by Michael Kerr
“Where have you arranged to meet him?”
“I haven’t. He’ll head on back to Charleston. We don’t meet socially, only to work.”
“His address?”
Roy gave it to him.
“Thanks,” Logan said, and blew Roy’s other big toe off.
CHAPTER THREE
“What are you going to do with him?” Rita asked after Logan had gone back to the Airstream and told her most of the story.
“Make him vanish,” Logan said. “He killed your husband and then came here to kill you. And his partner attempted to whack your daughter.”
Rita shook her head. “You can’t just murder him. We need to call the police.”
“I blew two of his toes off. How do I explain that to some hick sheriff? I’d end up in jail counting bricks and you and your daughter would be back to square one, waiting for some stranger to put bullets in your heads.”
“There must be another way,” Rita said. “Surely you couldn’t shoot a defenceless man in cold blood.”
I could. “What do you suggest, Rita? This is probably the guy that murdered your husband and followed you up here to kill you. Should we fix up his feet and send him on his way? He executes strangers to him for money. Who knows how many men, women and children he has murdered in cold blood?”
Rita lowered her head and closed her eyes. This was horrendous. Violence had not been a part of her life experience. She had enjoyed a safe, structured, happy family life until Richard had been killed. It dawned on her that many people must feel the same until tragedy turned everything upside down and sucked all the goodness away. It was impossible to stand apart from her present predicament and envisage ever having a normal life again. If it hadn’t been for Logan, who was still an almost total stranger to her, then she would now be dead.
“I don’t know what to think or do,” Rita said. “This is like a waking nightmare.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Logan said. “Warn him off. OK?”
Rita kept her face lowered and just nodded. She had to trust him. He had just appeared from nowhere and seemed to know how to deal with trouble. Sharon’s safety was paramount, and whatever Logan could do to keep them safe would have to be done. She acknowledged that she needed him, and that she was lucky that he was willing to help.
Logan went back to Rita’s trailer. Roy was still sitting in the shower. Still bleeding.
“Where’s your car?” Logan asked the sad-looking excuse for a professional killer.
“Off-road, about a hundred yards south of the entrance,” Roy said. “What are you gonna do?”
“Take you to your car, drive to some remote spot away from here and cap you.”
“Please, I’ve told you everythin’ I know. Can’t we work this out?” Roy pleaded.
Logan shrugged his broad shoulders. “Don’t see how. In an ideal world we could let the law deal with you. But that would tie me up as a witness and so forth, and I’ve got too much to do to be involved. And let’s be honest, Roy, you’d whack me without a second thought if the tables were turned.”
Logan threw a punch that connected with the point of Roy’s chin, fracturing his jaw and putting him to sleep again.
Dressing an unconscious man is not easy and is time-consuming. He didn’t bother replacing Roy’s socks and shoes.
It was a half hour later when Logan got to the Pontiac and spilled Roy off his shoulder into the passenger side foot well. With Rita following in the Discovery, he drove the car south through Grafton to a quiet spot on the west side of Tygart Lake.
Rita stayed in the 4x4 with the engine running, forty yards back from the Pontiac.
Roy was conscious again, and now he was crying. To know that you are going to die imminently and by violent means is a big deal.
Logan pressed the end of the suppressor tight up against the back of the hitman’s head, into the depression at the base of his skull.
Roy wanted to do something. Not just stay frozen like a rabbit in the glare of a car’s headlights and wait for the end. But there was nothing he could do. His wrists were taped together behind his back, and he could hardly move an inch in the confined space.
“You ready for this?” Logan asked him. “Now you get to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end.”
Roy pissed himself as the seconds ticked by.
“I’ve had a change of heart,” Logan eventually said. “With your wallet and phone I guess I can find you if need be. I’ve decided to let you live, Roy. But if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. Just think of me as your kryptonite out there somewhere, ready to take you down. Use this as a learning curve. And do yourself a favour; find a new way to make a buck, because you’re a sad excuse for a paid killer.”
