by Jack Lynch
I was slowly gaining on Big Mike again until he wasn’t more than a couple hundred yards ahead of me. There was a station wagon ahead of him now, and beyond that a curve. It would be a very tight judgment to make, especially traveling at speeds you weren’t used to. I don’t know what I would have done in his place, but Parsons decided to go for it and swung out around the wagon, flashing his highbeams and spurting forward, and that’s when forty tons of fully loaded lumber rig trying to beat the federal park deadline roared around the curve ahead of us, and despite a heroic attempt by Parsons to get back into his own lane, the load of logs slammed into the trail vehicle and blew it away in an explosion of metal.
TWENTY-THREE
The station wagon Big Mike had tried to pass missed being involved by a matter of inches. The driver of the lumber rig, other than having his dinner shocked out of him, escaped injury and managed to stop a ways up the road. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but Joe Dodge and Allison had been following along behind us as best they could. The car with flashing red and blue lights had been a sheriff’s deputy. It made my chores a bit easier, because he’d been involved in the plane search on Sunday and recognized my name as being the one who found Tuffy. And from my busted-up, dirty appearance, he knew I hadn’t just been out for a joyride. This was some time after the collision. He had his hands full the first twenty minutes or so just trying to keep traffic snaking around the wreckage that was strewn along the highway until he was joined by other law officers.
Then he listened to my story, but just briefly. I tried to keep it concise, but finally he just rolled his eyes and said I should just answer the questions on his accident report form and make a fuller statement somewhere else some other time.
Allison stood nearby. She didn’t approach the larger piece of wreckage where the bodies were. She just leaned against the side of Joe Dodge’s car, which Dodge had parked behind my own, with her arms folded across her chest.
Dodge said there was nothing more to be done, and suggested they leave. Allison shook her head and told him to go on back to town. She walked the few paces to lean against the side of my own car and resumed an unblinking vigil into the night.
Dodge approached me with a troubled expression, started to say something, then shrugged and went back to his car and drove off.
Allison didn’t say anything to me the whole time. When the deputy finally told me I could leave, she just went around to the other side of my car and wordlessly got in.
“I guess you want a ride back to town,” I told her.
“I guess.”
“Why did you stick around?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to back up your story with the sheriff, if you needed it. Maybe to see if something would fall into place for me. I’m all cockeyed inside. I’m not used to this sort of thing.”
We rode back into Barracks Cove. I told her I had some phone calls to make. She just nodded.
“You look as if you could use a drink,” I told her.
“I could. Brandy. But I don’t want to be around other people.”
She directed me to a store that sold a variety of things and stayed open late. She went in with some money I gave her while my sore ankle and I stayed in the car. She came back out with a bag of stuff and I drove over to my motel and limped in while she poured us a couple of glasses of brandy. I began making my calls. Chief Morgan was the first. I got him at home. He’d heard about the accident and listened quietly while I recapped things for him. Allison was listening closely.
“Not that it hardly matters now, Bragg,” Morgan told me, “but can you prove any of this?”
“You’re bound to turn up something at the Parsons’ house. The stolen painting, if nothing else. And if they can recover Big Mike’s .45 from the wreckage—I told the deputy to look for it—you can make test firings and maybe compare them with any slugs you might have found in Stoval or around the Dodge house. Or maybe there’s one lodged in Lind’s body up by the cabin.”
“That again is out of my territory, thank the Lord. But I don’t think you ought to plan on leaving just yet.”
“You figure I should go back up there while they dig up the body?”
“Yes. Probably first thing in the morning. I know the sheriff would feel that way.”
“I’ll stick around,” I told him.
I called Lind’s sister and gave her the bad news. She’d been ready for it, which helped, but not all that much. Then I started to call Marcie Lind, but halfway through dialing I replaced the receiver. “I’m just not up to that.”
Allison was sitting quietly in a chair in the corner with her legs tucked up beneath her. “To what?”
“Telling Jerry’s wife. She still thinks he’s out there somewhere and I’m the big hero who’s going to find him. Only not quite the way we’re about to find him.”
Allison shook her head and got up to pour us both more brandy. “God, you look awful.”
I thought maybe she was going to dampen a washrag and wipe me off or something, but she just went back over and sat down again.
Finally I called Zoom, down in Larkspur. I determined that she wasn’t drunk or spaced out, then told her quietly some of what had happened. Primarily that I was certain Jerry was dead and that Marcie was going to come into a lot of money as a result of it. I asked her to go up and spend the night with Marcie and to try to break both bits of news as gently as she could, mixing it up however she felt best, and to tell Marcie I would call her the next day, after I’d been back up to the cabin with the sheriff’s people and coroner’s people who by now probably were getting a little tired of me.
