Accused

by Michael Kerr

  “Behave, Detective,” Logan said. “Dicky was a witness to the fact that I had nothing to do with what happened at his diner. And if you’re getting a colleague to trace this call, be aware that the second after I forward the video to you I’m going to take the SIM card out and destroy it, and dump the phone. Give me a number, now, or I’m gone.”

  Lucy gave him her cell number. Seconds later she received the file.

  “Got it,” she said. “Meet me, Logan, one on one. We need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. When I know that Ellie is going to be safe, then I’ll be happy to answer any questions. Till then I know that Cassidy will have corrupt cops on his payroll, so excuse my lack of confidence in your department.”

  “I’m not on the take, Logan.”

  “And I’m not someone that should be a person of interest. Do your job, nail Cassidy, and save me the trouble of having to do it for you.”

  “There’s no place for vigilantism in―”

  The call was terminated. Logan had gone. Lucy thumped the top of her desk, hurt her hand and said, “Fuck you, Logan,” through gritted teeth.

  “What just pissed you off, Luce?” Rod said as he walked past cubicles towards her in the bullpen workspace that was the domain of the detectives.

  “Logan just called to say hi and sent me the video of the Q and A he had with LaSalle.”

  “So let’s watch it,” Rod said as he sat on the edge of her desk. “This could be a snuff movie, but without the final scene of Logan blowing LaSalle away.”

  “I don’t believe that Logan is stupid enough to kill people unless as a last resort and in self defense.”

  “Just open your mind to the possibility that he’s taking out everyone that he considers being a threat to the waitress. He’s a fucking drifter these days, Luce. He could have just caught the first bus out of town and kept going. He didn’t have to stay here and be involved.”

  “It’s called chivalry,” Lucy said. “Ellie Mae Sawyer needed help, especially after the trooper and motel owner were murdered at The Pilgrims’ Rest. I daresay if he hadn’t taken on responsibility for her, he’d be gone.”

  “Whatever the reason, the fact is if he killed Cassidy’s men we need to bring him in.”

  Lucy accepted that under normal circumstances no one should put themselves above the law. But in Logan’s position would she have much in the way of reliance in law enforcement that had failed him and Ellie Mae once already? He was doing what was necessary to keep them both alive, knowing that if Cassidy discovered their whereabouts it would probably prove fatal. And having been a cop he knew that every police department in the land had its share of personnel that would take bribes for information, or in some cases actively help criminals. There were bad apples in every barrel that needed to be found and discarded, but that was easier said than done.

  Trooper Dave Ballinger had been one such ‘bad apple’. He had been in law enforcement for ten years, was married and had a young son. The problem was he also had a coke habit that he couldn’t shake, and his pay check was stretched beyond the limit. He owed a dealer a few thousand bucks and the hole he’d dug for himself just got deeper and deeper as he snorted himself into a corner.

  The New Orleans mafia was a dwindling force, but still operating; narcotics and gambling being their main way of making money. A Capo for the city’s Mafia, Joey Farino was informed by Ballinger’s supplier that he was in over his head, and so Dave got a visit at home by two guys with broad shoulders and dark suits. They looked more like federal agents than hoodlums. They laid it on the line; settle his debt within twenty-four hours or risk his wife or child suffering a fatal accident. The alternative was for him to be on call and offer up any information that would be helpful to the organization they worked for. He and his family would be safe if he chose the latter, which he did.

  Dave’s body was found in his car. He had finished a late shift and climbed in it and done what too many cops had done down the years, eaten his gun, as it was informally termed. He had left a note, stating that he’d been under threat and pressure of his own making, and that this was the only way out he could come up with.

  Lucy had liked Dave. He’d been a good cop gone bad, but couldn’t live with selling out his colleagues, so took drastic measures. And he hadn’t named anyone in his suicide note, so was, to her mind, protecting his family from retribution that the mafia was infamous for carrying out.

