Accused

by Michael Kerr

  ACCUSED

  A Joe Logan Thriller

  -6-

  By

  Michael Kerr

  Copyright © 2017 Michael Kerr

  Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author.

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Also By Michael Kerr

  DI Matt Barnes Series

  A REASON TO KILL

  LETHAL INTENT

  A NEED TO KILL

  CHOSEN TO KILL

  A PASSION TO KILL

  RAISED TO KILL

  The Joe Logan Series

  AFTERMATH

  ATONEMENT

  ABSOLUTION

  ALLEGIANCE

  ABDUCTION

  The Laura Scott Series

  A DEADLY COMPULSION

  THE SIGN OF FEAR

  Other Crime Thrillers

  DEADLY REPRISAL

  DEADLY REQUITAL

  BLACK ROCK BAY

  A HUNGER WITHIN

  THE SNAKE PIT

  A DEADLY STATE OF MIND

  TAKEN BY FORCE

  DARK NEEDS AND EVIL DEEDS

  DEADLY OBSESSION

  COFFEE CRIME CAFE

  A REASON TO LIVE

  Science Fiction / Horror

  WAITING

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE STRANGE KIND

  RE-EMERGENCE

  Children’s Fiction

  Adventures in Otherworld

  PART ONE – THE CHALICE OF HOPE

  PART TWO – THE FAIRY CROWN

  ‘EVERY damn thing can change in an instant for better or worse. You need to dig deep sometimes, find the strength to adapt, deal with whatever it is the best way that you can, and then move on.’

  ~ Joe Logan

  Don’t trust everything you see or hear, or the word of strangers, ever. Nothing is necessarily what it appears to be. Let your instinct be your guide, because people are unpredictable and don’t always do what you expect them to.

  ~ Michael Kerr

  CHAPTER ONE

  CLAYTON LaSalle slipped the 9mm Sig Sauer handgun from the shoulder rig under his powder blue suit jacket and checked that the ten round magazine was fully loaded. It was, and he’d known that it was, but checking more than once never harmed. He returned the semiautomatic pistol to the holster, settled back in the rear seat and listened to the Marvin Gaye CD that Dwayne was singing along to in a deep, tuneless voice.

  It was eight p.m. The light was quickly being sucked from the clear, cloudless sky, and the moon would soon be creeping up over the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

  “Almost there,” Dwayne Nash said, giving up warbling I Heard It Through The Grapevine as the blue and red neon sign of Dicky’s Diner came into view up ahead, flickering at the side of the quiet highway, southwest of the ‘Big Easy’ on the Mississippi River.

  “What’s this jerk’s problem?” Kyle Tate asked Dwayne as he leaned forward in the front passenger seat and drummed his fingers on the dash to the beat of the music.

  “The boss loaned Dicky the foldin’ green to open this dump,” Dwayne said as he slowed and pulled onto the gravel side lot and parked between two eighteen wheelers. “He still owes over a hundred grand, and all he’s payin’ off is the interest. Talkin’ to him hasn’t worked, so the boss wants us to enlighten him as to the fact that the honeymoon is over.”

  “How enlightened do we make him?” Clayton said.

  “We do whatever it takes to impress on him that only upping his payments will save him from losin’ his business and gettin’ his legs broken.”

  “And if he can’t cough up?” Kyle said as they got out of the gleaming Carbon black Buick La Crosse sedan and walked purposefully towards the single-story diner.

  “It’s principal with the boss,” Dwayne said. “He thinks that Dicky is playin’ him, and that isn’t acceptable. They’ve known each other forever, and so this turd doesn’t believe that he’s at risk. If he doesn’t hand over at least ten grand tonight, the boss wants the diner signed over to him.”

  Dwayne and Kyle sauntered up to the main door, and Clayton went around to the rear to enter by way of the kitchen.

  Kyle looked at the menu board that was affixed to the wall facing the door, while Dwayne walked between tables and the counter to where a waitress was pouring coffee for a guy sitting on a stool.

  Dwayne had eyeballed the people in the diner. There were only five customers: the guy on the stool, two more in a window booth, and a middle-aged couple at a table in a corner. He didn’t want this to turn ugly with witnesses. Just wanted to sit down with Dicky in his office out back and keep it a private matter.

  Lots of factors can come together to create a clusterfuck out of what should have been a simple job. The first complication was a French-speaking short order cook with garlic on his breath and a bad attitude, who took exception to Clayton entering his workspace uninvited. He stood in Clayton’s path with an ugly looking meat cleaver in his hand and told him to get the fuck out of his kitchen.

  “I need to see Dicky,” Clayton said. “Where is he, in his office?”

  “What you need is to use the front door,” Gabriel Marchand said in broken English as he stuck his stubble-covered chin out and blocked Clayton’s way.

  There was no reasoning with some guys. Given a choice they always seemed to opt for the wrong one.

  Clayton said, “Okay, no problem, Frenchie,” and turned as if to leave, but lashed out with the edge of his hand to hit the little frog in the throat with enough force to fracture his larynx.

  Gabriel went down like a sack of Idaho potatoes. The razor-sharp cleaver he had been holding spun out of his hand and clattered on the tiled floor as he cradled his throat and attempted unsuccessfully to draw breath.

