Aftermath (4 page)

“He saved my life, honey,” Rita said.  “If he hadn’t been staying at the trailer park I’d be dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Sharon said to Logan.  “Thank you for what you did.  I’m just scared.  Maybe we should report what has happened to the police.”

Logan gave the girl a slow, humorless smile.  “If neither one of you have what whoever wants you dead is after, what good are the police going to be to you?  You need to be somewhere safe, out of harm’s way.  Some place where no one knows where you are.  And I mean no one.”

“Where do you have in mind?” Rita asked him.

“West Virginia is fine,” Logan said.  “Plenty of forest and mountains.  We’ll find somewhere off the beaten track, stay a few days, then find another place, and keep moving till it’s safe for you both to get on with your lives.  But before we go anywhere, give me your cell phones.”

“You think someone can trace us through them?”  Sharon said.

He shrugged.  “Better safe than sorry.  I’ll destroy these and we’ll pick up three pay-as-you-go phones.”

A couple of hours later they’d done some shopping for toiletries, the phones, and clothes.  Logan told them to pay with cash and not to use their plastic: that in this age of technology, the best defense against it was to avoid using it in any form.

While the women went in one store, Logan found another nearby that sold cheap menswear.  He bought a short sleeved tan shirt, dark chinos, boxer shorts, socks, and a thick wool jacket for what might be cold nights in high country.  Went into a changing room and put them on.  Bundled up everything he’d taken off and dumped it in a waste bin next to the counter, apart from the windcheater.  He had transferred a roll of about eight hundred dollars, a drivers’ license and a major credit card, and secreted the license and credit card into the bottom of his left boot.  Those, and a few toiletry items and now the cell, gun and wallet he had taken off Naylor were his worldly possessions.  He zipped up his rucksack, and slung it over his shoulder.  He was good to go.

Rita drove.  Logan sat next to her and slid the seat back for legroom before studying a West Virginia road map.  Sharon was in the rear seat.  Logan told Rita to head south.  He’d decided that somewhere in the Spruce Knob National Recreational Area was as good as anyplace to vanish.  They made one stop in an alley on the way out of Morgantown.  Logan exchanged the Discovery’s the plates with those of an old Buick that had two flat tyres and looked as if it had been parked for months.

It was late afternoon when they stopped at a strip mall near Elkins on highway 219.  They bought groceries at a 7-Eleven – the chain that boasted to be home of
Big Gulp fountain soft drinks, Big Bite hot dogs, Slurpee drinks, and other convenient, healthy and fast food items –
and put the bags in the cargo bay of the Discovery before deciding on a Ruby Tuesday’s to eat at.  They ordered, and Logan spent some time just staring out of the window and thinking of anything he might have missed.  He had.

“Go use the payphone in the lobby, Rita,” he said.  “Call your uncle at the trailer park and tell him that if anyone braces him over you, he doesn’t know where you went.  He can say that you and a guy from another trailer just took off.  That we didn’t check out, just disappeared.  He can alter my name to whatever, if he registered it.”

“Will he be safe?”  Rita said.

“Yeah, if he acts dumb and they don’t know there’s a connection to you.”

After they’d eaten, Logan took over the driving and headed east.  A mile past a one-horse town called Job he spotted a rustic sign screwed to the trunk of a tree that advertised Bear Country Cabins.  He pulled onto the gravel road and followed it up through what may have at one time been a firebreak in the forest, to where it opened out into a clearing.  Dotted among the trees were more than a dozen log cabins with the backdrop of a lake, and mountain peaks that looked almost purple in the haze beyond it.

Logan registered for three nights.  Had to show his driver’s license.  He parked at the side of cabin number 3 and went inside.  Thought that he, Rita and Sharon probably looked like a family: husband, wife and daughter.

He felt safe, to a degree. What he didn’t know was that there was one thing Roy Naylor had
not
told him.  When Roy had followed Rita up to the trailer park, he’d stopped at a rest area when she had pulled off the highway for coffee and planted a magnetized GPS tracker on the Discovery, up under the offside front wheel arch as far as he could reach.

