Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4) (12 page)

Della
stopped for gas at an Exxon station on the outskirts of Jersey City.  It was on a strip mall that had a variety of other businesses around a parking lot at its center.  All three of them were hungry, so after Della and Margie had used an ATM to max out their credit cards, they walked over to a Perkins restaurant and ordered an all-day breakfast.  While they waited for the food, Benny went back outside and lit a cigarette.  It started to rain, so he stepped back under the overhang and leaned against the wall.  He was becoming agitated.  Maybe staying with Logan and the two women was a dumb idea.  The people that were looking for them were as dangerous as the Mafia.  They would somehow find Logan and kill him, and that went for anyone that was with him.  If he had any sense he would just walk away.  He was no threat to them, and they knew it.  In fact they would be all but sure that he’d drowned.

“Food’s on the table,” Margie said, appearing next to him.

Her sudden appearance broke his train of thought.  He dropped the end of the cigarette and followed her back inside the restaurant.

It was a slow drive back to the Blue Heron.  The rain intensified and they stopped again at a supermarket to pick up some toiletries.

“What’s the problem, Benny?”  Della said a few minutes later as they crossed the bridge to the island.  “You haven’t said a word since we left the diner.”

“The problem is that a lot of people will be lookin’ for us; the type that gets what they want by blackmailin’, maimin’ or killin’ anyone that pisses them off.”

Margie frowned.  “Logan will—”

“Logan will get himself killed,” Benny said, interrupting her.  “He’s just one guy.  They probably know where he is now.  He went to the police, and Fallon has cops on his payroll.  When he left he’ll have most likely been followed.  They’ll turn up at the motel, and if we’re still there they’ll whack us all.”

“If someone tries to follow him, he’ll lose them or deal with them,” Margie said.  “He won’t come back to the island if he doesn’t know for certain that he’s in the clear. If you knew him a little better, you’d have more faith in his abilities, Benny.  I trust him with my life because I know that he will keep me safe from harm.”

Benny said nothing.  He knew that Logan was competent, but the word would be out on the street, and a great many people would be doing their best to find them.  And they wouldn’t stop looking.  One way or another it was just a matter of time before they were discovered.  Temporarily laying low at an out of the way motel would not save them forever.  And if Logan went head to head with the people that Trask worked for, then he would not survive the encounter.

It crossed Benny’s mind to make a call and get back on side.  Giving up Logan and the women’s location would be rewarded.  Selling them out would enable him to get on with life without waiting for a bullet.  He was torn between doing what was right and what would save his ass.  And he was jumpy; needed a joint to calm him down and help him think straight.

The big yellow ferryboat powered its way across the chop of upper New York harbor, and ten minutes after it had left Battery Park, Logan was out on deck at the stern with his fleece zipped up and collar raised. The exterior bulkhead was protecting him from most of the strong gusts of cold wind and the whipping rain. He was oblivious to it, allowing himself to just absorb the sights and sounds around him.  He loved the view of the statue, which seemed to erupt from the waves with a backdrop of the cityscape.  It was a sight that was fixed in his mind like an engraving, and had been there for as long as he could remember.  As an eleven-year old he had watched as the twin towers had been erected, to pierce the sky and take the attention of onlookers away from the Empire State and Chrysler buildings.  And then as a thirty-seven year old he had sat transfixed in front of a TV, to be horrified beyond words as first one and then the other tower was hit by planes that had been hijacked by members of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda.

He had been off-duty, at home at his apartment in the Bronx on that bright yet darkest of days, and had driven into the city before the burning towers collapsed to spew massive clouds of smoke and dust into the warren of streets below.  There had been little he could do, but he did what he could, helping terrified citizens to safety, to then just sit on the sidewalk with tears cutting lines through the sad-clown layer of white ash that covered his face and everything else. But that was then, and the years had rolled by.  He was fifty now, and like many events ‒ extremely good or bad ‒ the day that would always be known as 9/11 was firmly lodged in his psyche.  It had gone a long way to subtly strengthen a certain disillusionment he felt.  The pointless death of so many on your doorstep brought it home that any expectation could be shattered abruptly.  Had that been the point at which he had backed-off from becoming too emotionally involved with others, especially women?  Probably.  He had tried to kid himself that his decision to be a loner was because of the freedom of action it gave him, but deep down he knew better.

