Abduction (21 page)

Logan allowed himself a rare smile.  “No one said that life is easy,” he said.  “And if they did, then it was before the shit hit the fan for them.  Everyone has drama and trauma in their lives.”

Gail came out of the store and hugged Tom and didn’t ask him any questions, they would get to discussing what had happened later, if Tom wanted to.  They were all standing in the lot, and everyone hugged each other, apart from Boo, who just leaned on his crutch and waited, like a gatecrasher at a wedding.

Debbie was still crying with relief and joy.  She put Kelly down, thanked Tom for what he had done, and then went to Logan and stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

“No need,” Logan said.  “I can see what it means for you to have Kelly back.  I’m glad it worked out.”

“C’mon,” Gail said, breaking up the gathering.  “Let’s get inside and have some coffee.”

Logan decided that there was no need to rush.  He went back to the Camaro for his rucksack.  It would be nice to clean up and maybe stay for a meal before setting off for Fort Myers with Karen and Boo.

After Karen had showered, Gail told her to pick some new clothes off the racks in the store.  Tom and Logan took turns in the shower, and Logan then went downstairs to talk to Debbie and tell her what to say to the police.  Got her to repeat it to him.  “Keep it real simple,” he said.  “The less you say, the better.”

“What shall I tell them that the man who saved me and then got Kelly back was called?”

“Think of a name, now, and say it.”

“Er, Jim.”

“Fine, stick with that.  You don’t know anything else about him.  Only what he looked like, and that he had a Southern accent.  They’ll show you mug shots, but don’t identify anyone.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll take Boo up to Alabama, and then just keep on going.”

“Don’t you have anyone, Logan?”

“I’m not a social animal.  It suits me to keep moving.  Some folk need to have a false sense of permanence and familiar surroundings.  I’m always wondering what’s up ahead, round the curve of the road, or over the next hill.”

THE
security gates opened and Ace drove the Tahoe through and along the long and winding brick-paved driveway to the front of the large, modern house on N Key Drive. Greg Modine followed in the other SUV, and the guard manning the small gatehouse hit the button to close the gates as soon as he had.

Nick felt safe. Casa Cady was intruder-proof.  CCTV was monitored from within a security complex above the detached triple garage.  Guards patrolled the perimeter, and the whole shebang was lit up like the fourth of July. All the windows of the house were bulletproof, and there was a panic room on the second floor.  In Nick’s line of work it wasn’t paranoid, it was prudent.  There were firms in the city that would take great pleasure in taking him down. They all had their own territories, but like Nick they were greedy and wanted the whole cake, not just a slice of it.  It was warfare that he was good at, but now one man had done a lot more to harm him than any rival gang.

“We need for Logan to think that breaking in is a viable proposition,” Ace said.

“What do you suggest?” Nick asked.

“That we leave the security lights switched off at night, and have static guards, out of sight, not patrolling.  The infrared cameras will light him up like a candle.  If he comes, you and Mrs. Cady can go in the panic room until we’ve dealt with him.”

“I want him alive, Ace.  A bullet would be too quick for the sonofabitch.”

Gina appeared from the living room.  She was wearing a pearl-colored, loose-fitting silk Oscar de la Renta floral lace embroidered blouse, black Victoria Beckham tuxedo pants and matching Saint Laurent ankle strap sandals, purchased from Harrods in Knightsbridge on a recent trip to London.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Gina said to Nick.  “You look as if you’ve been in a fight with a junkyard dog.  And why haven’t you called me?”

Ace backed up and left the house, to go across to the garage block and use his key card to gain entry to a stairwell that led up to what he called the control room.  He had seen Gina lose the plot on previous occasions, and her temper was legend.  He had not wanted to be standing anywhere near Nick if she started throwing things.

“I got into a situation,” Nick said to Gina.  “There’s a psycho on my case.  He could come to the house, that’s why Ace is here, to handle it.”

“What do you mean by a psycho?” Gina said.

“He took exception to something that was none of his business, and now he’s treating it as personal between him and me.”

“You mean he wants to kill you?”

“That’s a possibility.  We need to take care of him.”

“Jesus, Nick, that’s totally out of order.  You’re making me feel scared to be in my own house.”

“He won’t get near us.  We’re ready for him.”

