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

sickening splat behind. Getting the skidding car under control, he looked bewilderedly around. The Inspector was nowhere in sight. It was possible the chauffeur thought that the cop had been thrown out of range.
    The three men outside the car saw what had happened, Harry had hopped up to the auto’s hood and vaulted from there to a hanging hook above the speeding vehicle. Harry pulled himself up, his knees bent, just above the car’s roof, as the vehicle skidded to the side just beneath his shoes.
    As soon as it passed, Harry let go of the hook. It was attached to a spring controlled pulley unit, so that it held Harry high enough long enough before drooping slightly. It now hung like a giant fishing pole from heaven. Callahan hit the floor with both feet, kept falling forward and somersaulted across the floor away from Tuccio and Bender.
    The two criminals were keeping each other busy. Tuccio was on one side of the collapsed shack the hitman had retreated to, his own gun out, a sleek esoteric looking Heckler and Koch 9mm Automatic. With it, he was trying to plug Bender before the hitman was able to peg him. Fatso, in the meantime, had been unable to sight either of them because of the passing car.
    Harry had rolled to one knee when Tuccio’s fourth rapidly fired bullet happened to catch Bender in the side as the dazed man was pulling himself out of the booth’s rubble. It was obvious that the debris from the car’s collision with the shed had stunned the big man, but was far from enough to knock him down for the count. Even the 9mm bullet wasn’t enough to do that.
    Bender took the bullet with a grimace, the same way many people took allergy shots. He twisted in the direction the bullet had come from and started blasting .45 rounds. But he was firing blind and Tuccio knew it. The bullets splattered into the ground in front and to the right of the businessman as he continued to pump lead into Bender’s torso.
    The next 9mm bullet went into the hitman’s left shoulder, making Bender react as if to a punch. One shattered his jaw, turning the lower half of his face into a bloody mass of pulpy muscle and jagged bone. If the bullet had hit him straight on, he’d have been dead. As it came across his profile, however, it merely tore off his chin.
    Bender was unable to keep upright after that. He fell to his right, making Tuccio’s next round miss. He fell heavily, his own gun silent. Spooked by his own ability to stop a man he was certain was going to kill him, Tuccio ran around the back of the destroyed booth toward the idling car, pulling the trigger of his now empty automatic as he went.
    From that angle, Harry was unable to hit the crook himself, so he scrambled to his feet to give chase. As he raced forward, Bender turned slowly over, like a bear lazily rolling in the noon sun. He fell onto his back, his gun hand dropping perpendicular to his body. His head drooped. Drifting slowly, looking as if he were simply rolling over in bed.
    But Bender wasn’t one to go out like that. Even Harry could see that the .45 was raised off the ground at a slight angle. Bender’s finger tightened and the big automatic boomed, the speeding bullet smashing through the middle of Tuccio’s back, exploding out his stomach just above his sternum.
    Some of Tuccio’s middle made it to the car before he did. It splashed against the grill and hood, glowing in the hot white of the headlights. It started to dry immediately from the engine’s heat, losing its lustre just as Tuccio collapsed across its front. The crook’s eyes—gleaming first with surprised life then lost all their illumination. He died as he slowly slid across the grill to the ground.
    Again it was just Callahan and the car; facing each other in a sort of perverted version of High Noon. Pressing his foot down on the gas pedal, he sent the big auto barreling across the body of its dead owner. Tuccio bounced twice beneath the spinning wheels, hunks of him being spit out of