Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4)

by Michael Kerr

“What did he mean by that?” Benny asked.

  “It’s a Navy SEAL motto,” Logan replied. “And you needn’t have shot him. I was handling it.”

  “I know you were,” Benny said. “But if he’d walked away from this he wouldn’t have let it lie. He would have tried to get back at us. I want to be able to get on with my life without always expectin’ to be shot or stabbed to death. And Margie and Della would have done the same. Shootin’ Quaid was just as much self defense as when I shot Gilmore at the garage.”

  Logan noted the subtle difference in Benny’s attitude. He was toughening up. The events that had taken place since Arnie had been shot had been cumulative, and had altered the younger man’s disposition.

  “Don’t get to enjoy pulling a trigger, Benny. Or ever begin to see killing people as an acceptable way to deal with hostility in general.”

  “I won’t,” Benny said. “I’d be happier if none of this had happened. But I know that until Dalton and maybe even Fallon are history, we won’t be safe.”

  Logan knew that Benny was right. Deep down he acknowledged that he had decided that those responsible for Arnie being in a coma would have to be hunted down and taken care of with extreme prejudice. He accepted that Dalton and Fallon would have to die to re-establish the status quo.

  Patting Benny on the shoulder, Logan said, “You’re right. They’ve brought whatever happens on themselves. We’ll do what we have to. First thing we need to do is hide Quaid’s body.”

  They found some old, damp sacking, a large section of corrugated iron sheeting that had been presumably blown down by high wind, and an office door that had been removed and dumped on the ground. They dragged the body into a dark corner and covered it up, then kicked rubble and dust over the large pool of blood that had spread out to mark the spot where a man had died.

  Back in the Malibu, Logan drove away from Hunts Point, to stop at the first coffee shop he saw. He needed caffeine, and wanted to consider all that he now knew about Dalton and decide on the best time and place to make his move.

  “What’s it to be?” Benny said, as if reading his mind. “Do we go to Cape Cod for a change of scenery, or break into his penthouse in the city?”

  It was at the house near the small New England town at the Cape where both Dalton and Fallon would feel completely safe, especially now that they had been told Logan was dead. The security may be good, but guards with no reason to feel under threat became lackadaisical. You only upped your game to red alert if there was a clear and present danger to contend with.

  “I think we should drive out to Provincetown,” Logan said. “We’ll need a road map.”

  “Quaid’s Nokia is a Smartphone,” Benny said. “It’ll have a map app in it.”

  Logan passed him the phone and Benny quickly found the route and journey time. “It’s three hundred miles and six hours away if we keep to the speed limits,” he said.

  “So let’s go,” Logan said and drained his cup, slid out from the booth and tossed a five dollar bill onto the Formica tabletop. “We can spell each other at the wheel. You can drive for the first couple of hours.”

  “If the place is as well guarded as Quaid said, how do you plan on gettin’ to him and Fallon?”

  “We’ll find a way in and play it by ear. First we need to stop and buy a few things.” He gave Benny directions to a place he knew in the Bronx.

  At the house near the seashore so many miles away, Patrick Fallon was strolling along the broad scimitar-shaped private beach, hand-in-hand with Candice Templeton, a twenty-eight year old bottle blond with a silicone-enhanced rack and a great figure that she kept tight by working out at a gym four times a week. Candice; real name Maureen Denton, had been born and raised in Philadelphia, was college educated, articulate, and could blend in with the type of people that she purported to be one of.

  Candice was an ex-model, did not work fulltime, have a pimp, or even consider that she was a high-class hooker. Referrals came from other women that had gone that route, and also from certain fashion photographers, and by meeting extremely wealthy men at private parties or five thousand dollars per plate minimum charity functions.

  Having spent a very enjoyable and profitable time with Patrick Fallon on three previous occasions, Candice had put him on a very small list of punters that could contact her privately without a go-between.

  The short notice invitation to fly to Cape Cod with Patrick for a couple of days was too appealing to turn down. He was the type of man that she intended to cultivate, due to the connections that he had.

