by Michael Kerr
“Thanks for sharing your philosophy with me, Logan. I’ll still take you up on the meal you offered, but won’t read anything too deep into us being together.”
Logan was silent for a few seconds. “Doesn’t mean I don’t care, Kate. I can love a spring day, a sunset, all manner of things, including people. But I don’t need to own them or see them all the time. Does that make any sense?”
“If I was a psychologist it might. I’d peg you as having lost a lot in life, and that you feel vulnerable, so have decided that if you keep people you care for at a safe distance, you can’t get hurt.”
“Maybe you’re right, Kate. I don’t do self-analysis. We all have to do what gets us through each day the best way possible.”
Before leaving, Logan told her what he had suggested to Lyle. And that he thought it likely that the perp would be identified sooner rather than later.
The Nissan was gone when he stepped back out onto the street. He called in the hardware store and made a purchase, and then set off on the road back out to the motel, half expecting the stranger in town to be waiting along the way. A few vehicles drove past him, but not the Nissan.
Back at the Pinetop he got in the pickup and drove off. Made his way at a steady forty miles an hour to the track that led up to the ruin of the Carver house. If he had been followed, then it was by a pro, because he had kept an eye on the rearview mirror all the way.
Parking outside the husk of the burned-out house, he went inside, through the remains of an internal doorway into what he recognized as having been a kitchen, due to the blackened and cracked pot sink that was positioned beneath and in front of a rectangular hole that no longer had a frame or glass in it. Standing in deep shadow with his back against the wall, he waited, listening for the slightest sound as he reviewed the conversation with Kate and begrudgingly decided that she had him pegged. He did avoid forming strong relationships with anyone. He was a loner by choice, unable to lower his mental defenses and allow his emotions to lead him into situations that would constrain his inherent need to keep moving on. Being a murder cop in New York had kept his mind occupied. Case followed case, and he was always investigating, and running killers down with a ruthless determination. It had been a mission in some way. He had been addicted to bringing the worst of society to book; to see them pay for the atrocities they had committed.
A sound. Wings flapping as skittish birds took off from the bare branches of surrounding trees. He remained as still as a statue. Ten minutes ticked by before the almost inaudible sound of a shoe sole on a piece of glass confirmed that someone was in the house with him, stalking him with what he chose to believe was deadly intent.
Mickey had nearly missed seeing the pickup turn into the opening on the back road. He had kept well back, always keeping another vehicle or a bend in the highway between himself and Logan. He was not to know that his quarry had stopped at the entrance for a few seconds before driving up to the house at no more than a slow walking pace, to give any pursuer chance to see him.
Driving a hundred yards further along the road, Mickey stopped in a small parking area, checked his gun and screwed on the suppressor. This was a perfect location to kill Logan. He could then return for the car, to go back and load the body into the trunk. Sometimes the hits he carried out were almost too easy.
He hunkered down behind evergreen bushes in sight of the pickup, and the house that looked as if it had suffered a direct hit by a bomb.
After waiting for a while and seeing no movement, Mickey skirted around the ruin, and noted that a trail led off from the rear of it. He doubted that Logan was still inside the building. He had probably gone off walking, and would be a sitting duck when he made his way back to his vehicle.
He took no chances. Entered the house with the gun raised and his finger on the trigger. Once satisfied that it was clear he would pick a spot and wait as long as need be.
Logan smiled as a faint shadow was cast on the crumbling concrete floor inside the doorway.
Mickey almost slid around the opening and into the room like a human snake. He looked to his left first, and as he turned his head to look the other way, a blow to his wrist knocked the Sig from his hand. He pulled back, instinctively cradling his lower right arm as a dull, sickening pain erupted within it. He knew that the bones in it were fractured, and also knew that he had been suckered. The big man had somehow expected to be followed, and had been waiting for him.
Logan kicked the pistol across the floor and then sideswiped the retreating man across the side of his head with the large piece of quarry tile that he had armed himself with.
