Read Dirty Harry 08 - Hatchet Men for Free Online Page B

user ran after his associates, swinging the locked door closed behind him. It was all the same to Harry. He shot the Magnum right through the door. The .44 boomed again, bucked, and the bullet blasted through the door’s glass and into the Uzi user’s left shoulder. The disguised man hunched, twisted, and fell against the mailboxes.
    The MAC man, framed in the second, heavy wood front door, twisted around to cover his friend. Harry fired his third shot at the same moment the MAC man fired his first. The 9mm rounds of the sub-machine gun tore out slices of the banister next to Harry’s face, pushing him back and up in spite of himself. Harry’s slug punched out a two-inch section of the wooden door’s side.
    As Harry fell back, the MAC man grabbed his wounded partner by his good shoulder and hauled him outside. Harry heard the thick door slam as he leaped up and rounded the landing to charge down the stairs. His shoe hit something wet and gooey. It slid right across the stuff and sent Harry crashing to the floor on his back. As he dropped, he realized that it was the dinner Suni had promised to bring him.
    The leftovers saved his life. Almost as soon as he fell, the painfully vindictive Uzi user and MAC man opened up on the closed front door as some sort of a warning not to follow them. The bullets bore through the wood and shot up the staircase over Harry’s prone figure. The cop pulled himself forward, letting the foodstuffs get crushed under him as he snaked down the stairs. He stood the moment the flurry of lead stopped.
    Midway down the first-floor flight, he blasted another .44 round in return. A peephole the size of an “a-ok” finger sign appeared in the middle of the thick wooden door as the revolver’s report echoed up all three flights. Harry reached the first floor before the sound had diminished and twisted off toward Suni’s apartment just before some more 9mm missiles came shooting through the door. The portal was beginning to look like a slice of brown swiss cheese.
    Harry kicked open Suni’s door and ran from the small foyer into the living room. Since the woman lived on the first floor facing out on the street, her place had a bay window. Through it, Harry could see that the VZ man was loading her into the back of a dark, nearly windowless van. His two associates were covering his ass. Harry decided to keep them occupied. He pushed the Magnum’s barrel through Suni’s window and fired once again.
    It was one time he wished he had the eight-inch barrel. With its added accuracy, he just might have been able to hit the hunched over Uzi user again or the left rear tire that was just behind him. As it was, the .44 slug took off a piece of the man’s pant’s leg and poked a hole in the van’s side—just to the left of the tire and too low to hurt anyone inside.
    The backup men didn’t take their time returning Harry’s shot, but as their bullets blasted out the remainder of Suni’s bay window, Harry was already racing past her dining room to barrel through her bedroom. He jumped onto her bed, using it as a trampoline to throw him toward her bath. Inside the spotless, white-tiled expanse he found the opaque blue window leading out to her fire-escape landing.
    He threw the window wide, dove out, scrambled for the ladder and slid down the creaking thing to the ground. Harry came around the base of the building just as two masked men slammed the back doors of the van and ran toward the front seat on either side of the vehicle.
    Harry did some quick calculating. The VZ man had to be in the back with Suni, so his best bet was to peg the one heading for the driver’s seat. That would give him a couple of extra seconds with the van stationary. Without further ado, Harry let the guy on the driver’s side have it right in the back. His aim was perfect this time. He could practically chart the bullet’s progress as it streaked unerringly from the cloud of metal ash and fire at the end of the barrel to