Roy
regained consciousness in the darkness and assessed his injuries.  He needed help and the sooner the better.  His feet were pounding with pain, as was his right index finger and his jaw.  He worked hard on the tape binding his wrists.  It took him the best part of thirty minutes to work it loose enough to pull his left hand free.  The guy had left the keys in the ignition, but he didn’t know if he could drive.  He shuffled across into the driver’s seat, put his right foot gingerly on the accelerator and slowly applied some pressure.  Cried out as what he imagined a bolt of lightning would feel like if it was shooting up his leg.

As he took deep breaths and tried to work out how to get out of the situation he was in, headlights lit up the inside of the Pontiac.

“Please…No,” Roy moaned, convinced that the big guy had thought it over and come back to whack him.

Thirty seconds slid by.  There was a sharp rap on the window.

“Put your hands on the steering wheel, now” a voice said.

Roy slowly raised his hands and placed them over the wheel.  He never thought he would be so relieved to see a cop, but he was now.

The door opened.  The trooper was dressed in a green uniform and wearing a campaign hat.  A regular Smokey Bear.  He had a hand on the butt of a gun that was holstered to his belt.

Trooper first class Gene Harris had seen pale moonlight reflecting off the car’s roof as he passed by Tygart Lake on his way home to Grafton.

“What went down here?”  Gene asked Roy, taking into consideration that there was blood dripping out of the man’s mouth, and that he seemed to be in a lot of distress.

“I was mugged,” Roy replied, hardly opening his mouth and sounding like a ventriloquist’s dummy.  “I pulled off here to take a nap and the next thing I knew the door was yanked open and a couple of young guys with handguns were in my face.”

“Did you see what make of vehicle they were driving, sir?”

“No.  They must have cut the lights and free-wheeled up behind me.”

“And what exactly did they do?”

“They took my wallet and cell phone, and asked me for the PIN numbers for my credit cards.  I said I couldn’t remember.  That’s when they hit me a couple of times.  I gave them the numbers, and then one of them told me to take off my shoes and socks.

“Look,” Roy said, raising his legs.  “They shot both my fuckin’ big toes off.”

“No shit!”  Gene said, reaching for the radio that was clipped to the knife-proof vest he wore over his uniform shirt, to call it in and request an ambulance.

It was almost noon the next day when Roy woke up in a hospital bed in Morgantown.  They had operated on his feet, jaw and finger.  He was bandaged up and wired up, but whatever pain reliever they’d given him was doing the job.  He was uncomfortable but already feeling a lot better.  Didn’t yet know how hard it was going to be to walk without his big toes.  And he wouldn’t be using his right hand to shoot a gun for a long time if ever.

A nurse came into the room.

“I need a phone,” Roy said to her.

“Sorry, but the police are outside waiting to speak with you,” the nurse replied.  “Would you like some water?”

“Uh, yeah,” Roy said through his teeth.  He was parched.  He had to use a straw to suck the water up slowly from a plastic beaker.

Five minutes later a tall middle-aged, clean-shaven guy in a dark suit, and a young woman in uniform came into the room.  There was a sad lack of sympathy in their eyes.  Roy knew that they’d have checked out the Pontiac and know it was stolen.  He had been going to dump it after hitting the woman, and then lift another vehicle for the ride back to Charleston.  Now he was in the shit, but it could have been a whole lot worse.  The bastard that had hurt him had done him a big favor by taking his gun and ID.  He could ride this out.  It was no big deal.

The Suit settled in one of the plastic contour chairs next to the bed.  The uniform stayed on her feet, almost at attention as if she was on some cop parade ground.

The guy smiled at Roy.  The left side of his mouth came up like he was doing an Elvis impression.  “I’m Captain Frank Macklin of the State Police,” he said.  “We took your prints while you were snoozing, and guess what?  We got a hit.”

Roy said nothing.  Didn’t complain that they had no right to print him because he had been a victim, not a perp.

