part one
chapter seven
Harry Callahan's return from Southeast Asia marked the beginning of a cold, dark and bitter period in his life, a time marked most of all by very personal loneliness. His mother was gone and his father slipped in and out of anger and depression; worst of all his father rarely visited these days, not even when he'd just returned from sea. Harry went by the house from time to time and every time he found the yard an overgrown mess. It still hurt to see the Everson house next door, too, and he dreaded making the trip out to his old home for that reason more than any other. He would fight past the memories, past the tattered For Sale sign to the front porch and peer in the glass, not quite knowing what he'd find inside beyond heartache and broken dreams. Some trips his father was home and he must have seen Harry over there and he'd come out and meet him in the yard and they'd be angry and depressed together before heading to a seafood shack down on the wharf. They'd drown all their misgivings in schooners of cold beer while talking about how there was nothing better in life than fresh, hot onion rings and a fresh bottle of ketchup. Nothing much mattered at that point; life seemed over and done with, just one more thing that had passed them by on the way to nowhere.
Harry slipped into all the routines on the street like he had never left the city. All the same problems were still out there, waiting, only now Callahan had a little less patience for what felt like petty bullshit calls at four in the morning. A few weeks after his return to the street he responded to yet another family disturbance, and when he went up to the door he was met at the door by a belligerent, knife wielding drunk. The man started cursing Callahan, and Harry simply tossed the man aside and walked into the apartment, found the man's wife crumpled on the floor, her face a pulpy mass of bleeding contusions. Then the drunk was in the doorway, yelling at Callahan about his rights as a citizen and how he was 'gonna sue your ass into the ground' when Callahan turned around and looked at the man.
Who saw the look in Callahan's eyes and stopped talking.
The drunk still had the same knife in hand when Callahan walked up to him, and Callahan unholstered his Smith & Wesson and beat the man's face until it looked something like his wife's, then he dragged the man out into the street and kicked him in the groin once before dragging the writhing form over to a huge commercial trash dumpster. Callahan picked up the man and tossed him inside, then went back and picked the woman off the floor and carried her to San Francisco General, leaving the three other responding officer slack-jawed by their patrol cars.
He'd never said a word. Not one.
And pretty soon word got out, went around precinct houses and neighborhoods like a wild fire.
Don't fuck with Callahan.
When Harry worked a beat the word quickly got out: neighborhoods suddenly grew quiet. Anyone dumb enough to create a disturbance soon went to the School of Callahan; and so-called men stupid enough to beat-up on their wives or girlfriends soon met with the same fate as that first drunk.
And soon enough word spread throughout the detective division, too.
Deep Night shifts, the overnight shift that typically stretches from midnight to eight in the morning, tend to operate under rules all their own, at least they did out in the real world beyond the courts, judges and lawyers that defined the other side of the criminal justice equation in the 60s and 70s, and San Francisco tended to operate somewhere way beyond 'nice and proper' those days. And that was not taking into account cops like Callahan, who seemed to operate with huge chips on their shoulders -- on their good days.
Then one night while Callahan was out patrolling a residential neighborhood around four in the morning he passed a streetlight and saw a blanket in the shadows. He stopped and looked at it -- until it moved, anyway -- then he radioed in and stopped to check it out.
He found a little girl maybe five years old wrapped-up in a tattered, flea-infested blanket and he parted the rancid fabric, found the girl was naked, her body covered with bruises and what looked like little burn marks. Callahan had seen these burns before, and too many times to count by then; they were made by someone holding a burning cigarette up to the skin and pressing in just hard enough to broil the tissue underneath, but this little girl's body was literally covered with them -- even her eyelids.
Callahan picked-up the little girl, heedless of the fleas and other crawling things all over the blanket, then he cupped the girls face and whispered to her: "Can you hear me? Just move your eyes if you can."
"It hurts," the girl said, her voice a faint trembling remnant of someone long past gone.
"My name is Harry, and I'm a police officer. What's your name?"
"Susan," came the withered, brittle reply.
"Well Susan, you're going to be okay now. We're going to take care of you, but first I need you to show me where you live. Can you do that for me?"
She pointed to a house across the street.
"The one with the blue roof?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Who did this to you? Do you know?"
She nodded her head. "Todd did it. He's my mommy's boyfriend." She seemed to tremble a little more, then she held up her head. "Are you Officer Callahan?" she asked.
"I sure am, Honey."
She smiled as she drifted off, as back-up units pulled up behind his patrol car.
"Get an ambulance," Callahan growled, handing off the little girl to another officer as he started across the street...
...right about the time a new homicide detective named Carl Stanton pulled up on the scene. He had heard all the stories about Callahan and knew the score, so when he'd heard the call come out he knew Callahan had found something, so he raced to the scene. Still, he kept to the shadows and watched...
...as Callahan crossed the street, walked up the stoop and politely knocked on the door.
Stanton saw the shotgun barrel, but not before Callahan -- who grabbed the end of the barrel as he kicked the door in, and in one continuous motion slammed the butt of the shotgun into his would-be-assailants face. Stanton ran up to the porch and got there just in time to see Callahan stick the end of the barrel in a man's mouth -- then pull the trigger.
There was a muffled 'woompf', and about all Carl Stanton saw was a pink mist in the air, then a scorched piece of carpet where the man's head had been. Stanton walked into the house, then went room-to-room until he found a woman's body in the little bathroom, her battered body a bloody mess, curled up and lifeless in the dingy bathtub.
As a detective who had 'on-viewed' the incident, Stanton was the senior officer on-scene so it was his call now, his report to make, so he walked over to Callahan and took the Winchester pump from him and laid it across a chair...then he looked into Callahan's eyes...
...and saw tears behind a veil of rage...
A sergeant walked in, saw Harry then the detective. "You got this, Carl?"
