Atonement

by Michael Kerr

  “No idea. The corpse was impossible to identify.”

  “You think it’s linked to what happened to Tanya?”

  “No reason why it should be, Clifton. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Two unnatural deaths only three miles apart off the same country road.”

  “Sure does. I’ll tell Logan you called when he gets back.”

  If he comes back. “Thanks, Clifton. Bye for now.”

  Kate put on her coat and left the office. Walked down to the Steamboat and ordered a Reuben sandwich and coffee. Couldn’t shake Logan from her mind. He was one of those people that made an instant impression that lasted. Not just because he was so big and stood out in a crowd, but because he had an aura about him; came across as the type of guy that you could trust with your life. She hoped that he would come back. Time spent with him would be something that she knew would be precious, and however fleeting, would be worth having. Hell, everything was fleeting. Her late grandmother had once said that one second she was walking down the aisle on her wedding day, thinking that it was the beginning of a journey that was stretching to near infinity in front of her, and what seemed like the next minute fifty years had rushed by, her beloved Walt was beneath the ground, and the party was almost over.

  Kate shuddered. You really did have to live in the moment as far as was possible. No point looking back from a future still ahead and wishing that you had done things that were beyond your ability to, or that you knew you were now too old to enjoy. Life took its toll, wore you down like wind on soft rock, and eventually blew you away. Everyone’s dreams ended up in the ground with them, or scattered with their ashes.

  Leaving the diner and lighting a cigarette, Kate attempted to shrug off her maudlin thoughts. She was discomposed as she walked down Main Street, and would’ve walked straight into the sheriff if he hadn’t sidestepped.

  “You okay?” Lyle said.

  “Uh, yes, thanks,” Kate said, stopping and forcing a smile. “I was in a world of my own.”

  “You know where I might find Logan?”

  Kate shook her head. “No idea, Lyle. Why?”

  “You hear about the murder?”

  “I heard a burned car was found with a body in it out at the old mine.”

  “News travels fast, Kate. Someone trussed a guy up with barbed wire, popped him in the trunk and torched the whole caboodle.”

  “And you think Logan could help you with your investigation?”

  “Who knows? I get the impression that he’s a loose cannon. His willingness to use violence doesn’t do him any favors.”

  “He defended himself against your out of control deputy and two others that attacked him with no provocation. Does that make him a violent man?”

  “It puts him under the microscope, Kate. I look under every stone. I’ve just come from the Pinetop. Clifton says he gave him a lift over to I-25 just after dawn. Maybe he has something to run away from.”

  “Does Logan seem to you the type of man to run away from anything?”

  “Is anyone really what they appear to be, Kate?”

  “I think so. Our type of work is prone to make us more cynical of people.”

  Lyle smiled. “That’s true,” he said. “Be sure to let Logan know I want to talk to him if he shows up or makes contact.”

  Kate walked away, back to her office, wondering if Logan was implicated with the murder. She determined to ask him if he returned to the Creek.

  Larry was walking leisurely along the lakeshore, repeatedly throwing a stick in the water for Bama to retrieve. He was whistling some old Toby Keith song about a big red cup. He thought that everything was taken care of and that he was in the clear. Earl Dempsey had called and told him about the barbequed corpse at the Springdale mine. Larry had punched the air and mouthed ‘Yesss’. Knew that the body would be Logan’s. Wade had come through for him and got the job done.

  As he reached the bungalow his cell chirped. “Yeah,” he said.

  “It’s Wade. Get to a public phone and call me. This is urgent.”

  Larry had no time to answer, the connection was broken. He veered away from the bungalow and climbed in the Silverado. Bama leapt up over the tailboard and sat behind the cab in the back. The dog knew that it was not allowed in the front when it was soaking wet.

  Larry called Denver from the phone outside the store that was attached to Marshall Downey’s Texaco Station on Kiowa Street.

  “Yeah,” Wade said.

  “It’s Larry. Thanks for―”

  “Don’t thank me, Larry. You need to know that this guy Logan has been to see me.”