Mickey’s senses reeled. He thought he would lose consciousness, but somehow stayed alert. He was lying on his side now, and knew that he was in a desperate situation. With his eyes closed, he played possum.
There was a tension in the body’s muscles. Logan knew that the man was still aware, and so leaned forward and drove his right fist into the side of the man’s jaw, to both feel and hear the blow as it splintered the zygomatic bone in the cheek and shattered the mandible away from its moorings.
Mickey surfaced to a world of pain. He was in a sitting position with his back against a wall. His wrists were pinioned behind him with a length of rusted barbed wire, as were his ankles, and Logan was hunkered down three feet from him, holding the handgun loosely in a hand that made the weapon look like a kid’s toy gun.
Logan said nothing. He was in no rush. Silence was an unsettling weapon that he had used to great effect on numerous occasions. He had searched the man’s pockets, but found nothing to ID him. Just a pack of cigarettes, a Zippo lighter and car keys on a cheap plastic fob.
Mickey waited, expecting Logan to start questioning him, but was met with no more than a smile that did not reach the man’s cold, gray eyes. He suddenly felt a tongue of fear lick at his brain. He recognized callousness in Logan that he himself possessed.
“Who are you?” Mickey asked in a slur through his damaged mouth.
“I’m the man you planned on killing. So you know who I am. The question is, who are you, and who sent you?”
Mickey looked down into his lap. He had no intention of telling Logan anything.
Pain detonated in his face as Logan side-swiped him hard on his already damaged face with the suppressor of the Sig. “You need to wise up,” Logan said as Mickey cried out in pain. “The only chance you have of leaving this place alive is by telling me everything you know.”
Mickey tried to hold out. Logan pointed the gun at his leg and said, “Well?”
No reply. Logan smoothly squeezed the trigger and a round was spat out of the nine millimeter to blow the kneecap apart. The sound of the shot was much quieter than Mickey’s subsequent scream.
Logan stood up to stretch his back and legs. Unscrewed the suppressor from the barrel of the gun and placed the weapon in a pocket of his parka. Dropping to his left knee, he pulled up his right pants’ hem and removed his recent purchase from the hardware store from its ankle sheath. He held it out for Mickey to see, and saw fear blossom in now tear-filled eyes at the sight of the knife. It was a fixed bladed hunting knife, razor sharp and sporting a genuine ebony handle.
“Let’s start over and treat this as a game” Logan said. “Here are the rules. I ask you questions, and if you don’t answer them or I think your lying, I cut a piece off you. I’ll start with your ears, and then your nose. And we’ve got all the time in the world out here. We won’t be disturbed, so I won’t need to rush.”
Mickey was suffering more combined pain than he had ever experienced in his life. He had thought that this guy was just a drifter; an easy mark. Now he was severely injured and facing torture.
“Okay,” Mickey sobbed. “I’ll talk.”
“Good decision,” Logan said. “Let’s start with your name.”
“Mickey Morgan.”
“Where do you live, Mickey?”
“Grand Junction.”
“And you’re a hitman, right?”
&
nbsp; Mickey wanted to deny it. But why else would he have been here with a gun fitted with a suppressor? He couldn’t very well say that he’d been hunting game. “Yeah,” he said after a ten second pause.
“Who hired you?”
“A guy in Denver. Wade McCall.”
“And why does he want me dead?”
“I don’t know, and that’s the truth, I swear. He gives me a name and details. I don’t ask why.”
Logan believed him. Hitmen killed for money. They didn’t need to know the reason. “Tell me about McCall.” He said.
“He’s a gangster. Into everything illegal you can think of.”
“I need his description and an address.”
Mickey told Logan everything he knew.
“How many hits have you carried out for him?” Logan said.
“About thirty,” Mickey said. “Why?”
Logan whipped his hand out. The blade of the knife severed Mickey’s left ear from his head without the slightest resistance; just cleaved through the flesh and cartilage as if it was no more solid than butter. The now detached organ dropped down and came to rest on Mickey’s thigh. He stared at it in horror and disbelief, as if it were a deadly scorpion.
