The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I felt as if I’d put in a day’s work. I wasn’t hungry, particularly, but there was a hot shower and a bottle of bourbon back there and I wanted some time to think about things.

  At the motel I got out the gun-cleaning gear and spent a few minutes reaming and swabbing and oiling the .38. Then I had a shower and drank some of the bourbon, and after stretching out atop the bed for an hour or so, I decided I wasn’t hungry enough to go prowling up and down Aurora Avenue looking for a restaurant. With that decision under my belt I poured another stiff bourbon, propped up the pillows, and was about to spin the dial on the TV set when the phone rang on the stand beside the bed. I picked up the receiver and said hello.

  “You’re a dead man, Bragg. Bang-bang dead.”

  It was a male caller, and he had the voice Benny had described, as if it came from the bottom of a rain barrel. And then he hung up. I put the receiver back gently. My hand was still resting atop it when the phone rang again. I snatched it up.

  “Look, asshole, I don’t care if…”

  “Peter?”

  I exhaled slowly. It was Lorna.

  “Sorry, I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “Somebody who just called a minute or two ago. He didn’t identify himself.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to put a scare into me.”

  “Did he?”

  “You heard how I answered the phone.”

  “I certainly did. How are you coming with Benny’s problems?”

  “I think I must be doing something right, or I wouldn’t have had the phone call.” I told her about the bombing of Benny’s office. “He and Dolly and the kids threw some stuff in a suitcase and left town.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough for me or the cops or somebody to find out what’s behind all this.”

  “Do you have any idea how much longer it might be?”

  “No, but I’m hoping the police technicians can make something of the bomb residue in Benny’s office. God knows we’re due for a break. These people have been taking awful chances, getting away with things without being tripped up. Nobody can stay that lucky.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “Peter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If one of those people called you there at your motel, that must mean they know where you’re staying.”

  I brooded for a moment, then cleared my throat. “You still do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Find the little chinks in my armor.”

  “I didn’t mean anything like that. I’m just worried that…”

  “No, it’s okay, Lorna. I like to think I would have thought about that myself in the next ten minutes or so. These people have been lucky, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get away with something more. Damn it.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, I’ve had some to drink, and I’d about given up on the idea of going out to get anything to eat because of the trouble, but now there’s changing motels to think about…”

  “You could come here.”

  And there it was, out there on the table for us all to think about.

  “Just for tonight, I mean,” she continued. “There’s plenty of room. You’ve seen that. And it doesn’t have to mean anything. Man-woman kind of anything. It could just be my night to be a good Samaritan.”

  “Is that what it could be?”

  “Oh God. I don’t know what it could be. Won’t know until you get over here. But I could find you something to eat out in the kitchen. You wouldn’t even have to pack now. Just bring stuff for the night. You can go back and check out of the motel tomorrow.”

  It was too good an offer to refuse, despite the horn player with Stan Kenton. “I’ll be right over.”

  ELEVEN

  She stage-managed it pretty well, my ex-wife did. She met me at the door with a smile that spelled relief. “I’m so glad,” she told me. “I was afraid you’d change your mind and be all macho and bullheaded about staying at the motel.”

  “I saw what they did to Benny’s office,” I told her. “Going out of a person’s way for some of that action isn’t macho, it’s stupid.”

  She closed the door and led me into what originally had been intended as a bedroom, which she now used as a dressing room. But it did have a small bed in it, which she showed me she’d made up so I could spend the night in it, as if this were all businesslike and being done in the name of friendship to the bone. Then she led me out to the kitchen and poured me a large bourbon over ice, which I sat sipping at the breakfast bar while she made me a cheese omelet.

  She was wearing what looked like one of those sweaters imported from England or Ireland, a lumpy white knitted thing a couple of sizes too large for her. She might have been a boy, for all the figure it revealed. The skirt she wore was something else. It reminded me of the straight black pleated uniform skirts the girls used to wear over at St. Benedict’s parochial school when I was a boy. It might even have been an old school uniform, for all I knew. It barely came to her knees. She wasn’t wearing any hosiery this time and the skirt showed off her fine bare calves. She wore a trace of eye shadow but no lipstick. She chattered aimlessly while she prepared the meal, then sat quietly sipping a glass of white wine while I ate.

  When I’d finished she put things in a dishwasher, then poured a couple of snifters of brandy and turned out the lights in the kitchen. The only lights still on in the place were a couple of lamps up in her sleeping loft, but good old Ballard down below sent up enough light so a person could avoid cracking his shins on the furniture. We had settled down on the sofa in front of the tall windows, at a respectable distance from each other, when the telephone beside Lorna rang.

  “Uh-oh,” she said, putting down her brandy.

  “Why uh-oh?”

  “It’s maybe something I should have told you about earlier.” She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  She listened a few moments, then laughed. “Gene, I do believe you’ve been drinking. Hold on one moment.” She held one hand over the mouthpiece. “Would you do me a great favor, please? Just say hello and identify yourself.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Gene Olson.”

