The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I passed out at least twice more that I remember. Both times they probably left me alone for a bit so they could get a little rest themselves—this was hard, tough work they were doing—before they refilled the water bucket or whatever and brought me around again so they could continue the exercise.

  And this was a really dragged-out performance. I’m sure it didn’t go on for as long as it seemed, but thinking back later, they must have spent twenty to thirty minutes actually beating on me. All in all, including the time it must have taken them to drive to wherever we were at and the time they spent resting while I was unconscious, it could have been more than a couple of hours. It seemed like half the night. And I thought to myself at one point, Why don’t they just finish it? Why don’t they just put a bullet through my head and go on home to the wife or girlfriend or whatever? Why waste this much time?

  The last time I passed out while they were still there was when somebody rolled me onto my back and sat on my knees while somebody else smashed a shoe down into my groin.

  By the time I came to again, I could tell I’d won, finally. I’d worn them all out. They used another bucket of water to bring me around just so they could say something to me. My groin throbbed with pain, but then so did the rest of me. They hadn’t played favorites, these men.

  “Listen, slob,” somebody told me. “This is your last warning. Go back to San Francisco. If we have to come after you again, next time it’ll be with an axe. We’ll start with your left leg. At the ankle.”

  I think they left after that. I passed out again.

  It was raining when I came around again. I was lying with my legs in the tucked position, the left side of my face in a depression that was starting to fill with water. I stayed just like that for probably another ten minutes, just listening to things around me, or trying to listen beyond the continual buzz and ring in my ears. I heard a couple of jetliners go overhead. I could hear tires hissing after a while, along a wet roadway somewhere off in the distance. I heard a fog horn, and then I could hear water lapping against something not too far off.

  I tested my legs then, started to straighten them some, but it sent a sharp pain through my stomach. I didn’t know what that meant. Nothing good, I was sure. I thought of the funny slogan on a T-shirt my lady friend Allison down in California was fond of wearing. It said, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Shopping.” It was time for me to go shopping.

  I tried just one leg this time. Oh so gently. I moved my right leg just an inch or two, then returned it just the same distance. Stretch inches; tuck inches. Down, up. Slowly. Like trying to unlock the brake pads that have become frozen to the wheel drum of a car that’s been left outside during a rain storm. Stretch, tuck. Stretch, tuck. At least I didn’t get that same sheet of pain that had ripped through my stomach earlier. Good, Bragg. You’re recovering already. Stretch, tuck. Stretch, tuck.

  It was maybe another twenty minutes before I worked myself up into a sitting position. Things went blindingly fast after that. I finally realized they’d left the ends of the wires binding my hands out enough so I could work them with my fingers. They wouldn’t have let me do that while they were beating up on me. Probably, they would have broken my fingers if I’d tried. But now that they weren’t standing over me, pummeling and gasping to catch their breath, it was a snap. It didn’t take more than five or ten minutes.

  I gingerly felt at the wrists where the wire had bound them. It reminded me of what true pain is like. Pure pain. I almost fainted. For several more minutes I just sat there, shoulders slumped. Then I thought to dip the wrists in a nearby puddle of rain water. It helped. I left them soaking until the pain diminished, then pushed myself into a kneeling position. I didn’t try touching the wire wounds on my wrists again. My wrists had told me they didn’t want that. Instead, I tried raising my hands to get at the blindfold tied across my eyes. I tried this slowly. Good thing. My right arm went for it, but my left balked. My left shoulder didn’t want me raising my left hand more than about halfway up my chest. So right arm and hand had to do the lion’s share of the work. I finally managed to get an old rag off the back of my head and down from my face. I blinked into the night but couldn’t see anything at first. It was starting to rain a little harder. The fog horn was still going, a mile or more off from wherever I was.

  A couple of things began to come into focus, but it was slit-eyed focus. I finally reasoned it out. That would be from having a puffed up face everywhere the man wearing the gloves had hit me, on the cheek and mouth and around the eyes. As near as I could tell, I was alongside some sort of warehouse or industrial plant along the edge of a bay or lake. Bay, probably, from the sound of the foghorn. I could see lights reflected off water, just beyond the back of the building I was next to. Light in the distance had a bluish cast to it. Probably some sort of industrial vapor lamps.

  I must have been bleeding from the inside of my mouth still. I swallowed some of it and started to choke. It caused a bit of panic to well up in me until I realized I was able to cough out fluid around the rope. Once again my right arm started to make the salute of the slow people, laboring to bring my hand up behind my head to work on the rope gag. As a comradely gesture, I tried moving the left hand up again too, but the shoulder said, No thanks, pal.

  I couldn’t do a thing about the rope. Not with just one hand anyhow. The knot they’d tied was wet and tight. Well, I told myself, that’s okay. All I had to do was get to my feet and get out of there and go find the road where I heard that traffic and flag down a passing car with my good right arm. Hell, it’s nearly every day you see a bloodied, sopping wet man with a hank of rope in his mouth hitching a ride.