  “But I thought you’d sent someone to deal with him.”

  “I did. Logan turned it around. Said that the guy was history. I had to give up your name, Larry. Believe me there was no alternative. He took out one of my best men and stabbed me. I daresay he’s on his way back to Carson Creek as we speak. Could be there now.”

  “Is there an upside?”

  “Yeah. There are two guys en route. I want him dealt with as much as you do. Watch your back until they get to you.”

  “Maybe I’d better head for Mexico. Logan will put it together now that he has my name.”

  “Put what together?”

  “A mishap. A girl died.”

  “I caught it on TV. Wouldn’t have thought you were that stupid, Larry.”

  “Accidents happen.”

  “Especially if you let your dick rule your head. But Logan will want to deal with you personally. He can’t go to the law and admit that he killed a guy to get my name. And if it came to it, I never met the guy, so told him nothin’.”

  “Okay Wade. I’ll stay home and be ready for him. Tell your guys to phone if they’re comin’ to the house. I don’t want to start shootin’ up the help.”

  “You won’t see them. They’ll wait for him to make his move and then lift him.”

  “Lift him?”

  “That’s right. The bastard hurt me. I need to see his face when he buys the farm. Is there anyone in the Creek that he cares about?”

  “Yeah, a lawyer, Kate Donner. Maybe he’s screwin’ her.”

  “You got her address?”

  “Seventy Cherry Street. It’s on a small subdivision north of town. Why?”

  “Just another way to hurt the son of a bitch. I’ll have my boys call in and talk to the broad.”

  “Talk?”

  Wade chuckled. “Maybe play Tic-tac-toe on her face with box cutters.”

  Logan walked for several miles from the interstate. He took it as a given that McCall would have contacted Horton and warned him. The deputy would be expecting him, which made taking him out a far more difficult proposition. He wasn’t about to underestimate an armed man with law enforcement experience. Horton had seemed a lot sharper than Carl Purvis; older and wilier. He would expect an attack through the hours of darkness, so would be disappointed. Sitting up all night would deplete his level of concentration. Between three and four a.m. would be a good time to make his move. That was a period when the vast majority of people were at their lowest ebb. He had been told once by an army doctor that critically injured and terminally ill patients were at most danger of relinquishing the will to live and expiring in the small hours.

  The roadside diner he came to was rustic and set back from the blacktop among tall pines. Fronting it was a gravel parking lot with only three vehicles in it. He angled across and climbed the steps to a porch that stretched along the frontage and had rocking chairs and tables set out. Seemed the wrong time of year for customers to eat outside, but what did he know. Maybe hikers and other hardy types preferred the smell of the pine trees to fried food.

  The interior was like a hunting lodge, with elks’ heads and other trophies adorning the walls. It wasn’t to his liking. He preferred wildlife to be roaming free, not decapitated and converted into glass-eyed ornaments.

  He ordered coffee and went over to a wall-mounted phone and called Clifton.

  “Hi, Logan,” Cli
fton said. “How was your day?”

  “Productive. Do you know where Larry Horton lives?”

  “Out at Arrow Lake in a bungalow. It’s off Buffalo Road, just past a small one-room schoolhouse that’s been boarded up for over twenty years. Why do you want to see Larry?”

  “He may have some information for me,” Logan said. “And if any strangers call by looking for me, tell them that I picked up my stuff and left town. You can say that I planned on hitching south.”

  “You in trouble, Logan?”

  “No more than usual. It’ll all work out.”

  “Kate phoned me. She sounded a little disappointed that you weren’t here.”

  “Okay, Clifton. I should be back at Pinetop in the morning.”

  Ending the call, Logan sat in a corner under a wall clock, which he deemed preferable to being looked down at by a bear’s or elk’s head.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lenny wanted to go after Logan. His head was pounding and he had a crescent-shaped gash on his forehead that had dripped blood onto the wall-to-wall oyster-colored Axminster carpet. Wade was nearly as pissed at the state of the imported carpet as he was over his hand, which had swelled up and was causing him a great deal of pain. He would set the wheels in motion to run Logan down, and then have the wound treated.