Reentering the main cabin from a stairway on the starboard side of the ferry, he headed along its length towards the bow, and caught a split-second look of Ellery’s face, before the cop lowered his head to conceal his features with the bill of his cap.

Without slowing, Logan kept walking, but then paused to push back the cuff of his left sleeve and pretend to look at a nonexistent wristwatch.  He then increased his pace, as if he was in a hurry, even though it would be several minutes before the boat docked.

Dave kept his head down for a couple of seconds until Logan had gone by, then looked up and watched as the big man stopped and checked his watch before striding off.  It was as if he needed to be somewhere.  Was someone that he knew on board?  Had he arranged to meet them on the ferry when he was sure that he had not been followed?

Pulling his cap down as tightly as he could, Dave ambled out onto the deck with his hands in his pants pockets and walked over to the rail and placed his hands on the top of it as he feigned looking out at the view of the Saint George Terminal that they were cruising towards.

He was taken completely by surprise. The flap of his navy pea coat was pulled aside and up, popping two of the buttons as sudden pressure forced him up against the rail.  He attempted to turn round, but was pushed even harder in the back.

Logan flipped the press stud and withdrew the SIG Sauer P226 pistol from the hip holster in one seamless movement, dropped it over the side into the churned up water and spun Dave round to face him.

“Jesus, Logan, you just threw my gun in the bay,” Dave said.  “Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

“No, just mad, Ellery.  Take your cell out and ditch it.”

“You gotta be jokin’.”

“You ever remember me joking in the squad room?”

Dave saw an icy coldness in Logan’s eyes that convinced him to do what he was told to.  He reached slowly into his pocket and withdrew his phone.

“Before you commit it to the deep, give your sidekick a call.  Tell him to join us out on deck for a meet.”

“I’m on my own,” Dave said.  “That’s the God’s honest truth.”

“I don’t believe you,” Logan said.  “Call him, now, or you go over the side.”

“You’re bluffin’.  You’d never get away with it.  You may have quit the job, but you ain’t no cop killer.”

Logan grabbed him by the front of his coat with one hand, and his crotch with the other, heaved him up and back over the rail and gripped him by the ankles before he could fall.

The cell pin wheeled out from Dave’s hand and the ball cap was whipped from his head.  He watched the phone hit the water over thirty feet below his face, but missed seeing the cap dance along the side of the boat as the wind took it.

“Why are you tailing me?” Logan shouted to be heard above the noise of the wind, the boat’s engines and the roiling waves.

“Because Reynolds told me to.” Dave screamed.  “He didn’t say why, just said to follow you to wherever you’re stayin’.”

Logan believed him.  He hauled him back up over the rail and dropped him onto the deck.  His muscular biceps and forearms ached.  Ellery was heavy, probably bordering on obese, and the wind had nearly torn him from his grip.

Dave panted and waited for his heartbeat to settle.  For a few seconds he felt it skipping, racing, and then seemingly stopping for an instant before finding a regular rhythm again.

“You always were a second rate detective,” Logan said.  “When we dock I’m going to stay and wait till you’re on your way back across the bay.”

“What’s to stop me having you arrested when we moor up?”

“Reynolds doesn’t want me in a cell, Ellery.  He needs me on a string to see if I can lead him to the guy that shot Arnie.  I reckon that if you had me lifted I’d be back on the street in thirty minutes, and you’d be in deep shit for fucking up.”

“So what’s the big deal?” Dave asked.  “Why the secrecy about where your stayin’?”

“Because those that want the information that Arnie had are looking for me.  I’m on their shit list, and they’re on mine.  Call it a private war that is underway.  And the guy heading up the away team is connected all the way up to City Hall.  That means he owns a lot of people, including cops.”

“And you think that I―”

“No, Ellery, I don’t actually think that you do much more than sit around on your fat ass eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and drinking coffee.  But I’ll play it safe and choose to trust no one.”

