Atonement

by Michael Kerr

  “How is Ray?” Kate said, noting how pale and tired Clifton looked. He seemed to have aged ten years.

  “He’s stable. No permanent damage, thank God.”

  “What has he said to you?” Logan asked.

  “That he’s sorry for what he tried to do. Told me that everything just built up to a point that he couldn’t bear. Said that something just seemed to snap in his mind.”

  “Do you think that he may try it again?”

  “No, Logan. He seems more in control. It’s like a fever broke.”

  “Good. I need to take the pickup. And I can’t promise you’ll get it back.”

  Clifton shrugged, asked them both in for coffee. Between them, Logan and Kate filled him in on what had happened the previous evening.

  “If anyone stops by looking for me, say that I’m in the wind, Clifton. You came back from the hospital and I’d gone. Okay?”

  “What about Kate?”

  “She’ll be with me till the threat is negated.”

  “I’m sorry to have put you in this position, Logan,” Clifton said. “If I hadn’t asked you to help―”

  “Then Ray would most likely have been charged with a murder that he didn’t commit. Don’t beat yourself up over it, Clifton. It’ll all work out.”

  Twenty minutes later, Logan drove away from the Pinetop. He had changed the pickup’s plates for those on the Impala.

  “Where are we going?” Kate asked as they headed south.

  “I need to make a stop at the Wagon Wheel and talk to Ned Williams. After that we’ll head west and find a little hideaway to hole up in.”

  “When are you going to tell me who the killer is, and everything else you know, Logan?”

  “Not now, Kate.”

  “When?”

  “After I’ve done what I need to.”

  “You can trust me, Logan.”

  “Good.”

  Pulling in to a shaded far corner of the lot, Logan left Kate in the pickup and walked across to the main entrance of the bar/restaurant. The door was locked, so he went around the side of the building to the rear, where he found an SUV parked outside a door that he assumed led into the kitchen.

  Ned was checking stock. None of the staff were due in for an hour. He didn’t do breakfasts or lunches, just evening meals.

  “Hi, Williams,” Logan said, just appearing at Ned’s side with less noise than a hunting owl would make as it soundlessly swooped down on an unsuspecting mouse.

  “Jesus! You tryin’ to give me a fuckin’ heart attack?” Ned said, stepping sideways and coming to a sudden stop as his shoulder slammed up against a walk-in freezer’s closed door.

  “Not yet,” Logan said. “All I want for now are a couple of answers.”

  “Try Google. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  The heel of Logan’s right hand crashed into Ned’s forehead, whipping his head back to strike the metal door. Rebounding off it, his throat was gripped by the same hand, which squeezed hard enough to prevent any air from being allowed passage to his lungs.

  “You’re getting me pissed,” Logan said. “I overlooked the fact that you set me up with your dickhead nephew and his buddies. But if you don’t want to spend the next two months in a hospital bed, wise up. I’m going to let go, ask you a question, and if I think you’re lying to me, then I’ll hurt you worse than you can imagine possible.”

  Ned fell to his knees gasping for air and coughing as Logan released his grip. He made to haul himself up to his feet, but Logan kicked him in the chest, folding him backwards with his legs beneath him.

  “Was Larry Horton in here the night of Tanya Foster’s murder?” Logan asked in a quiet voice.

  “I…I’m not sure,” Ned gasped.

  Logan tutted. “You need to be, Ned. I require a definite yes or no. And if you say no, then it better be the truth, or you can count on me being in your face again.”

  Ned gave it some thought. He didn’t owe Horton the time of day. It was time to come clean. Logan was the real deal; meant any threat that he issued, and would make good on it. “Yeah,” he said. “Now that I think on it, he was in here for a few beers that evenin’.”

  “By himself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when the sheriff asked you for a list, did you put his name on it?”

  Ned shook his head. “Didn’t see the need. Larry’s a deputy for Christ’s sake. I didn’t think that he could be a suspect.”

  “Sure you did, Ned. But with him being tight with Carl and the others, you decided that honesty was the worst policy.”

  Ned said nothing.

  “Where’s the equipment for the CCTV?” Logan said.

  “In my office at the back of the bar. But I don’t turn it on durin’ the day. And like I told Lyle, I don’t save anythin’.”

  “You know I’m going to check for myself.”

  “I’m tellin’ the truth, Logan. If Larry killed that girl, then he deserves all he gets.”

  “When does the help arrive.”

  “Thirty or forty minutes. Why?”

  “Get up and go in the freezer,”

  “You’re kiddin’ me.”

  “Just do it, Williams. I’ll set the temperature to make sure you don’t freeze to death,” Logan said. “And when you get out, just forget that we had this conversation. At a later date I may need for you to tell the sheriff about Horton being here that night, but not yet.”

  Kate was standing next to the pickup on her second cigarette when Logan came back.