  It was obvious that Logan was going to ensure that Cassidy would not be in any position to finish what he’d started, but had, so far, been unable to complete. And the only outcome that she could envisage was one or both of them being killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ELLIE Mae got in the truck, opened the window and lit a cigarette. Logan leaned against the driver’s door and used Jansen’s cell to phone Cassidy.

  “You made a big mistake,” Logan said when the call was answered.

  “You made the mistake by burning down my warehouse.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake, Cassidy. You had no intention of doing a deal, that’s why you flew a hitman in from Houston to find and kill us. Jansen and the two assholes with him ran out of luck. They succeeded in tracking us down, but won’t be coming back. This is his phone I’m speaking to you on.”

  “So let’s start fresh from now and make a deal.”

  “Why would you keep it?”

  “Because if you took out Jansen, I guess you’re a bigger threat to me and my family than I thought you’d be. I want this to be over with.”

  “I’ll call you again with terms, after you’ve had time to let it sink in that I won’t stop at burning your properties down and taking out your hired help. If you want to get out of this without becoming a widower with no children, fine. Sometimes you’ve got to bite the bullet, Cassidy. Maybe you’re too dumb or arrogant to do that. It’ll be your choice.”

  Logan ended the call and got in the truck and drove another two miles before he pulled into the lot of the Lucky7 Motor Inn. The weathered gray planks of the single story building’s frontage broadcast the fact that the Inn was ancient and had been neglected. It was in an area of dockland that would not be visited by many tourists; just a cheap overnight stay for travelers on a tight budget. There would be no Wi-Fi access, courtesy toweling robes or free coffee and doughnuts, but all they needed was a place to hideout. A bed is a bed in the dark of night.

  Ellie Mae stayed in the truck while Logan went in the office and paid seventy bucks for two nights in what he knew would be a room that all but vagrants would turn their noses up at. You sometimes got what you paid for in life, and he wasn’t paying much.

  “Fill in the registration card,” Lester Watson said, nodding towards a ballpoint pen next to some cards on the countertop as he combed his overlong greasy hair back with stubby fingers, then handed Logan a key. “You’re in number four.”

  Logan registered as Jack London, with a Chicago address and a fake plate number for the truck, which was parked away from sight of the office.

  “Check out is eleven a.m.,” Lester said as he gave the card a cursory glance and watched the tall guy head for the door. “And don’t go by looks, Mr. London, I read Call of the Wild and White Fang when I was in high school.”

  Logan smiled. He acknowledged that he still had the capacity to underestimate some people, which was a little disconcerting. He knew that presumption could be a foolish thing to practice.

  Lester smiled back, stuffed the bills in his pants pocket and then tore the card in half and tossed it in a waste basket.

  The room was marginally cleaner than Logan had expected it to be, and the sheets on both twin beds appeared to be unsoiled. There was one easy chair, two night tables with lamps screwed to the tops of them, and a small, wall-mounted TV. He’d slept in much worse places, and even had a one-person tent folded up in his rucksack for when he found himself out in the wilderness on his travels. Being alone was something that he often savored. Some Greek guy,
probably Aristotle, had allegedly said, ‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god’. That was bullshit. He was neither. He was just a man that liked the quietude of his own company for much of the time, without being a part of other folks’ lives. They had points of view, beliefs and ideals that were usually not in line with his, and so he had no wish to spend more time than necessary listening to their credo. You needed to forge your own path as you traveled through life.

  “We can’t run forever, Logan,” Ellie Mae said as she sat on the edge of the bed and just stared at the worn and fraying carpet. “He’ll just keep looking till he finds us.”

  “What do you suggest? Do you want to leave town, and phone your mother in Baton Rouge and tell her that she can never go back home? Would you feel safe in another State, or would you be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life?”

  “I want to feel safe. I didn’t do anything to merit being hunted like a freakin’ animal.”