“What did you do to piss him off?”

“Personally, I did nothing.  He interrupted an operation that one of my crews was handling, and killed one of them.  Jade got away with the merchandise, but he kept coming.”

“By merchandise, I take it you mean drugs.”

“No, a person.”

“Don’t tell me anymore.  What you do is so fucking sordid.”

“What I do pays for everything that we have.  Don’t forget that,” Nick said as he headed for the stairs.  His jaw was aching, his ankle was on fire, and he was covered in scratches and bites.  He needed a hot shower, and then a large Scotch or two.

After loading the pickup and saying their goodbyes, Logan, Karen and Boo left Cody’s Country Store and Logan drove west and then north, back to Fort Myers.

“I’ll have to drop you off,” Logan said to Karen as they reached the south of the city and he pulled into the lot of a Perkins restaurant on Summerlin Road.  “Your father will have people watching the toll booths, just in case I take you over the causeway to the island. Phone for a cab and I’ll order coffee while we wait.”

Less than thirty minutes later Karen was gone.  The cab had stopped in the square at the rear of the restaurant, where actually the main entrance was located, facing away from the busy main road.  All she had said was ‘Thank you’ to Logan, nodded at Boo and left.  Logan didn’t know what the hell she had thanked him for.  He had abducted her to trade for Kelly, and then totally disillusioned her by showing her what kind of animal her father was.

“And then there were two,” Boo said, taking another couple of Tylenol that Gail had given him a pack of, and washing them down with coffee.  “How’re we going to deal with Cady?”

“
We
aren’t,” Logan said.  “You can’t even walk.  And why would you want to help me take Cady down?”

“Because I’d always be looking over my shoulder if he was still in business.  He doesn’t forgive.  I lied to Vince Palmer.  Cady will want to make sure I’m suitably punished for being disloyal.”

“Let’s see if Cady made it out of the Glades,” Logan said as he rummaged in his rucksack and found Boo’s BlackBerry.

“I don’t have his number,” Boo said.

“I do,” Logan said, and punched it in.

Nick picked up.  The incoming caller ID was that of an employee, Boo Mercer.  He hadn’t known that Mercer had his number, but supposed that Vince or Larry had given it to him.

“Yeah, Boo?” Nick said.

“Boo and his buddy are dead, Cady,” Logan said.  “Last time I saw them was when they sank in a swamp with wheel rims weighting them down.”

“What do you want, Logan?”

“Just checking to see if you made it back to town.  And to tell you that Karen should be home on the island in thirty minutes.  She just took a cab over the causeway.”

“I’m going to kill you, Logan.”

“That won’t happen.  I’m already heading north.  You’ll never see or hear from me again.  I’m in the wind, Cady.”

Logan switched off the phone, stuffed it back in his rucksack and said to Boo, “That should help you relax.  Cady won’t look for a man he thinks is dead.  Let’s eat, then find a motel.”

After making a stop at a CVS and picking up fresh bandage and a bottle of peroxide for Boo’s leg, Logan also bought some heavy-duty plastic trash bags and a roll of duct tape before driving in the direction of the river and finding a sleazy place to stay at called The Sunset Court Motel, which was situated on Pandella Road, just a block up from a Taco Bell and a fifteen minute drive from Cady’s waterfront home.

Logan went through the photocopies that he’d got Will Fleming to print out.  He decided where to go and what to do, and then lay back on one of the beds and went to sleep for a couple of hours while Boo surfed the basic package channels on the TV, trying unsuccessfully to take his mind off the pain in his leg.

It was two a.m. when Logan got up, double-bagged his rucksack in trash bags, tied the top of them nice and tight and wrapped tape round to provide a watertight seal and said to Boo, “I’ll be back soon.”

“What if you don’t make it?”

“That’s negative thinking.  I will.  And if I don’t, then ‘what if’ won’t matter,” Logan said as he took a grand in fifty dollar bills from a side pocket of his chinos and placed it on the top of the credenza, next to the TV.  “That should be enough to get you up to your aunt’s place.”

“Thanks, and good luck,” Boo said as Logan opened the door and vanished.

He had a loose plan.  It would either work or it wouldn’t.  One way or the other the situation would be finally resolved before dawn.

