Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4)

by Michael Kerr

  “That’s Scout,” Murray said. “Now that he’s got your scent he could give you a day’s start and run you down in the next county. You look like a drowned rat. How’d you like a cup of the best coffee you’ve ever tasted?”

  Logan was about to say ‘No thanks, I’m good’ but stopped and said, “Yeah that would hit the spot,” as he hunkered down and scratched Scout behind one of his long, floppy ears.

  Murray went in the office and was back out with a tin mug full of steaming java before his chair stopped rocking.

  Logan took the cup and sipped the brew. It wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but it was damn close. He nodded his appreciation.

  “So what’s your name?” Murray asked.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Logan answered. “Sometimes ignorance really can be bliss.”

  “So you and your friends are running from something, am I right?”

  “Or to something, Murray,” Logan said.

  Murray smiled, and Logan finished his coffee, thanked the old man and walked along the front of the motel to number eight, knocked and said, “It’s me.”

  Benny opened the door with a look of relief on his face. “Everything okay?” he said.

  “It will be,” Logan replied as he entered the room.

  But he was wrong.

  Paulie had taken cover behind a thick screen of rhododendron bushes on the other side of Wild Avenue from The Blue Heron. He watched Logan talking to some old fart outside the office. Stayed put while his quarry drank coffee, and saw him walk to a room, knock at the door and go inside. He made his way back to the main road and settled his tab with the cabby, after making a call to lieutenant Reynolds and giving him Logan’s present location.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dusty Quaid drove through the open chain link gates into the large yard of what they just called the ‘Warehouse’. It was situated on the waterfront in a part of Red Hook that had still not benefited from redevelopment. It afforded privacy, though was only a two minute drive from the Gowanus Expressway.

  Up until the sixties the building had been the Fairchild Tobacco Company, but was now just a relic with black mold overspreading the cracked and damp concrete walls of what was an unsafe and condemned building. The value of the warehouse lay in the large area of land it stood on. It was one of many properties bought through shell corporations owned by Patrick Fallon. Once he became the mayor he would ensure that the land he owned would sell for a fortune, due to arranging appropriation funding that would pump new life into rundown districts.

  Nick had discharged himself from the hospital, taken the subway home, and walked straight into two of Quaid’s goons. He was told to get in the rear of the car, and told to shut the fuck up when he asked what it was all about.

  Dusty parked next to a loading bay at the rear of the building and climbed the steps up to where Johnny Burke and Sy Carmody were standing at the side of a partly open steel door. With the door locked behind them, the three of them walked the length of a four storey-high room that at one time would have been stacked with bails of tobacco on palettes. The scent of it had been absorbed by the walls and ceiling and floor for over a century, and could still be smelled as the odor leached back out, driven by the pervading dampness that was undermining the butter soft mortar of the crumbling brickwork.

  Nick was tightly bound with nylon rope to a beech wood side chair with a spindle back that stood in what had once upon a time been the manager’s office. There was no other furniture, but a large piece of plastic sheeting covered the floor. The only light was that which filtered through a window set high in the back wall, with just a few sharp fangs of grimy glass projecting from the rotting frame.

  Nick was naked, shivering, feeling nauseous from the head injury that Logan had inflicted, and knew that he was at very least going to be hurt badly.

  “You’re a sad excuse for a human being,” Dusty said. “All you were being paid to do was follow a guy for us, and you fucked up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said. “The woman came in the hospital alone. I never saw Logan.”

  “So what happened?” Dusty said, nodding to Johnny, who left the room.

  “I was waitin’ for her to come out of the ICU, but needed to take a piss. I went in a disabled bathroom, and Logan just barged in behind me and nearly choked me to death. He took my cell and wallet, then smashed my head on a rail and knocked me out.”

  “You missed out the part where he questioned you, Nick. What did he ask you?”

  “Who’d put me up to it. I said that a guy I do some legwork for gave me a call, met me with a photo and told me to follow the broad.”