Before getting out of the car, Logan took hold of Roy’s trigger finger, snapped it backwards, then sideways, totally destroying at least the middle joint.
Roy Naylor’s scream drove roosting birds from trees and echoed across the lake.
Logan walked back to the Discovery and climbed in next to Rita. “Drive back to the trailer and pack,” he said. “We need to move out.”
“Did you kill him?” Rita asked.
“No. But I think I should have. He needed it.”
As they left the Golden Valley Trailer Park, after Logan had drunk coffee while Rita packed her case, Roy’s cell rang. Logan answered it.
“Roy, where the hell are you? Did you do the job?”
“This isn’t Roy, Sal,” Logan said. “He’s hurt bad, but still breathing. He told me all about you while I shot bits off him. I daresay he’ll be in touch.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Sal asked.
“Your worst enemy, Sal Mendez. You need to look at your friend and ask yourself whether you really want to fulfill the contract that Sammy Lester put your way. Now that I know who you both are, you’d better believe that you’ll live longer by forgetting that Rita and Sharon Jennings exist. If you ever turn up in the same county as them, I’ll kill you.”
He turned the phone off and slipped it back in his pocket.
Logan told Rita to stop at a rundown looking hotel outside the Morgantown city limits. It was in an industrial area with a gas station on one side of it and a U-Haul depot the other. Cheap and anonymous, with parking out of sight of the street.
Rita parked and cut the engine and lights.
Logan got out and went over to the office. A scrawny guy with greasy, gray hair and wearing a string vest the same colour was sitting behind an old metal desk watching basketball on a small TV that was bracketed to the wall.
“You know what time it is?” Nick Mercer, the night clerk, asked Logan.
“Meaning?” Logan said.
“That’s it’s a little late to be checking in.”
“I’ve got a lady friend in the car. I’ll pay you the full rate for what’s left of the night.”
“Forty bucks, cash,” Nick said with a smirk on his lumpy, unshaven face.
Logan tossed two twenties onto the desktop.
“No need to register,” Nick said, pocketing the money before stretching back and taking the key to number 9 off one of the sixteen hooks screwed into a pine board on the wall. “Have fun.”
The room was the same layout as most motel rooms; a short hallway with a bathroom on the right and a closet on the left, opening onto a room with minimum furniture and two queen-size beds.
“It’s filthy,” Rita said.
Logan shrugged. “It’s the last place anyone would look for you, and I didn’t have to give a name or car details, so it’s perfect.”
Logan dumped his rucksack on the almost threadbare carpet, hung his lightweight windbreaker on a chair and sat on the edge of the nearest bed to the door and waited to use the bathroom. Rita was in it for more than twenty minutes. He heard the toilet flush, the shower running, and finally the buzz of a battery-operated toothbrush. She came out wearing a thick fleecy dressing gown. He took his toilet bag from the pack, went in and had a quick showe
r. The water was hardly tepid, and two of the wall tiles were missing. After brushing his teeth, he put his shorts back on, carried the rest of his clothes out, and folded them and put them on one of the two chairs. Got in bed and threw the coverlet back. Just pulled the thin, worn sheet up to his waist.
“Now what?” Rita asked him.
“We get a couple hours’ sleep. Then wait for your daughter to call.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” Rita said, “After all that’s happened.”
“You’ll sleep because of all that’s happened,” Logan said, switching off the lamp on his nightstand and turning onto his side, away from her. He was asleep in less than a minute.
Rita lay in the darkness and let the events since Richard’s funeral loop round her mind again and again. It took awhile for her to concentrate on the present and not on her flight from Charleston and what had happened since meeting Logan. It struck her as being bizarre that she was in a seedy motel room with a semi-naked stranger in the bed next to her. She had only met him a few hours ago, and he had already saved her life and taken on the role of her protector, like some kind of guardian angel that had just appeared from the ether when needed. He was a big, powerful looking man who projected a quiet confidence that made her feel safe. As she finally fell asleep, she had the image of Logan as he’d walked out of the bathroom in her mind. He was muscular, and had a terrible scar on his right shoulder that she imagined – rightly – to have been made by a bullet.