Parking the pickup off-road in darkness, Logan donned a pair of latex gloves before wiping the vehicle carefully to remove any prints.  He left the key in the ignition and strolled along the side of a narrow but well-maintained side road to within a quarter mile of Cady’s house, which was at the end of a finger of land.  He had studied the aerial Google Earth image of the property and surrounding terrain to memorize it and the distances involved. After another hundred yards he came to a thicket on his right of what he thought to be sea grape, which was a salt tolerant species of shrub or plant that had the appearance of dense bushes with large coin-shaped leaves. The bushes were too tightly packed to walk through; a natural barrier.  He followed the back edge of them until they petered out at a spot from where he could hear water lapping against the shore of the Caloosahatchee River.  There were a few stand-alone houses with private docks; some having motor yachts moored up to them. He skirted the buildings, keeping low, and was soon past them.  All that was ahead of him now was Cady’s estate at the far end of the peninsula.  It was time to disappear.  The fact that the grounds were not lit up was significant.  They obviously wanted to lure him in.  It was a trap, but he would not be attempting to gain access by climbing fences.  Surprise was as lethal a weapon as the Glock or the knife that, among other items, were in his rucksack.

NICK
was still in a rage.  He waited thirty minutes and then phoned Karen’s home number, only for the dumbfuck fishing guide that she lived with to answer and tell him that she hadn’t yet got back from wherever she’d been.  He told Denton to ask her to contact him as soon as she showed up, and fifteen minutes later he had got a callback from Denton, who informed him that she was home, but that she didn’t want to talk to him.

Why were people so fucking ungrateful?  What he did gave them the lifestyle they had.  They wanted for nothing, but still had the temerity to revile him.

As the hours ticked by, Nick decided that Logan had probably been telling him the truth, and that he was running scared and would never set foot in Fort Myers again; probably not even in Florida.  A sensible man quits while he’s ahead.  Although Ace had said that the call could’ve been misdirection, to put them off guard.  And as for Karen, well, he’d get Ace to drive him over to Sanibel in the morning and lie to her and make things right between them. He was her father for Christ’s sake, she owed him her loyalty.

Gina had watched TV and then gone to bed at midnight.  He was still feeling hyper, so stayed up and sat on a sofa in the living room and drank too much Scotch.  On the coffee table in front of him was a fully loaded Ruger nine-millimeter pistol.  It didn’t harm to be in a position to defend himself, even though it would be impossible for Logan to get anywhere near him.

Ace had stayed in the control room above the garages; another pair of eyes to watch the monitors and wait.  He had a lot of patience. He had spent the last fifteen years fulfilling contracts for various gangsters.  And a lot of the work involved thorough planning and waiting for the right moment.

Ace was forty-two, had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and had been a gang member as a teenager.  He had shot a cop in the head when he was fifteen years old, and had killed at least fifty more men and women in the subsequent twenty-seven years. He was lean and mean, but cautious and very careful.  Killing was ‒ to him ‒ an art form.  And what made him so dangerous was his soft voice and good looks.  People trusted him on sight.  He was tall and slim, yet muscular, and had an easy smile and what seemed to be a warm personality.  Looks are in many instances very deceiving. Ace did not possess the ability to properly understand and share the feelings of another person.  Compassion and sympathy were two emotions that were associated with empathy, which was something absent in his psyche.  He was not a religious man, and therefore believed that he was without the spiritual or immaterial part of a human that was regarded as being the soul.  He did not recognize the qualities of good or evil.  Life was for living, to enjoy and take from it what gave profit and pleasure, period.

Logan’s head rose very slowly, just far enough above the surface of the cold water for him to be able to see.  He had slipped into the river and slowly swum round the tip of the peninsula, staying near the shore.  He was now under a wide pier, hanging on to a round support post that was encrusted with barnacles.  A large motor yacht was moored up. He swam into the gloom, to where the black water met the shore, and walked up the sloping muddy bank into the space below the decking, to rip open the plastic that had protected his rucksack.

Within a minute he was ready to go with the rucksack on his back.  He was chilled to the bone, soaking wet, and had used handfuls of thick, black mud to coat his hair and face and gloved hands.  He was like a shadow.  Only his slate-gray eyes could be seen.  Under severe duress, Vince Palmer had told him about the security of the house and grounds, so Logan knew that there were infrared cameras.  The cold and the mud would make him invisible for a few minutes, just like Schwarzenegger had been to the alien in the movie
Predator.

