Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death by Dane Hartman Read Free Book Online Page B

the slightest sign he was frightened.
    “A dead man,” the intruder replied.
    The judge frowned. This was not the sort of response he’d expected.
    “What are you doing in my house? If you don’t leave right away, I mean to notify the police.”
    The judge couldn’t identify the intruder though there was something vaguely familiar about the man. That the stranger had not yet produced any weapon he felt was reassuring. But what did he want? If he had come to rob his house surely he would have started to do so by now.
    When the man did not reply, the judge asked, “Were you ever in my court?”
    “No,” the man said. “I was in a lot of courts in my time, but never in yours.”
    The judge shook his head. Sometimes, the people whose trials he presided over sought him out for one thing or another, believing mistakenly he could function in the role of a social worker or psychiatrist.
    “Then what can I do for you?”
    At that moment, his wife called to him from upstairs. “Ed, what is is? Is someone there?”
    “It’s all right, dear,” he shouted up.
    It was then Gallant slipped his right hand underneath his jacket and removed the .44.
    Gallagher paled when he saw the gun. In all the years he’d been on the bench, nothing like this had ever happened to him. Now he was convinced the man was dangerous.
    “Whatever you want, please, we have so little, but you are welcome to it all. But please, please don’t hurt us. I am an old man and my wife . . .”
    Gallant was disinterested in listening to his feeble appeals for mercy. “You know a friend of mine named Callahan, Harry Callahan?”
    “Callahan,” the judge said, rummaging through his memory to place the name. “Yes, I believe I once . . .”
    Again, Gallant wouldn’t allow him to finish a sentence. “Well, then, this is for him.”
    The .44 was much louder than Gallant had expected. The recoil was so powerful that it nearly threw him off balance. He wasn’t used to handling a gun so big.
    When he recovered from the shock of the blast, he looked to the chair where the judge had been sitting. The judge wasn’t there any longer. He was sprawled out on top of the desk which had, in turn, toppled over to the floor. Blood soaked through his bathrobe and his arms were splayed out so he seemed to be assuming the posture of Jesus on the cross. His eyes were still open but they were rapidly filming over. There was no question he was dead. Out of the wound blood was slowly leaking onto the pages of a California statute book.
    Not unexpectedly, the blast had been audible upstairs. Rather than stay put, which would have been the wisest course of action, Gallagher’s wife had come rushing down to see what had happened and she now stood at the door to the study, horrified by the sight of her murdered husband. Her eyes bugged from their sockets, her jaw gaped open, and it seemed she was incapable of producing any sound.
    She was in her mid-fifties, by the looks of her, a woman who had never been beautiful. Gallant had only come to kill Gallagher. He hadn’t even known he had a wife, hadn’t even considered the possibility.
    Had he been wearing a mask, he might have permitted her to live. But the fact was he wasn’t. Until Turner had his face altered, as he’d promised, he could still be recognized.
    “I hate to do this,” he said apologetically.
    Too late, she reacted, and turned, and tried to run from him.
    With no urgency at all, Gallant raised the .44 and, sighting it on the back of her head, on the bun of coarse graying hair, he fired.
    This time he was better prepared for the recoil, and it didn’t unbalance him the way it had before. Betty Gallagher seemed for an instant to rise in the air, like a marionette suddenly tugged up and offstage. Her head blazed as though fire danced from it. But it wasn’t fire, it was blood. A torrent of blood.
    Something sticky had gotten on the legs of his pants. He looked down and saw it was a part of what had been inside