  What Candice was totally unaware of was that Fallon used the privacy of his island home to commit any act on a whim, up to and including murder. Candice was no more than an expensive toy that he considered to be his to do with as he saw fit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Logan and Benny left the city on I-95 and stayed on it through Connecticut until they reached Providence, to then cut east on 195 to Cape Cod. They stopped once for gas and a meal, and a couple more times to grab a coffee and use rest rooms. In just over six hours they were on the island.

  It was dark. Logan parked the Malibu in among high, grass covered sand dunes that formed an undulating ridge behind the beach over half a mile from what Quaid had called Fortress Fallon.

  “Dump the revolver, we’ve no more ammo for it” Logan said to Benny as he turned sideways, reached back and hauled his rucksack from the foot well in the rear. “Take the Glock and the extra mag.”

  Armed with Gilmore’s Ruger, Logan got out of the station wagon, slipped his rucksack on and set off towards the estate with Benny at his side.

  There was no moon. Cloud cover made for a dark evening, which was in their favor. Artificial light led them in. The grounds were lit up and were enclosed behind security fencing.

  Logan and Benny knelt down behind a dense thicket of scrub oak that gave way to mixed grasses that grew up to the fence. There were also many pitch pines to ensure that they had plenty of cover.

  Logan smiled as he studied the defenses. This wasn’t a fortress, it was a kids’ piggy bank.

  The house was an extremely large two-storey, stone-built dwelling with floor to ceiling windows to allow views of the Atlantic. There were other smaller buildings in the grounds, and a helicopter was standing outside a hanger. Logan recognized it to be a Bell 430 twin-engine model, as used by the New York State Police.

  The fifteen foot high security fence was the first obstacle to breach. It was probably as old as the house, which looked to be the kind of individual architect-designed type of rich mans’ retreat built in the sixties or early seventies. And the fence’s construction was of welded mesh panels with extended pickets and razor wire at the top, that were attached to ageing concrete posts, not modern high-strength steel posts.

  They waited in the gloom for over forty minutes, and during that time no dog patrol passed by, and there was no sign of life in the grounds. Quaid had lied, or may not have ever been here and just believed what Dalton had told him.

  “I don’t think there’s any external security,” Logan said. “And I’m almost convinced that the fence has no sensors and isn’t electrified. Let’s make our way through the woods to the rear and see if we can get in.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were behind the house. There was a narrow blacktop road leading to slide gates. A small gatehouse was in darkness, but they kept over a hundred yards west of it.

  Logan took his rucksack off and handed it to Benny. “Keep down and don’t even think about lighting a cigarette,” he said.

  “I’m not stupid,” Benny said. “Give me some credit.”

  Logan said nothing, just got down on his belly and crawled towards the fence, leaving a flattened pathway in the thick grass.

  It was no more than a barrier. He could see no sensors, and risking touching the rusting mesh for a split second with the back of his closed fist confirmed that it was not electrified. Examining the bolts that a panel was fastened to a post by, he could see that the
y too were corroded and not set firmly in the concrete that had been eaten by salt air for decades.

  The sound of a strong sea breeze whipping up the nearby ocean, whistling through the grass and strumming the wire like an out of tune guitar masked the two powerful kicks that was all it took to rip the side of a panel away from the post it had been bolted to. He backed into the grass and returned to rejoin Benny.

  “We’re in,” Logan said. “I want you to stay well behind me and watch my back. Treat everyone in the grounds or house as an enemy. We have no friends here. Any bodyguards will have been given orders to shoot to kill any intruders. Are you okay with that?”

  “Are you’re sayin’ I should shoot anything that moves, apart from you?”

  “If they’re armed or appear hostile. Not if it’s some maid or…just use your own judgment, Benny.”

  Logan took his Gerber lock knife from a side pocket of his Chinos. He didn’t want to give their presence away by having to shoot someone, unless he had no option.