“I ask the questions, Mickey,” Logan said. “Where’s your car?”
Mickey’s bottom lip had taken on a life of its own. It was visibly trembling, and saliva was drooling from the corner of his mouth. “It…It’s a hundred ya…yards south, in a p…parking area,” he whined.
Logan thought it through. The Marine in him had a small mini battle with the homicide detective he had subsequently become. But once a Marine, always a Marine. This piece of shit was the enemy; a lowlife that had admitted killing thirty individuals for just one man. God knows how many lives he had prematurely ended in total.
Logan brought the hunting knife up underhand and drove the long blade through the fleshy part behind the jawbone; up through the mouth, tongue and upper palate and into Mickey’s brain.
Withdrawing the knife, he wiped it clean on the hitman’s coat and returned it to the sheath. He took no pleasure in watching the self-confessed assassin jerk and go into spasm as he emitted noises that could have been the snorting of a distressed horse.
It crossed Logan’s mind that his capacity for violence was another valid reason not to become involved with women like Kate. He was much more than they could ever properly imagine.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Logan found the Nissan and drove it back to the clearing in front of the house. Picked up the deadweight of Mickey Morgan as if it were no more than a bag of feathers and folded it into the trunk, before driving three miles to where a faded sign indicated that there was a disused rhodochrosite mine a half mile back from highway 67.
Parking in front of the gates, Logan used a large rock to pound a rusted chain that was holding the gates together. The chain held, but the hasp of the padlock it was attached to sprung loose after several blows.
With the car parked behind a large corrugated steel building, Logan searched the vehicle and found a wallet under the driver’s seat and a cell phone in the glove box. He transferred them to his pockets and then set off to explore the immediate area and found a coil of old hosepipe fitted to an external faucet, and cut a three-foot length out of it with his knife. And from a large junk pile inside the building he picked up a plastic bucket with no handle and a crack in its side. It would serve the purpose.
He knelt next to the Nissan with the hose in the gas tank and sucked until his mouth was filled with fuel. He spat it out and transferred the end of the tube into the bucket and filled it. Repeated the exercise three times, emptying the contents into the interior of the car, its trunk, and over the corpse. He then spun the wheel of Mickey’s Zippo and backed-up a few feet before tossing the lighter into the now open rear window of the car, to then turn and jog away from the scene, to stop a hundred feet away and watch as the initial small explosion from the ignition of the fumes died down and the vehicle began to burn up. Once satisfied that the Nissan would soon be a blackened shell, and that all that would remain of the second-rate hitman would be a charred, twisted and unrecognizable skeleton, he jogged back towards the road and considered the consequences of his actions. The car would no doubt be discovered, but there was nothing to link it to him. And partially cremated bodies were usually impossible to retrieve any viable evidence from. Morgan would just be a John Doe that would prove hard to identify. And even if he had done time and his DNA profile was on record, Mickey Morgan – if that had been his real name – was unknown to Logan.
Keeping east of the road, Logan headed north using trails where he could find them. The forest floor was easy to negotiate; pine needles and cones and twigs had formed a thick mat to walk on. Burning the body of the hitman was uppermost in his thoughts as he strolled through the trees. It brought to mind the burning of another body; that of Sal Mendez, a contract killer intent on tracking down and murdering Rita and Sharon Jennings. He had ended up in a life or death struggle with Mendez, had mortally wounded him, and then dropped the corpse down the shaft of a mine and set it on fire. The unofficial cremation had been, as in this case, distasteful, but necessary to protect his identity from subsequent forensic investigation at the scene.
It took Logan almost an hour to reach the pickup at the Carver place. Twenty minutes later he was in his room at the Pinetop, standing under needle jets of piping hot water from the showerhead, soaping himself to get rid of the stink of gasoline.
