Yes, he determined he could lie next to a woman, even one as beautiful as Sydney, without confusion. He lay across the head of the bed.
“We could, though,” Sydney said.
Logan lifted his head. “Could what?”
“If you thought it might help.”
Was she talking about sleeping together? It felt wrong for her to discuss sex so casually. She talked about it in an emotionless, clinical way. That’s how she was such a good agent, though. Everything, even her personal life, was a mission that needed to be assessed and executed. Observe, orient, decide, and act; that’s what she did.
He did think about it for a minute, though. His head, his heart, and the rest of his body all had separate desires. His head and his heart won.
Logan responded, “No. That’s sweet of you, but we probably should rest.”
“I understand,” she responded.
He lifted his head back up. “Can I get a rain check?”
Sydney laughed and patted his thigh. “Yeah, that works for me.” The tone of her voice gave away her feelings and they weren’t mechanical. She switched gears. “Okay, if we were being hunted, what would be the signs?”
Logan sighed. “When you’re hunting, you want to create a kill box and then funnel your prey into it. So, we would see random road closures, police checkpoints, closed restaurants, and gas stations with no gas. Anything that could keep us moving in the direction Crow wants.”
Sydney thought about it. “He tried to snipe me at the restaurant. After that, we’ve been moving pretty freely. Unless he’s playing on a whole different level than I can even comprehend, I’d say he’s not hunting us.”
“So, we’re in the clear?” Logan sought confirmation of his thoughts.
Sydney continued, “He’s not hunting us right now. He’ll have his ears open, though. We don’t know how many agents he’s flipped. We could do it. We could move to Alaska, change our names, avoid social media, and maybe stay safe. It would only take one slip-up though. One time we end up in the background of somebody’s Instagram post, and he’s found us.”
Logan thought about it. He thought about changing his name, going off the grid, and avoiding Titus Crow until they were in the clear. It was an option but only barely. Living like a scared animal for the rest of his life shut up in some hole just didn’t seem very appealing. It was barely a life, and it wasn’t one for a trained agent.
Logan asked, “Is that what you want?”
Sydney replied quickly, “No.”
“Okay, so then what’s the other option?”
Sydney replied without hesitation, “We hunt him. But he’s not prey. He’s a predator. You stalk prey, chase them down, and kill them. How do you hunt a predator?”
“You make it think you’re prey. Lure a bear out of its cave, and shoot it when it gets confident,” Logan responded.
“Exactly,” Sydney said. “We make him think we’re on the run, but we make just enough mistakes to keep him on our trail. We lead him to the kill box and end him.”
Logan said, “For Park Dae Lun.”
Sydney agreed. “And for Juliette Verlay.”
Logan sat up on the bed. “I say we kill him in a swamp. The humidity, the water, and the predators will take care of the body.”
Sydney nodded and smiled. “You ever been to Louisiana?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sydney and Logan had a plan to get revenge for being betrayed by Titus Crow. They were going to avenge Park Dae Lun and Juliette Verlay. The plan was fairly simple. Choose the place to kill Titus Crow, make it look like they were on the run but leave enough clues to get Titus to follow them, lead him to the spot, and kill him.
They chose the Atchafalaya Basin as the kill box. The swamps were teeming with alligators that would dispose of Titus’s body. Impassable parts of the swamp were virtually unexplored. They could move undetected in and out without attracting any attention.
At the moment though, they were still in the cheap motel room in northern Kentucky. They checked it for bugs and even improvised an electromagnetic pulse to destroy any electronics that they might have missed. They’d hunkered down for a full day without poking their heads up. Titus didn’t make a single move. There was no sight of him. He wasn’t the type to sit around waiting either. If he knew where they were, he would have tossed a smoke bomb in the window and shot them as they ran out. He liked straightforward tactics, such as shooting a sniper bullet into a restaurant.
But that not happening, they knew Titus didn’t follow them. The motel room was the only confirmed safe place in the world.
“I’m starving,” Sydney said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed watching TV. Logan was doing pushups on the floor next to her.
