Free Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air by Dane Hartman

occasionally had to fight against.
    What Harry was looking for was the smug, proud, but still vacant look of a person totally committed to one way of thinking. It was the face of a murderous zombie or a homicidal cultist. There was a tension, an aura, around that kind of person.
    He didn’t see any of these characteristics on the first faces he looked at. He moved slowly, cautiously through the raucous crowd on the platform. The buzz in his mind was almost overwhelmed by the swelling noise of laughter and talk in the station. As he walked, watching everything carefully, he saw the telltale lights of an oncoming train reflecting on a faraway curve in the tiled tunnel. Its approach made his search all the more desperate.
    He scanned the crowd almost hopelessly for any sign of his quarry. In his present state of mind, he was worried that he could look right at Patterson and not see her. He. worried that she might have slipped through the throng and run out the second stairway.
    But he had practically fallen down the stairs in his rush to get there, and he had kept his eyes on the second stairway. She couldn’t have had enough time to fight her way through the crowd and get up the steps. But if he didn’t find her before the train came—between all the cars and all the stops—he might lose her for good.
    There was a movement in the middle of the crowd. A hand had risen, and someone had blown on his or her fingertips.
    He saw them both at the same time. Denise Patterson was hunched down in the thickest concentration of people in the center of the platform. She was looking forward and down, keeping her head low. Coming up behind her was a short, innocuous, rough-skinned man in slacks, a shirt, and a plain sports jacket.
    That was the one. Harry was sure of it. He had looked right through the same man at the Fulton Station the morning Murray was killed. And now, the pusher was coming up right behind Patterson, and Callahan was at least thirty feet away.
    “Hey!” Harry shouted, but the sound was swallowed up by the sound of the train rushing around the corner, and by the increased volume of conversation. “Hey!” he repeated, shoving his way forward.
    All of the actions seemed to be running at a slower, nightmarish speed—the kind of dream speed in which the limbs are moving, but not naturally. Everything was slowed just enough so that it seemed impossible to accomplish anything.
    Callahan kept pushing as he watched the killer get behind Patterson, wrap one arm around her waist, the other hand around her neck, and start walking purposefully to the edge of the platform.
    Harry saw the horror on Patterson’s face. It was almost a guiltless shock, not the look of a woman who felt she deserved such a fate. He saw her mouth working, but heard no sound.
    The train appeared in the mouth of the station tunnel. Already, the crowd began preparing to enter, covering the killer’s deadly approach to the platform’s lip. Harry pulled out his Magnum, pointed it at the ceiling like a starter’s pistol, and pulled the trigger.
    The explosion of the .44 drowned out everything else like a thunderclap. The crowd, as one, reacted fearfully to the sudden deafening noise, cowering away from its origin. For a split second, almost all movement stopped.
    In that second, the killer turned and saw Harry. He saw the recognition on Harry’s face. He saw that Callahan wasn’t going to be the easy target he had originally supposed. He took a step forward, and threw Patterson onto the tracks with all his strength.
    Harry jumped onto the tracks as soon as the killer’s foot moved. He raced forward at the oncoming train with speed he didn’t know he had. Between him and the BART was the groggy, sobbing form of Denise Patterson.
    The killer had nearly choked her to death before dumping her with his angry power. The woman didn’t fall to the tracks, she was hurled—crashing to the ground with vicious speed. The knees of her jeans were ripped, and