Aftermath (3 page)

“What
are you going to do with him?”  Rita asked after Logan had gone back to the Airstream and told her most of the story.

“Make him vanish,” Logan said.  “He killed your husband and then came here to kill you.  And his partner attempted to whack your daughter.”

Rita shook her head.  “You can’t just murder him.  We need to call the police.”

“I blew two of his toes off.  How do I explain that to some hick sheriff?  I’d end up in jail counting bricks and you and your daughter would be back to square one, waiting for some stranger to put bullets in your heads.”

“There must be another way,” Rita said.  “Surely you couldn’t shoot a defenceless man in cold blood.”

I could
. “What do you suggest, Rita?  This is probably the guy that murdered your husband and followed you up here to kill you.  Should we fix up his feet and send him on his way?  He executes strangers to him for money.  Who knows how many men, women and children
he
has murdered in cold blood?”

Rita lowered her head and closed her eyes.  This was horrendous.  Violence had not been a part of her life experience.  She had enjoyed a safe, structured, happy family life until Richard had been killed.  It dawned on her that many people must feel the same until tragedy turned everything upside down and sucked all the goodness away.  It was impossible to stand apart from her present predicament and envisage ever having a normal life again.  If it hadn’t been for Logan, who was still an almost total stranger to her, then she would now be dead.

“I don’t know what to think or do,” Rita said.  “This is like a waking nightmare.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Logan said.  “Warn him off.  OK?”

Rita kept her face lowered and just nodded.  She had to trust him.  He had just appeared from nowhere and seemed to know how to deal with trouble.  Sharon’s safety was paramount, and whatever Logan could do to keep them safe would have to be done.  She acknowledged that she needed him, and that she was lucky that he was willing to help.

Logan went back to Rita’s trailer.  Roy was still sitting in the shower.  Still bleeding.

“Where’s your car?” Logan asked the sad-looking excuse for a professional killer.

“Off-road, about a hundred yards south of the entrance,” Roy said.  “What are you gonna do?”

“Take you to your car, drive to some remote spot away from here and cap you.”

“Please, I’ve told you everythin’ I know.  Can’t we work this out?” Roy pleaded.

Logan shrugged his broad shoulders.  “Don’t see how.  In an ideal world we could let the law deal with you.  But that would tie me up as a witness and so forth, and I’ve got too much to do to be involved.  And let’s be honest, Roy, you’d whack me without a second thought if the tables were turned.”

Logan threw a punch that connected with the point of Roy’s chin, fracturing his jaw and putting him to sleep again.

Dressing an unconscious man is not easy and is time-consuming.  He didn’t bother replacing Roy’s socks and shoes.

It was a half hour later when Logan got to the Pontiac and spilled Roy off his shoulder into the passenger side foot well.  With Rita following in the Discovery, he drove the car south through Grafton to a quiet spot on the west side of Tygart Lake.

Rita stayed in the 4x4 with the engine running, forty yards back from the Pontiac.

Roy was conscious again, and now he
was
crying.  To know that you are going to die imminently and by violent means is a big deal.

Logan pressed the end of the suppressor tight up against the back of the hitman’s head, into the depression at the base of his skull.

Roy wanted to do something.  Not just stay frozen like a rabbit in the glare of a car’s headlights and wait for the end.  But there was nothing he could do.  His wrists were taped together behind his back, and he could hardly move an inch in the confined space.

“You ready for this?”  Logan asked him.  “Now you get to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end.”

Roy pissed himself as the seconds ticked by.

“I’ve had a change of heart,” Logan eventually said.  “With your wallet and phone I guess I can find you if need be.  I’ve decided to let you live, Roy.  But if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.  Just think of me as your kryptonite out there somewhere, ready to take you down.  Use this as a learning curve.  And do yourself a favour; find a new way to make a buck, because you’re a sad excuse for a paid killer.”

Before getting out of the car, Logan took hold of Roy’s trigger finger, snapped it backwards, then sideways, totally destroying at least the middle joint.

Roy Naylor’s scream drove roosting birds from trees and echoed across the lake.

Logan walked back to the Discovery and climbed in next to Rita.  “Drive back to the trailer and pack,” he said.  “We need to move out.”

“Did you kill him?”  Rita asked.

“No.  But I think I should have.  He needed it.”

As they left the Golden Valley Trailer Park, after Logan had drunk coffee while Rita packed her case, Roy’s cell rang.  Logan answered it.

“Roy, where the hell are you?  Did you do the job?”

“This isn’t Roy, Sal,” Logan said.  “He’s hurt bad, but still breathing.  He told me all about you while I shot bits off him.  I daresay he’ll be in touch.”

“Who the fuck are you?”  Sal asked.

“Your worst enemy, Sal Mendez.  You need to look at your friend and ask yourself whether you really want to fulfill the contract that Sammy Lester put your way.  Now that I know who you both are, you’d better believe that you’ll live longer by forgetting that Rita and Sharon Jennings exist.  If you ever turn up in the same county as them, I’ll kill you.”

He turned the phone off and slipped it back in his pocket.

Logan told Rita to stop at a rundown looking hotel outside the Morgantown city limits.  It was in an industrial area with a gas station on one side of it and a U-Haul depot the other.  Cheap and anonymous, with parking out of sight of the street.

Rita parked and cut the engine and lights.

Logan got out and went over to the office.  A scrawny guy with greasy, gray hair and wearing a string vest the same colour was sitting behind an old metal desk watching basketball on a small TV that was bracketed to the wall.

“You know what time it is?”  Nick Mercer, the night clerk, asked Logan.

“Meaning?”  Logan said.

“That’s it’s a little late to be checking in.”

“I’ve got a lady friend in the car.  I’ll pay you the full rate for what’s left of the night.”