  “The senior partner of Scandia Farms?”

  “The very same.”

  “The fellow who thinks you should throw a little fleshy enthusiasm into your work.”

  “Now careful, Peter. The fellow whom I suspect thinks that.”

  I took the receiver. “Hello, this is Peter Bragg. What can we do for you this time of night?”

  “Oh hey, I’m sorry,” said Olson. “It is later than I realized. Tell Lorna we can talk about it later.”

  We said good night to each other and I hung up and handed the phone back to Lorna. “What was that all about?”

  “I’m afraid I told a terrible fib today.”

  “What about?”

  “About you. Us. Gene and I were talking this afternoon about Brad Thackery, the Seahawks fellow he was with the other evening. He said Brad had told him he’d found me to be a very attractive woman. But Gene also said the Seahawks organization still hasn’t decided on the catering firm to stage their party. I couldn’t quite tell whether or not he was making a connection between the two.”

  “Sounds a little vague,” I said.

  “Exactly. And then I had a naughty, whacky thought. I told Gene that I might consider trying to win over Thackery in my own way, except that you were my ex-husband and—well, that we were sleeping together again and you were very jealous. I think he didn’t quite believe me, and I guess by now, tonight, he’d had enough to drink to phone here and ask me to prove it. Lucky for me you were here. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ve even been thinking about stopping by the office and telling him pretty much the same sort of story.”

  “It might even be sort of fun if it were true,” she said quietly.

 
“Fun for you, maybe. But I’d like to think, Lorna, that I’d never be foolish enough to feel jealous because of you again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been through all the pain of that sort I’d ever want to experience.”

  “To do with me?”

  “To do with you.”

  She took a sip of her brandy, then stared at the snifter. “Then what Benny said the other night was true.”

  “What was?”

  “He said he hadn’t told you I was back in Seattle because he knew things had been a little…rocky, I think he said. I assumed he meant after I left San Francisco.”

  “That’s both when he meant and what he meant.”

  We were quiet for a little while, avoiding each other’s eyes. “I didn’t know,” she said finally. “I thought we both were sort of tired of each other back then. That Sunday, when I phoned to tell you I was leaving, you sounded so matter-of-fact. So unsurprised. You sounded as if you’d been expecting it.”

  “No, Lorna. I hadn’t been expecting it,” I told her. “I put on a good act, was all. Oh, I knew, or suspected at least, that you’d been doing a little slipping and sliding around with somebody else. But I thought it was just a passing fancy, something you had to get out of your system. I told myself things would sort themselves out, given time.”

  “Oh God.” She lowered her head. Her eyes were squeezed shut. “You make me feel like a monster.”

  I put aside the brandy snifter—on an end table this time, not on the carpet. I scrunched over on the sofa and put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Look, Lorna. It was an awful time for me, but that was back then and it happened to the guy I was back then. I’ve told you, I’m a different man now. I got over the pain in time, and in a way I guess you did me a big favor. After I got over the shock of it all, I did some serious thinking about myself, about who I was and where I was going. It completely changed my life. I’m more satisfied with myself now than I was back then. A lot more satisfied. And what the hell, you did leave me half the money in our savings account. Any other broad probably would have skipped town with the whole bankroll.”

  It brought a fleeting smile, but she was sniffing and wiping a hand across her eyes. She got up and excused herself and went down the hallway to the bathroom.

  I got to my feet and stood by the window, staring down at Ballard, thinking about things. Everything I’d just told her was pretty true, I felt. But the memories were still there. I’d really felt back then as if I just wanted to crawl off someplace and die.

  I didn’t hear her come back into the room, but in a moment a vaguely familiar tune came softly from speakers she had connected to a tape deck.

  “Do you still dance, Peter?”

  I grunted. “No better than I ever did. That’s one thing about me that never changed.”

  “Show me.”

  She came to me and stood close enough so I could tell she’d put on some sort of scent while she’d been in the bathroom.

  “It’s your feet,” I warned her. I kicked off my shoes and we shuffled around the room in each other’s arms.

  “I think at heart I must be a very wicked woman,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I felt such remorse when you were telling me about the upheaval you went through. But then, while I was freshening myself in the bathroom, I had a different surge of emotion. To think that I could have caused anybody so much pain. It’s a little heady. Does wonders for a girl’s vanity, but at the same time I feel like such a heel.”

  She was grinning up at me. “It really hurt, huh?”

  I had to laugh in spite of myself. “I don’t know if hurt is quite the right word. Numbness and shock might better explain it. There are a lot of feelings involving ego that get all tangled up when something like that happens. Injured pride. You name it. But yes, it did hurt too. I don’t think I was in love with you still back then, at the time you left me. But you were a habit. And habits are hard critters to part with.”