Paulie had hung back at the far side of the cabin among other passengers.  He watched Logan pass by and go out on deck, followed a minute later by Dave.  The rain-lashed windows made it difficult to see what was going on.  Dave was obviously keeping his eye on Logan: standing against the rail.  And then in a blur the tall figure of Logan appeared, and a few seconds later Dave was being hung over the side by his feet.

Racing across the wide cabin space between rows of seats, Paulie bumped and shoved other passengers out of the way as he rushed to Dave’s aid.  As he was about to break cover, Logan heaved Dave back on board.  Paulie stopped and moved back.  Dave was sat on his ass, looking up at Logan, and they were obviously talking.

Once docked at the terminal in the St George neighborhood of the island, everyone but staff and Dave disembarked.  Logan patiently waited: just sat on a bench until the ferry was once more easing out of the dock and heading back to Manhattan.

He got up and looked around, then walked across to the intersection of Richmond Terrace and Bay Street, in sight of the nearby Borough Hall and the Richmond County Bank Ballpark.  There were a lot of people climbing on buses.  He went over to a taxi stand, climbed in the back of the next in line and gave the name of a chemical plant over a mile from the motel as his destination.

Paulie got in a cab two back, showed the driver his badge and said that age-old and hackneyed line: “Follow that cab.”

Dave borrowed a cell from one of the other passengers, after convincing him that he was a cop.  Phoned the lieutenant and told him that he had been made, but that Paulie was still on Logan’s tail, over the bay on Staten Island.  He held back on telling Reynolds that Logan had disarmed him and dumped his gun over the side of the ferry.

“Get back here,” Travis said.  “And have Neilson get in touch the second he knows where Logan is staying.”

Travis unlocked the drawer of his desk and took out a burner phone.  He then left the office, to go down to street level and out into the now easing rain.  He walked half a block, to stop under the awning of a store and make a call.

Logan
paid the driver, who had a thick eastern European accent that could have been Polish, Hungarian or the Czech Republic, at a guess.  It crossed his mind that the majority of New York cab drivers were like a United Nations mix of ethnic divergence.  And many of them seemed to be strangers in a strange land in more ways than one, displaying a less than proficient knowledge of the five boroughs.

Walking across the road from where he had been dropped outside the main gate of Zygol Industries, Logan walked for half a mile before leaving the road and heading along a trail that led to part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.  It took him twenty minutes to reach an area of ponds and woods that were adjacent to Miller Field.  He had been drawn there without any prior intention to visit the place.  Time melted around him as he reached the overgrown swampy pond that had once been a popular swimming hole for youngsters.  The jetty was gone.  It had been rickety way back in seventy-nine, when he had been a fifteen-year old.  He supposed that the remains of the small pier’s wooden legs were still sunk into the bottom of the pond, like loose and rotting teeth, hidden from sight by the stagnant water that had been choked by pea-green algae and had become little more than a swamp.

Logan sat in long grass at the edge of the pond in almost the exact place where he had attempted to revive Richie Kerry, one of his best friends at the time.  He whispered the words that he had shouted as he had pumped the dead teenager’s chest, “Breath damn you, breath Richie, please don’t be dead.”

Climbing to his feet, he sighed.  So much had gone down since that long gone day, and yet at this moment it could have happened yesterday.  One minute Richie had been laughing and splashing and enjoying life to the full, and then he had dived beneath the surface and got his foot snagged up in the branches of a dead tree that was resting on the bottom in the mud.

Turning away from the pond, Logan walked north and came to the road half a mile further along from where he’d entered the woods. He was quite a distance from the motel and needed a lift. An eighteen-wheeler Mack from the chemical plant roared by, ignored his thumb and left him standing in a cloud of dust.  The next vehicle that came by was an old pickup.  It passed him, added blue tailpipe fumes to the dust and then slowed and pulled over to the grassy verge of the road and stopped.  He jogged up to it and bent down to look in the passenger window.

“Where you headin’?” Myrna Hoffman asked.

“As near to The Blue Heron as you’re going,” Logan said.