Keeping low, now holding the silenced Glock, Logan climbed up the embankment at the side of the pier and saw the silhouette of a figure walking towards his location.  The man was holding what appeared to be a compact submachine gun, and ambled to within five feet of where Logan now ducked back down to push the gun into his waistband and withdraw a hunting knife from the sheath on his belt.

The guard turned and moved away, along the dock that the motor yacht was moored to.  When he reached a point next to the boat’s prow he turned again and headed back.  It was half-hearted defense.  Cady obviously didn’t expect Logan to make an assault from the river, but had placed one of his men there just in case.

The next time that the man turned, Logan struck from behind.  He moved with the grace of a big cat, like the rare and seldom seen Florida Panther, to clamp his left hand over the unsuspecting guard’s mouth and cut his throat deeply, almost from ear to ear, before dragging him down the embankment, pushing his face into the mud and holding it there until the man stopped quivering and became still.

After wiping the serrated blade on the corpse’s jacket, he returned the knife to its sheath; drew the Glock again and climbed back up the embankment and jogged across the large, landscaped back yard, skirting a swimming pool on his way past a small jungle of assorted palms.  Reaching the house, he could see Cady through the floor-to-ceiling patio doors.  He had no doubt that they would be triple-glazed, bulletproof and securely locked, so made his way around the side of the house to a door that was probably an entrance for the use of kitchen staff and housemaids.  It was a large residence, and he was certain that Cady’s wife didn’t do the cleaning or much in the way of cooking.

It was decision time.  Did he force entry or wait?  The door would be alarmed.  Too big a risk.  He wanted to deal with Cady and walk away in one piece.  This wasn’t a suicide mission, he valued his own skin.  He’d never understood the mindset of fanatics that strapped on explosive vests and blew the shit out of themselves.  Maybe if you’re a SNAFU (sub normal and fucking useless) with nothing much to live for, then the false promise of paradise, given to you by some extreme radical asshole, was the way to go.

He backed away, in among a stand of palms.  Stood and thought it through, until events caused him to act.  There was a metallic click, and then the brief glow of a cigarette being lit, which pierced the night like a ruby-red laser.  He had company just twenty yards to his left.  A security guard had taken a risk and fired up.  His addiction would be the death of him, not due to disease, but at Logan’s hand.

Chris Wright had figured it wrong.  He’d been sitting for two hours, and there was a radio silence, only to be broken if he or one of the other guards had a positive sighting of a trespasser.  And the control room would only contact them if anyone was seen.

Chris was wearing olive drab clothing and had camouflage paint on his face.  He had only worked for Cady for six months, and in that time there had been no major incidents at the property.  The team had been briefed earlier by Moran, to be told that there was the possibility that an armed man with seriously bad intentions towards Cady may attempt to gain access to the property.  But after the passing of time and the onset of boredom, Chris was finding it hard to keep awake.  He had been drinking heavily and making out with his girlfriend, Judy, till four a.m. the previous morning.  She was insatiable; what he supposed was a nymphomaniac.  It had been great at first, but even good sex could become tiresome.  It was like having steak for every meal.  Sometimes you needed a rest from it, or it would lose its appeal.

He shielded the cigarette as he flipped back the top of his Zippo and lit up.  It had been a two-second act.  He slipped the lighter back in his pocket and cupped the cigarette as he took sporadic drags from it.  He had nothing to worry about.  His hearing was exceptional, and in any case he knew that although the security lights were off, infrared cameras would spot anyone attempting to breach the perimeter fence.  And on the off chance that someone did make it, then the AK-47 across his lap would take care of business.

Logan drew the knife again and came out of the bushes behind the seated guard like a trapdoor spider, fast and focused on his prey.  He crooked his left arm around the guy’s neck and applied enough pressure to choke him off and make breathing impossible, and then hauled him back under cover and held the blade of the knife up in front of the young man to let him see it.

“Talk or die,” Logan said, and eased up slightly on the neck lock.  “What’s your name?”

“Chris.”

“How many other guards are in the grounds, Chris?”

“Six,” Chris rasped.

“What other security?”