  She stopped moving to the music then and just stood staring at me a moment with her arms looped around my neck, then she pulled my head down until our lips touched. It was a demure little thing when it started. I don’t think either one of us knew just where we wanted to go with it. Or maybe we did. At least we found our way. And a couple of minutes later you would have thought we were a couple of teenagers experiencing the first joys of heavy necking.

  You don’t just stand idly by at a moment like that. You hug and grope and move around some. Before long, Lorna had lowered her hand to pull out my shirttail and ran her fingernails up across my back. It seemed to me that that sort of activity on the part of my ex-wife certainly entitled me in turn to pass a hand or two across her back under her sweater, and when I did that, I discovered she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. I made a little point of lightly tracing one fingertip up and down across where her bra strap would have been if she’d been wearing a bra.

  She took a little pause in our kiss. “I shed my undies in the bathroom,” she told me, “just in case it came to something like this.”

  And then we were smooching again, and it was plenty easy for me to slip my hands down inside the elastic band of her black schoolgirl’s skirt and learn she spoke the truth. When I caressed her smooth, cool bottom she squirmed around a little. Finally, she broke off the kiss again. She opened her eyes and raised her hands alongside my face.

  “Robert Louis Stevenson said it about as well as anybody,” she whispered.

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill…’ ”

  We made for the loft.

  TWELVE

  I don’t know what time we finally went to sleep. Before daylight anyhow. And while the sleep I had was shorter than I was used to, it was about as sound as a person gets. Lorna was still snoozing when I got up and padded downstairs and put on a pot of coffee. Then I went back down the hallway and had a shower and shave. The face in the mirror that morning could truly be described as haggard.

  When I came out of the bathroom all fresh and clothed, Lorna was standing naked over at her tall windows, staring out at the rain drumming down. She still looked like a young sister of the woman I’d been married to.

  “Aren’t you afraid the neighbors will stare?”

  She turned with a faint smile. “Let them stare. I have nothing to hide.”

  “That’s not the Lorna of old speaking.”

  “No, it’s not. And it’s all your fault, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know. What’s my fault?”

  She came over to put herself in my arms and clung to me tightly. “You turned me into an animal last night.”

  “It was mutual, or didn’t you notice?”

  “I noticed.” She raised her face and kissed my cheek. “Damn office. I really don’t want to go in there today, but I promised Gene I’d see the men from Potlatch Bay.”

  “Where’s Gene going to be?”

  “Out of town for the day. I’d much rather just spend the day in bed with you.”

  “Catching up on your sleep.”

  “No, not catching up on my sleep. Catching up on the years we’ve been apart. It was good last night, wasn’t it?”

  “You bet it was good. I might never leave town again.”

  “Oh God.” She looked up at me. “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about us again. Things are better between us now than they ever were, don’t you think?”

  “What I think is that we just spent one wild night and didn’t get enough sleep and maybe shouldn’t try to make too much more out of it right now.”

  “You’re wrong, Peter. Oh, you’re so wrong. Listen, darling, go check out of your motel while I take a shower. Move in here. Forever, if you want.”

  “Now whoa, lady. Let’s not move along so fast. I don’t know where this is going, but I think we’d better slow down some.”

  She drew back from me. “You
didn’t seem to much want to slow down last night. In fact, I thought we’d set the sheets on fire.”

  She turned and walked down the hallway. She knew I was watching her. She was using the walk she used when she wanted to call people’s attention to her hindside. She paused at the bathroom doorway and looked back at me.

  “Well, if you won’t move in, how about at least giving me a ride into work. I hate to drive in the rain.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  I drove on out to the motel where I’d been staying. My room didn’t show any sign that somebody had been by to shoot me in the middle of the night. I packed up and checked out and told the clerk I’d be calling in from time to time for any phone messages I might get. I left a $10 tip to encourage him to hold on to the messages.

  I went back and picked up Lorna and drove her into the city. She asked me to go up to the office with her.

  “I want to see what you think of what they’re bringing over this morning.”

  “What are they bringing over this morning?”

  “Some renderings of what our new plant at Potlatch Bay will look like. Since Gene won’t be here, I’d like another male opinion.”

  “I guess I can take a few minutes.”

  I parked in the basement garage and we took an elevator up to the Scandia Farms offices over the restaurant. The two men from Potlatch Bay were there waiting for us. Lorna introduced them as Marvin Winslow and Bruce Sherman. Winslow was a cheery-faced, rotund little fellow of sixty or so with thin gray hair combed straight back from a high forehead. He had a broad, scraggly moustache that looked just right for his happy demeanor.

  Bruce Sherman was a younger man, in his forties, I guessed, with a long chin and sleepy-lidded eyes. They both wore neat dark three-piece suits and spoke with the sort of voices that suggested they might spell amaze with a zed.

  “Bragg? Any relation to Miss Lorna here?” asked Sherman.

  “He’s my ex-husband,” Lorna told them. “Just visiting for a few days.”