Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4)

by Michael Kerr

  Paulie fell back, consumed with the excruciating pain from both his damaged nose and badly bruised kidney. Logan picked up the gun, ejected the mag and lifted the corner of the bed sheet to wipe his prints off the weapon.

  “You’ve really stepped over the line, Logan,” Paulie said with a nasal twang, due to the flow of blood from both nostrils. “You’ll go down for this.”

  “Words,” Logan said, rubbing his shin as he climbed to his feet. “All that counts is here and now in this room, Neilson. This is where it could all end for you if you try any more stupid moves.”

  “You were a cop, Logan, you wouldn’t kill me,” Paulie said with no conviction.

  “You’re right; I was a cop, past tense. Now I’m just a guy that a few scumbags want to whack. You’re probably one of them.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about. I was just told to follow you and let my boss know where you’re staying.”

  “Why would Reynolds want Ellery and you to do that?”

  “I don’t know. He gives orders, not explanations.”

  “So you called him and told him that I was here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “To keep you in sight and to follow you if you left. He said there were people on the way.”

  “Not backup or other officers?”

  “Er, no, he said people.”

  “Didn’t that sound an odd word for him to use?”

  “What are you sayin’, Logan?”

  “That Reynolds is in the pocket of a sleazebag by the name of Patrick Fallon. The people that turn up here will be his men, not cops. They want any copies I’ve got of a flash drive that Arnie Newman had. I gave one to Reynolds. And whether they get it or not, they’ll do their best to kill me, the people that I’m with, and you.”

  “You expect me to believe you?”

  “Yes. I think that you have the brains to stand outside the box and see that this is a set up. If I was wanted for any crime, then this place would be surrounded by local police units by now. Reynolds wants to keep my present location between you and him, until a couple of vehicles with armed goons’ turns up to do Fallon’s bidding.”

  Paulie said nothing, just slowly got to his feet, groaning with pain at the effort. He walked into the bathroom to rinse his face, pat it dry with a limp, damp towel and then plug his nostrils with twisted up pieces of toilet tissue. What Logan had said made sense. He had been given no information as to why he and Dave had been told to follow him. And he had heard rumors about Reynolds being too well-heeled for a lieutenant’s pay scale. He also knew Logan’s reputation. A lot of the older detectives had nothing but praise for him; said that he solved more homicides than the rest of them put together, that he was the partner everyone wanted to work with. The only criticism was that he could be a little like the cop Mel Gibson had played in the Lethal Weapon movies. His methods were sometimes right out there on the edge, pushing the envelope as far as it would go, if that was what it took to get the job done.

  “Great,” Paulie said, sitting down on the end of the bed. “If you’re on the level, Reynolds has set me up to go down.”

  “Like it or not you’re expendable,” Logan said. “When they arrive we’ll be gone, and you’ll be trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. What do you reckon the odds are against you leaving this room in a body bag?”

  “If they’re as organized as you think, then you’re goin’ to need all the help you can get.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you can tell me the whole story while we get the hell away from here.”

  “You think I’d trust you?”

  “That’s your call, Logan. You’ve convinced me that I was in danger of bein’ taken out of the picture just to cover up what was planned for you. Reynolds wouldn’t want me to be a witness to what he’d set up.”

  Logan gave Paulie a long, hard look and saw the truth in his eyes. He had always believed that he was a better than average judge of character, and was as sure as he could be that the detective was on the level.

  “So let’s go,” Logan said, picking the Glock and mag up off the bed, reuniting them and sticking the pistol in the waistband of his pants. “But for now I’ll keep your weapon and phone, just in case you have second thoughts. You can keep your wallet.”

  They went along the walkway to number eight, and Logan introduced Paulie to Margie, Della and Benny. They were understandably suspicious of his motives, but satisfied that if Logan trusted the cop, then ‒ to a degree ‒ they could.

  “Grab everything and let’s go,” Logan said. “Paul says that company is on the way.”

  “Make that Paulie. I’ve never been called Paul.”

