Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air Read Online Free PDF Page A

man on the other end said. “We shall see what the computer comes up with on Maggin and Callahan. Wait thirty minutes, and then return to your office. Instructions will be waiting for you there.”
    “Very good, sir,” said the killer. “Thank you, sir.”
    The killer hung up, removed the special mouthpiece, left the booth, and had lunch at the bar. Afterward, he leisurely made his way back to the run-down, four-story brick building in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. As he walked up the warped steps to his second-floor office, he heard the comings and goings of the buses at the nearby Bay Bridge Terminal through the dirty, smoked windows.
    From all appearances, his office was exactly as he had left it. In fact, even his crude security device—the hair he had glued to the edge of his closed, locked door—was still in place. But when he unlocked the door and entered the simple, windowless, corner room, there was a bulky manila envelope on the large, chipped, wooden desk that hadn’t been there before.
    The killer closed and locked the door behind him. He walked around the desk once before sitting in the one padded, metal chair. After making a rudimentary, almost unconscious examination of the envelope to make sure it wasn’t a letter-bomb, he opened the package.
    Inside was a thin, small hypodermic gun with a metal vial screwed into it. The only other thing was a coded message written on flash paper. The killer translated the complex code into a simple message.
    Maggin would be taken to the hospital. He wasn’t to leave it alive. If Inspector Callahan could have an accident in the process, all the better.
    The killer leaned back, producing a thin lighter from his pocket. With a touch, a small flame appeared. Like a practiced magician, he barely touched the edge of the paper with the flame, and the message disappeared. Only a single tiny ash fell to the desk. That was why they called it flash paper.
    The killer nonchalantly wiped the ash away and leaned back, smiling.
    Halfway to headquarters, Maggin started getting a serious case of the shakes.
    “Aw, shit,” said the uniformed patrolman who had identified the pickpocket in the first place.
    “What?” Harry opened one eye to ask, remaining slumped in the passenger seat.
    The patrolman hooked a thumb toward Maggin, who vibrated in the caged back seat. “Marshall must’ve lifted the pocketbook to get money for a fix,” the cop replied. “It looks like he was too late.”
    Harry sat up and looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, Maggin was showing the unmistakable signs of a loser on withdrawal.
    “We’re never going to get him back to the station in that condition,” the uniformed cop, who had introduced himself as Jim Petrillo, said. “Any lawyer worth his salt could make a case for ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ if we bring him in like that.”
    “Head for the hospital, then,” Harry suggested, hunkering back down in his seat, trying to catch one wink, let alone forty.
    “I guess well have to,” Petrillo agreed. He took a fast right off of Market Street, away from the Justice Building, and onto Tenth—toward San Francisco General Hospital.
    As the patrol car sped south, Callahan thought about what Petrillo had told him. Maggin was a well-known purse snatcher, pickpocket, and small-time thief in the precinct. Petrillo himself had arrested Marshall at least twice, and almost every beat walker had a Maggin story to tell back at the locker room.
    But because of the insanity of the legal process, Maggin was still waiting for the third delay on his first rap trial to clear up. And while he was waiting, he was out committing his second through twelfth. Harry’s arrest was Maggin’s thirteenth rap, and Petrillo hoped it would be the guy’s unlucky one. Maybe now, the patrolman figured, they could make a case for Maggin being an undesirable, and get him exiled to Angel Island or something.
    All Maggin himself had to say, however, was that he knew nothing,