Bragg V1 by Jack Lynch

Author:Jack Lynch [Lynch, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brash Books, LLC
Published: 2015-01-14T07:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Detective Robert Dempsey, according to Tuffy, had spent more than ten years in the Los Angeles Police Department, winning citations, earning promotions and growing an ulcer. He had left, finally, to take a job as chief of detectives in Rey Platte, a wealthy retirement town inland from Santa Barbara, where the pace was slower and the work was easier on a cop’s stomach. Tuffy’s dad had celebrated a birthday on the Friday before Jerry Lind dropped out of sight, and his brother the cop had phoned him greetings that evening from Barracks Cove. During the conversation, Bob Dempsey had said that he was in Northern California on a special investigation. They learned later that Dempsey had phoned his wife in Rey Platte that same evening. It was the last anybody had heard from him.

In subsequent queries to the Rey Platte police, Tuffy’s father, Steven Dempsey, learned that whatever it was his brother had been doing in Barracks Cove, it apparently wasn’t connected with current duties in Rey Platte. He was on leave, and had made arrangements to be gone for as long as a month. The department wasn’t worried about him particularly, but his wife was. And by now his brother was worried too. Worried enough to fly down from Seattle to look for him.

I doubted that there would have been an army of out-of-town police marching through Barracks Cove on a given day, so I had to assume that Dempsey was the cop Allison had told me about. The one that Jerry Lind, for whatever cockeyed reason, had been on the trail of. I wondered how Jerry Lind would have known where Dempsey was. I also had to wonder, with an unpleasant feeling, what might have happened to a pussycat like Jerry Lind if a veteran police detective like Dempsey had disappeared in the same area.

By the time we reached the campground I was not only sore and exhausted, but worried as hell. I made some telephone calls from the ranger station there. I learned that Mendocino airport, closer to Barracks Cove, was fogged in again. I also learned an intrastate airline made a daily stop at the field in Willits, but not on Sundays, so I phoned down to San Francisco and made arrangements to be picked up in Willits by an outfit calling itself Golden Gate Sky Charter that would fly you anywhere twenty-four hours a day so long as your credit was good. They were based at San Francisco International and I’d used them before. They knew my credit was good, so by the time I’d driven from the campground over to Willits, there was a charter plane waiting for me. They were a reliable outfit, but I grumped a lot over their prices. When we landed at Rey Platte I told the pilot to wait for me. He gave me a slow, rich smile. They charge a lot more than a waiting taxicab does.

After I explained my business the local police gave me the home telephone number of their chief.

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