  The now dislodged edge of the fence panel was easily pushed back to allow them access to the grounds. Logan jogged towards a small copse that was fifty yards away. Benny waited a few seconds and watched for any movement, then followed him. They moved through the trees with Benny keeping well behind Logan.

  Where the line of trees ended, Logan stopped and waited for Benny. There was what he considered to be a no-man’s-land of cut lawns surrounding the house and stretching for one hundred yards. The house was isolated in the setting, with nowhere to approach it from without being in the open.

  “I’d guess that there will be infrared cameras covering the open ground,” Logan said to Benny. “If we break cover we’ll light up like fireflies.”

  “Terrific,” Benny said. “So how do we beat that?”

  Logan took his rucksack off again and unzipped a large, deep pocket on the back of it, to pull out two small square plastic pouches.

  “What’re they?” Benny said.

  “Space blankets,” Logan said. “They have a thermal protective layer, so among other things they hide eighty percent of your heat signature. If we move fast with these over us, chances are the cameras won’t see anything; we’ll be almost black on black.”

  Benny wasn’t sure that he trusted paper-thin and bright silver-colored plastic sheets to make him invisible, it seemed absurd, but he trusted Logan.

  “Just tent it over yourself and run like hell to the house,” Logan said. “But be sure you don’t trip over it or our cover will be blown.”

  They seemed to drift like two silver ghosts across the expansive lawn, towards steps leading up to a paved patio that ran along the full length of the rear of what was no longer a fortress, but just Ocean View, the one-time residence of a well-known artist who had ‒ at eighty-three years old and suffering from dementia ‒ walked out into the surf on a January morning, and just kept going until he was knocked from his feet and taken away by a powerful undertow.

  So much for security. With the heat-retaining blankets still draped around them, Logan and Benny stayed close to the wall, to stop after twenty paces when Benny spotted a small awning window that was open half an inch. It had a sliding limitation device that only allowed it to be pushed open three inches.

  Being so tall and physically strong had many advantages. Logan used both hands and nothing more than brute force to tear the metal strip free from the screws that held it in position.

  “I’ll lift you up,” Logan said to Benny. “Climb through and open the door on the right. This looks like the kitchen.”

  Logan basically fed Benny into the opening, as if he was cramming a slightly oversize package into a mailbox.

  Benny put both hands down onto a granite-topped counter to take his weight as he scrabbled his feet down behind him. Ten seconds later he unlocked and opened the door, and Logan entered. They were inside. There was no sound of running feet or voices, and so they believed that they had got this far undetected.

  Declan Finney was in a small office on the first floor at the west side of the house. He was sitting in a swivel chair in front of a metal desk that had two large split screen monitors on its top. There were six images on each screen; live feeds from fixed cameras strategically placed to cover the house and other key areas, including the helipad and hanger.

  You couldn’t just stare at screens endlessly, or even glance from one to another without breaks. Declan knew that any movement whatsoever would attract his attention. There had been only one eye-catcher so far this evening; the radiant shape of an opossum had appeared briefly at the edge of the wood. Nothing living could escape the infrared imaging.

  He drank coffee and read a few chapters of a dog-eared paperback titled 52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard. It was slick and violent. Just the way he liked books.

  Movement! He stared at the left hand monitor, at one of the views showing the back lawn up to the tree line. There was nothing, and yet he had been sure that something like a shadow had floated across the field of vision. Placing the book open and face down on the desk, Declan scanned all twelve screens, and then just watched them constantly for another few minutes. Not even a mouse lit up the night. Maybe he was just feeling a little more edgy because Dalton and the man whom he supposed owned Ocean View were staying. If anything happened and he missed it, then Dalton would at very least fire him. At worst, the man would be as brutal as some of the characters in Leonard’s crime thrillers. He had an aura of danger about him.