“Me too. Did you happen to grab any cash as we were crawling out of that restaurant under sniper fire?”
Sydney groaned. “No, I was a little more concerned about not getting a hole in the head.”
“So, thievery?”
“Thievery,” she agreed.
* * *
They ran a pretty simple operation. They found a Domino’s Pizza near their motel. Sydney distracted the teenager working the counter with a low-cut shirt and some playful giggles. Logan slipped in the back door and while a girl with her back to him took pizzas from the oven, he helped himself to two boxed pies waiting for the delivery driver. Sydney made some joke about forgetting her purse and said she’d be right back.
They went back to the motel, making sure to take random turns and U-turns. On the way back, Logan bit into a still-warm slice, of pepperoni. “This life is just as glamorous as Crow said it would be.”
“I like it. I grew up poor. We never got takeout food.” Sydney grinned.
They finished both pizzas while discussing the plan.
“Okay,” Sydney said, “It’s about 800 miles from here to Atchafalaya. We need to make enough mistakes that he can track but not too many so that it seems obvious. What’s our first mistake?”
Logan replied, “I think we’re making it right now. We’ve had the same motorcycles for 30 hours now. If they were reported stolen in West Virginia roughly 29 hours ago, we’re running short on time. 60% of stolen vehicles are recovered, and typically, within 72 hours. Two stolen motorcycles together are a pretty odd call. The first cop we pass will probably recognize the bikes.”
“Okay, so we have to immediately ditch the bikes. We steal something hard to identify like a silver Toyota or Honda or little pick-up, something there are a million of. Drive that through Kentucky. In Tennessee, we’ll change cars again.”
“Let’s get caught on a traffic camera before we change cars,” Logan suggested. “That will establish the direction we’re traveling. Can’t do the traffic camera thing again in Louisiana. I say we steal a credit card and swipe it in Picayune, MS. He’ll assume we’re headed to New Orleans and try to cut us off. Then he’ll really think he’s got us on the run. We high-tail it out of New Orleans, and he chases us right into the swamp. Boom. Headshot. Drop him in the murky water.”
Sydney asked, “Do you really think it’ll be that simple?”
Logan replied, “No chance.”
* * *
They needed to execute the first step of the plan. That meant leaving Beauregard, Kentucky but getting spotted by a police officer along the way. In Beauregard, there was a Domino’s Pizza, a local grocery store, two gas stations, a post office, and a public library. Their best bet was the grocery store. The parking lot wasn’t very big but it was typically pretty full.
Logan left the motel on foot. He walked the mile to the grocery store. Most of the cars in the parking lot were trucks. It was Kentucky, after all. Most of them were lifted with mud tires and 5,000-pound winches. They were too identifiable. Logan spotted a champagne-colored 2005 Honda Accord. Perfect.
He walked over to it and knelt like he was tying his shoe. He tried the door handle. It was unlocked. Small towns were supposed to be the safest places in the world. He hopped in the
driver’s seat and popped the panel off the steering wheel. He yanked the ignition switch out, clicked it over to “ignition” and put it back in. He popped the panel back on and closed the door. Now, they just needed to hope whoever owned the car didn’t plan to drive away in the next ten minutes.
The motorcycles sat untouched in the garage side lot. He rode the Harley back to the motel and got Sydney. “We’re good. Let’s roll.”
They drove through a four-way intersection, the big bike’s engine roaring as they passed one of the only police officers in Beauregard. The cop was either too lazy or sleepy to pursue them.
They turned the corner and pulled into the grocery store parking lot. They jogged to the Honda Accord. Sydney got in the passenger seat. Logan got in the driver seat. He popped the panel off the steering column. He clicked the ignition switch, and the car came to life. Soon, Beauregard, Kentucky was in the rearview.
