by Michael Kerr
DI Matt Barnes Series
1 - A Reason To Kill - Link
2 - Lethal Intent - Link
3 - A Need To Kill - Link
The Joe Logan Series
1 - Aftermath - Link (Sample at back of this book)
2 - Atonement - Link
Other Crime Thrillers
Deadly Reprisal - Link
Deadly Requital - Link
Black Rock Bay - Link
A Hunger Within - Link
The Snake Pit - Link
Children’s Fiction
Adventures in Otherworld – Part One – The Chalice of Hope - Link
Aftermath (Joe Logan 1) – Sample
PROLOGUE
You don’t always get value for money. In fact you hardly ever do these days. Maybe word of mouth from family or friends or work colleagues is the safest way to go if you need the services of a professional to satisfactorily undertake whatever job needs to be done.
But who do you go to if you want people killed? No good looking in Yellow Pages, because there are no listings for hitmen. It’s a problem. You need to know someone with connections; a lowlife to put you in touch with a homicidal maniac, or with a crew that murder for money.
Where there’s a will, there’s usually a way. The real problem was going to be the aftermath. Making sure that an alibi was rock solid and that nothing could ever lead back to you was the key. There was a lot to think about, and not a lot of time to sit around mulling it over. Every minute was sixty seconds too long.
It was almost a hundred degrees. He had the AC in the stolen gray Taurus on full blast to keep him cool as a can of chilled Bud as he waited in the tree-shaded car lot near the junction of 37th and O streets in D.C. for the mark to appear. He checked the SIG-Sauer again. The solid, blocky, black 9 mm pistol was a P239 with a regular eight round magazine. He didn’t know a lot about Switzerland, apart from the fact that it was famous for cuckoo clocks, the tennis player Roger Federer, and its beautiful guns. No wonder a third of all police forces in the US carried SIGs as standard issue. The weapon felt good in his hand, as if it was an extension of his limb. He had shot dead a dozen people with it; seven men, three women, and two minors that were not paid hits but potential witnesses that had to be eliminated for peace of mind.
He knew what building she was in. Had all the details, and a plan of Georgetown University’s layout. There was even info on the ‘net about how it followed the Jesuit tradition of educating the whole person, whatever the fuck that meant.
Claudia Duncan was in a hurry. She needed to get home, hit the shower, decide what to wear and be back in the city at the Kennedy Center to meet Jeff, the new love of her life. But being an undergraduate meant that it would be a few years before she contemplated playing happy families. She was living in the now, and loving every second of it.
He squinted through the windshield and watched as she jogged to her car. She was quite a way off, but looked to be the slim brunette he was being paid a lot of money to kill.
Yes. She got in the red Toyota and drove towards the barrier. Hardly gave the bar time to rise as she accelerated out onto the street and headed west.
He kept a couple of cars between the Ford and the Toyota all the way out to Oakton, and drove past as she pulled to the curb, stopped, and dashed out and across the sidewalk to the small duplex that he knew she shared with two other female students. It was going to be an easy job. Just knock at the door, push his way inside and do the deed. He would be back in the car and heading out to West Virginia very soon, stopping somewhere secluded on the way to change the plates on the car, and then again for a steak and a beer before he met up with Roy.
Claudia rushed into the kitchen to find Pam preparing a veggie meal for herself and Sharon.
“Slow down, Claudia,” Pam said. “It’s too hot to hurry. Do you want a glass of lemonade, or a Coke?”
Claudia glanced at her watch and took a deep breath. She had plenty of time. “Lemonade sounds good, she said. What’re you cooking?”
“A whole-wheat spinach lasagna. It’s one of Sharon’s favorites.”
“Sounds yummy, but I’m a practicing carnivore,” Claudia said, grinning at her friend.
There was a knock at the door.
“I’ll get it,” Claudia said. “You pour me that lemonade, with plenty of ice.”
It was broad daylight. Claudia opened the door expecting the caller to be a neighbor, or maybe the FedEx man. She was expecting a package.
