The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “We have company sneaking around the side of the house,” I told Jo quietly. “Go to your husband’s den or somewhere out of the way until you hear from me again. I’m going out the front door to come up behind them.”

  She went like the best little soldier in the world to the dead doctor’s den. I trotted down the carpeted hallway, looked quickly through the spy port and eased open the door. Down the stairs and to the right. The visitor had left open the gate, which saved me from having to vault it in order to avoid the warpy squeak that had warned me of all this. I was through the gate and saw a shadowy movement at the back of the house. Somebody had just turned the corner ahead of me. I was still a couple of steps from going around the corner after him when it sounded like somebody tried to blow off the roof. There was an ear-cracking bang that had me rolling on the ground from instinct. When I came up into a squat, Sam the cat, hair standing straight, was going over the neighbor’s fence. I peeked around the corner of the house. A figure was moving toward the other corner of the yard, holding an automatic pistol in an arm-extended, two-hand grip, looking for a gap in the bougainvillea to see into the patio and hot tub area. He was wearing a camouflage outfit like the one Allison had seen on the person going over the ridge at Big Sur. This one also had his face blackened, as if he were going to war. I intended to make him feel exactly that way, but he was a man finely experienced in these things. He sensed me and turned his entire body in my direction, then squeezed off two rounds that nicked the wooden shiplap in front of my face. I got off a quick shot of my own as I pulled back around the corner, rose up and then ran out at an angle to my left, which I figured would be the place he’d least expect to see me appear, but he already was gone.

  The blast must have come from something he lobbed over the lattice walls into the patio. There still were wisps of thin smoke in the air and the smell of explosive. This registered as I reversed myself and ran back down the side of the house with the gate. I wasn’t going to go around the corner the way the mad bomber had. He’d be expecting that. I thought that with luck I could go around the front of the house and find him slipping around in the ice plant alongside the garage. But as it turned out, that was too much to hope for. He already was out in the street and running hard by the time I got around to the front. There was no sense in sending a bullet after him just to let him know I was on his ass. I jammed the .38 back into the holster, tossed my sports jacket on the front stairs and took off down the street after him.

  He rounded the nearby corner and headed west, toward the ocean. I was thirty to forty yards behind him. As I rounded the corner after him, he turned his head slightly, not to get a look at me, just to listen to the sound of my clobbering shoes behind him.

  I figured I had about ten seconds to make up my mind what I was going to do. I stay fit, but if he was a dedicated runner, he’d leave me dogged out in short order. He was running as hard as he’d been when I first saw him out in the street. He wasn’t pulling out ahead of me, but I wasn’t gaining on him, either. I was trying to do this weighty thinking, cool as a cucumber, when an old fellow wearing a tam-o’-shanter and argyle sweater came around a far corner walking his short-legged dachshund. They threw my man off his stride.

  The dog yipped at the running figure and jerked his leash out of the old man’s hand. The running figure took a startled veer, swinging his arms up and pointing the pistol in the direction of the man and his dog, appraised the situation, lowered the pistol and resumed running. I had gained twenty yards on him. I vaulted the dog and shot a grin at the wide-eyed old chap at the curb. I pulled the .38 back out of its holster just as the jungle fighter ahead of me realized he’d come to the end of a cul-de-sac. That brought me five yards closer. I was bringing up the .38 when he dashed down along the side of a house overlooking the shoreline and scrambled over a back fence. I put the .38 back in its holster and went over the same fence off to the right of where he’d gone over.

  It turned out I’d been as good as he was at running, but I wasn’t as good at going over fences. By the time I got over it, the man I was chasing had scrambled down a long sandy bank and was slogging up the beach to the north. I knew I’d never catch him. So I did the next best thing. I took out the .38 again and sat down with my back braced against the fence, and with deliberate care gave him something to think about by emptying the revolver after him. It would have been uncommon luck to have hit him, and I figured he was experienced enough to know that, but by the last couple of rounds I sent after him, he was jittering around some at the bang the .38 made. At least I’d made a point. He’d know somebody else was lugging around a handgun. He wouldn’t be all cool and cocksure the next time we met.