  “Is your nose broken, Paulie?” Margie asked.

  He put his hand up to it and very gently pressed it first one way and then the other. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll live.”

  Della, Margie and Benny climbed in the rear of the Taurus and Paulie and Logan in the front. Logan had nominated Paulie to drive.

  “We need to change cars,” Paulie said. “Reynolds has the plate number. When they find out we’ve flown the coop he’ll put a BOLO on this.”

  “What’s a BOLO?” Della asked.

  “Be on lookout,” Logan said. “We could change plates, but Paulie will have given the make, model and color to Reynolds.”

  Paulie nodded.

  “Who’s Reynolds?” Benny asked.

  “A lieutenant that oversees the detective squad I’m part of,” Paulie said. “Logan thinks that he may be on the take from the people that had Arnie shot. So I guess that means that it’ll be bad company that turns up. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I was supposed to get whacked when you all did. They’d probably make it look like a shoot out that none of us survived.”

  “So where do we go now?” Della said.

  “We get the hell off the island,” Logan said. “Drive down to the Outerbridge Crossing, Paulie. When they find us gone they’ll think we headed north, not east into New Jersey.”

  They crossed the bridge twenty minutes later and stopped soon after in an alley at the rear of a printing works in Perth Amboy. It was late afternoon and the light was fading fast as Logan got out of the Taurus and exchanged plates with a Kia as the others kept watch. Their next stop was sixty miles farther north, where they parked in the lot of a diner and had dinner and used the rest rooms.

  Huddled round a table, Logan spelled out what he planned to do. “Once we have a new set of wheels we’ll find another motel to stay at, and then I’ll go and deal with Quaid and Dalton.”

  “Not without me,” Paulie said. “You need someone at your back, and I have a vested interest in clearin’ this up. My career and my goddamn life are on the line.”

  “Okay,” Logan said. “But we do it my way.”

  “What about me?” Benny said.

  “You can drive the car. Margie and Della will be somewhere safe,” Logan said. “I’ll leave them a gun, and we’ll keep in touch.”

  Benny was relieved. Driving was fine, but he didn’t want to go up against the guys that Jack Trask worked for. Trask was a violent, murdering bastard, but rumor had it that Quaid made him look like a kindergarten teacher by comparison.

  They left the diner and Paulie drove for a few blocks and found a twenty-four hour parking garage in a neighborhood that you wouldn’t relish walking through alone at any time of day or night, unless you were packing an AK-47. He took the ramp up to the second floor and checked out the dim interior as he drove at walking pace between the two rows of vehicles.

  “That one,” Benny said, pointing to an old Malibu station wagon. “They’re easy to hotwire.”

  Paulie parked in a slot next to the Malibu. The only security camera that he could see was wall-mounted above a staircase at least a hundred feet away, and the concrete support pillars would hide what they were about to do from view, if it was even working, which he doubted.

  �
�You got any tools in the trunk?” Benny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Della said. “There’s a spare tire, so there should be a jack and a lug wrench.”

  Benny stepped out of the Taurus and went to the rear to open the trunk. He found a canvas bag with a jack, lug wrench and a screwdriver inside. The wrench was an L-shaped metal rod with a prying tip on the long end for removing hub caps. Using the prying end of the wrench he loosened a strip of door molding trim, twisted it back and forth and snapped off a two-foot long piece, then used the flat edge of the rod as a wedge to force a gap in the top of the driver’s door, allowing him to insert the trim and hook the door stud up with the jagged end. Once inside the car, he quickly removed the casing beneath the steering wheel to allow him access to the wiring. Seconds later the engine was purring like a kitten.

  “That was slick and quick,” Paulie said to Benny as the four of them climbed into the wagon. Logan was last in, after collecting his rucksack form the Ford, checking to make sure nothing had been left in the car, and removing the plate.

  “Head north,” Logan said to Paulie. “Let’s find somewhere to stay the night, before you and I go back to the Big City and make this a safer world for Margie, Della and Benny to live in.”

