The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Dee came over the railing. “What’s going on?”

  I briefly explained things. “I’m going to go see if I can stop them.”

  “Want me to come with you?” Dee asked.

  “Let’s all go,” said Benny.

  “I’m good,” Dee told me. “I’ve been in tavern fights.”

  “No. The two of you wait on the Pan. Pull out a ways from the pier. Try raising the coast guard again. If you get them, ask them to call the local sheriff. I don’t even know what county we’re in.”

  “Kitsap,” said Benny.

  “If someone comes back down to the other boat, tail them and try to give the coast guard their position.”

  “How far offshore should I wait?” Dee asked.

  “Far enough so somebody can’t hit you with gunfire.”

  I left the dock and started up the stairway built into the cliff. On the way up, I remembered I’d forgotten to get spare ammunition for the .38 out of my suitcase before I ran out to Captain Ed’s slip. Too much going on.

  I crouched low going over the top of the cliff. I saw Winslow and Sherman over by a small plane parked a couple of hundred yards off. It looked like a Cessna 172, high wing, single engine, and tricycle landing gear. There were a million of those things around, a good plane to sneak off in.

  Winslow and Sherman were pulling out parking chocks and stowing the briefcases. Three other light planes were parked in a row on the far side of the primitive landing field. It looked like somebody’s pasture. Probably just a cleared strip of land used by island residents who had their own planes. Between me and the Cessna there was a corrugated metal shed with a windsock flying from a mast atop it. The Jackson agency man was leaning against a corner of the shed watching the two men at the plane. Nobody else seemed to be around. The windsock was blowing in a northwesterly direction, which meant the Canadians would have to taxi up toward me in order to take off into the wind. Now they were climbing into the plane, and a moment later the propeller made a little whine and the motor coughed raggedly to life.

  I did know a little bit about planes. If nobody had been out to the field to warm up that particular plane’s engine, they’d have to spend the next few minutes doing just that. You can get away with jumping into a car and starting a cold engine and driving off, but you can’t do that with an airplane. At least I didn’t know any living pilots who ever tried that sort of thing. I took out the revolver and began creeping up toward the shed and the man from the Jackson agency, standing with his back to me.

  The sound of the Cessna covered my approach. There are times when you address an opponent and formally demand this and that, and then there are times when you just whack him across the skull with your gun barrel. I whacked the Jackson man with my gun barrel. He was made of tough stuff. He only went down on one knee. I raised a foot and shoved him hard, in the middle of the back. I grabbed him by the collar of the topcoat he was wearing and dragged him across a shallow drainage ditch somebody had been digging and pulled him inside the shed and over to a corner, out of sight.

  He was wearing his shoulder holster. I pulled out the .45 automatic he carried, hoping it was the one stolen from me on Friday night, but it wasn’t. I put my .38 back into its belt holster.

  I heard the airplane engine rev up a couple of times. I looked out in time to see the Cessna turn out onto the strip and begin a taxi toward the upper end. I ducked down beside a workbench as the plane went past the open front of the shed. The men in the plane were looking around, probably wondering where the Jackson man had gone. Bruce Sherman was at the controls. He’d driven the car. Probably, he had operated the boat as well. Universal wheelman. I ducked out of the shed and began trotting after the moving plane.

  One of them must have looked back and seen me. Instead of continuing all the way to the end of the strip, Sherman spun the small craft around, shoved the throttle forward, and released the brakes. I ran out farther onto the strip, got down on one knee, braced the Jackson man’s automatic against my raised leg and began firing at the Cessna’s right wheel.

  The .45 banged and bucked twice in my hands, then jammed. I uttered a few colorful words as I threw the weapon aside and clawed out the .38 again. The plane was gathering speed. I concentrated on just the one tire and emptied the revolver as fast as I could cock the hammer and squeeze the trigger. I figured my aim would be shaky enough at the moving target without trying to fire with the gun’s double-action mechanism.