  There’d been enough of a ruckus to make somebody call the sheriff’s office. A couple of deputies had arrived by the time I got back to the house. Their cars were parked with winking roof lights at the curb. Jo had told them what had happened up to the point I’d last gone out of her life, and I brought them up-to-date on the chase down the street, mentioning the man and the dachshund if they wanted confirmation. After I’d spoken my piece, one of the deputies went out to his vehicle to radio another unit to get somebody searching that stretch of beach where I’d last seen the man in the cammies. I doubted that anything would come from that. Deputy sheriffs are only human. There had been a killer some while back, terrorizing my mountain up home, Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. It was a 2,500-foot-high, double-domed rise of ground offering two hundred miles of surrounding hiking trails and getting-away-from-it-allness, just nine miles away from downtown San Francisco. Three women had been slain while hiking or walking the trails of Mount Tam over a twenty-one-month period. The bodies of three other women and a male companion of one of them had been found at the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore. A suspect finally was caught and was awaiting trial for killing another woman down in Santa Cruz County. But before his capture, Mount Tamalpais had become voluntarily off-limits to the hundreds of Bay Area residents who had regularly enjoyed its restorative presence, and in the Sand Dollar Restaurant in Stinson Beach, at the mountain’s oceanside foot, I’d heard a Marin County deputy sheriff admit to a cocktail waitress that he no longer took rest breaks, as had been his habit during lonely night patrols, in a clearing off a secluded road on the mountain. He was afraid somebody would come out of the dark and shoot him. That was a lawman talking. And what would be true for a lawman in Marin County would be true for a lawman in Monterey County. Two-man patrol units would be one thing. Having a buddy to cover you was a comfortable feeling. But few men would go alone into the night looking for a man wearing cammies with blackened face, carrying a pistol and who knows what else, including hand grenades maybe. Because that was what the other deputy had determined was lobbed over the back patio hedge, making the big noise. And if I hadn’t heard the gate squeak—God bless warped wood—Jo and I probably would be on our way to the county morgue. The glass patio doors were pitted and cracked and there were shreds and bits of metal all across the patio and on the table and seats where we’d sat. The radio was on the ground nearby, gutted and burned.

  The deputies knew about the murder of Jo’s husband on Friday, but they didn’t know of the connection between Jo and the girl killed that afternoon down at Big Sur. If Wally Hamlin were in town, I would have told them about the girl, and they probably would have gotten in touch with him at home and pursued the matter further that evening. But since Wally wasn’t in town, I didn’t want anybody else around just then. I wanted cops out of it for a while. This was one of those times when only I might be the fellow to learn what was there to be learned. And I wasn’t too sure how far I might get.

  So the deputies finished taking down information and left, telling Jo a detective probably would be by to interrogate her further the next day. That was the word they used, interrogate. It’s part of the academy training. The way they’re taught to make out reports. The reports don’t acknowledge they deal with men and women with passion in their blood or despondency in t
heir bones. The reports refer to Male Number One or Female Number Two and use words like interrogate. I didn’t bother to tell them that I was going to do my best to see that Jo Sommers wasn’t around there the next day for interrogation by detectives, by men with blackened faces or by anybody else. Any interrogating that was going to be done was going to be done that night. By me.

  THIRTEEN

  I was the one to see the deputies to the front door and out of the house. I hadn’t noticed when Jo fell by the wayside and disappeared. On the way back through the house I glanced into the front room and checked the bedroom and sewing room, peered into her late husband’s den and walked through the kitchen.

  Out in the patio, her terry-cloth robe was thrown over a chair at the table, and Jo was back in the hot tub.

  “You’re a pretty cool cookie,” I told her, “coming back out here after what just happened.”

  “You don’t think he’ll come back, do you, whoever it was?”

  “No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. Not just yet.”

  “Then why don’t you take off your clothes and join me? It’s very soothing, after what we’ve just been through.”

  “No thanks. We have to talk some more, you know. Especially after what we’ve just been through.”

  “I suppose we do. Why don’t you go and get me a drink first. Gin and tonic, if you please. Everything’s in the kitchen. You could probably do with one yourself.”

  “You’re probably right. If the man in the cammies comes back in the meantime, tell him to lighten up. I’ll bring a drink for him too.”

  “And I’ll invite him to join me in the tub. There’s no reason we can’t all be civilized about things.”

  She was smiling when I turned and went back through the pitted sliding-glass door and into the kitchen. I didn’t worry about the family budget when I poured the drinks. The amount of gin I’d seen Jo throw back since that afternoon didn’t seem to have had any discernible effect, and I was due for a little kicking back myself. Maybe if we both got drunk, she’d tell me things she hadn’t told me before. The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. I found larger glasses. She had some of those French barrel glasses meant for canning. I poured the drinks I’d already made into two of them and added more gin. Then I constructed a couple more of the same in two of the barrel glasses, found a metal tray on top of the refrigerator, loaded it with the drinks and strolled back out to the patio. Hell, this job could turn out to be fun even, if I could just forget about Allison.

  When I put the tray down on the shrapnel-littered tabletop, Jo murmured approvingly. “There always was a certain panache about you I approved of, Peter,” she told me.

  I walked over to the tub platform and lifted one of the glasses to her waiting hand. “Yeah, well, once in a while I get tired of projecting such a stern figure.”

  “I could make a naughty little wordplay with that.”

  “Please don’t. We still have things to discuss. I just decided, what the hell, we might as well do it in a lighter mood.”

  “I’m glad you decided that. Cheers.”

  I lifted my own glass in toast and we drank. It tasted uncommonly good.

  “Come join me,” Jo said.

  “In the tub? I already said no to that.”

