Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill by Dane Hartman Read Free Book Online

driver didn’t seem to anticipate the turns he’d have to take, and at times the vehicle would stray off the paved surface, onto the grass, into clumps of bushes. Once it banged noisily into the side of an innocent oak. Could be that the driver was drunk or on drugs or else was so carried away by this enterprise that it had all gotten a bit too much for him.
    Because Harry was directly behind the Chevy and because the road pursued such a twisting and unpredictable course, he was not always able to keep the Mercedes in sight. He could, however, hear it. The tires screeched maddeningly as the car bounded from one side of the road to the other. Then there was another sound—a sound of crunching shrubbery—which was followed by moments with a terrific clatter of metal yielding quickly to the unresisting surface of a boulder that jutted out nearly to the highway, a big granite thing that had been sitting for a couple of million years waiting for some excitement.
    The Chevy passed right by the final resting place of the Mercedes, but only because it was going too fast to stop immediately. It slowed down with a fervent protest from the brakes and drew up to a gravelly stretch that ran flush along the road.
    Harry kept going until he was hidden from view beyond a bend in the road, then stopped and got out of his car.
    The Mercedes, when he crept to within sight of it, using the trees and the shadows they sent down along the high untrimmed grass to conceal himself, was a wreck. At least the front part of it was, jammed up against the boulder, practically melded into the damn thing by the force of the impact. There was nothing left of it aside from the windshield which, while resembling a roadmap with lots of roads and riverbeds, still remained intact. Where the occupants of the Mercedes had gone Harry couldn’t determine. In fact, he couldn’t even figure out what had happened to their pursuers. The Chevy, too, was vacant.
    But he didn’t have to go looking for them. They made themselves known with a sudden burst of fire. At first there were only scattered reports, then a relentless fusillade. The conflict seemed to be going on just up over the hillock and through a cluster of oaks just to Harry’s left. The question he faced was whether to return to his car and alert the station or to risk getting closer to better ascertain the situation—and to do so without somehow stumbling into the middle of the fray.
    He decided to return to his car. There were too many men involved for him to handle on his own. The dispatcher recognized Harry’s voice immediately.
    “You back with us, Inspector?” he inquired.
    “Not exactly. But don’t let technicalities stop you.”
    “Course not. I will relay the message. Ten-four.”
    Even from this distance the gunfire could be heard. It was not loud enough, however, to cause the few passing cars to stop. Then again when people were shooting one another usually the best thing you could do was to keep right on going. It was only the ones like Harry who felt the pull in the opposite direction. He wasn’t about to stay by his car until help arrived. By then the gunmen might all be gone. Or dead.
    Harry ventured in through the oak-strewn landscape, keeping low to avoid the stray bullet that every so often tore away the bark and smaller branches from trees in Harry’s immediate vicinity. As he approached the area that the gunmen had converted into a battlefield the trees grew fewer in number, allowing for an open grassy knoll. There were on the periphery of the knoll smaller boulders, cousins of the big one that had done in the Mercedes, and these were being used by the men for cover. Who was shooting at whom Harry couldn’t say for sure, and which ones had come from the Mercedes and which from the Chevy was a similar mystery. Harry, however, did have one advantage; as far as he was concerned he was against both parties to the conflict, so he really didn’t care who emerged victorious. His