  “What guy?”

  “I made a name up; Roy Morgan. I said that he was a PI.”

  Dusty shook his head slowly from side to side and said, “Nice try Nick, but no kewpie doll.”

  Johnny came back. He’d been out to the car and now held a black plastic case in his right hand, which he set down flat on the floor next to Nick, unlatched it and opened the lid to reveal a Black & Decker 20 volt cordless drill and an array of gleaming titanium bits.

  “Maybe you’re telling the truth, Nick,” Dusty said. “But I doubt it. You haven’t got the balls to lie to someone like Logan. He took your cell, and then you gave him what he wanted to know. Am I right?”

  Nick started sobbing.

  Johnny knelt down and took the drill from the case and ran the fingers of his free hand over the bits, to select one that was intended to be used on wood, not flesh and bone. He pushed the shank of the bit into the chuck of the drill, tightened it up and was ready to start.

  Nick started gibbering and rocking; attempting to somehow free himself from constraint. Sy moved in from behind and held Nick by the shoulders, as Johnny gave the trigger of the drill a couple of three second bursts and adjusted the setting to high speed.

  “No, God, no, please!” Nick begged. He began to leak from both ends, as tears ran down his face and his bladder voided and a jet of urine erupted from his flaccid penis to hit the front edge of the chair and spatter onto the plastic with a sound like rain on an umbrella.

  “So what did you tell Logan?” Dusty said.

  “Your name,” Nick wailed. “That’s all I could tell him, and that you had arranged that I follow the woman and report where she was.”

  “He knows who I am,” Dusty said, “So you told him nothing. The problem is you were willing to sell me out. You should have kept your mouth shut. Johnny is now going to stick that drill in your ear and see what shit for brains runs out of it.”

  Nick began to make a whooping sound, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. Dusty thought he looked like someone having a convulsion, but knew that fear came in ascending levels. It is an acute stress reaction arising in response to a terrifying or traumatic event. And Nick wasn’t just scared; he was totally overcome by a mind-numbing dread of an impending and horrific death that was uncontrollable and unavoidable.

  Sy began to chuckle and moved his hands up from Nick’s shoulders to grip his head and hold it steady.

  The sharp cutting edge of the bit began to rotate, and the noise of the motor could have been the amplified sound of a fly or wasp buzzing in its death throes after being sprayed with Raid.

  The bit revolved at such a speed that it was a blur as Johnny touched the tip of it to the inner rim of Nick’s ear. And even the tight grip that Sy had of Nick’s head did not stop him jerking away from it. Dusty nodded at Johnny, and he stepped back and released the trigger and the chuck of the drill whirred to a stop.

  “You just got a reprieve, Nick,” Dusty said. “You still work for us, and I hope that my leniency on this occasion will not be wasted on you. If you ever fuck-up again and then lie to me, Johnny will drill both your eyes out. Understand?”

  Nick nodded vigorously.

  “That’s good to know,” Dusty said as Sy cut Nick free. “Get dressed and we’ll take you back to town.”

  Dusty knew from past experie
nce that to incite bowel-loosening fear was the way to go. When he’d been in the SEALs and they’d captured fanatical sand niggers or rag heads ‒ that he knew were hell-bent on being martyrs ‒ the subtle application of grievous torture combined with an unbearable dread of being left blind or badly maimed, but alive, worked to good effect. A man may be happy to die for his warped beliefs, but is not so keen to be alive, blinded or with both hands removed, or paralyzed from the neck down. Water boarding and other forms of primitive torture paled in comparison to what Dusty and his like-minded colleagues were prepared to do to elicit information that would save fellow Americans’ lives. He had seen the results of what the enemy was capable of doing to captured soldiers, and so had modified his perception of right and wrong. Pouring gasoline over a man and flipping a lit match on him, once he had given up information, was fair payback to Dusty’s way of thinking, and fuck the Geneva or any other convention. You needed to play by the other guys’ rules if you wanted to come out on top.