“Infrared cameras and motion sensors on the fence.”

“Where are the monitors?”

“In a control room above the garage block.”

“Who’s in charge of you, and where is he?”

“Mr. Moran.  He heads up security, as well as doing other stuff.  He’ll be in the control room.”

“Are there any guards inside the house?”

“No, just Mr. Cady and his wife.”

Logan intended to apply more pressure to Chris’s neck, not to kill him, but to compress his carotid arteries and render him unconscious as the blood supply to his brain was restricted.

Chris took a chance.  Brought his right elbow back into Logan’s stomach, believing that the arm around his neck would loosen enough for him to jerk free and shout for help as he threw himself forward to get his hands on the AK-47 that he’d dropped.

Logan tensed his abs as the guard’s arm moved.  He hardly felt the blow, and instinctively tightened his grip, choking Chris before he could call out, as he brought his knife hand round and up, for the blade to enter under Chris’s ribcage and penetrate his heart.

Chris became rigid from head to foot.  The sharp pain in his chest was agonizing, and worsened as the blade was twisted and pulled free.

Logan dragged the dying man back into thicker foliage and then recovered the Russian assault rifle and pushed it in among the dead leaves under the bushes.  He had no use for it.  Silence and stealth were his allies.  The knife would hopefully be all he needed, for the time being.

There was a wet sigh from behind him.  Chris Wright had expelled his last ragged breath as his ruptured heart pumped a last pulse of blood through its ruined chambers.

Logan felt no sympathy for the man, or gave a damn that he had just murdered a fellow human being.  It was all about which side of a hard line you stood.  Everyone that took up arms for Cady was the enemy, and Logan believed that sometimes it was best to say ‘fuck to the law and deal with your own war’.  The law enforcement agencies had obviously known that Cady was a gangster, but had not been willing or able to close him down.  Going it alone was the only way to get the job done.

He kept to the boundary, up close to the trees and bushes that ringed the football field-sized lawn.

The second guard dropped his rifle and clutched at his throat as he fell to the ground.  Logan had emerged from the greenery behind him, said, “Hey,” and as he had turned, chopped him across the throat with the edge of his hand.  The guy’s larynx had fractured, and he was asphyxiating, unable to draw breath.

He picked them off one by one.  Left two more unconscious with serious concussions from being struck with the butt of his Glock, and another with a cut throat.  The next had heard him, turned and was raising his rifle.  Logan shot him in the forehead and hoped that the suppressed blast would not alert anyone.  If Chris had been telling him the truth, then there was only one more external security guard to deal with.

Josh Newcombe was sitting on a low brick wall at the far end of the staff car lot at the rear of the garage complex.  He had just poured a cup of coffee from a two liter thermos flask when he heard a pop that could have been a vehicle backfiring in the distance, a fish jumping in the nearby river, or something just as mundane.  It could also have been a bullet fired through a silencer, but he grinned and dismissed that as fanciful.  But what if…?  He set the plastic cup down on the top of the wall, stood up and raised his Uzi submachine gun. Looked around but saw no movement.  He was letting his imagination spook him.  The place was intruder proof.  The cameras would pick up anything warm-blooded.  He walked out into the center of the lot and did a couple of turns.  Nothing.  He stood in place for a minute, listening, and then went back to the wall, sat back down and picked up his coffee cup.

Logan was at the other side of a large SUV, only three yards from the seated guard, and having long legs, three yards equated to less than three strides away.

As Josh raised the cup to his lips and began to take a sip of the steaming hot coffee, a figure came from behind a vehicle, straight at him, too fast for him to react against.

Logan took one long stride, then another, and as he took the third he swung his right leg up and drove his foot into the seated man’s chest like a battering ram, knocking him back over the wall.

The cup flew from Josh’s hand as he shot back, ass over tit, to land on his stomach.

Logan vaulted over the wall, to sit astride the guard’s back and pin him down.  He pulled back on long, lank hair that was fixed in a ponytail, and pressed the edge of the knife’s blade against the throat, just above the Adams apple, hard enough to draw blood.

“Tell me your name,” Logan whispered in the prone man’s right ear.

Josh swallowed hard, and the razor-sharp cold steel bit another fraction into his skin.  “Josh Newcombe,” he said.  “Are you going to kill me?”