  “What did you do?” Kate said.

  “Asked the owner a couple of questions. He confirmed that the killer was in here the night Tanya was killed.”

  “Tell me that you’re going to give his name to Lyle.”

  “No. His being in here doesn’t prove that he did it.”

  “You said you knew who did it.”

  “I do. Larry Horton murdered Tanya.”

  “Deputy Sheriff Horton?”

  Logan nodded as he started up the pickup and drove out of the lot.

  “How do you know it’s him for certain?” Kate said.

  “Because he’s thick with a hoodlum in Denver that hired the guy that got burned-up in his car after trying to whack me. And when that failed, he sent the two that came to your house.”

  Kate let what he had said sink in, from a lawyer’s point of view. If no connection could be established between Horton and the gangster in Denver, then he was home free.

  “So you are going to deal with Horton outside the law?” Kate said.

  “I’m going to make sure that he pays for what he did, and for the grief he caused Clifton and Ray, and for planning on you and me to be taken out. What would you do, let it ride?”

  “I wouldn’t break the law to keep it. That’s like old frontier justice.”

  “Sometimes that’s the only way to go up against criminals that are known to have committed a crime, but are clever enough to evade prosecution. If you had been armed when you were attacked and left for dead in Chicago, would you have used deadly force to protect yourself?”

  Kate knew the answer to that. She would have shot the three young men that had raped and beaten her if she had possessed a firearm and had had chance to. And the memory of the incident still instilled her with fear and rage, in the knowledge that a minority of people had no respect for other people’s lives. She was still an attorney at law, but probably shouldn’t be, because a part of her could identify with those that took the law into their own hands when the system failed them. She knew of witnesses that had been threatened, or vanished before being able to give evidence, and watched guilty men and women walk free with smug smiles on their faces.

  “Yes, Logan,” Kate said in answer to his question. “I would have shot the bastards.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Larry spent most of the day sitting and thinking over what options he had, but couldn’t come up with more than two. He could stay and hope that the problem went away, or run. He f
inally made a trip into town to buy some supplies, and then went back home and packed what he needed, loaded it in the Silverado and then phoned Denny Matthews. Told him he had a personal problem to take care of and that he would be out of town for a few days.

  “Anything I can do?” Denny said.

  “Thanks, Denny, but I got it.”

  “What about Lyle. Does he know?”

  “He knows my back’s bad. I plan on lettin’ him just keep thinkin’ that for a spell.”

  “Okay, Larry. Hope you work out your problem.”

  “I will, Denny. Bye.”

  After swapping plates on the SUV with those of a rusted up old Chrysler that stood wheel less on cinder blocks out back in a timber garage, Larry headed west with Bama sitting next to him on the passenger seat. He hadn’t phoned ahead to say that he was coming; would just roll up at his aunt’s place, that was situated on a country road a couple of miles outside the old silver mining town of Leadville.

  Miriam Carmody was not Larry’s aunt. She had been his late mother’s cousin, and had lived in an apartment on Colfax just a five minute walk from the Hortons’. Miriam had only seen Larry a half dozen times in the twenty years since he had been a nineteen-year-old and she had stood next to him at his mother’s funeral. Larry’s mother, Alma Horton, had been an alcoholic, and her diseased liver had quit functioning on her a week before her fortieth birthday, which was just eleven months prior to his father, Ben, dropping dead of a massive heart attack as he climbed the stairs to the apartment.

  Miriam had been married three times, but was now living alone. Two of her marriages had ended in divorce, and the third had been cut short when George Carmody had been shot dead in a hunting accident.

  Larry had kept in touch with Miriam down the years, mainly by phone, and had not mentioned her name to anyone in the Creek. No one could make the link and connect him to her. Even when he had visited her he had not told a soul. His private life was nobody else’s business.

  Logan saw a flaking hand-painted sign for the Big Elk Trailer Park. Turned off the back road he had taken and followed a winding track for a few hundred yards through woodland, to where there were half a dozen trailers each side of a center driveway. He thought that they would have looked fine back in the sixties, but that they were now just shadows from the past that no self-respecting tourist would seek out.

  “Help you?” an old guy wearing faded navy-blue overalls over a thick plaid shirt and a red, sweat-bleached ball cap with a Texaco logo on it said – coming out of a small hut that had ‘office’ stenciled on the wooden door – as Logan parked in front of it and climbed out.

  “I’m sure you can,” Logan said, manufacturing a solid smile. “My wife and I would like to rent one of your trailers for a few days.”

  “My name’s Clem Parker,” the owner said, “I can let you have the best of the bunch for ninety bucks a night.”

  Logan noted that only three of the trailers had vehicles parked in the spaces next to them. “I’m John Bryce, Clem,” he said. “And I’d say sixty-five would be a fair rate.”