“Don’t tell me that you’re stayin’ at that dump?  Murray hasn’t put a lick of paint on it or checked the rooms for at least ten years.  He has some young Hispanic girl with big titties do the cleanin’, for him, and God knows what else.”

Logan smiled.

“So get in whydontcha?” Myrna said.  “I don’t have all day to sit here wastin’ gas while you stand out on the blacktop starin’ in at me.”

Logan climbed in the old Chevy.  The cab was clean and smelled of pine, and there was a Minnie Mouse figurine stuck on top of the dash.  The steel spring between the mouse’s head and neck kept her nodding and shaking to the sixties rock ‘n’ roll that was being played on what Logan could see was an original radio from that era.  The sound was bad and the volume kept fading in and out, but it was all part of the time capsule that the old woman appeared to live in.  It was harder to date her than the truck, and he didn’t even try to.  People were who they are, not the number of years they’ve lived.  She had long brassy-gray hair scraped back in a ponytail, and her face was creased, mainly with laughter lines.  He guessed that she’d had a hard but happy life, so far.

“Thanks,” Logan said almost as an afterthought as they cruised along the two-way at less than forty miles per hour.

“You’re welcome.  I’m Myrna Hoffman, son.  Who might you be?”

“I might be Logan,”

“A wise guy, huh?  Tell me your first name.”

“Joe.”

“Well, Joe Logan, what in Eisenhower’s name were you doing in the middle of nowhere on this back road?”

“Just visiting the past.  I was born on the island.  This will probably by my last visit.”

“Are you on vacation?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “I’ve just come back from out west to visit.”

Myrna didn’t believe him, but let it go.  Her curiosity knew no bounds, but she could tell that he didn’t want to elaborate.

Twenty minutes later Myrna stopped the truck at the end of the street that The Blue Heron was on and said, “This’ll have to do you, Joe.  I don’t wish to have to pass the time of day with Murray.  He doesn’t wash and he has a foul mouth.”

“You needn’t have gone out of your way,” Logan said as he got out.

“I didn’t.  I live nearby on Lamberts Lane.  I was just on my way back from my sister’s place.  She has a condo at Midland Beach.”

“Well thanks for the ride,” Logan said and closed the door.

Myrna smiled, gave him a wave and drove away.

Logan walked down the street toward the motel and didn’t notice the cab that passed by behind him.  He was deciding what to do next.  It was a given that Ellery had reported in and told Reynolds that he was somewhere on the island.  But it was a big island.  Even so, maybe they should leave it while they could.  He had no reason to think that the lieutenant was on the take from Quaid, Dalton or Fallon, but neither did he have any reason not to believe that he may be.

Paulie had been lucky.  The cab driver was a local guy.

“You want me to follow Leon?”  Dean Slack said.

“If he’s the guy driving, yeah.”

“I want twenty bucks before I move an inch,” Dean said.  “You’re a cop with a gun, and that means there could be trouble.”

Paulie didn’t have time to argue or get out and grab another cab.  The one that Logan was in had just vanished round a corner.  He leaned to the left, took his billfold from his back pants pocket, fished out a twenty and thrust it at the waiting hand of the driver.

“Just don’t fuckin’ lose him,” Paulie said.  “And keep well back.  I don’t want the guy in the cab to know we’re behind him.”

Dean said nothing.  Just dropped the transmission into drive and set off in pursuit.

When the cab in front stopped at the chemical plant and Logan got out, Dean pulled into the lot of a secondhand Toyota dealership, parking at the front of it and said, “What now?” as the distant figure walked across the highway and along the grassy verge in the other direction.

Paulie wasn’t sure what to do. He had thought that Logan would have been taken to a motel or maybe a house, not set off walking along a country road that was too straight to risk following him on foot.

Dean nosed the cab forward so that they could keep Logan in sight.  After a few minutes, and now just a speck in the distance, he angled into the trees and disappeared.

“Drive up there,” Paulie said.  “If you see him, keep goin’, if not, stop near where he vanished.”