  Declan was an electrician, and owned a store on Bradford Street in P-town. He had been offered and accepted the job of setting up new CCTV coverage at the house, and had also been asked if he would be interested in hiring local workers to maintain the extensive grounds. The money offered was too good to turn down, and he made even more by being available to watch the monitors through the hours’ of darkness when the owner was in residence.

  Max was in the overlarge living room, drinking single malt whiskey and watching a Jason Bourne movie on the fifty-inch plasma TV. He would be glad when they were back in the Big Apple. Being out at the Cape didn’t suit him. It was like being marooned on a wild and rugged planet inhabited by arty-farty types and gays. Not his scene. Ocean on three sides of him was in some way claustrophobic, even with all the space.

  There was a loud scream from upstairs. Fallon must be getting rough with the hooker. What not many people knew was that Patrick Fallon was a full-blown psychopath with a proclivity to belittle, humiliate, mistreat, and physically harm or on occasion kill people. He was a cunning manipulator, and a basically amoral, antisocial person, lacking the ability to establish meaningful relationships. He was by far the most egocentric man that Max had ever met, who thought that the universe revolved around him, existing primarily to feed his every desire.

  Another scream. Max turned up the volume on the TV. The blond was finding out what lay behind the mask of sophistication that Fallon could put on or remove in an instant. He had murdered six women here at the house during the five years that Max had worked for him.

  Candice was in pain and terrified of the man that she had found so charming up until thirty minutes ago.

  He had attempted to take her anally, and she had pulled away from him and told him that it wasn’t something that she did. At that point the Patrick that she had thought she knew became someone else. He knelt between her legs on the bed and his expression darkened and his eyes were filled with what she interpreted as hatred.

  “You really think that you can be flown down here, treated like royalty, and paid thousands of bucks to fuck, and then start acting like some stuck-up, high and mighty diva?” Patrick said. “You’re just a whore, selling your body, so don’t start telling me where I can and cannot stick my pecker.”

  “I’m leaving, now,” Candice said. “Please call me a cab.”

  He laughed. The stupid bitch didn’t seem to realize that he had now decided to go the whole nine yards and kill her in this room. He could do whatever he wanted. Other people existed
only to serve or pleasure him. As individuals they had as much worth in his eyes as a full condom or an empty bottle. Everyone was replaceable. Money bought the best of everything, and the greed of others ensured that he would always have what he wanted from life.

  He backhanded her across her glossy, cupid bow lips, which made him even harder than he had been all evening, as a blood-filled scream sprayed out from her torn mouth.

  Candice reverted to being Maureen; shed her classy act, spat blood in his face and said: “You sad little fuck. If it wasn’t for your money you’d be creeping around Central Park and paying twenty bucks to some old hustler for a blowjob. Now get the fuck away from me or I’ll call the police.”

  He clenched his fist and hit her as hard as could with a looping blow that fractured her jaw and put it two inches out of alignment. As she screamed again he grasped hold of both of her breasts and dug his manicured fingers and thumbs into the flesh, to twist them viciously before throwing her back onto the mattress.

  The pain, shock and fear froze Candice, now Maureen again, in place as Patrick spread her legs wide, to enter her where he chose to.

  Maureen gasped at the sudden added pain, and as Patrick neared climax he put his hands around her throat and squeezed with slow, even pressure.

  Only two of Max’s men were at the house. This was a minimal risk venue. No one knew that Fallon was here, or that he even owned the place. And with Logan dead, even the remote possibility of him showing up was now nonexistent.

  Vic Fuller headed towards the kitchen to make a sandwich. He was wearing a shoulder rig over a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a Seattle Seahawks logo on the front. His duty was to patrol the house at irregular intervals and check all the rooms, apart from the master suite where Mr. Fallon was doing his thing with the blond. And at two a.m. he would wake Kyle Fleming up to carry on the boring work till six. This was just window-dressing; playing at security. Fallon imagined he had the type of enemies that would do him harm. In reality the guy was just paranoid. Maybe if he did ever get to be mayor he would think he needed the same protection as the president The guy was a legend in his own mind.