Sal frowned. The brunette was wearing a loose, cream-colored blouse and blue jeans, exactly the same as the broad that had driven the Toyota. But she was not his target. Similar, yes, but not Sharon Jennings.
“Where’s Sharon?” Sal asked Claudia.
“Who’s asking?” Claudia came back as she studied the short, swarthy-looking man standing on the step.
He looked both ways along the street. It was clear. He stepped forward and hit her hard in the stomach with his clenched fist, and pushed her backwards as she folded at the waist.
Closing the door behind him, Sal drew the SIG from the calfskin shoulder holster and quickly screwed a suppressor to the end of the barrel. There was a round in the chamber, ready to go. He used his left hand to grab the moaning young woman by the hair and drag her along the hallway.
A plump bitch with red hair appeared in a doorway in front of him, almost filling its width. She was staring back and forth at him and the girl he had hold of. Her eyes were wide with shock, and the glass she was clutching was shaking in her hand. He could hear the ice cubes clinking, and liquid sprayed out from the rim. He shot her between the eyes and watched the spray of blood, bone and brains blow out from the back of her head. It seemed to be in slo-mo as she stutter-stepped backwards before falling down as dead as you can get. He took a couple of seconds to enjoy the spectacle. Noted that he had immediately got a hard on.
Claudia threw up on the hall carpet. Her mind could not properly comprehend the events of the past few seconds.
Sal hunkered down next to where she was sitting and stroked her tear-stained cheek gently with his thumb. He gave her a warm smile.
Claudia thought that he looked Italian. He had olive skin, dark-brown eyes, jet black hair, and his breath stank of garlic and nicotine.
“D’ya want to live?” Sal asked her.
She nodded as she wiped the slime of her vomit from her lips with the back of her hand.
“Good. Now listen to me very carefully,” Sal said. “I need to know exactly where Sharon is now, and why you were drivin’ her car.”
“I…I borrowed Sharon’s car because I have a date this evening. She’s still at the university. She said she would get the Metro home.”
“When is she goin’ to be here?”
“I don’t know. She said that she might go to the mall first.”
“What fuckin’ mall?”
“G…Georgetown Park Mall.”
“Terrific,” he said. He’d fucked up, knew it, and wasn’t sure what to do next. He was tempted to stay at the house and wait, but couldn’t take the risk. “Which is her bedroom?” Sal asked Claudia.
“Second on the left,” Claudia said.
He forced the end of the long suppressor into Claudia’s mouth, up against the top palate, and then withdrew it. There would be blowback, and he didn’t want to risk any blood spatter on him. He straightened up, stepped back three paces, turned and shot her in the right eye: Watched her collapse and her legs twitch a couple of times before she became still. Searching the bedroom gave up nothing. It was time to get the hell out and regroup.
CHAPTER ONE
Logan walked the half mile into town to the Crippled Horse Bar and Grill on Duke Street. It was the only place to get a meal after dark in Old Creek, West Virginia. Over two thirds of the once prosperous mining town was now abandoned; left for the weather and passage of time to blow it away like tumbleweed. The few businesses that remained were frequented by the remaining two hundred residents and outlying ranchers and farme
rs. Old Creek was off the beaten track, twenty miles south of Morgantown and not on a main route to anywhere that would bring tourists through a town that had started to die in the nineteen-forties when the gold ran out.
Logan shuck off his small rucksack. Sat at a corner table in the dining area and ordered a medium rare steak with two eggs over easy and a pot of coffee from the twenty-something waitress who looked like he imagined a young Dolly Parton would without the wig and makeup.
“You got English mustard,” he asked her.
“Just good old American French’s, honey.”
“Horseradish?”
“‘Fraid not. This isn’t Charleston. We do cheap, plain and simple.”
“Fine, I’ll make do with what’s on the table.”
Maybe he was getting old. He didn’t take any real notice of the two guys playing pool in the adjoining bar, which was separated from the dining room by an arch. Had he given them his full attention he would have recognised the one with the gray buzz cut and a deep scar running diagonally from just under his right eye to the bottom of his lobe less ear.
