’s films starring Clint Eastwood.

Following the release of the third Dirty Harry movie, The Enforcer, in 1976, Clint Eastwood made it clear that he did not intend to make any more Dirty Harry movies. In 1981, Warner Books (the publishing arm of Warner Bros., which made the films) began publishing a number of men’s adventure series under its now-defunct "Men of Action" line. One such series features the further adventures of Inspector Harry Callahan. The series was brought to an end when Eastwood decided to direct, produce, and star in a fourth Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact, which was released in December 1983.