“You’ve done time, Roy,” Macklin said.  “Last stretch was down in Glenville at Gilmer Federal Correctional Facility, for grievous bodily harm on a woman.  Am I Right?”

Roy nodded slowly.  His whole head still hurt.

“And that piece of shit Pontiac you were found in was stolen down in Charleston four days ago.  What’s your story?”

“I’m the victim here,” Roy said.  “I bought the car from some guy in a bar.  He said he would get the paperwork to me.  As for last night, I told the cop what had gone down.  I got robbed and seriously assaulted.”

“What were you planning on doing up here, Roy?”

“I was just taking a break.  Sightseein’ this beautiful part of the State.”

“How come I don’t believe you, Roy?”  Macklin said.

“Because you’re a cop and I’m an ex-con,” Roy came back.

“True,” Macklin said.  “So here’s what’s going to happen.  I’m not going to pursue the issue of the stolen vehicle.  I don’t want to waste taxpayers’ money on a crappy little matter like that.  As for the assault on you by unknown perpetrators, I don’t buy it.  I think you know exactly who attacked you, and maybe you got just what you deserved.

“I’m going to let you make one phone call.  I suggest that you arrange for one of your lowlife buddies to come and collect you.  The sooner you’re out of my county the better.  And Naylor, don’t come back here.  You’re not welcome.”

“That it?”  Roy said.

“Yeah.  All told, I think you got a result.”

That was all.  The cops left and the nurse brought a phone into the room and plugged it into a jack on the wall.  Roy rang Sal and told him the story.

“I’m back in Charleston,” Sal said.  “I should be able to get up there in three, four hours.  I’ll tell Sammy what went down.  He won’t be happy.”

“Fuck him.  Shit happens.  We need to find the guy that poked his nose in and did this to me.  I’m not going to get a good night’s sleep till he’s dead.”

It was the next morning when Sammy Lester got back to Sal.

“I’ve been in touch with the contractor,” Sammy said.  “He’s obviously pissed with both of you, but he still wants the job done.  OK?”

“OK,” Sal said.  “But we need the computer you’ve got that’s gettin’ the signal from the tracker on the broad’s 4x4.”

“You got a smart phone, Sal?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll link it to your phone.  Last location I got up for the Discovery was Morgantown.”

“We’re on it,” Sal said.

“Hope so.  They may change vehicles.”

Sal waited for the link to come through and checked the GPS.  The Discovery was northwest in the Monongahela National Park area.  But it wasn’t giving a pinpoint fix.  Maybe when they got near to the mountainous region it would home in on their quarries.  First thing to do was to go to the trailer park Rita Jennings had stayed at and start from there.

Roy should have stayed at his apartment, where Sal had dropped him the previous evening, and given himself time to heal up.  He was just a spare limb to Sal’s way of thinking.  But Roy wanted to be there when Sal found the woman and the big guy that had maimed him, so he picked him up on the way out of town.

When they reached the turnoff, Sal drove straight up the trail and stopped outside the motor home with the office sign in the window.  He got out of the Taurus and checked his immediate surroundings.  There was a half dozen people having a barbeque, and a kid throwing a Frisbee for a yappy puppy to catch.  He knocked on the door.  An old guy in overalls opened it.

“Hi, old-timer,” Sal said to Tom Ellerson.

“Hi back at ya, son,” Tom said.  “You want to rent a trailer?”

“Not today.  I’m lookin’ for a friend.  Thought she might be stayin’ here.”

“I’d have thought if you had friends, they’d have been city slickers like you.  You look a long way outside your comfort zone in these woods, dressed in that snazzy suit.”

Sal wanted to pistol-whip the old fart, get the information he needed, and then put a couple of bullets in his head for good measure, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

“I do work in the city,” Sal said.  “Maybe I should do what my friends do and get away from it more often.  So can you help me?”

“I don’t know yet.  Who’re you looking for?”

“Her name is Rita Jennin’s.”

“Then you came to the right place, son, but the wrong time.”

“What does that mean?”

“Had a woman by that name staying here for a day or two, but she took off the other night.  When I got up, she’d gone.”