Dressed in fresh clothes, Logan thought through what Morgan had told him. It was evident that whoever had murdered Tanya had decided that Logan was a threat to his continued anonymity, and had contacted a gangster up in Denver to have him eliminated. The problem was that after disposing of the paid killer, he could not approach Lyle Bumgarner with the new information he now had. Torturing Mickey Morgan was obviously an illegal act that he could not admit to having committed. Killing the guy may have been a little excessive, but he would not have felt good about letting a piece of work like that live. He had confessed to whacking a lot people. And like the phrase from the bible said in slightly different words, ‘those that live by the sword, die by the sword’. He felt no remorse for taking the life of a man who treated cold-blooded murder as a profession. In fact, what he had done gave him a degree of satisfaction. And he did not dwell on the right or wrong of it. During his time as a marine he had killed whoever his government deemed to be the enemy, with no qualms. He had never been a pacifist in his life. Some people just didn’t merit their place on this crazy spinning ball. He didn’t go out of his way to look for trouble, but if it came knocking at his door he was prepared to terminate any threat with extreme prejudice, if necessary. If that was wrong, then so be it. He could live with everything he had done so far in life. What others thought was their problem, not his.
Drinking coffee, and still able to taste the residue of the gas from the Nissan’s tank, Logan recalled a neighbor of approximately the same age as his parents, back in the house on Washington Street in Staten Island, where he had spent his formative years.
Ethel Grimaldi had been a widow, living with her nine-year-old daughter, Nina, and at least eight cats. Her late husband, Paul, had worked in construction and had died as a result of the cable of a crane snapping, to deposit a two ton steel girder from a hundred feet, which scored a direct hit and squished Paul like a bug. That had been a closed casket sendoff, Logan’s mother had told him years later.
Ethel was a devout catholic, though, and was convinced that God, though working in very mysterious ways, had need of Paul in a far better place. She also abhorred violence in any shape or form, and lived by the credo that there was never a good reason to resort to it. It had been three years after Paul had died that Nina was hit by a drunk driver and killed as she walked back from the local store with her mother. Long story short in Logan’s mind; Ethel had been outside the court when the guy got bailed, and put six bullets in him, using an old .38 revolver that s
he had purloined from a friend’s house. So much for being a pacifist. When it got really personal, nearly everyone wanted payback.
Logan had once thought that his capacity for violence may be some kind of personality disorder, but had long since come to appreciate that it was just a reaction to unwarranted aggression against him by others.
He sighed. It seemed as if he couldn’t live his life without trouble seeking him out; it followed him like the sharks that in the past had been attracted to slave ships, patiently waiting for garbage and the dead or dying to be thrown overboard. He supposed that he had the choice to walk away from any conflict, but had never backed away from any adversity in his life. He recognized a need in him to resolve incidents that presented themselves.
Sitting on the queen-size bed nearest the door, he picked up and opened the dead man’s wallet. There was a mix of fifty and twenty dollar bills totaling six hundred bucks. He withdrew them and put them in one of his pants’ pockets. The cell had just four stored numbers. One was for someone called Wade. He thought about removing the battery and SIM card and trashing it, but decided to keep it. He was all set. His plan was simple. Find out from Wade McCall who had put a contract out on him. He knew that it would be the local killer in the Creek. There was no rush. He determined to drive up to Denver in the morning to the address that Mickey had given him. He would ask Clifton to let him use his p.c. to check out Google, look at maps of the city and become familiarized with the area around where McCall had his office, and then follow the gangster out to his home address. It went without saying that the hoodlum would have guys round him, but that was of no real concern to Logan. There was only one way to go. And McCall would not expect him to still be alive, let alone intending to pay him a visit.
When Logan went over to the house, Clifton seemed more down than previously. He couldn’t connect with Ray. His son had withdrawn into himself, and the guilt that he felt was mushrooming, almost out of control. His life seemed to have dead ended, and the bright future that he had anticipated now appeared to be a bleak and dismal proposition. The joy of youth had been totally obliterated, and his heart was broken. He did not yet have the capacity to deal with such an overload of grief.