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

subsided, maybe because they wanted to be absolutely certain it was sirens they were hearing. But the imminent coming of the police evidently didn’t quite put the fear of God into them because in half a minute they resumed, though their bullets were doing little more than scooping up dirt and thudding into tree trunks.
    Then one of the men downrange from Harry allowed his head to appear above the craggy rock formation behind which he’d been hiding; he was obviously inspecting the territory, looking for a way out. The sirens were growing louder. The police were a factor to take into consideration right about this time.
    Harry risked breaking his own cover, possessed by a compulsion to put a stop to this man’s flight. He had a sudden vision of himself standing in the middle of the knoll explaining to his colleagues just what had happened and where in hell everyone had gone to and why he couldn’t save one for questioning—because he suspected that the man flattened out in the dirt back there had long since given up any notion of surviving.
    The man Harry had elected to take in saw him, couldn’t help but see him with the noise he was producing. Not much noise maybe but enough—crackling twigs underfoot, scraping past bushes that refused to let anyone go by without announcing their passage—but there was nothing Harry could do about it, not if he wanted to maintain his speed.
    The man and a friend of his who’d secreted himself among the fossilized crevices of the rock directed their fire at Harry, assuming he was leading some kind of attack. Their shots made the going treacherous but Harry, by zigzagging and dodging, escaped them, sustaining only rough scratches from the brambles and thorns that assaulted him in the dark, scraping skin from his face and hands.
    Across the knoll, surprised and probably incredibly confused by this unexpected onslaught, the opposition opened fire—not at Harry but at the rock formation. The men they were targeting were now so preoccupied with bringing down Harry they had thrown caution to the wind.
    One of the two shooting at Harry cried out. He then cried out again as if to reaffirm his pain. A .38 had caught him in the side of the face, gone right through one cheek, clipping off a good bit of bridgework, then gone out the other, leaving this great big bloody hole through which even the slight steady breeze off the bay could whistle. Though the wound was ugly it wasn’t lethal, but that did not make any difference to the gunman insofar as the pain was concerned. He dropped his weapon and pressed both hands to his injuries. His friend had to go it alone.
    The friend did not much like proceeding with the solo act since his only intention had been to escape from the field in the first place. But with gunfire plaguing him from across the knoll and now with Harry diving onto a steeply angled moss-covered rock, threatening with his Magnum, escape was out of the question.
    Harry, taking advantage of his distraction, gained ground, flattened himself out, then rushed him again. The rounds he got off forced his target to lower himself back into his Ice Age souvenir. “Shut the fuck up,” Harry could hear him urging his bleeding friend who was able to release just a sad whimper, a sob caught perpetually in the throat. A sound like that could set a man on edge.
    At last the poor trapped bastard couldn’t take it any longer. He decided he might as well chance crawling out of his lair in hope nobody would notice or noticing, give a damn.
    But as he did so, two rounds—neither of them Harry’s because Harry wasn’t in any position to hit him—struck him from the side. One was supposed to. It broke a few ribs in its journey, then got stuck somewhere in the right lung. The other had ricocheted up from a stone and caught him in the groin. You couldn’t say that one killed him and the other didn’t; he might have lived with just one of the injuries, but they had acted in concert and sucked the