by Jack Lynch
“Things are still quiet in Salinas,” he told me. “Reinhardt’s relief still hasn’t shown up. I haven’t heard back from the Scranton office, and here I sit.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
I hung up and decided I didn’t have to sit right there inside the house all the time. In fact a patrol of the perimeter fence would properly be in order, so long as I didn’t terrify the neighbors. I had the impression that outside of the sound of fire trucks or grenades going off, the neighbors kept pretty much to themselves.
I slipped out the patio door and pulled it shut behind me. I ambled around the patio, peering through the bougainvillea and listening to the night. It was noisy. The air was clear as a bell and the booming of the surf on the distant beach carried through the night like artillery fire. It would have been hard to hear the fall of a softly shod foot. I went through the lattice gate beyond the hot tub and prowled the backyard. The house in back was dark. I went to the corner of the house and took a look down the side where the ice plant grew. I turned and strolled back to the other corner and was about to round it when I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. The surf might have covered the sound of a footfall, but not the tinkle of glass. I got down on my haunches and took a peek around the corner. A dark figure had placed a short ladder against the side of the house. He was atop the ladder, reaching through the hole he’d just punched in the window to unlock and open the window in Jo’s bedroom. He was over the windowsill and inside before I could think what to do. He had a flashlight with him and was flashing it around the bedroom. He closed what was left of the window and the room went dark.
I trotted around to the front of the house. The bobbing flash was in the front room now, just briefly. He wanted to make sure nobody was home. There was a three-quarter-ton stake truck backed up in the driveway I hadn’t heard. Probably because of the distant surf. Either the man in the house had put it there or somebody who might have come with him. The angle wasn’t right for me to see into the truck cab. I stayed put a couple of minutes to see if anybody else was going to get out of the truck. When the man inside opened the garage door, I edged back around the corner, swung myself again over the warped gate and went around to the backyard and through the patio gate. I eased open the sliding glass doors. The door from the kitchen into the garage was slightly ajar, and a light came from the garage itself. I could hear grunts and some sort of sliding noises from in there. I glided down the carpeted hallway to the doctor’s study, where I’d left the hand radio.
It was time to get Collins moving, but a scraping sound along the side of the house made me hesitate. The man was already taking away the ladder he’d used to get up to the window in the bedroom next to the study. I didn’t take a chance on using the radio. I carried it into the front room and stood well back from the windows. The man was putting the ladder onto the bed of the truck. He was a fast worker. Half a dozen cartons already were loaded onto the truck bed, near the back of the cab. They looked like the cartons the audio cassettes had been in up in the garage loft. He must have gotten them down from there before he’d opened the garage door, while I was hunkered down waiting to see if anybody was with him.
He went into the garage again and closed the door. If he was getting ready to leave, I didn’t have time to use the radio or telephone or anything else. The first thing I had to do was hide.
I ducked into Jo’s bedroom, crossing to open the door to the walk-in closet. I stepped inside and nestled myself among the frills and flounces and slid the door mostly closed. I heard the door from the kitchen to the garage close. He came walking back through the house, flashing his light here and there as he moved. When he passed the open bedroom door I could hear him whistling softly between his teeth. He paused and flashed the light briefly over the broken window, then continued on to the front of the house. The front door opened and closed. I got hung up on something lacy while I was trying to get out of the closet and use the radio at the same time. Something ripped and came off a hanger, clinging to my elbow as I stumbled into the bedroom.
“Collins, this is Bragg, do you read me?” I shook off whatever was clinging to my arm and headed for the front door. Outside the truck engine started. “Collins, do you read me?”
There was some crackle and static from the little speaker. By the time I cracked open the front door, the man in the truck had already rolled out of the driveway and headed off down the street. I bellowed a curse. I was going to lose him again. I pitched the radio onto the nearby sofa and went out the door.