“Why can’t you phone and tell her, Pete?” Zoom asked softly. “She can take it, baby.”
“I know, Zoom, but I couldn’t, I don’t think. I’ve gone through a little too much myself today. Tomorrow, huh?”
And then I drank some brandy and hobbled into the bathroom and winced at the scraped and battered face in the mirror. It hurt plenty when I tried to clean it up. Allison came to stand in the doorway and to watch, but she didn’t offer to lend a hand. I was beginning to feel resentful.
When I was through she went back to the shopping bag and wordlessly tossed me a rolled elastic bandage she had bought. I took off my shoe and sock and wrapped it around the sore ankle and put stuff back on, then Allison got up once more, poured a lot of brandy into her glass and carried it over to the door.
“Now you can drop me off home.”
I limped out into the night air behind her and got in the car and drove across town. She sipped her drink but didn’t say anything, but when I pulled up in front of her house she didn’t move to get out. She just stared blankly through the windshield. I shut off the engine and waited.
“You know why I did that back there, don’t you?” she asked finally, shaking her hair and turning toward me.
“Up where I was fighting with Big Mike?” I raised one shoulder and dropped it. “I guess you felt you had to. It bothered me then. It doesn’t now. Let’s forget it.”
“No, you don’t understand at all. It’s my very shaky posture right now. Tonight. I’ve always been so goddamn dead certain about everything I’ve ever done or set out to do. I’ve always felt it was one of my strengths. But after last night at the restaurant down at the cove—I’ve never been hurt that way. And I never wanted to see you again. Or to speak to you. Not ever. But then this morning, when poor dear Joe was terrified at the thought of this man Stoval being in town asking questions and showing Joe’s picture, you were the one I wanted to get in touch with. Not out of any liking, but because you were the only son of a bitch I figured to be smart enough and mean enough to be able to help us. God, what a joke.”
She held one hand to her face for a moment. I kept my mouth shut and nibbled lightly at an inner cheek where it didn’t hurt so much. She looked up again.
“And then tonight, as soon as Mike and Minnie had left the cabin, I told Joe what you had said was going on. His mouth just fell, and a whole differe
nt expression came over his face, and he looked back behind the cabin, where he’d been prowling earlier in the day, and he said—he said that you had to be right, of course. That it explained a lot of funny things.”
“He must have found where Jerry was buried, not knowing it then.”
“He said there were other things about Big Mike, funny things that happened in the past. By then we were in the car, leaving there. And because I have such faith in Joe’s intuition—the totality of it finally hit home, and churned up feelings about you all over again.”
She sat biting one knuckle for a moment. “And then we came on you and Big Mike, fighting in the road. And I saw Minnie try to shoot you, and then you jumped back, and picked up a gun…”
She looked away again and I waited. “I don’t know what it is with me anymore. But I was certain of one thing. I knew that if we were ever going to try to explore things together again, despite how hurt I felt because of you, if it ever was to work, I couldn’t watch you shoot Big Mike. You could do it somewhere else and I might understand. But in front of these two eyes?”
She turned back and those two eyes effectively paralyzed me. “It was to keep that one little flicker of possibility to do with the two of us, maybe some other time, maybe in some other place, that made me throw myself on you and risk having all of us killed. And things haven’t improved much since,” she told me, taking a sip of brandy. “I don’t think I belong anymore.”
“In Barracks Cove?”
“Not anywhere. Everything just lost its underpinnings.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I have one small observation to make,” I told her. “And I’m a little afraid to try even that.”
“Go ahead. I don’t suppose this has been a million laughs for you, either.”
“You’re right enough there. A lot of my work isn’t. But what you just said made me think of something Parsons asked me this evening, after I’d learned who he was. He asked me if I’d ever created a work of art. I told him no. But in a way, maybe that’s what I’m trying to do every time I take on a job. I’ve heard it said that the job of an artist is to bring order out of chaos, or make the connections the rest of us can’t see right away, or something like that. I don’t know if that holds for everybody, but it sure holds for most of the things I take on. Sometimes I do a pretty fair job of it. Sometimes I fail miserably, and other times, like with Jerry Lind, I work my tail off trying, but it all gets taken out of my hands and things just happen. But I do try. To bring some order out of the chaos. So I guess in a way that does make me an artist, not all that different from yourself or Joe Dodge.”
“Okay,” she said with a wan smile. “And now you’re going to tell me we can’t give up because of the brutal setbacks.”
“Something like that. You have to expect to have your face shoved in it some, to do your best work.”
“Those are tough terms. What if I’m not up to them?”