  “He’s seen you, Lenny,” Wade said. “Go patch yourself up, and then arrange for this fuckin’ carpet to be cleaned.”

  Lenny left the office and headed for the bathroom while Wade made a call on a pay-as-you-go cell phone.

  “Henry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Wade. Where are you?”

  “East Colfax, boss. Collectin’.”

  “Is Bunny with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want you both back here in fifteen minutes. I’ve got an out-of-town job needs takin’ care of.”

  Henry Shaw and Benjamin – Bunny – Dawson were back in the office twelve minutes later.

  “Shit, boss, what happened?” Henry said as he looked from Wade’s injured hand to the blood-stained desk top and carpet.

  “I hired Mickey Morgan to hit some guy as a favor for a cop in Carson Creek. The mark took Morgan out, got my name and paid me a visit. I want you two to go down there and pick him up. I’ll give you all the details you’ll need.”

  Henry and Bunny used a Ford Cherokee from one of the chop shops that were part of Wade’s dirty little empire in Denver. They set off at four p.m. and worked out a plan as Bunny drove south.

  “This creep Logan sounds lethal,” Bunny said. “Morgan was a sharp operator.”

  “Everyone fucks up,” Henry said. “We know that Logan is plannin’ on lookin’ up this hick deputy, Horton. So we’ll be waitin’, after we’ve had fun with the bitch he’s tight with.”

  “Do we get to play with her?” Bunny said.

  “You bet your ass we do. She’s the cherry on the cake. Could even help us draw Logan in.”

  Henry was really up for the action. Most of the time he collected protection money from small businesses, and kept things running smooth by administering a constrained amount of violence, if and when absolutely necessary. Wade had told him that it was a pointless exercise to cut off a hand that fed you. The boss was right, fear was the key. A threat to hospitalize a guy’s wife or child usually resulted in him coming across with payments on time.

  Henry Shaw had been born and raised in what had until two thousand three been South Central, but had been renamed South Los Angeles, as if a name change would in some way erase the associations of urban decay and street crime. He had survived being a gang member, when many of his friends had not. The murder rate was off the scale, and being a little more intelligent than many of his peers, Henry had decided to quit L.A. and employ his streetwise education elsewhere.

  Henry was five-eleven, slim, and had a definite look of Obama, that he found useful in conveying a false sense of trustworthiness in many strangers, which surprised him, for who in their right mind would trust any politician? But beneath the well-groomed and pleasant veneer, Henry was as cold-blooded as a western diamondback.

  Bunny sat back and thought about food. He was five-eight and bordering on obese, with overlong and thinning dirt-brown hair. He wore a leather duster coat over jeans and a thick cotton shirt. A shoulder rig holding a Glock 17 was hidden under the western-style coat.

  Bunny was thirty, the same age as Henry. He had dropped out of high school in Lubbock, Texas on a whim, stolen a car and headed northwest, determined to see White Sands National Park, the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, and maybe settle in Vegas for a spell. But Sin City had been a letdown. He had worked intermittently as a dishwasher in many diners, and even drove a sewage truck, before upgrading to mugging tourists on ill lit streets off the Strip. They say that crime doesn’t pay, but Bunny knew that it did. Anyone that would rather pump shit out of tanks for a living was welcome to it. He would in all probability have stayed on in Vegas, if it hadn’t got too hot for him. He had attempted to rob an old guy in a parking garage. Showed him the knife he carried and asked for his billfold. The crazy old fart had started shouting for help at the top of his voice and attacked Bunny. He’d been given no choice. Had to shut him the fuck up, so had stabbed him a few times. The next day he had boarded a bus for Reno, and eventually moved east and settled in Denver.

  “I need to eat,” Bunny said to Henry as they approached a strip mall that was visible from the interstate.

  “You don’t need to, Bunny,” Henry said. “You could live off the fat you’re carryin’ for a year.”