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Ellie. Millions of people get up each morning thinking that it’ll be just another day that will unfurl without any real drama. For most it will be, but others will be struck down by fatal heart attacks, or be killed in road traffic accidents, or suffer the loss of someone they love, or get told that they have a terminal illness, or that their child has a brain tumor. The only sure thing is that you can’t take anything for granted.”

  Ellie Mae knew that what Logan had said was the god’s honest truth of it. She was old enough to have lost all four of her grandparents, and her late husband’s death had come as a bolt out of the blue. She still felt a little guilty for having being glad. It didn’t do to dwell on the many things that could happen to blight your life or steal it away from you. Looking forward was part of the human condition. It was a built-in outlook that probably kept a lot of people from going insane or committing suicide. You had to believe that there was a point to it all, plan for the future, and not dwell on the fact that it wouldn’t last forever and could end in the blink of an eye at any time.

  “I don’t want to run,” Ellie Mae said with conviction. “I shouldn’t have to.”

  “Then I’ll do my best to make sure you’re safe,” Logan said. “Tomorrow night this will all be settled, one way or another.”

  “How?”

  “I haven’t worked out the fine details yet, but I expect Cassidy to back down and cease to be a problem. All we need to do for the time being is keep a low profile. Tomorrow we’ll check into another motel, after I change plates on the truck.”

  They took turns to shower. There was tepid water and even some small tablets of damp soap and a couple of thin towels.

  It was gone eight p.m. when Logan drove ten blocks north to Tom’s Place on Calvin Street. It was a steak and burger joint and looked the same as a thousand other diners that Logan had eaten in. They always smelled of burned fat and coffee, and that suited him just fine, increasing his hunger as he walked in the door behind Ellie Mae. A waitress led them to a booth, took their drinks order and left them with menus.

  “That girl is how I was, decades ago,” Ellie Mae said. “I hope she isn’t still serving junk food and getting by on minimum wage and tips when she’s my age. It’s like being a bottom feeder in a pond. You smile a hundred times a day and meet a lot of people you’d rather not, and before you know it your middle-aged with swollen ankles and always dog-tired.”

  “What is, is,” Logan said, which was a saying he’d used more times than he could count.

  “That’s sad but true. What are you really running away from, Logan?”

  “A whole lot of people have asked me that. I like to think I’m running towards something, not away from anything. I got sick of being a cop. I guess in the beginning I thought I’d make a difference, but it became disheartening. It was like swimming against the tide and getting nowhere in a hurry. It wears you down. Most cops end up just hoping to survive the twenty years you need for a pension of half pay. I’d got no ties, so I thought I’d travel for a while, see new places and maybe wind up back where I was born on Staten Island.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing. I love the life I lead. I move around on a whim, stopping wherever I want to, sometimes for a day, sometimes a month. I even do casual labor now and then, because I choose to, not because I need to.”

  “So you just came to the Big Easy to see the sights?”

  “Yeah. I like Jazz and the blues, and I’ve never been here before.”

  “And then you dropped by Dicky’s for a meal and look what happened.”

  “Life happened, Ellie.”

  The waitress came back and took their order, and an hour later they were back out on the street, and Logan drove around until he found an alley with an ageing Honda Accord parked in the darkness. With the plates swapped he drove back to the motel.

  “I need to go out for a while,” Logan said as Ellie Mae used the tacky remote to turn the TV on. “Lock up after me. I won’t be long.”

  Ellie Mae didn’t ask him where he was going. He would have told her if he’d wanted to. He just left, carrying his damn rucksack, which he always kept close by, as though it was a bag full of diamonds.

  The cheap package didn’t offer many channels. She surfed what there was and settled for a rerun of an old CSI episode. It was probably from the first or second season, over fifteen years ago, and William Peterson, Marg Helgenberger, Gary Dourdan and George Eads all looked so young. Time played tricks on your mind. It seemed like yesterday that she had watched the episode the first time it aired, and yet she had been just thirty back then, and the years in between had for the most part crawled by, and she was now in her mid-forties and had nothing to show for the passage of time in between but lines on her face and mainly bad memories.

