The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Shellbacher,” I said.

  Thompson nodded. “He had a revolver in the trunk of his car. He came through the gate a few minutes ago and went over to his car. He put the revolver barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I know it sounds stupid, but I am sorry. About the whole mess. But the man had nowhere to go.”

  “No,” said the warden, beginning to walk back toward the administration building. “Not after this last bit of business. He had nowhere to go. I’m afraid the department couldn’t have handled this latest thing. Not administratively. Internally. Behind closed doors. It probably was foolish to ever think it could have been handled that way anyhow. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I think my brains are addled. And I’m only telling you this to let you know I’ve lost my animosity toward you as well. I hated the things you had to tell me. But your instincts were sound.”

  “So were Beau’s, when it came down to the end of it.”

  “Yes.” We walked on for a ways. “You know, Bragg, when this all started last Friday, Mr. Martin told me you used to be a newspaperman yourself.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How would you handle this? With the press, I mean. What would you tell them?”

  We walked some more. “I think I’d give it all to them.”

  He glanced at me, but kept silent.

  “I mean, you’ve had a very bad situation here, but you don’t have Shellbacher’s career, or reputation, to worry about now. You ought to turn it to your own advantage. Try to get a little more public awareness of the problems you have in here. Let the press and public learn the desperate sort of measures a twenty-year man like Shellbacher would consider to try to improve things. Not the killing, but the idea of supplying pot to the prisoners. In fact, hell, your people should be lobbying in Sacramento to make it a legal reality inside state prisons.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Nope.” I paused, and looked back at the brightly lighted, pie-crust–colored walls. “They let people with glaucoma take marijuana. You figure having glaucoma is any worse than living inside there?”

  We continued on in silence.

  “Well,” he said finally, “all this is going to have to be decided by my boss in Sacramento, anyhow. But I’ll tell him what you said. About what to tell the press, since you’re an ex-newspaperman. And I think I’ll tell him what you said about the pot too. What the hell, no skin off my nose. Not my idea. Just the idea of a madman who came in to lend a hand.”

  We were outside the administration building now and we shook hands. His eyes lifted, and he looked past me. I turned and looked too. The kids, Aggie and Buddy Bancetti, were asleep in the front of their car, arms looped around each other’s shoulders. Mr. Wumps, the dog, was curled up and snoring and making soft little yelps in the back seat.

  “All this going on, and they’re sleeping,” said the warden with a note of wonder.

  “They’ve had a busy day,” I told him.

  TWENTY-THREE

  An hour later I was stretched out on the front room sofa sipping from a large, round glass filled with ice and gin. Buddy was in the shower, Aggie was making sandwiches out in the kitchen beyond the breakfast bar and Mr. Wumps had resumed his beauty sleep on a rug in the alcove off the front room. I was watching an old movie on TV and trying to get the day’s events behind me when the telephone on the breakfast bar rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” I told Aggie.

  It didn’t have the dangerous tone to it that the phone call from Casey Martin had early Saturday, but I couldn’t think of anybody I wanted to speak to just then.

  It rang a couple of more times and Aggie put down a knife and crossed to it.

  “Can’t ignore a telephone,” she told me.

  “Disconnect it,” I said.

  She picked up the receiver. “Mr. Peter Bragg’s residence. Who is calling, please?”

  She held the receiver away from her mouth and put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Somebody named Allison?”

  I grunted and nodded. She was always nice to talk to. But she seldom phoned. Said it was up to the fellows to do the phoning. This must be important. Aggie came around the breakfast bar and carried the phone over to me, then went back to her sandwiches.

  “Hi, Allison.”

  “Hi. Who was that?”

  “Just somebody I have around to answer the phone that way. Sounds kind of classy, doesn’t it?”

  “She sounded a little young.”

  “You don’t have to pay them as much that way.”

  “I see. Well, how are you, Bragg?”

  I hesitated. It never went well when she called me Bragg like that.

  “I’m okay. How are things in Barracks Cove?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been there for several hours.”

  “How come?”

  “You drove me out.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Since we weren’t trotting around together having that gay, carefree weekend we’d planned, I was out in my studio working. Unfortunately I had the radio on. I heard about a shooting up in a place called Claireborn. They said a private detective from San Francisco had been shot too, and later he caught the man suspected of doing the shooting, and that it was all connected somehow to the hostage thing at San Quentin. After hearing that, I was able to work for about another four minutes. And then I just sat down in a corner and bawled. There was Bragg again, supposed to be my fella in a kind of nice way, out there doing his thing, in the middle of murder and mayhem, stirring things up…

  “So once I was able to pull myself together I put some things in a bag and got in the car and began to drive. I didn’t know where I was going. I just had to get away. But then, I did know where I was going, and after a long drive I checked into a motel and watched the Ten O’ clock News on Channel Two, and there you were again, in living color, this time.”