  Clayton hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. The guy must have bones as porous as a chicken’s. Stepping over the soon to be dead cook, Clayton made his way through to the rear of the Diner’s counter, where he could see through the serving hatch that Dwayne was standing facing him, asking a female employee – wearing a creased blue and white striped blouse and a short black skirt – if Dicky was on the premises. She was slim, had long bottle-blonde hair and could have been aged eighteen or fifty from his viewpoint, but her husky voice wasn’t sexy, it was that of someone who’d smoked two packs of cancer sticks a day for decades.

  “Yeah, I’ll call him,” Ellie Mae Sawyer said to Dwayne, reaching for the phone next to the register. “Who shall I say wants him?”

  “No need for that, darlin’,” Dwayne said as Clayton stepped through the doorway from the kitchen to stand next to Ellie Mae. “We’re big boys; we can find our own way.”

  Ellie Mae didn’t like the hard-eyed look on the big man’s broad and scarred face. She had spent over thirty years serving up coffee and fried food in a shitload of roadhouses and diners in the New Orleans area, and could recognize trouble when it walked in, and so she picked up the phone, only to have her wrist gripped by a rough hand that exerted enough pressure to make her drop it as she gasped in pain.

  “Listen up, bitch,” Clayton said. “If you don’t want to spend the next f
ew weeks in an intensive care unit, just chill and keep your pretty nose out of stuff that doesn’t concern you. Okay?”

  The local trucker that Ellie Mae had just poured a fresh cup of coffee for got up off his stool, advanced to within a couple of feet from where the confrontation was taking place and said, “Everything sweet, Ellie Mae? Or are these two city slickers giving you a hard time?”

  Dwayne turned and smiled at the burly teamster and said, “Best advice I can give you is to finish up your coffee and beat it, before you find yourself in a world of pain.”

  Neal Brody was thirty-one, an ex-con with a history of using his fists to settle any argument. The two guys in sharp suits didn’t know who they were dealing with.

  “You’ve got five seconds to show me your backs heading for the door,” Neal said to them.

  Clayton eased back the side of his jacket to let the asshole see a glimpse of the holstered gun.

  Kyle sighed. He had studied the menu and decided to have a loaded Dicky’s burger and fries while they were here, but reckoned that things were turning ugly and that he would have to wait and grab a bite later, back in town.

  Stepping through the arch from the lobby, Kyle approached Clayton and Dwayne, only to pause in mid-stride as one of the two guys in the window booth began to stand up. He looked to be extremely tall and fit, and was obviously going to interfere.

  Drawing his gun, Kyle swung it hard across the side of the big guy’s head, catching him plumb behind the ear in a sweet spot that caused him to fall forward over the table. He hit him again to make sure that he was out cold, and stepped to the side as he rolled on to the floor. The other guy made a lunge for Kyle, to grip him by the throat with a blocky, calloused hand and begin to squeeze.

  All hell broke loose.

  What should have been a walk in the park was turning as sour as his mood. Kyle pushed the muzzle of his gun up against the guy’s stomach and put two rounds in him.

  Seth Norris had driven his beloved Peterbilt for the last time. As he slipped back onto the bench seat with both hands now pressed firmly against his ample and now bleeding gut, he knew that he would never see his wife, Anne, or his twelve year-old daughter, Madison, ever again.

  “Holy shit!” Clayton said and let go of the woman’s wrist as both he and Dwayne were distracted by the gunshots.

  Everything happened in scant seconds. Ellie Mae dropped to the floor and crawled around the edge of the door behind her and into the kitchen, to climb to her feet and sidestep the body of the dead cook and flee through the rear door, out into the lot.

  The trucker, Neal Brody, made a grab for the gun that Clayton was removing from his holster, but was too slow and got a bullet in his forehead that blew him off his feet.

  The gray-haired couple didn’t move. Shock had frozen them in place like waxwork dummies. Greg and Angela Marshall had popped out for a quiet meal, to be caught up in a situation that they wanted to be no part of. Greg’s coffee cup was in his hand, midway between the tabletop and his gaping mouth, and Angela was holding her fork next to her lips with a piece of fried chicken skewered on the tines.

  “The broad,” Dwayne said. “She’s on the loose. Go and see to her while I clean up here.”

  Clayton went out back, wondered if the waitress was hiding in a storeroom, but decided that she was too spooked to think straight and so would have left the diner and be running for her life, literally. Stepping outside the door, into the lot, Clayton looked and listened, but saw and heard nothing, and didn’t have the time to search for her.

  Dwayne walked over to where the couple were sitting and staring at him as though he was a little green man who’d just stepped out of a flying saucer. He drew his Glock and double-tapped them both in the head. It wasn’t personal, just insurance. Witnesses could lead to you being strapped to a gurney with a needle in your arm over at the state pen in Angola.

  “Time to leave,” Kyle said through a smile after watching the couple being dispatched.

  Brad Dicky – known as Dicky by friends and family alike – heard the shots from where he was sitting at his desk in the small office at the end of the passage on which the rest rooms were located.