“Time to go,” Logan said, gently rousing her with a nudge to her shoulder. He was dressed and had already been outside to check the vehicles parked in the lot. There were only four cars, and they had all been there when they’d arrived.
It took Rita a few seconds to remember where she was and who she was with. Her mouth was as dry as sand and she was too hot. The old air conditioner was making a lot of noise, but hardly lowering the temperature in the room.
“Go where?” she asked.
“For breakfast. I’m hungry, and I need some coffee” Logan said.
They stopped at a place a half mile nearer the city centre. It was the type of unpretentious diner that locals used. They sat at a window booth. Logan ordered bacon and eggs, double portions, and coffee. Rita asked for toast and OJ.
Logan said nothing till the waitress had brought a coffee pot over and he’d poured a cup and drank half of it. He thought it was good; strong and freshly brewed.
“How do you think I can get out of the mess I’m in?” Rita asked.
“By doing what I tell you,” Logan said. “When your daughter calls, tell her to wait for us wherever she is, and to turn her phone off. Then you turn your phone off. We’re going to have to trade plates on your Discovery and find somewhere safe for you both to stay while I go see the guy who wants you dead.”
“How can you know who it is?”
“A calculated guess. Don’t worry about it.”
They were driving through downtown when Sharon called. She had got off a Greyhound bus and made her way a couple of blocks to a little café next to the Metropolitan Theatre. Within five minutes Rita had parked up and was walking up to the café with Logan by her side. Sharon was sitting outside at a sidewalk table that had a blue and white sunshade poking out of its centre to fend off the sunlight.
Sharon and Rita caught sight of each other at the same time, and Rita ran the last few yards and embraced her daughter as she stood up. They hugged each other fiercely, and Logan hung back while they talked over each other and got a little teary-eyed. After a minute they broke apart and Rita introduced Logan to Sharon.
“So just who are you?” Sharon asked him.
“I’m the guy that your mother elected to play knight errant,” he replied, thinking that she looked just like Rita, but younger, and with maybe a slightly stronger chin and an inch in height on her mother.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Sharon said. “Why does someone want to kill us?”
Logan beckoned them sit, as he sat down facing the street. A teenage Asian waitress was with them in a second. “Coffee, please,” Logan said. “A pot.”
Rita ordered nothing, and Sharon already had a glass of fizzy soda.
“Your father was killed by someone who believed he had information that he shouldn’t have had,” Logan said to Sharon. “Or maybe information that he was going to use that would put someone in a lot of trouble. Whoever it is got to thinking that maybe your father had made a copy on a disk or memory stick, and that one of you had it. He’s thought it over and decided to clean house.”
Sharon thought about what he’d said. “I still don’t understand why you’re trying to help us. You don’t know us, Mr Logan.”
Logan said nothing as the waitress came back with coffee in a white ceramic pot and a large cup and saucer with some French-looking motif printed on all the crockery in the same shade of blue as the large parasol. When she left he poured a cup and gave Sharon a hard gaze.
“It’s just Logan,” he said. “And I don’t go out of my way to find trouble. It has a habit of finding me. Your mother told me about the warning, and then you called over what had happened to your friends. Let’s just say that I don’t like injustice, so I decided to do whatever it takes to end what some scumbag has begun.”
“How do we know that we can trust you?” Sharon came back.
“You don’t. If you want I can finish my coffee and just get up and walk away. It’s your call.”
“He saved my life, honey,” Rita said. “If he hadn’t been staying at the trailer park I’d be dead now.”
“I’m sorry,” Sharon said to Logan. “Thank you for what you did. I’m just scared. Maybe we should report what has happened to the police.”
Logan gave the girl a slow, humorless smile. “If neither one of you have what whoever wants you dead is after, what good are the police going to be to you? You need to be somewhere safe, out of harm’s way. Some place where no one knows where you are. And I mean no one.”
“Where do you have in mind?” Rita asked him.