  The plane roared past. I figured I’d missed with all eight shots, but then it began to wobble and spin sharply right, as if somebody had planted the right wheel into the ground. Sherman pulled back on the throttle, but he’d already lost control. The little plane’s tail pitched skyward and the craft spun onto its back. I got up and began running toward it.

  The plane’s engine had choked to a halt. A hatch was batted open, and first Winslow, then Sherman tumbled awkwardly out of the cabin and crawled away from the plane. They’d been badly shaken up. Winslow was holding his head in his hands and Sherman stretched out on his back, moaning. I turned and went back to the shed.

  The Jackson man was about the way I’d left him. I was looking around the workbench for something to bind him up with. I had my back to him when I learned he’d been playing possum. He came up onto his feet with a steel crowbar in his hand and took a vicious swing at my head. I saw movement just in time to duck. The bar missed my head but banged off my right shoulder. He was between me and the workbench now. I couldn’t reach anything to defend myself with. There are times you stand and times you run. I ran.

  I ran out of the shed and around behind it, the Jackson man stumbling after me. He was still a little woozy from the whop I’d given him earlier. I could run faster, and what I wanted to do was get all the way around the shed and back to the workbench to find something I could strike back with. A revolver with six empty shell casings in its cylinder wouldn’t do the trick. I was nearing the front of the shed again when I tripped and stumbled over a clod of earth. The Jackson man got close enough to take another swipe at me with the bar. It clanged off the shed, just behind my head. Instead of ducking into the workbench, I had to keep running. We went around again. This time I got far enough ahead of the Jackson man to dash into the shed, glance this way and that, then spot the long-handled shovel that must have been used to dig the shallow drainage ditch outside. I smiled inwardly. It was an oddly appropriate Seattle weapon. I’d used one of those as a building laborer, making enough money to put myself through school. Digging ditches, packing lumber, doing what had to be done. I knew all about shovels, and when the Jackson man came panting around the corner, I swung the shovel in a sharp arc, slapping the shovel head into the startled man’s groin.

  He stopped in his tracks, doubled over. I pulled back the shovel and stabbed it roughly into the man’s neck. He yelped and dropped the crowbar. This time I sent the shovel in a roundhouse swing and clanged it off the back of the man’s head. He fell to the ground and began to moan.

  I picked up the crowbar and threw it toward the rear wall of the shed. I kept the shovel with me as I reached down and began dragging the man one-handed out onto the air strip. I dropped him finally and stood a few feet off to let him catch his breath. When he was able to take a couple of deep, ragged breaths, I stabbed the shovel head viciously into the ground a couple of times, to let him see I knew about shovels.

  “Let’s talk,” I told him.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Jackson man, who said his name was Munch, told me pretty much what I wanted to know before a couple of Kitsap County sheriff’s deputies arrived in response to a call from Dee to the coast guard. The Jackson agency had been hired by Derington, alias Winslow, and Sherman to “take care of any problems” that might come up in the course of a business venture they were setting up. The Seattle detectives hadn’t been told right out what the Potlatch Bay project was all about, but they had a pretty good idea after they’d
been on the job for about two days. And they were the sort of agency willing to look the other way in order to make a couple of bucks.

  “We might look like a bunch of thugs—that’s the image we want to give—but we’re a smart group of men,” the shovel-battered man told me.

  The Canadians’ objective had been exactly what had occurred earlier in the day, to gull those shrewd businessmen Lorna had told me about out of advance fees for the fictional low-interest loans to develop the Potlatch Bay property. On the boat, the two men had crowed about lifting nearly $250,000 from the people at the luncheon. That was a nice return on about $25,000 they’d spent since hitting town to set up the scam. They’d acquired a short-term lease on the Potlatch Bay site, stuck an old trailer office on the property, fenced it and hired a watchman, had some lumber dumped there, put up a few billboard messages around town and began whistling Dixie to anybody who’d listen to them. There wasn’t any cheap money to be had. There was no Hong Kong bank waiting in the wings to be angel for the project.