  Benny chuckled. “You sound like Batman,” he said to Logan.

  “Well I ain’t Robin,” Paulie said.

  “You make a dynamic duo, though,” Della quipped.

  “Yeah, you should have costumes,” Margie added.

  The banter went a long way to relieving the tension that they had all felt.

  “Let’s stop at a store and pick up some finger food and booze,” Della said. “I need a little normality this evening to dispel this crazy nightmare we’re caught up in.”

  “And I need some extra-strength Tylenol,” Paulie said. “The caped crusader nearly broke my nose.”

  They were safe, below the radar of those that were searching for them, but that could not be said for Murray Baylis at The Blue Heron. He was in the little bungalow at the back of the motel ‒ frying fillets of a small catfish that he had hooked ‒ when unbeknown to him a panther-black Ford Galaxy with tinted windows parked out front of the office.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dusty Quaid and three other men stepped out of the seven-seater vehicle. The office door had a sign hanging on the inside of the glass with the message Gone Fishing written in Magic marker.

  “Search the place,” Dusty said to Mickey Chan, Jake Demski and Henry Parker. “There should be a cop here to meet us, and a Ford Taurus in the lot. I don’t see either.”

  Jake and Henry knocked at the doors of the only two rooms that had cars parked outside them. No luck.

  Mickey tried the office door and found it to be locked, so walked down the cement pathway at the side and saw the chalet bungalow at the rear, which looked to be in far better shape than the motel was. The clapboard siding was painted white, and the cedar shingle roof looked weatherproof. There was the sound of music coming from inside the house: the shit-kicking country variety that Mickey thought belonged in Nashville and out west. Some broad with a loud voice was singing Jolene, Jolene…

  He walked up the two plank steps onto the porch and twisted the ball-shaped brass handle. The door opened and he drew his silenced 9-millimeter pistol and stepped inside.

  The spitting fat in the skillet, the sound of Dolly Parton on the radio, and the fact that Murray’s hearing was failing with the passing years prevented him from hearing the squeak of hinges in need of a drop of oil, but Scout heard the door open and trotted out into the hallway to see who was visiting. He stopped and looked up at the stocky human holding something that did not smell of food. He just looked up at Mickey with doleful eyes and stored the scent of sweat and cologne in a part of his brain that identified everything by its individuality.

  Mickey almost shot the dog in the head, but could see that it was old and of no threat to him. And he liked dogs. They were loyal to their keepers.

  Scout turned tail and headed back to the kitchen, unmindful that he was being followed, as the familiar smell of tasty catfish filled his nasal passages.

  “Hey old-timer,” Mickey said as he took his cell out and called Dusty. “Back away from that stove and sit on a chair.”

  Murray jumped in surprise, spun round to face whoever had trespassed into his home and said: “Who in God’s name are you?”

  Mickey ignored him as Dusty accepted the call. “I’m round the back in the house of an old fart who I think is the motel owner,” he said. “Judging by the smell of the fish he’s cooking it was him that left the sign in the window.”

  “What the hell do you want?” Murray said, still standing, now with his grizzled chin stuck out in defiance, and holding an old stainless steel spatula in his hand that he had been turning the fish with.

  “I said sit the fuck down,” Mickey said, redirecting the pistol and leveling it at Scout’s head. “And drop that turner.”

  Sometimes it’s difficult to gauge what another person’s reactions will be to any given situation. Mickey could not imagine someone of advanced years like Murray doing anything other than what he was told to. But Murray had not always been old, and he had been a GI way back in the final year of the Korean War, and had never been the kind of man to back down when threatened. Back in ninety-eight ‒ when he had been in his mid-sixties ‒ two young guys had walked into the motel office with the intention to rob him. One of them had held a knife, but ended up being thrown through the window. The other had backed up, ready to run, but Murray had picked up the portable TV off the desk and thrown it at him, knocking him to the floor, where a subsequent kick to the head put his lights out.