One thing, at least, the man in the truck didn’t seem to know. There was just one street that led out of this small community to Highway 1, Ribera Road. It made a long, deep loop around the perimeter of the area. He was taking the long way. There was just a chance I could intercept the truck by cutting across the street above the Sommers home and intercepting Ribera a couple of blocks over. There was only one way to make that work. I had to run like hell. I ran.
NINETEEN
I don’t like running all that much. It hadn’t bothered me so much when I was a kid. In fact I’d had some deviltry in me, growing up, and there were times when running for my life was the only thing that kept me from packing home a black eye at day’s end. But since those days I’d grown and filled out enough so that extended running was a job. And add to that the odd bullet-wound scar here, the once-fractured bone there, and it all came together to remind me of my spotty past when I had to run that way. Then there was the weaponry. I had the .38 revolver on my right hip and the .45 automatic in the shoulder holster under the dark windbreaker Collins had bought me. The revolver wasn’t much of a problem, except for the additional weight, but the .45 was a handicap. If I’d known I was going to be in a footrace with a stake truck, I would have strapped the holster tighter around my chest. As it was, it thumped and bumped in counterpart to the pounding heart beneath it. But I wasn’t about to throw either of the guns away. One thing I did have to do was to transfer a spare magazine for the .45 and a box of .38 shells for the revolver from the windbreaker pockets into my trousers so they wouldn’t bounce out. Finally, though, when the pain began to get to me, I thought about Allison. That put most other things out of my mind.
I got to the corner of Meadow Way and Ribera about ten seconds ahead of the truck. I knelt gasping for breath inside a nearby hedged driveway. At least the truck wasn’t moving so fast that I risked killing myself trying to get aboard. It chugged on by and I ran out and caught the slats along the side opposite the drive. Pulling myself up over the side was painful and time-consuming, but by the time we reached Highway 1, I was aboard and hunkered down up against the cab, where I couldn’t be seen in the side or rearview mirrors. At Highway 1, the driver turned right and headed south. I stared at the stars and got my breath back.
He took a while to get to where we were going. I hoped, of course, that we were going to wherever they had Allison. But we weren’t. Where he was headed for, it turned out, was a convenient place to dump the cartons of audio cassettes, where hopefully the stuff of extortion would be forever cast out to sea. If I’d known that was what he was looking for, I could have knocked on the back of the cab and suggested several other places along the coast road dug into the high cliffs. Maybe he was a stranger to the area and had been given specific instructions about where to dump them. At any rate, the place he chose was a spectacular bridge spanning a gorge several miles south of Carmel.
The first inkling I had of what he was up to was when he pulled off to the side of the road to let a car about a quarter mile behind us go past. Then he drove out onto the two-lane bridge, swung across the centerline and stopped. He put the truck into reverse and backed up to the guard railing.
By the time he’d started to back up, I was over the side and crouched down low. This was a long, naked bridge, a couple of hundred feet over a river pouring into the Pacific Ocean below us. It wasn’t a good place to play hide-and-go-seek. I did not intend to go over the railing and see if there was something to h
ang from beneath the roadbed. When the truck stopped, I rolled beneath it. The man inside opened the door and climbed up into the truck bed. There was grunting and scraping again as he lifted the cartons and hurled them over the railing into the water below.
A moment later he was clambering back down into the cab, and I was rolling out from beneath the truck on the opposite side. When the door banged shut, I got up and grabbed the slats again as the truck began to move and made a wide loop to head back north. I lifted my legs to keep from losing them as he banged off the opposite railing. By the time I got back up over the side of the truck, I was panting and my heart was thumping once again. It took a few miles before I calmed down.