  The harassment campaign against Benny had been to avoid exactly what happened at the Olympic Hotel: Benny spotting Derington. The Canadians wanted Benny out of the way until they’d gotten their money and left town. Benny was the one person who knew Winslow’s true identity. There was a danger Benny might see the con man in a newspaper photo or on television.

  The Jackson agency had agreed to scare off Benny until the Canadians had what they wanted. The agency had been responsible for all of the violence and threats except for the incident with Benny’s car, Munch told me. Derington had spotted Benny running his errands downtown that day. He saw Benny park his car on the hill and disappear up the street. Battering loose the brake lines with a tool from his own car had been a spur-of-the-moment act on Derington’s part. When he thought about it later he decided he didn’t want to run the risk of a murder charge, so asked the Jackson people to solve the Benny problem. But Munch swore there had been no serious attempt to take Benny’s life.

  “We missed him purposely when we shot at him at Woodland Park that day,” he told me. “If we couldn’t have hit him with the thirty-aught-six with a scope on it at that range, we don’t deserve to be in the business.”

  The attempted abduction of Timmy and Al had been just to throw a further scare into Benny, the man told me. He said they had planned to hold the boys for a few hours, then release them with a threatening message to their parents.

  “You must have been the one to break that up,” Munch said.

  “I was. Who were the two men who tried to pick up the boys?”

  “Old man Jackson’s boys, Tom and Wally. They did most of the rough stuff, plus beat the crap out of you. I was used as escort for today because it was supposed to be a piece of cake. Jesus,” he said, rubbing his neck. “Some piece of cake.”

  “Why did they work me over?”

  “You were getting too close for comfort. The watchman at the site called Winslow and said you’d been by asking things.”

  “How did Tom and Wally know I’d show up at the Scandia garage?”

  “Winslow said you were sweet on your ex-wife. He said to keep watch there, and you’d probably show up.”

  Munch said Wally and Tom also had tossed the bomb into Benny’s office but that they’d purposely waited until Benny was away from his desk. They had rightly figured that the phone call to him, without anyone answering on the other end of the line, might scare him out of there. He said Wally was the one who threw the bomb and followed it up with a couple of wild pistol shots.

  “That Bartlett’s a tough little guy,” Munch told me. “We didn’t think he’d ever leave town.”

  “It turned out he didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well. Cut of the deck, I guess.”

  “Wally and Tom came down to Benny’s office all yelling and cursing about the article in Sound Sounds. What was that all about?”

  “They were just trying to find out if he was still around or not.”

  “When I was beat up the other night, somebody lifted a pistol I was carrying. Who was that?”

  “Wally. He’s got it in his desk back at the office. They thought you’d be in the hospital for a week.”

  I looked down at the two men by the Cessna. Sherman tried once to get to his feet, but finally gave up on it. “Those two were on their way to Canada?” I asked.

  “I guess. I wasn’t supposed to know that when people came around asking about them and the money. I wasn’t supposed to know about anything.”

  “What were you going to do next?”

  “Wait till they were airborne, then take the boat back to where we’d leased it, call Grady Jackson and tell him the job was done.”

  “What were you going to do with my friend down on the boat?”

  “Leave him on the dock. Let him make his own way home. He didn’t know who I was. If he ever found out, it’d be his word against mine. He couldn’t prove anything.”

  “What about me? I knew who you were. Where you were from.”

  “Yeah, well. We would have had to think of something to do with you.”

  I stabbed the shovel into the ground beside his ankle.

  “I didn’t mean anything like that. I didn’t expect to see you today at the hotel. Grady just would have had to pay you off somehow.”

  “And you recognized Benny at the luncheon?”

  “Of course. We all knew what he looked like, even with the rug and chin mop. His glasses gave him away.”