  Murray didn’t think, just acted in response. He tossed the spatula to his right, for it to clatter onto the tiled floor, and simultaneously picked up the skillet that bubbled with cooking oil and threw it at the armed man’s face.

  Mickey pulled the trigger as the thick rim of the heavy pan hit his forehead and split it open. Reeling backwards, he dropped the gun and put both hands to his face. The oil was frying his skin. He could not see as his eyes were seared, blisters formed domes on his cheeks, and a curtain of blood masked his now lobster-red face.

  Scout’s claws scrabbled on the tiles as he turned and found purchase, to hightail it out into the hallway at a speed he had not seemed capable of for several years, to crash headlong into Henry Parker as he walked in the open doorway ahead of Dusty and Jake.

  For a dog with the gentlest nature imaginable; one that had never drawn its lips back in a full snarl, Scout, sensing danger and fearful for his owner, let a deep-seated canine instinct surface, and attacked the man. He did not bark or even growl, just found a wrist, bit down hard and shook it, ripping through skin and muscle as his teeth sawed back and forth until they met bone and locked in place.

  Henry screamed like a schoolgirl who’d had a spider put down the front of her dress. The gun dropped from his numb, unfeeling fingers, and he increased the damage to his wrist by attempting to pull it free.

  Dusty stepped to the side of the door as he saw what was happening and told Jake Demski to deal with it.

  Jake couldn’t risk a shot. The twisting, jerking forms of man and dog made it impossible for him to shoot without a fifty-fifty chance of putting a bullet in Henry. He edged around the pair to get a better view of the dog, to be taken completely by surprise as a figure emerged from a doorway and took a swing with a baseball bat that hit him across the side of the head and fractured his skull. Murray had found his target with the sweet spot of the forty-inch long ash wood bat that he had kept behind the larder door for more than twenty years. It crossed his mind that Joe DiMaggio would have been proud of the swing, angle of impact and follow-through he had executed. Blood looped from Jake’s head as he was knocked sideways and the other side of his face thumped into the wall. He sagged down it onto the solid oak floorboards like a sack of cold grits, leaving a glistening red streak ‒ that overlaid the blood
droplets that had sprayed from Henry’s wrist ‒ on the faded floral-patterned wallpaper that Murray had hung in the hallway back in nineteen-eighty, on the day after John Lennon had been mortally wounded by gunshots outside the Dakota Building. Jake was spared the pain, due to already being out for the count, and so was unaware of his cheekbone and jaw shattering against the hard surface.

  The scene was surreal. It could have been from an old Chaplin or Keaton movie that had got out of hand and gone from slapstick to extreme violence, had it been in black and white instead of in graphic living color.

  At arms’ length from the dog, Henry managed to kick Scout hard in the stomach, and the old hound yelped and released his grip, to fall back, panting, with the man’s blood staining his gray muzzle and dripping from his mouth in swinging strings that were mixed with saliva. He was trembling, whining and struggling for breath.

  “Bed!” Murray said, and Scout got up and trotted back into the kitchen to lie on the folded duck feather-filled comforter.

  “Drop the bat, now, or I’ll shoot you where you stand, and then go back and kick the shit out of the mutt,” Dusty said as Henry rolled away from Murray and climbed to his feet, moaning and cradling his badly bitten wrist.

  Murray let the bat slide from his sweat-drenched hand and just stood and faced the man who he was positive was going to kill him.

  “Why are you here?” Murray asked. “As far as I know I haven’t pissed off anyone enough to warrant this.”

  “We came to talk, is all,” Dusty said, his eyes widening as Mickey staggered out of the kitchen holding his face with both hands as he blindly shuffled towards them asking for help.

  “Your associate with the cooked face appeared from nowhere holding a gun,” Murray said. “That constitutes more than wanting to talk.”

  “Whatever,” Dusty said as Mickey collided with a small half-moon console table and went sprawling, to land on top of Jake’s motionless body. “Tell me where Logan and the cop have gone.”