He drove north of the Carmel exits this time and turned onto the road that dips down into Pacific Grove and the butterfly trees. And it was almost to the butterfly trees that we traveled, down past the entrance to the Del Monte property with the swank homes and the slick golf courses where they hold the Crosby Pro-Am Tournament, almost to the ocean itself. But he turned finally onto Asilomar Avenue and drove north, past the conference grounds. Then he slowed and stopped, in the middle of the road. Off to the right was a large, old, three-story home glowing with lights and rattling with laughter and conversation. We’d come to a party, and the man in the cab hadn’t expected that. Cars were parked in the driveway and lined both sides of the road. He put the truck back into gear and moved ahead slowly, looking for a parking place. When he found a big enough gap between cars he braked again, I went over the side, and he backed into the open space. I lost myself in the shadows of nearby cars, and made my way back toward the house. I scrunched down beside some trees next to the driveway. I had my first clear view of the man in the truck when he swung down out of the cab and approached the house. He was wearing a camouflage uniform, minus the duckbill cap. He’d probably fit right in at the party. Cammies were a fashionable item this year. They had designer cammies for smart women and dumb kids.
The truck driver went up to the front door, rang the bell and rapped on the side molding. He didn’t seem to be all that learned about house parties and other urban affairs. Maybe he’d spent the last few years out in the South African bush or in Central America.
He wised up eventually and opened the door and stuck his head inside long enough to ask for somebody, then he backed off and took a turn around the front porch, staring out at the truck. He was about six feet tall with a medium build and a meaty, pitted face, as if he’d had a bad case of acne when he was young. His eyes seemed to bug out of his face a little. He had thinning dark hair and a nervous habit of hunching his shoulders. I’d seen that in men who’d been subjected to severe shellfire. I estimated his age to be in the early thirties.
The door opened again and a man stepped out onto the porch. He was wearing dark slacks and a white turtleneck sweater. I recognized him. And I assumed he was the man on the tape, the skipper who’d ignored the SOS from the Indianapolis. It was one of the men Billy Carpenter had introduced me to at the Hunt Club the night Haywood Sommers was smothered to death. I’d seen him the next night as well, at the Gus Wakefield party, talking to Lawrence Pitt. Whiteman was his name. They called him Whitey, and Wakefield told me he’d captained a destroyer in World War II. I was trying to remember something else about him, but it didn’t come through to me just then.
The two men had a brief conversation. Whitey was smiling and briefly clapped one hand on the other man’s shoulder. Then the man in the cammies turned and came back down the stairs.
It didn’t seem to me that Allison would be held in a home where they were staging a big party. Even with three stories, I didn’t think anybody would take that kind of chance. And maybe the man in the cammies with the truck would now be driving to wherever Allison was being held. But I didn’t know that for sure. I had an awful time making up my mind about what to do.
And then I decided. Whitey had to be my main man. If Allison wasn’t in the house, he must know where she was being held. I watched the man in the cammies climb into the cab of the truck. He started the motor. My stomach flopped over. He drove off.
I sat down to rest my back against the side of the tree away from the house. Okay, Bragg, now what? They’ve got your girl, and the man in the house probably knows where they’ve got her. But you’re not the Invisible Man. You can’t walk in and grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him on out of there. He’s having a party. People and drinking and laughing and flirting in the corners. You’ve got to get him out. How?
I tried to put myself in Whitey Whiteman’s shoes. What is something that would force me to leave my own party, outside of somebody setting fire to the place? If I am him, I have killed, or arranged to have killed, three people to keep a secret. I smiled. The secret was my answer. CA 35. The tape.
I got to my feet with what I suspected was a mean grin on my face. I didn’t have the tape, but I knew how to get him out of the house and away from the party. I jogged on up the road. I passed an angled extension of Lighthouse Avenue that ran on down to the ocean, a couple of hundred yards away. There was a navy reserve training center down that road, and at this time of night the road was dark and secluded. Considering what was behind all of this business, it seemed apt that there should be a navy facility there. I continued on up to where Asilomar intersected with the main part of Lighthouse that ran east through Pacific Grove. There was a motel at the intersection with an outside pay phone.
I dialed the motel Collins was at. Or was supposed to be at. He didn’t answer the room phone.
