Read Online Dirty Harry 09 - The Killing Connection by Dane Hartman - Free Book Online Page A

titillation, but they had also taken a swipe at alleged police inefficiency. Now the pretty, capable, dark-haired Baxter was sonorously reminding her sisters how dangerous it was out on the street as if she had no personal interest in the situation. Her voice was as clipped and reserved as though she were reading a recipe. In fact, someone later told Harry, she had returned to do a restaurant review further on in the broadcast.
    “Yeah, guys,” Harry told the TV screen as he turned it off. “And James Brady was killed during the Reagan assassination attempt.”
    Given his media-fueled state of mind, Callahan went right back to the Justice building between the Skyway and the Southern Pacific station, ready to chew up and spit out anybody who got in his way. He left his green bomb at the curb and vaulted right toward the front steps. There were reporters on the stairs, outside the main doors, inside the lobby, and in front of the homicide department’s door on the seventh floor.
    They accosted almost everyone of note who came in, jostling for position, holding their cameras over their heads and using their microphones and tape recorders like electric prods. Every time an officer or politician appeared, they would crowd around him like bees to honey, forcing him to push his way through while their questions were thrown together in a shouted buzz.
    They had just given the treatment to someone when Harry appeared. At first they turned on him expectantly, but when they recognized the face, they gave him plenty of room. Dirty Harry was well known to the veterans of the City Hall Beat, only they thought his nickname signified something other than his investigation techniques.
    More than a half decade ago, when they sorely abused him during the “Scorpio Sniper” and the “Enforcer” cases, Callahan decided he wouldn’t be seen in the papers or on the TV news again. So now, whenever a camera or mike is turned his way, all he does is make faces, obscene gestures, and swear grievously.
    Someone could try to embarrass him by printing the goofy pictures, but he’d slap a suit on them which would bring their ethics in question. And a paper or network could lose its license on a question of ethics far faster than it could on almost anything but pornography.
    Harry ran up the steps without interruption and just made it out the seventh floor elevator doors when a young photographer tried to catch him off-guard. Bringing the camera up to capture Callahan’s serious expression on the way to room seven hundred and fifty, he shouted.
    “Over here, Inspector!”
    He saw Harry’s head turn in his direction, so he quickly brought the Nikon up, a feeling of success in his head. He found himself looking through the viewfinder at a widely smiling Harry, whose middle finger was prominently in evidence.
    He left them all behind the door of the homicide department. The world could be going to hell in a hand-basket—and judging by their caseload, it was—but very little changed within the walls of suite seven-fifty. It still smelled like a locker room and looked like the psychiatric ward of S.F. General Hospital. The major difference between it and the horror of the Vice Squad was that, there, the nuts were all the suspects; here, the cops were the crazies.
    “Hey Harry!” he heard Reineke call. “I heard you had some blind date last night.”
    Harry remembered the crushed horrid remnant of the girl he pulled out of the goo several hours earlier. “Yeah,” he replied to the Sergeant, “but she was still better looking than the dogs you take out.”
    The squad’s basic insanity came from the fact that had the Mortician Murderer’s graveyard not been discovered, Harry still would have had plenty to occupy him. With violent deaths coming in at an average of two and a half a day, the whole force had to tread water just to keep the bends away.
    And if one were foolish enough to ask how half a death a day could be reported, as one rookie