Free Dirty Harry 04 - The Mexico Kill by Dane Hartman Page A

them to.
    This is some fucking way to go, he thought, waiting in vain for his life to pass before his eyes, the way it was supposed to when you were drowning. But it didn’t happen. Neither his life nor anyone else’s showed up. Just my luck, he considered distantly, just my goddamn luck to be deprived of a last-minute show.
    Then he let go and the darkness opened up.

C H A P T E R

S e v e n
    I t was just that the darkness didn’t want to keep him very long. When he opened his eyes Harry found himself stretched out on moist wooden planks. There were lights and a sky cluttered with stars, and there were people who seemed to be looming over him and so far as he knew these were not the sorts of things you associated with heaven or hell. Particularly not hell. They weren’t going to provide you with a glimpse of stars and sky in hell.
    “Harry? Harry? You alive?”
    The question seemed not at all irrelevant or gratuitous. Harry thought in fact that it was a highly crucial inquiry, and he wasn’t so sure he had the correct response down yet. There was so much pain at work in his abused body that the very notion of trying to say something defeated him. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t even care to keep his eyes open, could barely make out anything anyway.
    “He’s alive,” someone else said. “He has a pulse, he just opened his eyes, that’s more than a lot of folks do.”
    “Yeah, well, he might not stay alive if we don’t get him some medical attention soon.”
    “You don’t know Harry. That son of a bitch doesn’t know how to die. No one ever taught him.”
    Very hazily Harry’s mind registered what was going on around him. He just wasn’t interested in reacting to it. They were hoisting his body up off the dock and onto a stretcher, and they were doing this real gently, afraid maybe that some important part of his anatomy might drop out on them. Someone was busy giving his arm an injection, adding the pain of a needle prick to all the other pain he’d amassed in the last half hour or so.
    Then his rescuers—he presumed they were his rescuers—proceeded with him down the length of the dock. They stopped suddenly.
    “Who you got there?”
    Harry recognized the voice but he couldn’t remember to whom it belonged.
    “Friend of yours.”
    “Oh yeah?” A pause while he took a look. “Oh shit. Harry again! What the fuck’s he doing here?”
    “How should I know what he’s doing here? He washed up with the kelp. Seems he was on a boat. Boat went one way, he didn’t want to follow.”
    “First he’s running around loose in Golden Gate Park, then he’s fucking with sinking yachts in a marina. What is it with this guy? Would you get him out of my sight?”
    Had his lungs been up to it, Harry would have laughed in spite of the pain. He knew whose voice it was now. Sergeant Bob Togan’s.
    When he came back to some semblance of life twenty-eight hours later, Harry discovered that his mind was more or less in place. The problem was he couldn’t hold it there. It had this tendency to stray, and he’d find himself staring blankly out into space, wondering where he was.
    He was in a hospital room. A semi-private. The man who shared the room was hidden from Harry by an opaque curtain that divided the space in half. But Harry sensed from the strained wheezing noises the man was producing he couldn’t be in very good shape. He didn’t think he ever wanted to see who it was.
    Fluids raced into him from one tube connected to a bottle above him and ran out of him from another connected to a bottle beyond his line of sight. The pain wasn’t so bad now, it had eased into something tolerable, and it was possible that one day not so far in the future it would all go away. Feeling his face with hands raw and scraped he found that he’d developed a harsh stubble. He imagined how he looked and decided he didn’t care to look into a mirror in the foreseeable future.
    He tried not to think. When he thought, the pain came