The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Where’s my girl?”

  “Why did you come back? We aren’t going to hurt her. We just needed time…”

  He stopped talking when I banged his ear again.

  “Where’s my girl?”

  He sobbed, then said something so low I couldn’t hear it.

  “Speak up, before I make mush of your ear.”

  “I said she’s down the coast.”

  “Is that where the man in the truck is headed for?”

  He didn’t answer right away. In fact he took altogether too long for the mood I was in right then. I made a fist this time and drove knuckles into his ear.

  “Jesus, don’t do that…”

  “Is that where the man in the truck is headed for?”

  “Yes! Don’t hit me again. I can’t hear.”

  I started the motor and got back onto a street that would take me out the back door of Pacific Grove and over to Highway 1, and turned south.

  “What did you need time for?”

  “To destroy the tapes. To find the Sommers woman.”

  “To kill her?”

  He didn’t reply right away. I took a hand away from the steering wheel and pulled it back to swing at him again.

  “Yes!” he cried. “If it came to that. I had to end it.”

  “It’s ended,” I told him. “For you. How did your man know where to find the tapes at the Sommers home?”

  “I’ve been there several times. He even pointed them out to me one time. The doctor did.”

  “Did he show you the ones he kept in a chest in his study as well? The ones to do with people living around here?”

  He shook his head and looked as if he might be sick.

  “How many men are with my girl?”

  “Two. I mean one, right now. I hired two men. One’s at the cabin. The man in the truck is going back there. He isn’t as experienced. He’s to relieve the man at the cabin. Then the man at the cabin—Dancer—is to find Mrs. Sommers.”

  “Was to find Mrs. Sommers. Get it through your head. It’s all over with. Mrs. Sommers is stashed away and has men guarding her. Who killed Alex Kilduff?”

  He made a sigh. “Dancer, and the other man.”

  “Why didn’t they just shoot him and let it go at that? Why hang him from the flagpole?”

  “He was a traitor. It was to warn off the rest of you.”

  “The rest of us weren’t a part of it. Why was Alex Kilduff a traitor?”

  “His father was aboard my ship, during the war.”

  “A radioman?”

  “That’s right. A radioman.”

  “And he was on duty when you heard the SOS from the Indianapolis.”

  “Yes. I assume he told Alex about that. And the boy must have had blackmail in mind for a very long time. I know others in the community were being blackmailed the same way. But only for piddling amounts of money. A thousand dollars. Two thousand. But it was just to set me up.”

  “How much money did he want from you?”

  “A quarter million dollars. Two hundred and fifty thousand. It would break me.”

  “Who killed Dr. Sommers?”

  He glanced across at me and hesitated, but not long enough for me to have to take one hand off the steering wheel again. “That was a mistake,” he told me. “I thought he was the one behind the blackmail.”

  “Who killed him?”

  He looked away. “Dancer did. But then I got another phone call.” He fell silent.

  “The girl in Big Sur. Who killed her?”

  “Dancer again. I know somebody else who received a threat over the weekend, after Sommers was already dead. He was told to leave money with her. She had to be a part of it. And I meant to end it. I couldn’t afford the money. I had a good career in the navy. I’ve been a successful man since. I just made one mistake, a long time ago. I couldn’t let that become known. My home and family…My reputation and those of a lot of other good men were being threatened.”

  When I snorted he looked at me sharply. “Reputations,” I muttered. “How far down the coast is this cabin?”

  “Twenty miles, or thereabouts.”

  Once past Rio Road I opened up the big car. It was a little soft on the curves, but on the straightaway it hummed right up to 85 without a wheeze. It could have done more, but I wasn’t used to driving that fast.

  We swooshed across the bridge where the man in the cammies had dumped the cartons of tapes. “This is where your man disposed of the cassettes he took from the Sommers home. If he was coming back south later, why did he drive all the way back to your place? Why not just phone you?”

  “I don’t know the man that well. I’ve just been taking things a step at a time. I didn’t know I’d be sending him to relieve Dancer until he came by the house. How do you know where he disposed of the tapes?”

  “I was a passenger on the truck. He just wasn’t bright enough to know it.”

  Whiteman looked at the glow of the dashboard lights. “Maybe it is all over with,” he said quietly.

  “Believe it.”

  We strutted right along. I passed a couple of late-night travelers. A couple of miles further along I came up on the rear of the truck the man in cammies was driving.

  “Get your head down,” I told Whiteman.

  He ducked down and I went on around the truck. I hadn’t wanted to just ease back from him. He would have seen me coming up on him at high speed. If I fell back he might have become suspicious. A mile further along there was a wide turnout where people could pull off the road and gawk at the ocean below. It was a bright, moonlit night. I pulled off the road and parked and gawked at the water until the truck went past. I waited a couple of minutes more then fell in a good half mile behind him.

  “Where’d Dancer come from?” I asked Whiteman.

  “He’s a merc.”

  “A what?”

  “A mercenary. He does—all sorts of things, for a price. I didn’t have connections with any gangland figures I could resort to for what had to be done. I had a discreet conversation with a friend. He told me about Dancer.”

  “What about the other man?”