“Forty bucks, cash,” Nick said with a smirk on his lumpy, unshaven face.

Logan tossed two twenties onto the desktop.

“No need to register,” Nick said, pocketing the money before stretching back and taking the key to number 9 off one of the sixteen hooks screwed into a pine board on the wall.  “Have fun.”

The room was the same layout as most motel rooms; a short hallway with a bathroom on the right and a closet on the left, opening onto a room with minimum furniture and two queen-size beds.

“It’s filthy,” Rita said.

Logan shrugged.  “It’s the last place anyone would look for you, and I didn’t have to give a name or car details, so it’s perfect.”

Logan dumped his rucksack on the almost threadbare carpet, hung his lightweight windbreaker on a chair and sat on the edge of the nearest bed to the door and waited to use the bathroom.  Rita was in it for more than twenty minutes.  He heard the toilet flush, the shower running, and finally the buzz of a battery-operated toothbrush.  She came out wearing a thick fleecy dressing gown.  He took his toilet bag from the pack, went in and had a quick shower.  The water was hardly tepid, and two of the wall tiles were missing.  After brushing his teeth, he put his shorts back on, carried the rest of his clothes out, and folded them and put them on one of the two chairs.  Got in bed and threw the coverlet back.  Just pulled the thin, worn sheet up to his waist.

“Now what?” Rita asked him.

“We get a couple hours’ sleep.  Then wait for your daughter to call.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” Rita said, “After all that’s happened.”

“You’ll sleep
because
of all that’s happened,” Logan said, switching off the lamp on his nightstand and turning onto his side, away from her.  He was asleep in less than a minute.

Rita lay in the darkness and let the events since Richard’s funeral loop round her mind again and again.  It took awhile for her to concentrate on the present and not on her flight from Charleston and what had happened since meeting Logan.  It struck her as being bizarre that she was in a seedy motel room with a semi-naked stranger in the bed next to her.  She had only met him a few hours ago, and he had already saved her life and taken on the role of her protector, like some kind of guardian angel that had just appeared from the ether when needed.  He was a big, powerful looking man who projected a quiet confidence that made her feel safe.  As she finally fell asleep, she had the image of Logan as he’d walked out of the bathroom in her mind.  He was muscular, and had a terrible scar on his right shoulder that she imagined – rightly – to have been made by a bullet.

“Time to go,” Logan said, gently rousing her with a nudge to her shoulder.  He was dressed and had already been outside to check the vehicles parked in the lot.  There were only four cars, and they had all been there when they’d arrived.

It took Rita a few seconds to remember where she was and who she was with.  Her mouth was as dry as sand and she was too hot.  The old air conditioner was making a lot of noise, but hardly lowering the temperature in the room.

“Go where?” she asked.

“For breakfast.  I’m hungry, and I need some coffee” Logan said.

They stopped at a place a half mile nearer the city centre.  It was the type of unpretentious diner that locals used.  They sat at a window booth.  Logan ordered bacon and eggs, double portions, and coffee.  Rita asked for toast and OJ.

Logan said nothing till the waitress had brought a coffee pot over and he’d poured a cup and drank half of it.  He thought it was good; strong and freshly brewed.

“How do you think I can get out of the mess I’m in?”  Rita asked.

“By doing what I tell you,” Logan said.  “When your daughter calls, tell her to wait for us wherever she is, and to turn her phone off.  Then you turn your phone off.  We’re going to have to trade plates on your Discovery and find somewhere safe for you both to stay while I go see the guy who wants you dead.”

“How can you know who it is?”

“A calculated guess.  Don’t worry about it.”

They were driving through downtown when Sharon called.  She had got off a Greyhound bus and made her way a couple of blocks to a little café next to the Metropolitan Theatre.  Within five minutes Rita had parked up and was walking up to the café with Logan by her side. Sharon was sitting outside at a sidewalk table that had a blue and white sunshade poking out of its centre to fend off the sunlight.

Sharon and Rita caught sight of each other at the same time, and Rita ran the last few yards and embraced her daughter as she stood up.  They hugged each other fiercely, and Logan hung back while they talked over each other and got a little teary-eyed.  After a minute they broke apart and Rita introduced Logan to Sharon.

“So just who are you?” Sharon asked him.

“I’m the guy that your mother elected to play knight errant,” he replied, thinking that she looked just like Rita, but younger, and with maybe a slightly stronger chin and an inch in height on her mother.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Sharon said.  “Why does someone want to kill us?”

Logan beckoned them sit, as he sat down facing the street.  A teenage Asian waitress was with them in a second.  “Coffee, please,” Logan said.  “A pot.”

Rita ordered nothing, and Sharon already had a glass of fizzy soda.

“Your father was killed by someone who believed he had information that he shouldn’t have had,” Logan said to Sharon.  “Or maybe information that he was going to use that would put someone in a lot of trouble.  Whoever it is got to thinking that maybe your father had made a copy on a disk or memory stick, and that one of you had it.  He’s thought it over and decided to clean house.”

Sharon thought about what he’d said.  “I still don’t understand why you’re trying to help us.  You don’t know us, Mr Logan.”

Logan said nothing as the waitress came back with coffee in a white ceramic pot and a large cup and saucer with some French-looking motif printed on all the crockery in the same shade of blue as the large parasol.  When she left he poured a cup and gave Sharon a hard gaze.

“It’s just Logan,” he said.  “And I don’t go out of my way to find trouble.  It has a habit of finding me.  Your mother told me about the warning, and then you called over what had happened to your friends.  Let’s just say that I don’t like injustice, so I decided to do whatever it takes to end what some scumbag has begun.”

“How do we know that we can trust you?”  Sharon came back.

“You don’t.  If you want I can finish my coffee and just get up and walk away.  It’s your call.”