  “I didn’t know they shot any stuff of me.”

  “Sure. You were coming out of a building at San Quentin with this wimpy-looking boy and a smart-looking girl. The story was a little muddled but they said the hostage thing was over but somebody else was dead. Oh, and you were on crutches. That’s why I thought I’d give a call and ask how you were. So how are you? Really.”

  “I’m okay, really. It’s just a flesh wound. I don’t need the crutches. I just use them as a safety net. The boy you saw was the one who’d been framed for murder up in Claireborn. Did you hear about that part?”

  “Lordy, no. Nor do I think I want to.”

  “And the smart-looking girl you saw was Aggie, his girlfriend. She’s the one who answered the phone for me. Neither of them thought to bring any cash along, so I’m putting them up here for the night. Along with their dog. You’d like the dog, if you put a clothespin over your nose. The warden said he’d let the boy visit his brother, over at San Quentin, tomorrow. After that, the two kids and the dog are heading back to Claireborn. How’s that for an update?”

  “Swell. God, Pete, I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Try to maintain this relationship. I mean, we’re so totally different. I have to have a certain serenity to do the work I do. And you, your job…You’re on the edge of so much violence. How can you do it?”

  We’d been through this conversation, or variations of it, since we’d first met. I tried once again.

  “I do it, Allison, because I’m not bad at it. For the past couple of years I’ve even been making a pretty good living at it. But a lot of the people I deal with are at their very limits, emotionally or other ways. There’s bound to be occasional violence in a situation like that. I take it into consideration and try to make allowances for it. That’s not always enough. But the most important thing about what I do is, occasionally the good guys come out ahead. And Allison, when that happens, it makes me feel like I’m doing what I was put on this planet to do.”

  “Did the good guys w
in today?”

  I thought about it. “They won some. But they took some awful punishment too. That girl at the lake today—no, I guess on whole you’d have to say the good guys came out slightly behind today.”

  “Then what did you accomplish?”

  “I kept it from being a lot worse. I mean, there was a time when I thought there was going to be a lot more killing. I’m talking in terms of five or six people. I like to think I helped to keep that from happening.”

  “Is it all over with now?”

  “My part is, except for a trial I might have to testify at a few months down the road.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”

  “Don’t have any. Not going into the office, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Why don’t you come see me? Can you drive?”

  “I can drive. Where are you?”

  “Let me look.”

  She was gone from the phone for a minute.

  She came back finally and told me the name. “It’s across from the Strawberry Shopping Center.”

  “As I recall, that’s about a mile and a half from my apartment here.”

  “That’s what I recalled too.”

  “I could crawl that far. Why didn’t you come to the apartment?”

  “I’ve been to the apartment. That’s why I decided to check into a nice, clean motel room.”

  “It’s not that bad here.”

  “Yes it is. Besides, it sounds like you’re all booked up.”

  “Yeah. Hey, do you know what the original name was of that place where you’re staying?”

  “No, what?”

  “They called it the Hi-Ho Motel.”

  She snorted.

  “That’s what I thought every time I drove past,” I told her. “Even spent a night there once.”

  “With a name like that I’m surprised you didn’t move in. It’ll be like visiting an old friend, then, if you get into your car and drive over.”

  “Yeah, it will at that. What room are you in?”

  She told me. I said I’d be there in about fifteen minutes and we hung up.

  Aggie helped me repack some stuff in the suitcase I’d had up in Claireborn with me.

  “Think you and Buddy can manage to get through the night without me?”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “I don’t know what you have in mind, but feel free to use my bed, or the sofa in the front room. It opens out into a bed too. Or use both. Just keep the dog on the floor.”

  “Do you have any plastic garbage bags?” she asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “If you’re going to go see your lady, Mr. Bragg, the first thing you’ll have to do when you get there is climb into her shower and scrub yourself down. I mean, you’re not really offensive, but a person can tell you’ve been out doing things. You can wrap the plastic around the bandage on your leg to keep it dry in the shower.”

  “You think of everything.”

  “It’s growing up in the country, mostly.”