  “I don’t know. He’s somebody Dancer brought aboard last night.”

  “To help with Alex?”

  “To help with—somebody was with the Sommers woman last night when he went to…” He looked away, out the window. “When he tried to dispose of her. I suppose it was you with her. Whoever it was chased Dancer. He said he got down on the beach and was well away from them, but then he took small-arms fire. Whoever it was came awful close to hitting him. He said anybody who could shoot that good with a handgun from that distance commanded respect. He wanted to call in this other man. I never even heard his name. But he lived just an hour or two away, up in Gilroy. They apparently got together later last night. By that time, through some phone calls I made, I learned that my old radioman, Kilduff, had a son now living in this area, and that it was Alex. I knew Alex, and I knew people who in turn knew where he lived. So I sent the men off to take care of the young man who had decided to use one of the navy’s greatest wartime tragedies as part of a blackmail scheme. Such a man is beyond contempt.”

  I had no answer to that.

  TWENTY

  We continued to wend our way south. Me and Whiteman in the Caddie and the guy in the truck. The feeling I was getting closer to Allison put me in a funny frame of mind. I even developed a fondness for the truck up ahead of me. It wasn’t a speed demon, but it soldiered along doing its job. Up hill and down. Round the bend, over the bridge, climb the hill, flirt with the cliff. I wondered for a minute about the man in the truck. I even wondered if he had a wife and kids. Little chance of that, I thought, considering the sort of work he was doing. And just as well, I decided. Chances were about fifty-fifty he’d be dead before the night was over with.

  We kept on trucking.

  The man ahead of me turned off, finally, onto one of those roads you’re apt to wonder about when you’re idly driving down
the coast. It was cut into the side of a small river valley coming down out of the hills to the east. It was an old dirt road, and there was a sign at the start of it I’d seen at other times. It warned that in rainy weather, the road wouldn’t always be passable. It used to trigger my imagination. It made me think of mud and earth slides and old coots and bears burrowed down up in the hills somewhere for the winter.

  When I turned onto the dirt road, I switched off the headlights, using moonlight and a lot of concentration to move up closer behind the taillights of the truck. It was a road of ruts and warps and potholes. The Caddie had a better suspension system than the truck did. I moved up to within 100 yards of the other vehicle. A mile back into the hills, he turned off onto another road, in just as bad shape as the first. We went another half mile, part hilly, part flat. His destination was a moonlit meadow with the sound of running water off to one side. I stopped just shy of the clearing. The truck jounced on across toward a cabin at the far end with smoke coming out of a chimney. Another building that looked like a storage shed was a dozen paces to the left of the cabin.

  I backed up a few yards, then swung the Cadillac around so it blocked the road, in the event anybody tried to drive back out. “That your cabin?” I asked Whiteman.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the floor plan inside?”

  He just looked at me a moment. “No. I suspect you are about to ruin the entire rest of my life. You’ll have no more help from me, sir.”

  “Okay.” I took out the .45 and gave him a sharp crack alongside the head. I didn’t want him conscious and thinking slick thoughts while I was out there doing what I had to do.

  I left the car and crept down one side of the meadow. The man ahead of me had swung the truck around in a circle so it was pointed back toward the road. The cabin door opened and another man stepped outside. I could see him clearly in the pool of light from the cabin. He also wore cammies. What a foolish way to go about life, I thought. He was bigger and older-looking than the truck driver. He had a grizzled look about him. They talked for a moment, and the bigger man gestured toward the inside of the cabin a time or two. The light they stood in had a flickering quality to it, and I realized the cabin didn’t have electricity. The light must have come from a stove or fireplace and oil lamps. The two of them continued talking for several more moments. The bigger men even pulled the door behind him nearly closed. It was as if they didn’t want somebody else inside to hear their conversation. Allison.

  When they finally went inside I moved on around to the back to stand in the trees at the edge of the meadow. Moonlight reflected off a rear windowpane, but the room inside was dark. So it meant the structure was divided into at least two rooms. I moved up closer. The cabin’s outer walls were made of rough-cut siding, as if somebody had set up a portable band saw and cut his own timber from the surrounding forest.

  I stood staring at the rear window. I was sorely tempted to sneak up for a quick look inside, but there were too many things wrong with that idea. One of the men might enter the back room while I had my nose up against the window. I’d lose my one big edge, surprise. And if Allison was inside and saw me, whether she recognized me or not, she might let out a startled yelp and accomplish the same thing. An owl hooted a couple of times from nearby trees, agreeing with me.

  But there was something else that I wanted to learn about the window itself. Crouching, I moved up on the cabin and squatted just beneath the pane of glass. It didn’t look like a window that would open. They probably used it for light, not ventilation. I ducked back to the edge of the woods and continued on around to the other side of the cabin. That side had another window in it, with light coming through it. I made my way slowly on toward the shed, but I was still staring at the cabin window when I should have had my eyes on the ground in front of me. I tripped over a root and fell hard, strangling a yelp in my throat and barking one fist when it hit the base of a tree trunk. At least it kept me from braining myself. I rolled and squatted for a moment, letting the pain subside and my breathing grow regular again. I dug out my penlight and used it briefly to continue on through the timber and out around to the side of the shed away from the cabin. I rested a minute, then peeked around the corner. The shed door faced the cabin. The door was equipped with a metal hasp and hoop. An old bolt was dropped through the hoop to keep the door closed. I lifted out the bolt, slid off the hasp and slowly opened the door. It squeaked a little, but not enough to alert the men in the cabin. I stepped inside and pulled shut the door behind me.

