Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill Read Online Free PDF

you?”
    “Why don’t you start by coming out here for a visit?”
    “Any special occasion?”
    “You might say so, Harry. When can you make it?”
    “How about right away?”
    “I always liked your style, you know that, don’t you?”
    “Right, Harold.”
    “You remember how to get up here?”
    “How could I forget?”
    The Keepnews’ home commanded a view of the bay that was so spectacular it was nearly impossible to tear your eyes away. About the only thing that could do it was Mrs. Keepnews. Between the bright blue water, which Keepnews’ mansion overlooked from the San Francisco side of the bay, and Wendy’s eyes you would have a hard time knowing where to look first.
    “We haven’t seen you for a million years,” she said when he approached the door. He’d anticipated a servant or two, not this splendidly bronzed woman who from her appearance seemed to have nothing else to do but cultivate a tan all day long.
    “What a surprise,” Harry said. The sight of Wendy was the first pleasant sight he’d had all day. She was as good as it was ever going to get.
    “What surprise? I live here, you know.” She laughed, a delightful trilling laugh.
    “I didn’t think I’d see you is all.”
    “Well, it’s not like I’m a nun stuck in a convent.”
    Harry observed her lithe form, the soft browning body dramatized by the thin white lines of her bikini. “No,” he agreed, “you don’t bear much resemblance to any nun I ever met.”
    She laughed again. She liked doing that, laughing.
    Shortly, Keepnews himself appeared. Clapping Harry on the back, he invited him inside which meant parting from Wendy. Whatever Keepnews had asked him up here for, Harry thought, he couldn’t imagine it would be half as interesting as exchanging pleasantries with Wendy, idly watching the parade of sailboats on the bay.
    Keepnews had first met Harry on a case a long time ago. There’d been a theft; a burglar had tried making off with a cache of jewelry one night. Keepnews had stopped him by putting a bullet into the back of his head. Keepnews was a hunter and maintained an interesting arsenal of rifles and handguns. The burglar was running away when he shot him. Didn’t want to waste ammunition; one bullet was all that was necessary to change the burglar’s mind by eliminating a good part of it.
    Harry had been called upon to investigate. The problem was that Keepnews had gone to the papers and announced what he’d done and further, recommended that every other law-abiding citizen of San Francisco, of all California for that matter, go out and buy a gun, if they didn’t already have one, and use it to protect their life, their family, and their property, not necessarily in that order.
    This caused something of an uproar among supporters of gun-control legislation and a large number of minority groups, who felt that Keepnews was calling for something like open warfare against any poor sucker whose only crime might be to swipe something from the five-and-ten. That had not been Keepnews’ intention, but he was not a man either to repudiate his words or to clarify them. You either understood what he was talking about in the first place or you didn’t, and he for one didn’t really give a damn.
    But the furor was such that the word came from the mayor’s office to bear down hard on Keepnews in order to demonstrate to the concerned citizenry that he was not being let off easy. No one on the force especially relished the assignment. Not that they exactly condoned what Keepnews had done, but they weren’t especially put out by it either. The man he’d killed had a rap sheet that read like a catalogue of the ten plagues. He’d done more than burgle, he’d raped and assaulted and conned folks who should know better out of their life savings. If anyone deserved to meet an early end it was this fellow.
    What usually happened when no one on the force wanted to undertake this kind of investigation was that it was handed to