  When the deputies arrived, I went back to the stairs at the top of the cliff and waved Dee and Benny back into shore. Benny told the deputies enough for them to take the Jackson man in for investigation of a number of things. Benny said he’d give them a complete statement the next day. He wanted to get back to Seattle and put his life back together. The shrewd businessmen in Seattle had acted quickly as well. The Seattle police had a number of complaints they wanted to talk over with the men calling themselves Winslow and Sherman. The deputies got on the radio and asked for a back-up unit to help carry people.

  Which, so far as I was concerned, left the Jackson Detective Agency to deal with. I doubted that much in the way of criminal charges would stick against any of them. None of them would admit any of the things their man at the airstrip had told me. And even Munch wouldn’t repeat it to law enforcement people. He’d only told me because I pretty well convinced him if he didn’t, I was either going to brain him or sever his head with the shovel.

  I didn’t feel any great need for revenge against any of them, not even Tom and Wally Jackson, who were supposed to have put me into a hospital for a week. They at least hadn’t broken any bones, other than the rib damage. They could have broken bones.

  But something needed to be done about those people. I thought about it on the cruise back to the boat harbor behind the Shilshole Bay breakwater.

  I gave Dee a card and told her to bill my office for the use of the boat and her skippering services. Benny phoned Dolly up in Sequim and told her to come home. I finally made a phone call of my own, to Bomber Hogan. It was a hard decision to make, and one I knew could come back to haunt me someday. I rationalized it by telling myself I wasn’t really asking the old hood to do me a favor, but just to give the impression he was doing me a favor.

  Bomber and the two men who’d given me and Zither a ride the day before met me out in front of the Jackson Detective Agency building at a little past five o’clock. I’d phoned ahead and told Grady where he could find his employee with the slicked-down hair and asked him to stick around the office until I could get there. I told him we had a couple of things to talk about.

  The four of us went up the worn stairs and into the office. Both of Grady’s sons were waiting as well. They hadn’t known I’d have company with me. And from the startled looks on their faces, they recognized Bomber Hogan.

  “Hello, boys,” he told them. “How do you open this thing?”

  Tom came to the front desk and buzzed us through. I asked Bomber to wait up
a minute and went over to where Wally stood uncertainly behind his desk.

  “I hear you have something of mine,” I told him. “A product of the Colt manufacturing company. I lost it the other evening. I understand you found it and have been saving it for me.”

  He slowly licked his lips, making up his mind, but then he bent and opened a desk drawer. He took out the .45 and handed it to me butt first. I checked. It still had its fully loaded magazine in it.

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  Grady Jackson had heard our voices and now stood in his office doorway. He was as astonished to see Bomber Hogan as his boys had been. Before we went back to his office, one of Bomber’s men brought out a camera with a built-in flash assembly. He snapped closeup photos of both Tom and Wally. The brothers blinked dumbly in the flashes of light but didn’t move. Then Bomber and his two men and I walked back to Grady’s office.

  Bomber walked up to the older Jackson and stared at him a moment without expression. “Hello, Grady,” he said at last.

  “Hello, Bomber.”

  Hogan looked into the inner office. He saw just the one visitor’s chair and turned to drag in another castered chair from a nearby desk. Grady went in ahead of us.

  “You two wait here,” Bomber told his men.

  They folded their arms and stood staring back at the Jackson boys. Tom and Wally sat down at their desks.

  Inside Grady’s office, the older Jackson had started around to his chair.

  “No, Grady,” said Bomber. “You sit here.” He indicated the chair he’d wheeled in from the outer office.

  Grady hesitated, then came back around his desk without a word and sat in the castered chair. Bomber went around behind the desk and sat in Grady’s chair. Bomber was wearing a light gray business suit with a vest. He wore a pale blue shirt with a dark print tie and had a ruffled handkerchief stuck in the top suit coat pocket. He looked quite spiffy, and he sat regarding Grady Jackson very soberly for two, maybe three minutes. Then he opened Grady’s desk and searched through drawers until he found a small tape recorder with its spools spinning.