  “I know you did. But you’re a grown man. You can change your mind about things. I can’t have you asking me all sorts of questions with you all clothed and solemn-faced, despite the drink in your hand, while I’m here all vulnerable and naked in my hot tub. It would give you too much of a psychological advantage. Humor me, please, kind sir.”

  Sometimes there’s a randy side to me that slips out and makes hay of the steady-as-you-go image I try to project. I sat at the table and took off my shoes, then stood and began peeling off my duds. In for a penny, in for a pound. When I stepped out of my shorts, as gracefully as any man can, which isn’t very, Jo Sommers whistled. I didn’t let it bother me. I was sure I wasn’t among the first half dozen men she’d seen without their underwear on. I climbed up to the platform with the tray carrying the other two drinks and put it on a shelf built onto the outer rim of the tub. Then I climbed down a ladder on the inside wall of the tub into the warm, warm water, lifted my own drink off the tray and sat on the underwater bench opposite Jo. I lifted the glass again in a little salute and drank. She held her own outsized glass just below her mouth, staring at me over it.

  “I like this side of you,” she said quietly, “the way you drop your—inhibitions.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t get too comfy about it all. I still have to ask you some things you’re not going to want to talk about.”

  “But at least we’ll be equal in the eyes of God while you’re asking them.”

  “And the eyes of anybody else who might wander through.”

  “You’re not expecting anybody, are you? Lady Allison, perhaps?”

  “No, I’m not expecting anybody.”

  “Good. Neither am I.” She took another drink of the gin and tonic, then made a rather elaborate arc of her arm, which raised one breast out of the water, as she placed the glass on the outer shelf near where she was sitting. She settled back down into the water and crossed her arms in front of herself. “Well, Daddy, I’m waiting. Do whatever bad to me you’re going to do.”

  I brought my mind back to business. “How long were you and your husband married?”

  The question surprised her. She blinked at me a time or two before replying. “It’s been years. Six, seven maybe.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “At a swimming-pool party up in Sacramento. Woody still was practicing then. He was seeing somebody at an air force base near there.”

  “Mather?”

  “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “McClellan?”

  “That’s the one. I’d been visiting a friend I’d gone to school with when we both lived up in Washington. She’d been invited to the party and took me along. Woody knew somebody else who knew the people having the party. We were both in swimsuits when we were introduced. We were attracted to each other instantly. We made love for the first time that evening, back at his motel. At the time he was living in San Mateo. I still lived in San Francisco. We saw each other frequently after that. We married within a month.”

  “When did you move down here?”

  “Three or four months after we were married. It took us that long to find a place acceptable to both of us. Here.”

  “Why did you move down here?”

  “Why not? It’s beautiful, when the sun’s out. The temperature is mild. And in Woody’s case, of course, there were so many people he knew living in the area.”

  “Ex-patients?”

  “Not necessarily. Some, of course, but other people as well.”

  She reached back to fetch her gin and tonic again but didn’t exaggerate the effort this time to give me another flash of her body.

  “Did he continue to practice down here?”

  “No, that’s when he gave it up.”

  “Tired of other people’s problems?”

  “Not necessarily. He continued to lecture, at schools here on the Coast and back East. And he wanted time to think, and he wanted to write.”

  “Write what?”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Professional things.”

  “Was he working on something now?”

  “Yes. His first book-length manuscript.”

  “Can I look at it?”

  “Of course. But I doubt if you’d much understand it. I tried reading it once. They have their own language, you know.”

  “I’d still like to see it.”

  “All right.”

  “And I’d like you to show me where he kept the tapes of his patient visits.”

  She held the French glass in front of her chin and stared into the tub water. “You really think that’s it, then?”

  “What’s it?”

  “That somebody was using his tapes to—get money from people.
” She looked up at me. “That that’s the reason somebody killed Woody and Nikki.”

  “Yes, I do. But since your husband was killed, somebody’s figured out that your husband wasn’t the one behind it. Probably because the extortion has continued after he was killed. They found out Nikki was a part of it. That’s why she’s dead. And now they’ve decided that you’re the one behind it. That’s why somebody lobbed that grenade in here tonight. And it won’t stop at that. It didn’t work this time, but they’ll come after you again. So it isn’t just whether or not you’ll get your husband’s insurance money that’s important now. In fact, that grenade tonight will weigh in your favor, so far as the insurance people are concerned. But what you and I have to see to now, Jo, is that you’re alive to collect it.”

  We sat quietly. I left her alone to let her think things through. She’d been having a lot of distractions recently, but she was bright enough to see where things stood if she was left to herself for a bit.

  By the time she’d finished her drink and was nibbling on a piece of ice, she seemed to have made up her mind. She made a little nod of her head, then took a mighty breath and stood up in the tub. The water came to a couple of inches below her belly button. She crossed over to my side and leaned past me to put the glass on the tray and get one of the fresh drinks. Then she passed one hand through her hair and settled herself sideways on my lap and looped one arm around my neck.

  “You’re not going to like what I have to tell you,” she said quietly.