Logan had only started in on his second cup of coffee when his meal arrived. He sawed a piece off the steak and dipped it in the pool of bright yellow mustard he’d squeezed out on the side of his plate, and got on with fuelling his body.
Thinking of nothing in particular and everything in general, Logan ate his meal, drained the coffee pot and left a twenty on the table to cover the bill and a tip for ‘Dolly’.
He’d walked maybe thirty yards out of the glow from the flickering neon outside the Crippled Horse and into the gloom of the unlit street when a blow to his right temple sent him spinning sideways and down onto his knees. As he made to stand up another impact to his ribcage made him grunt.
“Remember me, Joe?” the guy with the buzz cut said as Logan looked up to see his attacker.
“Yeah,” Logan replied. “You’re still ugly, still stupid, and a lot older.”
“We’re all a lot older, Joe,” Troy Atkins said. “I’ve dreamed of bumping into you again. I’m gonna leave you so near dead that you’ll wish you were.”
It was like yesterday, but was almost twenty years ago that Atkins had raped a girl in New York City. Logan and two other cops had gone to arrest him, but he wanted to do it the hard way and had wound up with a broken jaw, courtesy of Logan.
Some guys didn’t forgive, forget, or appreciate that the problems they had were more often than not self made. Atkins was one of them.
Logan didn’t say another word, just shot his right leg up, straightened it out and drove his timberland-booted foot into Atkins’ left knee.
Troy grunted loud and started to fall. Logan’s massive fist met his face, breaking his nose. The sound it made was satisfying; sharp like a dry twig being snapped. It was over as quickly as it had begun. But Logan knew that Atkins’ pal would be with him. He heard an intake of breath behind him as he got to his feet, and turned to see the blur of a hand holding a knife arcing towards his chest. His move was pure reaction. He blocked the guy’s arm with his left forearm, put his right arm behind it and wrenched backwards. As the knife was dropped there was a feeling of give as the elbow joint popped and broke. The guy howled and dropped to the sidewalk to flop around like a speared fish.
“You need to stay away from me, Troy,” Logan said, looking back to were the ex-con was now sitting in a world of pain. “You ever jump me again, I’ll kill you.”
Back at the trailer he’d rented at the Golden Valley Mobile Home Park for a couple of weeks, Logan decided that he wasn’t concussed, but maybe had a cracked rib. It would heal.
He took a tepid shower, dry-swallowed three Tylenol and went to bed. Sleep was an ally. It was what he enjoyed doing a lot of. Being a cop had taught him to sleep when you could, because you never knew when you’d next be able to.
Logan had been in Old Creek for four days. He’d moved west from D.C., courtesy of a gleaming fire engine-red Kenworth stopping for him, and the trucker offering to take him as far as Morgantown on I-68. He’d stayed in a cheap motel the night, and then had donuts and coffee and started walking south on Highway 119, sticking his thumb out whenever he heard engine noise approaching. A good ol’ boy in a battered Ford pickup had stopped and asked where he needed to be.
“Anywhere,” Logan had replied, and was now in what had seemed to be a sleepy backwater, till Atkins had briefly re-entered his life.
A dirt track led into woodland off the blacktop. And a weathered cedar sign was hung by two lengths of rusted chain across it about twelve feet from the ground. The name ‘Golden Valley’ was carved on the wood in foot-high letters, with Mobile Home Park beneath that in almost illegible six inch letters.
Logan had made his way up the track on a whim, to be confronted after a while by a small trailer park in a clearing that looked as if nature was absorbing it back into the landscape. The first trailer on the left was the newest and had a faded plastic sign in a window that said Office –Open, hand printed on it with a black marker pen.
He’d knocked at the door and a skinny old guy opened it and looked him up and down through round John Lennon-style spectacles that were covered in grime. He wore blue bib overalls over a plaid shirt, and looked pale and cool like a day old corpse.
“Yeah?” Tom Ellerson said. “You buyin’ or sellin’?”