  She insisted on carrying the bag back out to the car. I was just using one of the crutches this time. When I got to Allison’s motel I planned to leave it in the car. Aggie waited while I got in and settled and had the motor running.

  “Buddy will be sorry he missed saying good night. But I guess you’re in sort of a hurry.”

  “That’s right, I am. If I don’t show up in the morning don’t worry about it. Help yourself to whatever food you can find and lock the door behind you.”

  “Okay. And Mr. Bragg?”

  “Yeah?”

  She reached in and gave me a light punch on the shoulder. “I don’t know what the lady on the phone was complaining about, but I’m sure glad that you do what you do.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  I drove up to the corner and glanced in the rearview mirror just before turning down the hill. She was waving at me. Good kid, that Aggie.

  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.

  TRUTH OR DIE

  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 © 1985, 2014 Jack Lynch

  Previously published as Monterey

  ISBN: 1941298362

  ISBN-13: 9781941298367

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line, #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  BOOKS BY JACK LYNCH

  The Dead Never Forget

  Pieces of Death

  The Missing and the Dead

  Wake Up and Die

  Speak for the Dead

  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 was the wrong girl at the wrong time, but she’d seen me and seemed to recognize me, and I couldn’t ignore her. I hitched up my pants, went over to the pottery stall and said hello.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said, but it was obvious she couldn’t remember how long, or where or under what circumstances. But none of that mattered much. She was the girl I used to see from time to time—in the company of another man—during one of the most awful times of my life, when my marriage had broken down and I’d quit the newspaper job and was all at war with myself. She would come into the establishment on the arm of a man who was short and swarthy. She, in contrast, was tall and cool and willowy. She had a wide, Charlotte Rampling mouth and slate-gray eyes. Her voice was as calm and fine as the dark hair that fell to her shoulders. I had, in a way, fallen in love with her with the awful ache that accompanies a truly messed-up life. Back then I had badly needed somebody to hold my hand and tell me things would get better. Back then, on those lonely nights in my Sausalito apartment when I couldn’t get to sleep, I would pretend that she was lying beside me telling me that things would get better, and a couple of other things as well.

  But she hadn’t told me that back then, and she didn’t tell me that now. Instead, she searched my face, trying to remember.

  “Did we meet in the Valley?”

  She meant the Carmel Valley, since it was the one the people down here always meant, being just over the long hill from Monterey and back inland.

  “No, more like at a bar in Sausalito a few years ago.”

  She grinned and remembered. I’d been the tall and brawny guy behind the bar who’d given her and her fellow a free drink from time to time, and would flirt with her softly when the short, swarthy fellow went back to the men’s room. She had come from Bellingham, originally, a town eighty miles north of Seattle, and Seattle had been where I’d come from. It was a starting point. A common touchstone i
n the past. I had wanted to spend time with her very badly back then. But I knew her fellow, sort of, and that was enough to keep me from trying to move in on her, even though the fellow was married to another woman.

  “God, that was forever ago,” she told me. She reached out and touched my arm. Briefly.

  She was wearing a light blue pants suit with a cream-colored, wide-brimmed hat. There was something about her eyes that let you know she’d walked down a couple of long roads since those days in Sausalito, but other than that she was as beautiful—no, more beautiful, wiser—than ever. The only problem with all this was that back inside the main arena of the Monterey County Fairgrounds, listening to the closing number of the Bobby Hutcherson Percussion Ensemble, was Allison France, the quiet blonde artist from Barracks Cove with whom I had—once—even tentatively discussed the hair-raising subject of marriage.

  “I don’t remember your name,” she told me, more in astonishment than apology.

  “Peter Bragg. And I never did know yours, other than Jo.”

  “I always regretted that,” she told me evenly. Forthright, if nothing else, this girl. “The other name is Sommers, these days.”

  “It wasn’t that when you were going with Jimmy John?”

  “No. I’ve married since then.” She turned to the thin, lank-haired girl running the pottery stall. “Nikki, this is Peter Bragg. He’s one of the ones who got away, a long time ago.”

  Nikki was a serious-looking girl in a blue smock who could smile when something touched her right, and Jo’s remark had done that.

  “If I’d thought seriously she didn’t want me to get away,” I told Nikki, “I would have chained myself to a nearby tree.”

  “You two look good together,” said Nikki, doing her part to further the mischief.

  “Well,” said Jo Sommers, with a very correct face, “what do you suppose we should do about that?”