  I had to stop everything and just rest again. Every move felt as if I were doing it underwater. There was a drag coefficient I’d never experienced before. I’d been beat up in the past. Not often, but enough. But never, ever had it been anything like this. My mind didn’t even want to be bothered right then wondering who might have done it to me or what chance I might have somewhere down the road, say in a year or two, to exact some sort of revenge. My mind right then was dwelling on one very simple aim. Survival. I concentrated on my sense of direction. When I got to my feet, I had to make sure I stumbled away from the water. If I inadvertently fell into the water right then, I would drown. I couldn’t move enough of me to avoid that. What a way to go.

  With that thought I scared myself enough so I got on my hands and knees and crawled away from the sound of water and toward the sound of traffic. I crawled until I couldn’t move any farther, but had to sit and rest some more. I spotted some dark blobs silhouetted off to one side. When I felt strong enough, I dragged myself over to them. They were old packing crates. Big things. I raised my right hand and grabbed an edge, pulled myself up until, lo and behold, I was on my feet.

  I felt like singing. Look, Ma, it can walk. Only I didn’t walk much right then. I leaned against the packing crate and breathed in and out as best I could through a clogged nose and a roped mouth. I found my handkerchief in my hip pocket and got it out to dab at my nose and around my mouth. No pain there. They were both too numb.

  I tucked away the handkerchief and wondered what else they’d left me. Surprisingly, most everything. Spare change in my front left pocket. Wallet on my left hip. Keys and a small pocket knife in my front right. The shoulder holster was empty, of course. They’d taken my .45. I couldn’t remember where I’d left the .38. Either in the car or back at the motel.

  I made a movement that brought back that pain to my stomach muscles. I hoped there wasn’t anything inside there ripped and bleeding.

  I leaned back on the packing crate and lifted my face to the rain. I’d quit caring about how long all this was taking. As long as I could move, as limited as those moves were right then, I’d get somewhere better. I leaned forward, bracing my hands on my thighs. My right hand felt the keys in my pocket. Keys and knife. Finally, my brain made the connection.

  I dug into the pocket and brought ou
t the knife. I unclasped the blade, then felt around my head and face for a place where I could cut through the rope without stabbing myself through to the brain. I decided finally to just start sawing in from the back of my neck. The knife was reasonably sharp, and after penetrating the outer fibers of the rope, it went pretty quickly. When I felt the blade was getting close to skin, I jammed the rope back into my mouth as far as I could. It was enough so I could then slip the knife blade between the back of my neck and the uncut section of rope, sawing in sharp outward strokes. In a couple of seconds it parted.

  I spat out the rope and my jaws screamed. I couldn’t close my mouth. Part of that was because of the cramped open position my jaws had been in, the other was from the beating they’d given me around the mouth.

  I put away the knife, then felt around on the ground until I found the rope gag again. I put one of the severed ends back between my teeth, using it the way a boxer or football player uses a mouth guard. I stood straight then and did a little tentative stretching, this way and that, shuffling my feet, and finally I pushed off the packing crate and made for the sound of traffic.

  It was more of a shamble than it was a walk. But I kept at it, a steady pitching and rolling pace. I found a pocked and rutted road leading from the building I’d been near to the sound of the distant traffic. After a long trudge, I found the road emptied out onto a city street. Overhead was a viaduct. That’s where the traffic I’d heard was. The lower-level street I was on gave access to various industrial activities. It was all dark and deserted at this time of night.

  At least I felt I knew where I was now. The viaduct looked like the elevated roadway that runs between an area just south of downtown Seattle out to Alki Point and West Seattle. Probably, I was near Harbor Island, at the south end of Elliott Bay. There were shipyards on Harbor Island, and somewhere nearby there once had been a steel mill I’d worked at one summer. Also, somewhere in this area, there had been an old wooden trestle carrying streetcar tracks to West Seattle. I’d been taken over that trestle on a streetcar one time when I was a very young boy. I’d bawled then, terrified at what seemed such a dizzying height. Take me up high enough today and I damn near bawl again.

  I started walking east. I went about a quarter mile before I found an outdoor telephone booth. The light in the booth was out, but there was just enough light filtering in from a nearby building for me to look up the phone number of a local cab company. I took the rope out of my mouth and dialed the number.

  When the dispatcher answered, I learned I couldn’t talk well enough to be understood. The dispatcher tried to get the information from me, but all I could do was croak back at him. Finally, he hung up. After he hung up I realized I didn’t have an address I could have given him even if I’d been able to make myself understood. I started walking again.

  And now I began thinking about just where it was I planned to go next. Ordinarily, I would have made my way somehow back to the motel out on Aurora Avenue that I’d checked into earlier in the day. But I didn’t have any idea where the people who’d beaten up on me might have picked up my trail. They might know about the motel. Still, I argued back to myself, the motel was where my suitcase was. And I remembered that inside the locked suitcase was where I’d left the .38. I’d quit carrying that in the car when I began carrying the .45 in the shoulder holster. But I was a long way from the motel. Cab. Talk. I had to practice talking.

