Read Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers for Free Online Page B

but by whom?
    She remembered the woman’s words: “We have friends everywhere who are able and willing to help the revolution.” Were there such friends even here at KCVO? Perhaps sitting only a few cubicles away in the newsroom?
    “Miss Winston?”
    She started and looked up to find herself staring into a pair of angry eyes. The eyes belonged to Harry Callahan.
    She wondered how he’d gotten past the security guard downstairs, but supposed it couldn’t have been too difficult. If terrorists could acquire her personal phone number why shouldn’t cops be able to come into the newsroom without being admitted first?
    By the look of him she had an idea of what was coming.
    “Please, sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”
    Anything to calm him down, she thought. She would not ever want to be this man’s enemy.
    “No coffee,” he muttered. “Too much coffee already.”
    He did appear to be a man fighting off sleep and beginning to lose.
    “Tell me what can I do for you?”
    She didn’t like the tone in her voice, sounded too officious, too formal. The man made her uneasy, that was part of it. But she was determined to brazen it out with him even though in the back of her mind she was thinking: Maybe I should get out of this.
    “I am sure you are a good journalist, but you’d be doing me a great favor if you would find some other detective to follow around. I’ve got enough on my mind already.”
    “I am sure you have. But your superior chose you and he must have had his reasons. In any case, I doubt whether he would assign anyone else to me. You are my one opportunity.”
    “I don’t give a shit about your opportunities.” His voice was rising. “Do you know anything about me, Miss Winston?”
    “Ellie. And no, except that you’re a homicide detective.”
    “Ellie.” He pronounced her name quickly, a bit derisively. “Listen to me. I am very bad luck. My partners have had a way of dying or getting seriously wounded. Isn’t my fault, isn’t theirs. It’s just a lot of very bad luck. I function well on my own, always have, and that is how I prefer it. Nothing against you.”
    “Inspector Callahan . . .” She waited for him to tell her she could call him Harry but that didn’t happen. “I won’t get in your way if that’s what’s troubling you. I have no wish to be shot at or prove myself a hero so don’t worry yourself on my account. If anything happens to me neither you nor the San Francisco Police Department need take any responsibility. The station handles my insurance.”
    Harry was becoming exasperated. He didn’t know how he could break through to this woman without threatening her and he had no wish to do that. “Look, it’s not like you can decide whether you want to get shot at or not. It doesn’t happen that way. The fact of the matter is you are going to hamper my investigation and put me in a very bad humor.”
    “You already seem to be in one. I doubt I could make you worse. Inspector Callahan, do you have any choice in the matter.”
    “I wish I could say yes.”
    “But you don’t. You have your obligation, I have mine. Let’s see if we can’t get along then. It might make things easier for both of us.”
    “Shit.” He rose to leave.
    “I may not be such a burden as all that. Listen.” She pressed the rewind button of the recorder on her desk, then proceeded to play back the conversation she had just had with the representative of the People’s Struggle for a Free Puerto Rico.
    When it was finished she asked Harry if he’d heard of the group before. He hadn’t. She asked him if he’d been aware of the provenance of the guns. He hadn’t.
    She then brought out the cassette made that afternoon from the man purporting to be a member of the so-called Alpha Group and played that for Harry as well.
    When that was over she asked him if he had heard of this group before. He hadn’t. She asked him if he’d known of anyone else in the police department or in the media