“This is an emergency,” I told the man at the desk. “Could you or somebody else run up to the room and knock on his door. Maybe he fell asleep.”
We argued over it for a moment or two, but I convinced him it was important. He left the switchboard and made a quick trip up to the room. He was back a couple of minutes later, short of breath.
“Nobody there. At least they aren’t answering any knocking on the door.”
I thanked him and hung up. I thought about it. Maybe Collins had tried ringing me at Jo Sommers’ home, and not getting me, drove over there himself. I dialed the Sommers number. No answer. I couldn’t worry any longer about what might have happened to Collins. I looked up Whiteman’s number in the directory and dialed it. After a while a woman’s voice answered, with party noise roaring in the background. I asked for Whiteman, then waited some more. When he came on the line I used a mock Chinese singsong voice that a bad comic might use.
“Ho ho, hello, please. I have tape recording, you catch ’em? Talky talk all about CA thirty-five, ha-ha, sailor boys all drown, you bet. X-ray Victor Mike Love, we been hit by two torpedoes, you bet, but you on secret mission, gotta go ’way chop-chop. Leave poor sailor boys, many days out bake and float and drown, you bet…”
“Who is this!” he demanded. He yelled it at the top of his lungs, and some of the party noise in the background quieted.
“You wanna leave party now, and come talk chop-chop, or I send tape all ’round crazy place—lemme see now, Mon’rey Herald, Gussy Wakefield, U.S. Navy men, you bet. You come alone now, right now. You drive down sailor reserve center on Lighthouse and you keep lips tight about where you going. You come down near gate, park ’long side road and get out car and wait round, or you sure be sorry, Mr. CA thirty-five man. Chop-chop.”
I hung up the phone. If that didn’t work I’d go bust up the party. What the hell. I had two guns and my pockets full of bullets, and somebody had my girl. I left the phone and jogged on down the extension of Lighthouse and settled down in some shadows across the road from the entrance to the reserve center gate. I didn’t have long to wait. Headlights swung around the corner of Asilomar, and a late-model Cadillac tooled down the road and came to a stop across the way. The driver doused the lights, then shut off the motor and got out, staring in at the dark navy building. I came up behind him with the .38 in my hand.
“Put your hands on the roof of the car,” I told him.
He made a little start and g
lanced over his shoulder. “You!”
“Me. Hands on the roof of the car.”
He did what I told him. He’d put on a dark sports jacket that hung oddly. “Leave your hands flat on the car roof and move back your feet about six inches.” He moved his feet back. I holstered the .38 and was about to pat the pockets of the sports jacket when he tried to put a move on me.
He had a good little compact body and moved quickly. He pushed off from the car roof, ducked and whirled, his hand going for the right-hand jacket pocket. I gave him an open-handed clout along one ear and he crumpled onto the road. I reached down and took a .22-caliber revolver out of his jacket. I rolled him over and went over the rest of him without finding any other weapons. I opened the car door. He’d left the keys in the ignition. He was still stunned. I reached across and unlocked the passenger-side door, then picked him up and shoved him headfirst across the seat of the car. I went around to the other side and wrestled him into the position I wanted him in, with his head down on the floor and his knees on the seat. I shut the door and went back and got behind the wheel. I wanted to get out of the immediate vicinity. I started the car and drove on down to the road that ran above the beach. I turned south and drove on a ways, then swung off onto a street that retreated from the ocean and did some winding around until I was sure nobody was trying to find us. I turned off onto a quiet, residential street and stopped the car. He was fully conscious again but not saying anything. I found a handkerchief in one of his pants pockets and tied it to the end of my own and used them to bind his hands behind his back. Then I went around to the passenger side again and pulled him out and sat him up on the seat. I got back in the car beside him. We could barely make out each other’s faces.
“Where’s my girl?”
He didn’t say anything. I cuffed him alongside the ear where I’d whacked him before.