  I took the rope end out of my mouth again and began moving my jaws. It wasn’t as painful as it had been earlier, but I didn’t seem to have very good muscular control over my mouth. It felt about the way it does when you’ve been anesthetized by a dentist. My tongue was thick. I couldn’t feel the roof of my mouth. I made a couple of noises in my throat and began to practice talking. I recited the words to songs and made up grocery lists and practiced what I would tell Ceejay down at the office in San Francisco the next time I phoned in. I babbled, but I kept at it until a wave of nausea and light-headedness hit me so strongly I had to sit down on the curb and lower my head to my knees until it passed. It took a while. It was about then I knew I was going to have to get in somewhere off the street. I wasn’t going to make it to that motel at the north end of Seattle. Somebody would have to come get me. And I doubted that my speech had improved enough to summon a cab. I was able to articulate a little better than I’d been able to earlier, but probably I still would sound either too drunk or crazed for any hackie to want to pick me up.

  So, I asked myself, head still down between my knees, what alternatives did I have? Call the cops? No, they’d take me to a hospital and the people at the hospital would put me under for three days. I didn’t want to be unconscious for three days.

  Benny? No, I’d need a doctor in and out, and until I knew where Benny’s troubles originated, I didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to where he was holed up.

  Lorna? After a lot of thought, I decided no. They might know that Lorna Bragg was my ex-wife. They might have somebody swing by the Phinney Ridge condo. I didn’t want them tearing up her place. And there were other reasons.

  Mary Ellen Cutler or Zither? Not bloody likely.

  Who, then? Marietta Narcoff.

  I struggled to my feet and went looking for another phone booth. When I found one, I crossed to read the street signs at a nearby intersection. Then I looked up Marietta’s number and dialed.

  Her phone rang twenty times before I gave up. My watch, which had come through the beating in a lot better shape than I had, told me it was a little before 11:00 p.m. So. I had to go back up the ladder of people I knew in Seattle. Mary Ellen Cutler wouldn’t be in her studio this time of night. Zither might. I looked through the pages of names and numbers I’d written in my notepad since coming to Seattle. I found her number and dialed. She answered on the second ring.

  I tried to tell her who it was, but my mouth still didn’t work right. I couldn’t say Peter, and Bragg came out sounding something like Bogg.

  “Who is it?” she asked. “I can’t understand you. I’m going to hang up if you don’t tell me who this is.”

  My mind, such as it was, raced. “Shitheel,” I blurted.

  “Bragg? This is Peter Bragg?”

  “Yes. I’m hurt. Need help. You have a car?”

  “No, no car, but I’ll get a cab. Where are you?”

  I told her the names of the intersecting streets. She said she’d get to me as soon as she could. I hung up and thanked my lucky stars.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The night went on for a couple of more hours, into Saturday morning. Zither got me back to her place and made up a bed for me on the sofa in her living quarters, looking out over the Alaskan Way viaduct and the piers beyond. She and the cab driver had been properly subdued when they saw the shape I was in, but then Zither pulled herself together and showed she had a good head on her shoulders. She didn’t know any practicing physicians who made midnight house calls, but she did know a physician and professor of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center. He didn’t ordinarily make house calls, either, nor did he particularly care to be called out on a Friday at midnight, but Zither had told me she and the doc had dated at one time and still were pretty good friends. She was able to talk him into coming down to have a startled look at me.

  He told me he’d rather have me go into a hospital for some X-rays, but I told him there were reasons why I couldn’t do that. So he cleaned me up as best he could, swabbed me with this and that, taped my rib cage, gave Zither a couple of prescriptions she was to get filled the next day, and left me some pain pills. I gave him a business card, asked him to be discreet and told him to bill my office.

  “You bet I will,” he assured me, snapping shut his bag and stepping out through the beaded curtains accompanied by Zither. Earlier, while I’d been waiting for the doctor to arrive, I’d phoned Benny at his motel and told him why I hadn’t brought over the burgers. Now, while Zither was seeing the doc to the door, I made another call, waking Turk Connell, head of the
World Investigations office in San Francisco. I apologized for the hour, then told him briefly what had been going on. I’d used my mouth enough by this time to be practically intelligible. I asked him to have one of the men in their Seattle office get my car out of the parking garage the next morning and return it to the rental outfit and to check me and my gear out of the motel on Aurora. I told him to have the man drop my stuff off at Zither’s studio and gave him the address.

  “But have him do some loop-the-loops first to make sure nobody’s tailing him. I don’t want those people coming in here after me.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Turk said in the middle of a yawn. “You want some of our people up there to give you a hand? Sounds like you could use it.”

  “Maybe. Make sure they know my name, so they can jump if I call them.”

  And then I slept.

  I thought that with a sound night’s rest I should have been able to get up about midday Saturday. It didn’t work out that way. I could barely lift my head, let alone swing my feet off the edge of the sofa. Between stints of work out in her studio, Zither fed me soup and pain pills and some other anti-infection agents she’d gotten that morning with her doctor friend’s prescriptions. I slept most of the time, but it wasn’t a comfortable sleep. A lot of it was in that fuzzy twilight stage between sleep and wakefulness. I dreamt about the beating.

  Sometime in the course of the day a local World investigator dropped off my suitcase. I went through it and dug out the .38 and put it on the carpet next to the sofa. Zither watched somberly but said nothing.