Accused

by Michael Kerr

  “We need to find Logan and put this case to bed.”

  “He’ll probably contact you again. You’ll have to arrange a meet, and then we can bring him in to give up what he knows.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE door flew open and the figure lurched out into the daylight.

  Holding his gun two-handed, Ed fired four shots and was pleased to see the man collapse to the ground. Handguns were fine close up, but he was standing almost thirty yards away from the cabin door, and so to bring down a moving target at that distance was satisfying. Time on the range was the key to accuracy. Shooting was like anything else, it took a lot of practice to master and become an expert shot.

  Keeping low and moving as quickly and quietly as possible to a slightly nearer vantage point, Ed saw movement at the rear of the cabin; a split-second blur of a figure vanishing into the foliage that was only several feet from the back door.

  Logan walked slowly through the trees in the direction that he knew the shots had been fired from. His plan was working.

  Mike and Ellie had followed Logan’s instructions and dressed the now dead Tim Garvey in an old work jacket of Mike’s and pulled a woolen watch cap on his head, then lifted him up into a standing position between them. Garvey could have been a drunk being helped to his feet by friends, with his arms around their shoulders, head lolling forward on his chest, and the toecaps of his shoes dragging along the floor.

  On Logan’s count of three, Mike opened the front door and he and Ellie Mae thrust the corpse out into the sunshine, for shots to ring out as it fell to the ground.

  Logan had left by the rear as he heard the gunshots.

  Standing as still as one of Mikes sculptures, Logan listened for the slightest sound of footfall on the twigs and leaves of the forest floor.

  “I’m behind you, Logan,” Ed said. “You make a big target. Drop the gun, link your fingers behind your neck and take three steps forward to that pine tree in front of you and kneel down.”

  Logan hesitated. Considered throwing himself sideways into a stand of bushes, but knew that any sudden move would be anticipated.

  “I’m waiting, Logan,” Ed said. “Do what I told you to or I’ll shoot you where you stand. The only reason you’re still breathing is because you have something I need.”

  Logan dropped the gun, turned to face Jansen and said, “You won’t get the video if you shoot me.”

  Ed chuckled and said, “I get it, you’re a Duke Wayne kind of guy; a regular American hero. Problem is you’re vulnerable, Logan, because for some reason you want to save the waitress’s life. So here’s the once in a lifetime offer: give up the phone with the video on and I’ll walk away. If you don’t, then I’ll kill the broad and anyone else in the cabin.”

  “You’ll kill us anyway,” Logan said. “Cassidy isn’t paying a hitman to just retrieve a cell phone.”

  Ed decided to shoot Logan in the leg. The ex-cop was right, and he was through talking to him.

  The sound of a hammer being pulled back from somewhere behind him diverted Ed’s attention. Spinning round he saw a guy pointing a shotgun at him, and flinched waiting for the impact as the weapon was discharged with a thunderous report.

  Mike had never fired a shot at a human being in his life. He had decided that Logan might need backup, so had left the cabin with the 12 gauge and told Ellie Mae to lock up behind him.

  Seeing that the guy was about to shoot Logan, Mike felt that he had no choice but to pull the trigger. Nervous tension made him snatch the shot and the load went high, missing the hitman completely.

  Logan dived for the ground, picked up the Glock and shot up at an angle into Jansen’s back.

  The round entered just above the waist, to travel up at an angle through Ed’s right lung and exit above his nipple, releasing a large amount of bright red and frothy blood that was ejected like the spume of a whale from the large exit wound.

  Ed was thrown forward and hit the ground face first, still alive for scant seconds to suffer a spiking, crippling pain in his chest, before a second bullet entered his skull to find egress through his forehead.

  There was absolute silence for ten seconds. Mike was shocked by what had taken place; just stood with the shotgun gripped tightly in his hands and stared at the body in front of him. Logan climbed to his feet and walked over to the corpse, knelt on one knee, placed his gun on the ground and used both hands to roll Jansen over. He then frisked the now dead hitman and found a wallet and a phone, nothing else.