  “It’s hereditary,” Bunny said. “My parents’ were fat fucks, just like a couple of those Wal-Mart slobs you see on e-mails that get sent round on the Net. We ate decent food; a lot of chicken and vegetables.”

  “So how come you now live on burgers and fries?”

  “Because it’s fast and cheap.”

  “Okay,” Henry said. “I could use a coffee.”

  After parking in a slot near the front door of an Arby’s, Henry and Bunny went inside and slid into a window booth. When the waitress came with the menus, Bunny ordered a chocolate shake. Henry asked for coffee. When she came back with the drinks, Bunny ordered a Three Cheese and Bacon with fries, and Henry plumped for a chicken salad.

  “So run through it,” Bunny said through a mouthful of beef and cheese. “How are we goin’ to deal with the woman and Logan?”

  “If the bitch is at home, we break in, talk to her, and then do what comes naturally before we hurt her,” Henry said “She probably has Logan’s cell number. She can phone him and get him to join the party.”

  “Then what do we do with them?”

  “Put them in the back of the Cherokee, suitably subdued and covered up. Wade wants them alive.”

  “You think he’ll whack the broad as well?”

  “I know he will,” Henry said. “Then we’ll have the job of getting’ rid of the bodies.”

  Kate bought a few items at the general store, and then drove home, had a shower, got dressed in jeans and a sweater and opened a bottle of chardonnay. Had a glass while she made a sandwich, but had no appetite. Her thoughts were of where Logan might be, and of the gory details she had been unofficially told of the burned body in the trunk of a car. She could not imagine what sort of person could truss up another human being with barbed wire and set fire to them. So much seemed to have happened since the murder of Tanya Foster. Carson Creek was now under a microscope. The press was in town, and the State Police were involved. Many houses were offering accommodation at a high price, and the Pinetop Motel had a No Vacancy sign up. The small town was enjoying an unexpected injection of revenue, but for all the wrong reasons.

  Sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and an episode of the Brit drama Downton Abbey on the TV, Kate sipped her way through a second glass of wine and began to doze.

  Henry drove down Cherry Street. There was a Kia in the driveway and a downstairs light on in number t
wenty. Behind the row of houses on that side was a stand of trees. He smiled. The darkness at the rear of the property would give them the privacy that they needed.

  Henry parked the Cherokee down a rutted lane, and with Bunny following in his footsteps he walked forty or fifty yards through the trees to the fence enclosing the backyard of the woman’s property.

  The lock on the kitchen door was cheap and no deterrent to Henry. He picked it inside thirty seconds and entered the house.

  Kate was on the edge of sleep, but came fully awake as something struck her across the cheek.

  “Scream or do anythin’ stupid and I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear,” Henry said in a toneless voice. “I need for you to answer a few questions.”

  Kate was frozen in place; just stared up at the two men standing in front of her. The one with a knife in his hand was tall, black, well-dressed, and was smiling. The other was shorter, wore a coat that almost reached down to his ankles, and was perspiring heavily and licking his lips.

  Nooo! Kate’s mind screamed. She was in part transported back to the night that she had been raped and almost beaten to death in a Chicago alley. Her bladder actually voided as fear flooded through her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It is absolutely erroneous to believe that things cannot get worse. They can and often do.

  Clifton tapped on the door and entered Ray’s bedroom to ask his son if he wanted a cup of coffee or anything for supper. It was ten p.m., and Ray had been in his room since just after six.

  It took Clifton three of the longest seconds’ of his life to react to the sight that met him. A table lamp shone dimly on a night table, but the bright light from top of the stairwell flooded the room and the open closet to illuminate the body.

  Ray had made the decision that he could not live with the guilt and loss he felt over what had happened to Tanya, so had sought oblivion that he could not return from. He had used a short length of blue nylon rope to end it all. One end was tied to the rail inside the closet, and the other had been fashioned into a noose that was tight around his neck. Had the fittings that held the metal rail to the interior of the closet been made from plastic, they would have most likely snapped. But they were fashioned from metal and solidly screwed in place.