“By herself?”

“I reckon not.  There was a big guy staying in that Airstream over there,” Tom said as he pointed at it.  “He was missing the next morning as well.”

“You got his name and address?”

Tom stepped back inside and lifted a binder up off a shelf.  Opened it and nodded at Sal.  “Yup,” he said.  “He said that his name was Johnson, and that he hailed from Oklahoma City.”

“What was he drivin’?”

“Nothing.  He just walked in.  Didn’t even have any luggage, ‘cept for a little rucksack”

“Thanks,” Sal said gruffly as he turned to leave.

“You a cop?” Tom asked him.

“No,” Sal said without breaking stride or looking back.  “A PI.  The woman’s husband is payin’ me to locate her.”

Sal drove out onto the highway; told Roy what little he’d learned, and kept going till he came to a timber-built diner that looked as though it had been there since the Civil War.  He parked in the side lot and got out.

“You want some take out?”  Sal asked Roy.

“As if I could eat with my mouth wired up,” Roy said.  “Get me a Coke and a straw.”

Sal gave him a hard look.  “This isn’t goin’ to work, Roy.  You can’t fuckin’ walk.  You’re a mess and a liability.  You need to be at home chewin’ pain killers, restin’ up and letting that bimbo you’re screwin’ look after you.”

Roy thought it over while Sal was inside the diner.  He was in agony, and couldn’t ignore it and function properly.  Common-sense told him that Sal was right.  He needed timeout to recover.

“OK, Sal,”  Roy said after taking a few sips of the soda and wishing he was able to eat the cheeseburger that his partner was working on.  “I don’t want to slow you down on this.  Get me back home, then find the woman and the guy and take them out.  And make the guy suffer for what he did to me.”

Sal finished the burger, took a mouthful of coffee and then placed the plastic cup in a holder on the console.  Wiped his hands on a paper napkin and patted Roy on the shoulder.  “Good thinkin’, Roy.”  He said.  “You know how it is.  I’m gonna need to move fast and not have to worry about you.  I’ll find them, and blow the toes off the creep that did this to you, before I gut shoot him and watch him die.”

“Do me a favor, use your phone to video him croaking,” Roy said.

Sal grinned.  “You got it, pal.”

Logan got the woodstove in the cabin going while Rita and Sharon checked the place out and selected the largest bedroom and unpacked what little they had.

After a few minutes, Rita came back into the large kitchen/living area, found the coffeemaker, used a clean filter and coffee from the welcome pack on the counter and set it going.

Sharon came through from the bedroom wearing a cream T-shirt, denim shorts and bulky air-trainers that made her feet look massive.

“What now?”  Sharon said to Logan.

“We eat, and then get a good night’s sleep.”

“I mean about the trouble we’re in.”

“I’ll work it out and fix it.”

“How?”

Logan sighed.  The girl was understandably uptight and fearful.  This was a situation outside her life experience.  She was obviously intelligent, but in an educated way.  The nearest she would have probably ever come to violent death, previous to this episode, was on TV or in movies, and that was easy to disassociate yourself from.  That her father had been murdered, and seeing the bodies of two friends that had been shot dead, and knowing that it was you that had been the principal target, must be a lot to take on board and cope with.  Most people were naïve.  They lived ordinary, orderly dull lives, and thought that a flat tyre or a sprained ankle was a big deal.

“I don’t know yet,” he replied, and then blew the dust out of a mug, filled it with fresh coffee and went outside the cabin to be alone and think.

All the cabins were angled to give a view of the lake behind them.  It was a nice setting.  The reflection of the mountain peaks on the smooth water looked like a painting.

He walked down to a small landing that had several canoes and kayaks stacked next to it on the shore and sat at the end of the solid timber jetty with his legs over the edge and his feet just a couple of inches above the water.  He cleared his mind.  Just enjoyed the moment in a place he’d never been.  He could smell the scent of pine and hear geese honking way out on the lake.  Maybe a cabin on its own somewhere in an area like this would be a good base to travel from when he got the urge to see pastures new.