  “There’s a body in my cabin, one out front of it, and this one here,” Mike said. “What the fuck are we going to do?”

  “Get rid of them,” Logan said. “No one knows where they are. They found the canoe that we stole and guessed right that I’d stashed it in the reeds. The trail from the canal led them to your cabin, and so they were checking it out. We’ll load them in the bed of your truck, and when it’s dark we can drive as near to the water as possible, transfer them to the canoes they came in and paddle a half mile south before tying the bodies into them. Once they’ve been sunk we can walk back to the truck and everything will be fine.”

  “Fine,” Mike shouted. “Three men dead and you say everything will be fine.”

  “They came here to kill us,” Logan said. “This guy is a professional hitman, and the other two were muscle for Cassidy. It was them or us, and you know it.”

  Mike had known that there would be a certain amount of risk in letting Logan and Ellie Mae stay with him. Now, with hindsight, he should have given them a ride to wherever they had asked him to, wished them good luck and left it at that. They had brought trouble to his door, big-time, but he had offered to help, even when Logan had said he could feasibly end up in the firing line. But retrospection was pointless.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “But sinking them in their canoes is a bad idea. The guy that rented them out will report these guys and his canoes missing when they don’t return. They’ll have a vehicle parked outside his office, and the canal would be checked.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Bury the bodies in a secluded spot well away from here, and carry the canoes into the woods. There’s a choice of really deep ponds to sink them in.”

  Logan liked Mike’s plan. He also thought that Ellie would now be safe to stay at the cabin while he dealt with Cassidy.

  An hour later the bodies of the three men were taped up in tarps and laid in the bed of Mike’s truck. Logan had picked up the duffel bag from where Jansen had dropped it in the clearing, and was examining the contents as he drank coffee that Ellie Mae had brewed.

  “We’ve got guns, phones, wallets and even an iPad,” Logan said as he put the items of interest on the tabletop. “I’ll keep Jansen’s pistol, and one of the phones. Everything else can go with the bodies.”

  Jansen’s wallet was of some interest. It contained major credit cards and drivers’ licenses in three different names: Edward L. Jansen, Steven Harrison and Charles Dennis Buchinsky. Logan smiled. The last name was the real name of the late actor, Charles Bronson; it seemed that even some hitmen had a sense of humor. There were three thousand dollars in Jansen’s wallet, and six hundred in total in the wallets of Cassidy’s men. Logan placed the bills on the table and said to Mike, “That’s for the inconvenience and danger that you’ve been subjected to. No point in throwing it away.”

  Mike left it where it lay. It was like robbing the dead, although he knew that money had no memory of the good or evil hands it had passed through.

  The sun set and daylight was seemingly swallowed by the horizon, and an almost full moon cast its cold luminosity to ward off total darkness.

  They tended to the canoes first. Ellie Mae stayed with Henry in the cabin, the shotgun loaded and leaning against the easy chair that she chose to sit in. The shutters at all the windows were closed and barred, as were the front and back doors.

  It took Logan and Mike over two hours to transport all three canoes to what was a water-filled
sinkhole in a limestone crater that most people didn’t even know existed. Logan punched holes in the canoes with the ax that he had employed to cut Don Collins’ arm off with, filled the front of each one with rocks and slid them down a steep bank into the deep water, for them to vanish beneath the surface into the depths of what Mike had been told by a county official was at least seven hundred feet below ground level.

  All that was left to do was dispose of the corpses, guns, wallets and the cell phones, which Logan had taken the SIM cards from and crushed. He kept the one that had belonged to Jansen, knowing that the hitman’s would be untraceable. He placed the rest in Jansen’s duffel bag with the iPad, keeping one Glock 17 with a silencer and an extra mag. He also kept Nash’s phone with the video confession on it, believing that it would also be a no contract burner phone.