  I dinked around the flash from the penlight. It was your average utility shed crammed with junk. Some tools and hardware, nails and bolts and a couple of rolls of wire. Sandpaper and paint and stiff brushes. Some scrap plywood was stacked against one end. I didn’t see any rope, which I’d been hoping to find, but decided one of the rolls of wire would do as well. It was about the thickness of the piece of hard graphite in a lead pencil. I found a pair of wire cutters among the tools, snipped off a piece of the wire and used that to fasten the rest of the coil to my belt. I tucked the wire cutters into a hip pocket, put my penlight away and swung open the shed door just enough for me to peek around its edge and scan the cabin. Things seemed calm enough. I stepped outside, put the bolt back across the hasp and retreated around behind the shed to where I couldn’t be seen from the cabin. I took the .45 out of its shoulder holster and jacked a round into the chamber. I took out the .38 and cocked the hammer. I carried the .45 in my right hand, the .38 in my left. I left the shed and trotted across the clearing to the other side of the cabin, so that if anybody opened the cabin door, I’d be shielded from sight behind it. I didn’t consciously think about these things. My body just did them. With the tension and adrenaline shooting through me the way they were just then, thinking would have been a handicap.

  I came up on the cabin and stopped a step away from the door. It was fitted with a hasp and locking hoop similar to those on the shed. The door also had a little thumb latch fitted through the door. I clicked the latch, threw open the door and stepped inside.

  The bigger of the two men was sitting in a chair tilted back against the right rear wall, near a doorway leading into the back room of the cabin. His buddy was standing along the opposite wall fixing himself a sandwich from a platter of cold cuts on a table near the window. A lamp was on the food table, another was on a stand beside the fellow tilted back in the chair and now lowering a magazine he’d been looking through.

  There was a Franklin stove with a dying fire in it halfway along the wall where the fellow was sitting. There were two more chairs and a couple of sleeping bags along the wall to my left.

  “Just freeze,” I told them.

  The fellow making the sandwich looked as if his heart had jumped up into his throat. The older man lowered himself slowly until his chair was back on the floor. He put up his hands and got to his feet.

  “Well, well, well, well,” he said softly, with a voice that reminded me of rural Texas. “Two-gun Gus, come to call.” He said it with a smile and a glance across the room to his partner.

  Maybe they had talked over what they’d do in a situation like that. The instant their eyes met they moved. The man to my right smashed his magazine into the light beside him, while his partner knocked over the lamp on the table. Then the bigger man went through the door behind him and his buddy went through the window next to him headfirst. I fired the .38 after the man going out the window. I didn’t fire toward the back room. I crunched on glass, crossing to the shattered window. The man was up and running a zigzag pattern toward the woods. I sent a round from the .45 after him, not expecting to hit him, just to keep him moving away.

  I crossed back to the inner door. I’d heard the man who went through it slide a bolt across it from inside. That was fine. It was where I wanted him for now. I pulled off the loop of wire and in the glow of light still coming from the stove, snipped off a long piece of it and coiled it several times around the doorknob. I dragged over the table with t
he cold cuts on it and positioned it across the doorway. It filled it and then some. I made several loops of wire from the doorknob to one table leg. To get out now, the man inside would either have to go through the back window or pull the table through the walls. I didn’t think he was ready to go through the window yet. Allison, if she was in there, was supposed to be his ace in the hole.

  I took a quick look out at the meadow from the cabin doorway, then ran out and over to the tree line on the opposite side of the meadow from where the man had gone through the window. I went back up the side of the meadow, then crossed over until I had the truck between me and the cabin. I trotted up behind the truck and crawled in under it. I’d tucked the .38 back into the belt holster. Now I took it out, removed the shell casing of the one round I’d fired from it and replaced it with another cartridge from the box in my pocket. I reholstered it, then waited with the .45 out and ready.

  The man who’d gone through the window came out of the shadows about ten minutes later. He’d been doing a circuit of the meadow, the same as I had. He came out of the woods on my left and dashed around to behind the cabin. I could hear him speaking. He was talking through the closed window, to the man inside. The older man would be telling his partner to go around into the cabin and undo whatever I’d done to seal off the rear room. A moment later the outside man came into view. He was crouched low, and stayed still that way, studying the territory. I had the automatic in a two-handed grip, braced against one of the truck wheels. When the man in cammies rose to a semi-crouch and started to round the corner of the cabin, I fired off two rounds, aiming for the lower part of his body.

  The big slugs slammed him against the corner of the cabin as if he’d been hit by a bull. He gave a startled yelp, then his body fell to the ground.

  “Your head is directly in my line of sight,” I yelled to him. “Throw away any weapon you have and move your hands away from your body.”

  His hands jerked out from his sides. “Lost my gun when I was hit,” he called.