  Armed with a Remington twelve gauge pump-action shotgun, Dicky made his way along the passage, to peek around the corner of the wall to see what was happening, before stepping out and shooting a man in the back, having noted that he was holding a pistol in his hand, and that there was a lot of blood and dead or dying people in the diner.

  Kyle’s smile froze as the heavy load from the cartridge punched a grapefruit-sized hole between his shoulder blades, pulverizing his spine, heart and lungs and knocking him forward and down like a felled tree. He was, though, saved the pain of his face striking the floor, due to having died almost instantaneously.

  Dwayne spun away from the corpses of the couple, went down on one knee and fired three shots at Dicky. The first hit him in the left thigh, the second grazed his cheek, and the third missed altogether and buried in the wall next to him.

  Dicky ducked back into the passage, to limp along it to his office, lock himself inside and sit in his swivel chair, watching blood bubble through the material of his pants leg. He rested the shotgun on the desktop facing the door, finger curled around the trigger as he used his free hand to punch 911 in his cell.

  Clayton heard the shots, and then the louder blast of a shotgun. He went back inside to find Dwayne knelt beside a guy lying on the floor next to one of the booths, placing his now wiped gun in his hand.

  “Stop fuckin’ around,” Clayton said. “We need to be gone before the cops arrive.”

  Dwayne got up and they headed out the door, ran across the lot and climbed into the Buick. Clayton drove north into the city, wondering what the hell he was going to tell the boss.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LOGAN estimated that the drive up from Fort Myers in Florida to the small community three miles east of Ozark in Alabama was a little over five hundred miles, which would take the best part of eleven hours with stops for food and rest rooms. Not being in any hurry, he decided to come off I-75 at I-10 and stay the night at a motel on the outskirts of Tallahassee.

  Boo Mercer was in the rear seat of the Ford Fusion, fitfully sleeping with the help of the large amount of pain killers in his system. His left leg was swollen up and he was almost positive that it would have to be amputated below the knee. He wanted to hate the bitch that had set the old bear trap on the kitchen floor of the country store in Alva. But he had been breaking in, and so he guessed that he deserved what he got. His priorities had changed. He’d been a lowlife with bad intentions working for a gangster, Nick Cady, doing things that he wasn’t proud of to make a living and get by. Logan had killed Cady and a few others during and then after he had rescued a three year old girl who’d been abducted. Fort Myers was now a marginally better place for Logan having got involved and taken Cady out. Although there was always another ‘wise guy’ ready to step up and fill the gap. Crime was still organized and big business. Always had been; always would be.

  Logan pulled off the Interstate north of Tampa, stopped at a strip mall, turned to look at Boo and said, “You awake, son?”

  “Yeah,” Boo said. “Where are we?”

  “At a strip mall near Tampa. You hungry?”

  “A little. But I don’t think I can walk.”

  “Sure you can,” Logan said. “We’re right outside a Perkins, just twenty paces from the door, and your leg’s splinted and bound up as tight as a drum.”

  With support from Logan, Boo limped and groaned his way into the family restaurant. They were shown to a table next to the door leading into the restrooms, and a young waitress, with the shape and looks that would probably make a priest ditch his dog collar for, approached them and placed a couple of glasses of iced water on the table.

  Logan ordered a Classic burger with pepper Jack cheese, fries and a pot of coffee. Boo had the same meal with a large Coke. They ate slow and easy, used the rest room, and t
hen got back in the car and didn’t stop again until the Interstate swept north of Tallahassee and they were on its western fringe.

  Logan came off I-10 onto highway 196 and soon saw a faded sign for what was a cheap motel to stay the night.

  The Live Oak Lodge was a seedy twelve unit construction, built before Logan had been born. It was set among a few trees that were almost weighed down with Spanish moss, and the lot was hard-packed earth with potholes like small craters and just a sprinkling of dirty gravel.

  Logan parked sideways on and well away from the office, cut the engine and lights and walked over and pushed open the door. The guy behind the low counter was on the phone. Didn’t even look up to acknowledge he had a prospective guest, just carried on talking for another thirty seconds before saying, “Fuck you, Larry,” and cradling the phone so hard that it bounced off onto the desktop.

  Art Jenner took a pack of Winston from the breast pocket of a corduroy shirt, fired up a cigarette with a throwaway lighter and said: “You wanna room?”

  “That’s the plan,” Logan said.

  “Forty bucks.”

  “I want to sleep in it, not buy it,” Logan said. “How much for cash?”

  “Thirty-five,” Art said. “Seein’ as how it’s late, and that if you could afford to lay your head down at the Hampton you wouldn’t be stoppin’ here.”

  That was fine by Logan. Paying cash meant that the bony old guy with a drifting left eye and bad case of body odor wouldn’t ask for ID. He filled in a registration slip with a false name and vehicle details that he knew would be consigned to a wastebasket in the morning, and then took the key to number six, which the brusque motel owner tossed onto the countertop.

  Inside the room, Boo switched on the wall-mounted TV and sat on one of the two Queen-size beds, up against the padded headboard with his injured leg straight out and the two pillows – that were as thin as the faded comforter – behind his back.