The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (30 page)

"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 different 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.