The miles from Beauregard were pretty unremarkable. They stayed on the interstate and kept the cruise control set at 70 miles per hour. Rookies often stuck to back roads and tried to stay anonymous. Sydney and Logan were trained by the best, though. Back roads weaved through small towns with small-town sheriffs who sat beside the road waiting to pull over unfamiliar cars and generate some revenue for their town. You could drive hundreds of miles across a state on the interstate without seeing a single state trooper. Interstate driving and being out in the open was the only way to travel.
After a couple of hours, they approached the Kentucky-Tennessee border. They would enter Tennessee on Interstate 65. They started looking for a place to stop. Logan was still driving. Just before entering Tennessee, they swapped the gold Honda for a white Camry. They would drive straight through to Louisiana.
Having driven a stolen car across state lines, they needed to get caught on some security camera or traffic camera footage. Crossing state lines in a stolen vehicle was a federal crime. If Titus was feeling oddly law-abiding, he could use that as justification to move Agency resources to find them. Truth be told, he would probably just engage in another rogue operation.
Logan pulled off the interstate on an exit with only one sign. The sign said “Venus and an arrow.
Sydney frowned. “Venus, Tennessee?”
“You ever heard of it?” Logan asked.
Sydney replied, “No. Should I?”
“Nope and neither should Crow. We fill up the car here and don’t stop until we get to Louisiana. We’ll run a red light somewhere close to Nashville.”
The interstate exit dead-ended. Logan craned his neck to the left and saw nothing. He turned his head to the right and saw a large American flag flying on a 40-foot high flagpole. That looked somewhat promising. Somebody ran that flag up the pole.
He turned the car down the skinny road. Trees, mostly pines and poplars, grew tall and wild on the side of the road. Grass grew unkempt between them. They were definitely headed into the country now. They drove past the flagpole. It was in front of a double-wide trailer that had been converted into a house by adding a tar paper extended roof. A 1970s black Pontiac Trans Am sat under a tarp in the side yard. A riding lawn mower was rapidly being reclaimed by the grass, probably lying dead where it had fallen.
The road ran straight and pocked with potholes. Logan weaved the car around them until they reached an opening. The road widened slightly and smoothed out. It was easy to see where the county’s money ran out. A small gas station sat on the side of the road. There was one rusty pump and what looked like a garden shed.
“No security cameras here,” Logan said.
Sydney replied, “Yeah, so no one will see us get kidnapped. You ever seen Deliverance?”
Logan chuckled as he pulled up to the pump. He scanned the area. He remembered the situational awareness they were taught intended to identify threats and anticipate actions. Then, there was just plain old common sense.
He left the keys in the ignition. “You stay with the car. I’ll get snacks.”
You didn’t send a woman by herself into a shack in the middle of nowhere.
Sydney started pumping the gas.
Logan turned around and added, “If something goes sideways, get in the car and punch it for Mexico.”
“Leave you here?” She asked.
Logan smiled. “A country boy can survive.”
Sydney rolled her eyes.
He stepped into the shed. His initial assessment was correct. It was a shed. It was the kind you could buy at Home Depot for storing lawnmowers and gardening supplies. A man sat in a folding lawn chair reading an old copy of Field and Stream and spitting tobacco spit into a Styrofoam cup.
He looked up from his magazine at Logan but didn’t seem to acknowledge him otherwise. The shed was stocked with chips, beef jerky, and other gas station snacks setting on a rickety shelf made from an old fence board. There were no prices on anything.
Logan grabbed armfuls of each.
“Uh, how much is all of this?” He asked.
The man spit into his cup. “Let’s call it twenty. Fair?”
“Uh, sure.”
Logan took twenty dollars out of his pocket they found in a purse in the Camry and handed it to the guy.
Sydney was just finishing pumping gas when he got back to the car.
“How’d it go?” Sydney asked.
Logan tossed the snacks in the car and shrugged. “It was weird. It seemed like…”
Sydney yelled, “Get down!”
Logan dropped with no idea why. He flopped onto his belly and crawled towards the car. A shotgun blast shattered the window. Logan rolled behind the pump. Whoever was shooting wouldn’t want to shoot the gas pump.