  As they drove towards the city, Dusty got a phone call that brightened his day even more.

  Paulie was nervous. Reynolds had told him to stay where he was in case Logan decided to make a run for it.

  “Stay where?” Paulie had said. “This isn’t a busy area. I’m in the boonies. Apart from the motel he’s holed-up in there’s nowhere close by to keep an eye on the place. I can’t just hang about like some perv jackin’ off in the bushes next to a kids’ playground.”

  “I’ll hold on to the picture that you just put in my mind, Paulie. Logan obviously hasn’t made you, or he wouldn’t have gone back there, so check in and let me know what he does.”

  “There’s a Ford Taurus outside the room he went into. If he decides to take off in it I can’t follow him.”

  “Whoever owns the motel will have wheels. If it comes to it, show him ID and borrow it. The priority is not to lose him. Get back to me with the plate number when you’ve got a room. There are people on the way to you.”

  Paulie was one hundred percent positive that Logan hadn’t made him, so why did he feel as nervous as a virgin on her wedding night as he walked across the road to the forecourt and up to the old guy sitting outside the office.

  “Help you?” Murray said to the swarthy-looking man who he thought looked shifty and very tense.

  “I need a room for the night,” Paulie said. “My car broke down, so I’m stuck while it gets fixed.”

  Murray could spot a lie quicker than a frog could flick its tongue out and take an insect off a lily pad. And he thought that the guy might be a cop; he had that kind of manner about him.

  “Best come in and register, then,” Murray said as he got up and made his way into the office, limping slightly as the pain of bones grinding together against a badly worn cartilage in his left knee slowed him down.

  Paulie reluctantly showed the old man his driver’s license, paid for the room up front in cash and was given a key to number five. He hoped that Reynolds would get someone out to the motel soon. He didn’t like the responsibility of going it alone.

  After checking the coffee maker and deciding it had not been used by previous dubious guests to cook up meth in, Paulie made himself a brew. He kept one eye on the window. If the Taurus left the lot he would see it go by. And if Logan decided to wander off on foot, he would pass his room.

  Pulling the only chair in the room over to the side of the window, Paulie sipped at his coffee and kept watch. The angle was too acute for him to make out the plate on the car, and so he decided to take his coffee outside.

  Ambling across the lot as if he was just familiarizing himself with his immediate surroundings, Paulie put the paper cup on the lid of a dumpster and lit a cigarette.

  Murray was too long in the tooth to accept anything or anyone at face value. He watched as the man glanced at the door of room eight and also took an interest in the car parked outside it, as if he was clocking the plate.

  After giving it some thought, Murray waited until the guy went back inside his room, and then once more limped into the office and phoned room eight.

  When the phone rang, Logan and the others just stared at it as if it was a rattlesnake making the noise. No one knew where they were, so Logan decided that it was an internal call from the office, picked up and said, “Yeah?”

  “It’s Murray. There’s a guy just checked in. I put him in room five, and he’s been out front taking a good look at your car. I reckon that you’re a person of interest to him. He’s packing a gun, and I’d put a ten spot on him being either a cop or a hitman.”

  “Thanks,” Logan said. “I’ll deal with it.”

  “Give me a coupla minutes to lock up and leave,” Murray said. “I don’t want to end up being a witness to what I have no intention of being a party to.”

  Five minutes later Murray drove away from the motel in his Jeep with Scout sitting up in the front passenger seat. There was a pond a half mile away that was nestled off a potholed track and hidden by a briar patch which screened it from casual observers passing by. It was a stretch of water fed by a small stream that passed through it, and was well-stocked with fish.