“You’re up to them. You’ll find that out when you go out into your studio tomorrow. You’ll find a way to live with it. To get it under control, and one day to use it.”
She thought about it some, then sighed and handed me the rest of the brandy. “Thank God for one thing. There are artists and there are artists.” She got out a little unsteadily, slammed the door, then leaned back down to the open window.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.
“At least I don’t have to get up early in the morning and help the sheriff dig up a body.”
She straightened and started up the walk. I stuck my head out the window. “I guess you think that’s pretty funny, Allison.”
She tossed her head and nodded in the affirmative, without looking back.
“Well look, how about tomorrow evening? I don’t have to race right back to San Francisco. Will you be here? Can I call you when I get back into town?”
She paused near the top of the stairs and stood with her back to me. She either was having a tough time trying to make up her mind, or she was paying me back some. My neck was getting sore from craning out the window. And then she slowly turned.
“Yes,” she said simply.
And then she went on inside and I started the engine and tried to whistle something through swollen lips as I gripped the glass of brandy between my legs and tried not to spill any on my lap as my car and I limped on back to the motel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACK LYNCH modeled many aspects of Peter Bragg after himself. He graduated with a BA in journalism from the University of Washington and reported for several Seattle-area newspapers, and later for others in Iowa and Kansas. He ended up in San Francisco, where he briefly worked for a brokerage house and as a bartender in Sausalito, before joining the reporting staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper after many years to write the eight Bragg novels, earning one Edgar and two Shamus nominations and a loyal following of future crime writers. He died in 2008 at age seventy-eight.
PIECES OF DEATH
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982, 2014 Jack Lynch
ISBN: 1941298311
ISBN-13: 9781941298312
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line, #253
Leawood, Kansas 66209
www.brash-books.com
BOOKS BY JACK LYNCH
The Dead Never Forget
The Missing and the Dead
Wake Up and Die
Speak for the Dead
Truth or Die
Yesterday is Dead
Die for Me
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
It had been raining for the better part of a week in San Francisco, so I’d been indulging myself, spending most of that time holed up in my Sausalito apartment reading and making halfhearted attempts at doctoring up my social life and things like that. Business was a little slack at the office just then, which was fine with me, because I was pretty tired of other people’s problems and just wanted to get off to myself for a while and think about some other things.
Harry Shank was the guy who got me back out on the streets. He made a personal plea for me to work a couple of days for him. He promised me I’d be well paid and reminded me I would gain the gratitude of a man with considerable influence at the San Francisco Chronicle, meaning himself. Years before I’d been a reporter at that newspaper so I knew there was a bit of truth in what he said, which was not always the case when old Harry opened his mouth. His position these days was somewhere just beneath the managing editor.
I agreed to take the job probably as much as anything else because of some nice parties I’d been to out at the Shank place at Stinson Beach. He was married to a woman named Erica who was half his age and about the nicest part of the parties I’d been to out there. She had a smoky, dangerous presence that could get you thinking the sort of thoughts you’re not supposed to think about another man’s wife.
Shank wanted me to nursemaid somebody named Buddy Polaski who was flying into the airport that afternoon from New York. Harry didn’t tell me a lot more than that. The guy was a part of some personal business deal Harry was putting together.
Apparently Polaski would be carrying something of value that called for a little extra protection. Since Shank didn’t tell me whether it would be a secret password or a trayful of diamonds, I put on the shoulder holster and the .45 automatic pistol, which is about the only thing to set me apart as a bodyguard from any other guy who’s reached his growth and stays reasonably in shape. Harry told me to stop by his office on my way to the airport to pick up a press pass for my car so I could park next to the terminal building. He also told me to wear a gray and black Donegal tweed rain hat he’d seen one time. He said Polaski would be wearing a Russian shapka, and we could recognize each other from the hats. I’m glad he told me about it over the phone. In person I would have had difficulty keeping a straight face.
At the airport I waited for Polaski at the terminal end of the long finger corridor leading to the parking aprons. That way I didn’t have to go through the metal detector and explain about the pistol and all. I figured any man who couldn’t make it that far on his own was in more trouble than I wanted to be a part of anyway. When I spotted the guy in the shapka coming up the corridor I grew a little more curious. I figured if I ever needed a bodyguard myself, I’d want to hire someone who looked about the way he did. His face was a shame, but he was big, nearly as tall as I am, and heavier. He didn’t carry much fat, either. He had a solid, burly build, with a barrel chest and thick hands. He wore an overcoat over a dark suit, a blue shirt and a black knit tie that looked like an afterthought. He carried an attaché case and gave me a curt nod.