Free Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death by Dane Hartman Page A

cellar, would you? And there were huge crates and barrels and shelves and shelves of canned goods. You had to go deep down to get to it.”
    “How many feet would you say?”
    “Jesus, I don’t know. All I know is that we had to walk down two or three sets of stairs.”
    “Deep as going down to a BART station, would you say?”
    “Yeah, maybe, it was as deep as the subway. Maybe.”
    “Could it have been a fallout shelter?”
    “A what?”
    “A place you’d go when they start dropping the bombs on you?”
    This seemed to puzzle her. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen a fallout shelter so big,” she said.
    “Have you seen many fallout shelters?”
    She admitted she hadn’t.
    “Were the walls soundproofed? I mean could you hear anything from the outside?”
    She shook her head again.
    “And what about when you were going into the shelter—we’ll call it a shelter, if you don’t mind—did you hear any noises then? Or coming out?”
    “It was in the woods, you know, I could smell pines. You could hear birds.” She paused, adding, “And then, just for a minute when I was leaving, I thought I heard gunshots.”
    “Gunshots?”
    “Yeah, I remember, I thought, ‘Shit, they execute people here, and they’re going to kill me.’ But one of the men said they were only practicing, and not to worry.”
    “Practicing?”
    “Yeah, practicing.”
    “Thank you, Miss Hamalian, you’ve been a great help.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it for now.”

    There’d been nothing about the gunshots either in the report he’d been given. He began making a series of calls both to neighboring police forces and to the National Rifle Association in an effort to discover the location of practice ranges in the area.
    Once he had a list, he perforated a map of the Bay region with a handful of colored pins. He selected those that he considered most likely, and got into his car, and went visiting.
    But most of the practice ranges were located no where near a house to which a lavish underground shelter was attached. After three days it began to get rather discouraging. Besides his ears were ringing constantly from protracted exposure to dozens of .22’s and .38’s discharging simultaneously.
    So he decided to travel another route and put in calls to building contractors in the northern part of the state who handled underground shelters.
    A contractor by the name of Samuel Keating, of S.T.V. Builders, Inc., said he had installed an elaborate shelter north of Santa Rosa about five years previously.
    “What was the terrain like, do you recall?”
    Keating sounded like a man who prided himself on not forgetting anything. “Woods, lots of woods.”
    “Could you tell me where exactly you built this, and who hired you?”
    “No problem. Hang on.” He returned in a couple of minutes with the information. He gave Harry the address and said that the client’s name was the Saving Remnant.
    “Saving what?”
    “Saving Remnant, that’s the name of the client. It’s some sort of fanatic organization, to be personally frank with you. What they call a survivalist group. You know, the type of people who believe the world’s coming to an end, but that they’re going to hang in there. But, look, it’s good money, this end of the world business.”
    “You wouldn’t know the name of the man who runs Saving Remnant, do you?”
    “Not really, but I think they publish a newsletter or something, same name as the organization. The man you want would be the editor.”
    Harry was about to hang up when Keating posed a question, “You don’t think it is, by the way, do you?”
    “Don’t think what is?”
    “The world coming to an end?”
    “Not a chance,” Harry assured him.
    “Good. That’s just what I thought,” said Keating.
    The newsletter Keating referred to was not widely available. Its circulation was restricted to true-believers evidently, but even true-believers discard their clutter from time to time. Harry dug up