  Mike drove to a gully in the back of beyond, where he and Logan sweated and labored digging a deep hole in soft ground that was riddled with a network of roots, before lifting the bodies from the back of the truck and rolling them into the hole. Logan tossed the bag in after them, into what was now a grave, and they refilled it and dragged the damp, moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree over the disturbed earth.

  “This is like a nightmare,” Mike said as he pitched the shovels into the back of the truck, before sitting down with his back up against the nearside rear wheel, to catch his breath. “I find it almost impossible to believe what we’ve just done.”

  “We buried three dangerous critters that posed a threat to us,” Logan said. “I’d be surprised if anyone even misses them. They came to kill us and got no more or less than they deserved.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that it happened?”

  “No, Mike. I don’t feel an ounce of compassion for lowlifes’ that live outside the law.”

  “What we’ve done is outside the law.”

  “We protected ourselves against armed men that came with deadly intent. All we’ve done is removed that threat. Everyone has the right to defend themselves.”

  Mike could think of nothing further to say. Logan’s expression was impassive, and what he said made sense. The three men had come to murder them in cold blood. They would have probably shot Henry as well. Somehow that made what they had done acceptable. But he just wished that he had never set eyes on Logan or Ellie Mae. He was now wholly embroiled in a seemingly ongoing life or death struggle.

  “It doesn’t end here, does it?” he eventually said as he got to his feet and climbed in the truck.

  Logan shook his head and said, “It won’t be over until Cassidy is dead. Guys like him don’t stop. He perceives Ellie and me to be a threat to him, and so he’ll keep coming at us.”

  “How do you propose to deal with it?”

  “Make a deal with him that I know he won’t keep. Arrange a meet, and then kill him.”

  “What’s to stop him and his men killing you?”

  “The fact that I know they’ll try to. You have to consider every possible outcome and plan for each and every one of them.”

  Back at the cabin they found that Ellie Mae had cleaned the blood up and disinfected every surface. The place was cleaner than Mike had ever kept it.

  Logan ran through a mental list. There would be a small amount of blood outside the front door where the body of Don Garvey had landed when Mike and Ellie threw it out as a diversion. And there would be considerably more at the side of the workshop. Collins had lost a lot from the stump of his severed arm. It meant more cleaning up to do, after he’d had a cup of coffee. He could think of nothing else that would point to the three men having ever been to the cabin. The only problem was that the guy that had rented them canoes would at some juncture phone the police. That would instigate a search, due to their vehicle still being at the launch point. And being one of only a very few properties along this stretch of the canal, they would visit the cabin. He and Ellie could not stay at Mike’s. After a few hours’ sleep they would have to move on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE truck headed north towards the city, and the couple listened to the radio as they merged with the morning rush hour traffic on I-90 and crossed the Mississippi by way of the Crescent City Connection.

  He was unshaven, wore a sweat-stained Zephyrs ball cap and a pair of shades. She had short hair and wore a baggy black tee with the Stones’ Lick motif on the front of it, and a pair of blue jeans that were loose and long in the leg.

  Coming off the bridge he headed southwest, stayed next to the river and parked in the dockside lot of a Cajun diner on Tchoupitoulas Street. Neither of them was hungry. They ordered coffee and talked.

  Events had moved on. Having eaten an early breakfast of ham and eggs, Logan had asked Mike to drive them to where they could catch a bus.

  “Bad idea,” Mike had said. “Take the truck, then let me know where you leave it and I can get a cab and go collect it.”

  “No guarantee that you’ll get it back,” Logan said.

  “It’s old and there’s more rust than metal holding it together. If I see it again, fine, if not then your need is greater than mine. I’ve kept meaning to upgrade.”