Dean drove at a snail's pace and stopped at what he guessed as being forty or fifty yards short of a stand of trees that had a more golden canopy of autumn leaves than most of the others.  He realized that he had no idea why the cop was following the man.  The last thing he wanted was to wind up in the crossfire of a shootout.  Edging forward, he saw the opening to a narrow trail.

“He must have gone down there,” Dean said.

“Where does it lead?” Paulie asked.

“It’s an unmanaged area; part of Miller Field that’s just old woodland being strangled by undergrowth.”

“Does anyone live in there?”

“Not legally.  It’s part of the National Park Service, and there are no facilities.  They plan on clearing it out and revamping it, when they can afford to, which in these hard times may be never.”

“So what’s your best guess at why he’s gone in there?”

“Search me, buddy.  Maybe he needed to offload.  Best bet is that he’ll come back out.  There are trails all along this stretch.”

It paid off.  Paulie told Dean to cruise back and forth along the road, and to make random stops and wait awhile.  Paulie was sure that Logan had given him the slip, even though he was positive that he hadn’t been seen.  He sighed with relief when the big guy reappeared way up ahead of them and started to thumb for a ride.  A semi truck didn’t stop for him, but the rust-spotted pickup behind it did.

“Who is he?” Dean asked when Paulie told him to resume the tail.

“You don’t need to know,” Paulie said.

“I do if he’s armed and dangerous.  I’m a cab driver, not a cop.”

“You’ve got nothin’ to worry about, trust me on that,” Paulie said.

Dean followed the pickup, but wasn’t happy about it, and he didn’t believe cops.  Most that he’d had any dealings with were only slightly more trustworthy than politicians in his book.

The Chevy made a left and started to slow down.

“Drive by and stop,” Paulie said as they passed by the end of the street.  “And wait for me, I won’t be long.”

“I’ll need some more dough,” Dean said.  “Just in case he makes you and you don’t come back.”

Paulie gave him another twenty and got out and walked back to the end of the street.  The pickup reappeared, and he eyeballed an elderly woman behind the wheel before it made the turn at the corner and vanished.

Logan walked into the lot, past the office.  Murray was sitting outside in a rocking chair, squinting through his grimy spectacles as he set a new fly on a hook. The rain had petered out and the sky was a couple of shades brighter.  But it was cold.  Murray wore denim bib overalls over a thick plaid shirt and was a dead ringer for the Uncle Jesse character in the old TV series,
The Dukes of Hazzard
.  Lying on the walkway next to him was a sad-looking bloodhound with a graying muzzle.  It looked up at Logan and sniffed disdainfully, before resting its wrinkled face back down on its paws and closing its eyes.

“That’s Scout,” Murray said.  “Now that he’s got your scent he could give you a day’s start and run you down in the next county.  You look like a drowned rat.  How’d you like a cup of the best coffee you’ve ever tasted?”

Logan was about to say ‘No thanks, I’m good’ but stopped and said, “Yeah that would hit the spot,” as he hunkered down and scratched Scout behind one of his long, floppy ears.

Murray went in the office and was back out with a tin mug full of steaming java before his chair stopped rocking.

Logan took the cup and sipped the brew.  It wasn’t the best he’d ever tasted, but it was damn close.  He nodded his appreciation.

“So what’s your name?” Murray asked.

“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Logan answered.  “Sometimes ignorance really can be bliss.”

“So you and your friends are running from something, am I right?”

“Or
to
something, Murray,” Logan said.

Murray smiled, and Logan finished his coffee, thanked the old man and walked along the front of the motel to number eight, knocked and said, “It’s me.”

Benny opened the door with a look of relief on his face.  “Everything okay?” he said.

“It will be,” Logan replied as he entered the room.

But he was wrong.

Paulie had taken cover behind a thick screen of rhododendron bushes on the other side of Wild Avenue from The Blue Heron.  He watched Logan talking to some old fart outside the office.  Stayed put while his quarry drank coffee, and saw him walk to a room, knock at the door and go inside. He made his way back to the main road and settled his tab with the cabby, after making a call to lieutenant Reynolds and giving him Logan’s present location.