Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

then he remembered the time, and gazing down at his watch, found it was a few minutes after six.
    If I work this right, he thought, I should get to Sheila’s only an hour late. It was a goal to strive for anyhow.

C H A P T E R

T h r e e
    I t was the unshakeable conviction of Grant Turner that the world was coming to an end. It would not end, as the poet said, with a whimper, he was goddamn sure of that. No, it would end with one hell of a bang. But that the world, and the human race along with it, was shortly to blow itself to smithereens was of scarce concern to Turner. On the contrary, he welcomed the occurrence, believing he would be one of the few—he’d go so far as to say one of the lucky few—who would survive the apocalypse. On the morning after World War III, he would walk out, in suitably protective gear of course, into the radioactive air and survey the waste of the city of San Francisco.
    Turner was an ordinary looking man. That might have been his secret. He could have been a lawyer or a flunky for some corporate firm, with his wire rim glasses and his Brooks Brothers wardrobe. Only on weekends and late in the afternoons, when he’d left work for the day, would he do a Superman number, changing into a paramilitary outfit, pack up his arms and his provisions and set off into the woods. There he would take target practice, camp out, and subject himself to tests of all kinds. He had friends, but they were few. Mostly he had followers, those who looked upon him as their commander, the man who would lead them when the government had collapsed and millions lay dead, annihilated instantly because they happened to be standing at Ground Zero at the wrong time.
    Not that Turner was simply waiting for the next war, caching tins of food and barrels of fresh water in his fallout shelter. No, Grant Turner was already capitalizing on people’s fears of worsening times. He didn’t need a damn war, he just needed panic and uneasiness and rampant inflation. The more people invested in collectibles, in antiques, in gold and silver, in Impressionist paintings, in Rolls Royces, and rare stamps, the happier Turner was. He could not afford to buy any of these things, but that mattered not at all to him. He stole what he wanted. He did not especially like seeing people killed during his heists—it meant that the police would investigate more thoroughly—but he would not lose sleep if that happened. The way he looked at it, they would die anyway when they dropped the big one.
    It was not what his associates and acquaintances would have expected—Grant Turner changing from thief to leading survivalist and future commander of a post-holocaust elite military unit.
    But everyone would have had to admit Turner was lucky. He should have been arrested and convicted long ago for the various felonies he had committed. Except for one youthful escapade in his hometown of Minneapolis, he’d managed to keep his fingerprints out of police records and his body out of prison cells. A great many who knew him, considered Grant Turner a law-abiding citizen with a penchant for hunting and mountain climbing. To all outward appearances, he was a bureaucratic functionary laboring in the county clerk’s office for no other reason than to collect his pension. They had no idea his only motivation for remaining in what was, after all, a dull and unrewarding job was to gain access to various deeds and title claims, giving him the leads he required to plan his raids on the very rich.
    He occupied an office by himself. It smelled musty, as was to be expected with bundles of decaying records piled up, waiting until the day someone got around to putting them all on microfilm. There was no window in the office and that was what Gallant remembered most about it: the absence of any window, and the must in the dead air.
    Something was missing though, a large framed painting of a rustic scene with a village and mountains in the background.
    There was a