Logan smiled. “Neither. I want someplace to stay for a week or so.”
“I sell mobile homes, son, I ain’t a motel,” Tom came back.
Logan did a slow turn and counted nine trailers on the left and eleven on the right of the dead end strip. Half looked to be unoccupied. Two of them were crying out to be broken up and burned, to give the weeds that grew up their sides more room to flourish.
“Looks as though you’ve got one or two begging for a little company. Why let me give my money to the next motel I come to?”
Tom grinned and showed off the three teeth left in his mouth. They were black after chewin on baccy for more than sixty years. “I got a classic 1960 thirty footer Airstream Sovereign travel trailer over there, son, that I could sell you for as little as seven thousand bucks. And the ground rent is just two-seventy-five a month. Whaddya say to that?”
Logan turned again and studied the cigar-shaped aluminum trailer. He’d always liked them. They seemed to have been a part of American life forever. From a time when I Love Lucy ruled on TV and the hula-hoop and yoyo were new fads.
“What’s your name,” Logan asked the old man.
“Tom. Yours?”
“Logan. I like the Airstream, Tom. But I don’t take root. I need to keep moving, so give me a weekly rate. It’s too damn hot to be standing out here all day.”
Tom thought it over for the best part of two seconds and said, “Two-forty a week.”
“Two hundred,” Logan said. “That’s what I can afford.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Logan,” Tom said. “I’ll need the week up front.”
Logan took bills from his pocket and paid.
As Tom took the money he hesitated. “No luggage?” he asked.
“I travel light,” Logan answered, half turning to let Tom see his undersized rucksack.
The mattress on the Airstream’s bed was a little thin and soft, but it didn’t matter. He’d slept on hard ground when it had been the only place to lay his head. A few years in the military before he’d become a cop had hardened him. He’d learned to take the rough with the smooth, and had, so far, been able to deal with any problems that came his way, which had been many.
It was on the day after the brawl in town that Logan met Rita Jennings. She had stepped out of her trailer at five p.m. and stopped in mid-stride when he had looked up from where he was sitting on the step of the Airstream.
She was scared. Why? Her eyes were wide and filled with apprehension. Who did she think he was, some serial killer she’d seen a mug shot of on TV?
He raised his hand in greeting, wincing as his ribs complained. His hea
d was sore, but he felt OK. He’d suffered far more serious injuries.
“Who are you?” Rita asked him, tentatively approaching to about twenty feet.
“Nobody,” Logan said. “Just a guy passing through and minding his own business.”
She stared into his eyes and seemed to see something that promoted trust. “I’m Rita Jennings, and I need your help,” she said.
“I’m Logan. I don’t have much cash, avoid odd jobs, and am obviously not a lawyer,” he replied. “So I think you’d do better looking for help off someone else.”
“I don’t know anyone else that I can involve,” Rita said. “Will you at least hear what I have to say?”
He sighed. Trouble seemed to follow him around like a stray dog that he’d been stupid enough to throw scraps to. He was six-three, still in good shape, and had been told that he gave off the aura of a guy that could be depended on. And he’d always been a sucker for someone that had a hole they couldn’t dig themselves out of.
“You got coffee?” Logan asked as he appraised the woman. She was Caucasian with dark, shoulder-length hair and gray eyes. Maybe five-three, and slim, not thin. Attractive in a homely way. He guessed that she was in her late forties, and she still looked good in jeans and a tight T-shirt.
She gave him a quick, nervous smile. “Yes, plenty”, she said.
He followed her back on board her trailer. There was a smell of orange and spices, and the interior was nicely furnished and immaculately clean. He eased onto a bench that fronted a small dinette table. Watched the woman start up a fresh pot of coffee, and waited.
They didn’t speak until she placed two steaming mugs on the maple patterned Formica tabletop and sat down opposite him.
“Uh, sorry, do you want creamer or sugar?” Rita asked.
“No, as it is,” Logan said. He picked the mug up and tentatively sipped the hot coffee. It was strong, just as he liked it.