  The show ended, and Logan hadn’t returned. What if he’d just quit on her; got behind the wheel and driven away from New Orleans? Her heart thudded, and she bit the inside of her cheek until it made her eyes water. What would she do if he didn’t come back? What could she do? There was nowhere for her to go. She was still in mortal danger. ‘Stupid freakin’ woman’, a voice in her head said, cutting through the dismal thoughts. She breathed in deeply, having not realized that she had been holding her breath. Then breathed in again, got up and went into the bathroom to rinse her face with cold water. It was as hot as a sauna in the room, and the noisy AC unit was doing little more than circulating the heat. Commonsense cut in and dismissed thoughts of being abandoned. Logan wasn’t the type to run away. If he had decided to go, then he would have told her so to her face, but uncertainty still cast an unbidden and tenebrous spell. He would not desert her, but that did not guarantee that he would return. He was just one man, and whatever he had left the motel to go and do could feasibly get him killed. They had been found at the cabin, so to her mind it wasn’t safe here, or anywhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PARKING on a street that was close to the river, Logan walked along it to where a flickering red neon sign hung over the open doorway of a rundown bar by the name of The Boat Hook. The noise of music and voices spilled out into the night. Way back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century the waterfront building had been a ship’s chandler; a store supplying everything that was needed to furnish a ship for it’s next voyage.

  The barkeep was a big man with a ruddy complexion, a network of purple veins coating his bulbous nose, and only one eye, unless the leather patch he wore was an affectation, which Logan thought doubtful.

  “Bourbon,” Logan said as One-eye approached him, wiping the top of the oak counter with a damp gray cloth that was probably laying down more germs than it was removing.

  “You want ice?” Eddie Malloy said with what sounded to be – and was – an Irish accent, due to his being an immigrant to the U.S. after the Troubles had supposedly been resolved.

  Logan shook his head as he sat on a stool and took in the faces of other patrons that looked like many that
he had seen on a daily basis in the holding cells of police precincts.

  The big black guy sitting on the next stool in line gave him the once over and said, “You a cop?”

  Logan took a sip of what he decided was watered down and low quality bourbon and studied the Morgan Freeman look-alike and said, “If I was, I’d be doing my drinking in a better class of dive than this.”

  “Just askin’,” Marcus Brand said. “You got that air about you, like most pigs have.”

  “Name is Jason Kidd,” Logan said, using the name of a former New York Knicks basketball player, who as far as Logan knew was now a coach. “I worked on a production line for Ford in Detroit; got laid off and decided to visit my brother out here and see what New Orleans had to offer.”

  “I’m Marcus Brand. And this town hasn’t had much to offer since Katrina hit. The majority of us common people are still sufferin’ from what that motherfuckin’ bitch of a hurricane did to the city. You can’t be poor and black and expect much from the honkies holdin’ the purse strings.”

  “Same in a lot of places” Logan said. “Detroit was bankrupt. Some areas of the city are still so sparsely populated that you’d think there’d been some kind of apocalypse. It nearly became the biggest ghost town in the country.”

  “Yeah, I guess a lot of folk are feelin’ the pinch. I used to play horn in a combo, made a good livin’ and appeared at all the class clubs in the French Quarter.”

  Logan didn’t need to ask why he wasn’t still doing it. The man nursed a glass of draft beer with twisted fingers that had swollen joints. Arthritis had taken his livelihood away from him.

  “You ready for another drink, Mr. Brand?” Logan said.

  “I’ll have to decline, Mr. Kidd, because I don’t have enough dough to buy you one back.”

  “No sweat. You drink bourbon?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “You’ve got a bottle of Wild Turkey on the top shelf,” Logan said to One-eye. “Crack it and pour us both a large measure, no ice.”