Sydney dropped behind the car and pulled her guns out of the shoulder holster. She popped up, bracing her arm against the hood of the car. It was the gas station clerk. He was striding towards them with a short-barreled shotgun. It was a side by side double barrel with a pistol grip instead of a buttstock, cut so short it was barely longer than a pistol.
Sydney thought to herself, short-barreled shotguns are class 3 firearms. The South has some very loose laws. It was an odd thing to pop into her mind while she was being shot at, but she’d been in more shootouts than she could count at this point. They were becoming pretty routine.
She aimed at the gas station clerk but he swung the shotgun in her direction as she did. She shrank back behind the car. Pellets peppered the hood.
Logan sat up with his back against the pump. “Hey, before we kill you, could you maybe tell me what’s going on?”
The clerk spat tobacco on the pavement. He popped the two spent shells out and reloaded with two new ones in one fluid motion that took maybe three seconds.
“Man named Titus Crow put out the word to be looking for y’all. Put a million dollars on each of ya.”
He pulled the trigger again. This sounded like both barrels based on the deep thunderous boom. Metal crunched. Logan couldn’t tell what he’d hit until he noticed the gas spewing out of the hose connected to the gas pump.
He was shooting his own gas pump. For two million dollars, he could buy this whole gas station and have one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred dollars left over.
“You’re, uh, an agent?” Logan asked.
The man reloaded his shotgun. He was walking around to the side of the pump.
“An agent?” He laughed. “Hell no. I sell hillbilly-heroin. Crow put a hit on y’all with every oxy dealer in Menelaus’s cartel.”
Oh. Well, that made sense.
He shot at the pump again. This time the pellets screaming through metal through sparks in every direction. One of the sparks caught. The pump made a sound like air rushing into a vacuum and was instantly engulfed in flames.
Logan shot to his feet and scrambled for the car. The wall of flame and waxy black smoke blocked the man’s view. Sydney rolled into the driver’s seat. Logan dove into the shattered passenger side window. Sydney spun the tires as she drove away. Two more shotgun blasts
hit the car before they disappeared around the corner.
Logan wiggled into the seat.
“You were supposed to drive away,” he said.
Sydney shrugged. “We had a rain check, remember? I can’t collect if you’re dead.”
Logan laughed. “We need a new car now. Can’t drive around with bullet holes. Attracts too much attention.”
* * *
They siphoned gas from the Honda into the Pontiac Trans Am and were back on the road within five minutes.
The V-8 engine growled as it devoured the interstate.
Sydney said, “A 1977 Trans Am isn’t exactly inconspicuous. You know this is a bad idea, right?”
Logan replied, “If everybody in Menelaus’s cartel has our picture, so do the cops. We’re probably going to die, Sydney. And If I’m going to die, it’s going to be in the car from Smokey and the Bandit.”
She patted his thigh. “That’s fair.”
The speedometer didn’t work on the Trans Am. Neither did the odometer or the fuel gauge. The engine roared like a grizzly bear, though. Logan felt bad about stealing it. He memorized how to get to the house where he’d stolen it. If he survived this run-in with Titus Crow, he would be sure to return it. Chances are, he would probably die in the attempt.
They churned through the miles. Soon, they were in Memphis and staring at the Mississippi River. They sped past a few state troopers along the way, so whoever they stole the car from didn’t report it stolen yet. In Memphis, Logan sped through a red light at an empty intersection. The camera on the red light snapped a photo as they raced through. He turned and headed for the Mississippi River.
Logan had only crossed the Mississippi River by car a few times. Every time he did, he felt something like reverence. The powerful artery of the United States flowed brown underneath the bridge. A barge carrying shipping containers bobbed along the water. The river started as a trickle in Minnesota and became a thundering beast by Tennessee. It was the lifeblood of America. Sydney felt it too and they both fell silent as he drove across the powerful river.
When they reached the other side, Sydney said “One state to go.”
Clean Cut Kid (A Logan Connor Thriller Book 1) Page 14