  Logan placed his rucksack on the table, unzipped the top and rummaged underneath the clothing, to open a large ziplock bag, withdraw two banded wads of bills that totaled ten thousand dollars and place them next to the other money that he’d taken from the now buried hoodlums’ wallets: “Here,” he said to Mike. “This should help you purchase a decent replacement.”

  Mike frowned.

  “Take it,” Logan said. “I always seem to end up with an embarrassing amount of walking money that I don’t need.”

  Mike nodded and said, “I’ll have to report the truck stolen. I’ll hold off for twenty-four hours, so change the plate if you need to keep it for longer than that.”

  Logan shook hands with Mike, and Ellie Mae gave him a long, hard hug and a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thanks, you helped us out and got involved in something really heavy, Mike.”

  “When Logan makes everything right for you, come back and visit,” Mike said. “Maybe you could design a website for me, or sort out the chaos of my accounts, or both.”

  “I may just take you up on that,” Ellie Mae said.

  Mike jotted his cell number down on a scrap of paper, handed it to her and said, “Call me when you’ve done what you have to.”

  After fussing Henry, they got in the truck and headed along the bumpy track, dressed in clothes that Mike had given them.

  “Where are we going now?” Ellie Mae said to Logan after sipping her coffee and actually considering the possibility of a future with Mike Audley in it.

  “We’ll find a sleazy motel to stay at, run by someone who isn’t interested in anything but folding green, and doesn’t ask questions,” Logan said. “And I’ll phone that detective again and send her the video. Any extra grief we can put Cassidy to will help our cause. And I’ll talk to him again as well and ruffle his feathers. Problem is the video isn’t collaborated, and LaSalle will say that he said what he had to, to save his life.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Shot him in both feet and put him to sleep.”

  “You’re a freakin’ dangerous kind of guy to be around, Logan. Why are you doing all this?”

  “Because I got accused of being implicated in the murders at Dicky’s Diner, and you helped save my ass by telling the detectives that I was out cold on the floor before anything happened.”

  “So you’re risking your life to protect me?”

  Logan shrugged: “Cassidy needs to be doing hard time for all the misery he causes. I’d hate to leave New Orleans with the knowledge that he’s still at liberty to carry on being a player.”

  “And what do you suppose will become of me?” Ellie Mae said.

  “With Cassidy taken care of you’ll be able to start afresh. I got the feeling that Mike Audley was a little besotted with you. Maybe you two could be more than friends.”

  Ellie Mae felt herse
lf blush. She would love to live at the cabin with Mike and Henry. Mike was a nice guy whom she considered to be a gentle and caring man. She had been attracted to him for his qualities, and had seen the way he had looked at her when they had held hands. Maybe good could come from bad. Logan was a good man as well, cared for her safety, and at the moment was her rock, but would move on from New Orleans and her life if and when the threat was negated. He wasn’t a keeper; just a drifter who’d decided to hang around and make sure that she was safe before he metaphorically rode off into the sunset. She didn’t know much about him; he kept his cards close to his chest.

  Logan went out into the lot and phoned police headquarters and asked to speak to Detective Pleshette while Ellie Mae used the rest room. He told the dispatcher that he was Detective Rick Lewis, calling from the Baton Rouge Police Department.

  “I’ll get back to you, Detective Lewis,” Lucy said when the call was put through.

  “No need,” Logan said. “It’s me.”

  “You need to come in, Logan. A lot has happened during the last twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ll drop by when I think it’s safe to, not before. Give me a cell number and I’ll send you the video of LaSalle purging his soul and implicating Cassidy with the shootings at the diner.”

  “Where are LaSalle and Nash?” Lucy said.

  There was a pause: “The last time I saw them they were at LaSalle’s apartment in Terrytown.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “In what sense?”

  “They’re both missing. All we found were bullet holes and blood.”

  “I guess Cassidy decided that they were like Ellie and me, loose ends. When I left they were both there.” That was the truth.

  “And Brad Dicky and his wife got hit at their home. Did you happen to call by to see them as well?”