  Murray had been casting his line in Johnson’s Pond at least once a week for well over forty years. Back in the mid-seventies he’d taken up angling to have some time alone; a little space. His late wife, Marion, had always been glad to have him out from under her feet for a day. With hindsight they should have spent every minute that they could together, because nothing lasts forever. And what would she think now, if she could look down and see what had become of him? He needed to clean up his act in more ways than one, but age exacted a heavy toll, and chores that used to be done without a second thought had now become a challenge that he wasn’t up to meeting. He had lost the stamina to get things done, and put a lot off and determined to do it tomorrow: and the tomorrows just kept coming and going, to join all the others that had been and gone. He wanted to shave off his straggly white beard, have a hot shower, and maybe go to Target and buy some new clothes, and spend some of the money he had tucked away on having a local builder do some work on the motel. Trouble was, being eighty, a lot of hopes, dreams and schemes were now behind him, and all that he seemed to have left was a few regrets over things he’d done, and more over things that he hadn’t. It struck him that he was just marking time now in old age. The highlights in his life had come down to going fishing, and touching up the maid when she stripped off and earned a few extra bucks by getting jaw ache as she attempted to suck a little life into his soft prick and make him pop. Shit! If Marion was able to look down from heaven and see him, she would be disgusted and think that he was a sad old bastard. And she’d be right on the money, because he was.

  Sitting on a fold up canvas chair, Murray cast his line and hoped that the big ol’ flathead that had slipped the hook a dozen times over the years would be tempted to reward him with a bite. It was the best part of five feet long, and he knew that it was getting on for twenty years old. It was like him, past its sell by date, but still more wily than most of the younger and fitter fish in the pond.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Logan waited until Murray drove off. His plan was simple, as most that turn out to be successful usually are. He left the room, walked up to the door of number five, carrying an ice bucket, and knocked.

  Paulie saw Logan stroll into view carrying an ice bucket, and thought that he was going to the antiquated machine outside the office. But there was a knock at the door of his room. He had a choice, open it or ignore it. The bucket decided him. No one came to your door in broad daylight holding something like that if they had bad intentions. He would speak to the guy and bluff it out. He unlocked the door and was about to smile and say hi, but didn’t get chance to.

  Using both hands, Logan brought the small but rigid metal ice bucket up under Paulie’s chin with enough measured force to knock him on his ass and daze him as the back of his head crashed onto the thin, stained and almost threadbare carpet that covered the floo
r. By the time Paulie had even begun to realize what had happened he had been relieved of the Glock pistol in his shoulder rig.

  Logan used the heel of his timberland boot to kick the door closed behind him, and then aimed the gun at Paulie’s head and told him to stay exactly where he was.

  “I’m a cop,” Paulie said. “Put the gun down.”

  “Show me some ID,” Logan said. “Nice and slow, and with your left hand.”

  Paulie took his wallet out and flipped it open to disclose the detective shield fixed to the leather flap.

  “Paul Neilson, a third grade detective with a lot to learn,” Logan said, studying it. “Throw it on the bed, and then do the same with your cell phone.”

  Paulie wasn’t going to let the guy get away with assaulting and disarming him. He was at least fifteen or maybe even twenty years younger than Logan, and although he didn’t look it, he worked out, was fit and could handle himself.

  Tossing the wallet on the bed, Paulie then took out his cell and threw it up a little higher into the air and off course, so that it would just miss the bed and fall to the floor. And as Logan was momentarily distracted and watched it spin through the air, Paulie kicked his leg out ramrod straight and his leather shoe sole connected with Logan’s shin, hard enough to bring him down onto one knee.

  Logan grunted, more out of surprise than from pain. He brought the Glock back on target, but Paulie was fast and came up into a sitting position with alarming speed, grasped Logan’s gun hand and whipped it sideways to smash his wrist full force against the corner of the wood unit that the TV stood on.

  As the gun fell from his hand, Logan snapped his head forward, butted Paulie in the nose and used his left fist to hit the cop in the side, below the ribs and well back; a kidney punch that paralyzed Paulie in place.