“West Virginia is fine,” Logan said. “Plenty of forest and mountains. We’ll find somewhere off the beaten track, stay a few days, then find another place, and keep moving till it’s safe for you both to get on with your lives. But before we go anywhere, give me your cell phones.”
“You think someone can trace us through them?” Sharon said.
He shrugged. “Better safe than sorry. I’ll destroy these and we’ll pick up three pay-as-you-go phones.”
A couple of hours later they’d done some shopping for toiletries, the phones, and clothes. Logan told them to pay with cash and not to use their plastic: that in this age of technology, the best defense against it was to avoid using it in any form.
While the women went in one store, Logan found another nearby that sold cheap menswear. He bought a short sleeved tan shirt, dark chinos, boxer shorts, socks, and a thick wool jacket for what might be cold nights in high country. Went into a changing room and put them on. Bundled up everything he’d taken off and dumped it in a waste bin next to the counter, apart from the windcheater. He had transferred a roll of about eight hundred dollars, a drivers’ license and a major credit card, and secreted the license and credit card into the bottom of his left boot. Those, and a few toiletry items and now the cell, gun and wallet he had taken off Naylor were his worldly possessions. He zipped up his rucksack, and slung it over his shoulder. He was good to go.
Rita drove. Logan sat next to her and slid the seat back for legroom before studying a West Virginia road map. Sharon was in the rear seat. Logan told Rita to head south. He’d decided that somewhere in the Spruce Knob National Recreational Area was as good as anyplace to vanish. They made one stop in an alley on the way out of Morgantown. Logan exchanged the Discovery’s the plates with those of an old Buick that had two flat tyres and looked as if it had been parked for months.
It was late afternoon when they stopped at a strip mall near Elkins on highwa
y 219. They bought groceries at a 7-Eleven – the chain that boasted to be home of Big Gulp fountain soft drinks, Big Bite hot dogs, Slurpee drinks, and other convenient, healthy and fast food items – and put the bags in the cargo bay of the Discovery before deciding on a Ruby Tuesday’s to eat at. They ordered, and Logan spent some time just staring out of the window and thinking of anything he might have missed. He had.
“Go use the payphone in the lobby, Rita,” he said. “Call your uncle at the trailer park and tell him that if anyone braces him over you, he doesn’t know where you went. He can say that you and a guy from another trailer just took off. That we didn’t check out, just disappeared. He can alter my name to whatever, if he registered it.”
“Will he be safe?” Rita said.
“Yeah, if he acts dumb and they don’t know there’s a connection to you.”
After they’d eaten, Logan took over the driving and headed east. A mile past a one-horse town called Job he spotted a rustic sign screwed to the trunk of a tree that advertised Bear Country Cabins. He pulled onto the gravel road and followed it up through what may have at one time been a firebreak in the forest, to where it opened out into a clearing. Dotted among the trees were more than a dozen log cabins with the backdrop of a lake, and mountain peaks that looked almost purple in the haze beyond it.
Logan registered for three nights. Had to show his driver’s license. He parked at the side of cabin number 3 and went inside. Thought that he, Rita and Sharon probably looked like a family: husband, wife and daughter.
He felt safe, to a degree. What he didn’t know was that there was one thing Roy Naylor had not told him. When Roy had followed Rita up to the trailer park, he’d stopped at a rest area when she had pulled off the highway for coffee and planted a magnetized GPS tracker on the Discovery, up under the offside front wheel arch as far as he could reach.
CHAPTER FOUR
Roy regained consciousness in the darkness and assessed his injuries. He needed help and the sooner the better. His feet were pounding with pain, as was his right index finger and his jaw. He worked hard on the tape binding his wrists. It took him the best part of thirty minutes to work it loose enough to pull his left hand free. The guy had left the keys in the ignition, but he didn’t know if he could drive. He shuffled across into the driver’s seat, put his right foot gingerly on the accelerator and slowly applied some pressure. Cried out as what he imagined a bolt of lightning would feel like if it was shooting up his leg.