  Clem grinned. His few remaining teeth were walnut-brown from half a century of chewing tobacco. He scratched at the silver stubble on his cheek and said, “I don’t normally get into a haggle Mr. Bryce, but seein’ as how you could look elsewhere, I’ll save you the trouble and come down to seventy-five, and not a cent less.”

  “Fine,” Logan said.

  “Would you and your wife care for a cup of coffee while we check you in?”

  “Sounds good,” Logan said.

  Twenty minutes later, Logan and Kate were inside one of the tired and externally neglected trailers. They placed brown paper sacks full of groceries – which they had purchased from a country store ten miles away – on the small table in the dinette.

  “It’s a lot cleaner inside than I thought it would be,” Kate said. “But I’ll have to wipe down every surface to feel a little better about it.”

  Logan shrugged. It looked fine to him, after having laid his head to rest in much dirtier and more uncomfortable places during his life.

  “What are we going to do now?” Kate said as she filled the coffee pot with fresh water.

  “You’re safe here, Kate. No one followed us, so if you keep your cell phone switched off there is no way that anyone can find us here.”

  “You hope.”

  “I know. I checked the pickup over before we set off.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Yeah. The vehicle is clean. Old-style tracking devices are large and magnetic. Some modern ones are the size of pagers, and nowadays smaller and more expensive GPS tracking devices can be hard-wired into the battery and hidden almost anywhere. But someone would have needed time and privacy to go to those lengths, which they wouldn’t, because there was no reason to think that I would use Clifton’s pickup, or leave town.”

  “You’re planning to leave me here, aren’t you, Logan?”

  “Not for long. I want to go visit with Horton. And I need to do it without worrying about your safety.”

  “He won’t admit to killing the girl.”

  “Maybe not. But I have enough to convince him that I know he did it. Push someone hard enough and they react; they fight or run, and usually make mistakes.”

  “If he is guilty, he might just shoot you on sight.”

  “I don’t plan on giving him the chance, Kate. I should be back in a few hours.”

  “And what if you aren’t?”

  “Then you’ll need to call Lyle and tell him everything that you know.”

  “Run through it for me, I’ll make notes,” Kate said as she rummaged in her purse for a notepad and pen.

  “Larry Horton was in the Wagon Wheel on the evening of the murder. The time he left will negate him being at the bar as an alibi when Tanya was killed. And when I stuck my nose in, found the zip tab and convinced Lyle that Ray Marshall had been set up, Larry decided that I was a threat, so he contacted an old pal in Denver, Wade McCall, who happens to be a gangster. He agreed to help Larry out.

  “He sent a hitman, Mickey Morgan, to deal with me. And when Mickey fouled up I went up to the city and braced McCall. He didn’t have the sense to back off, so sent another two idiots to get the job done. If Lyle finds the link between Horton and McCall, it’ll all come together.”

  Kate put the pen down, got up from where she had been sitting at the table and went to Logan, who had been leant up against the archway that led into a small living room.

  “Be careful, Logan,” she said, looping her arms around his neck and looking up into his face.

  They kissed, conveying their feelings through the physical gentleness of their lips as Kate held him tight and Logan cupped her cheeks with his hands.

  “Careful is my middle name,” he said. “I’ll be back before midnight. If I get hung up I’ll phone this place and give Clem a message for you.”

  Kate watched as Logan drove away. She felt more alone than she had ever been in her life. A few minutes later she switched on the old twenty-inch TV to provide a distraction from her bleak thoughts. CBS News was churning out doom and gloom, so she used the remote to surf the channels, to stop on a rerun of Cheers.

  Logan parked twenty yards up a firebreak that was a couple hundred yards from the driveway to Horton’s place. He approached from the cover of the trees until he was at the fringe, opposite the lakeside bungalow. Moving low and fast across the narrow highway he was soon standing at the side of the building, catching his breath and listening for the slightest sign of occupation. He had not seen Horton’s Silverado, and there were no lights on, or smoke coming out of the chimney. If his quarry was out, then he would be able to take him by surprise on his return. He would have to arm himself, though, because the large, crossbreed dog was potentially as dangerous as Horton. But the deputy would not want to start shooting, having no idea who else knew of Logan’s whereabouts. He was sure that the deputy would prefer to talk it over, given the chance.

  Using
a knife taken from the cutlery drawer in the trailer, Logan forced open a kitchen window at the rear of the house, climbed in and checked every room. No one home. He found a flashlight on a counter in the kitchen and began searching in earnest.

  It was in the bedroom closet that he found a Mossberg pump action shotgun and a box of ‘aught’ cartridges powerful enough to take out large game such as deer. Logan loaded it up; five shells in the mag and one in the chamber ready to go.

  He went through every drawer in the house, looking for everything in general and nothing in particular. As an ex-cop it was just standard procedure. People, and especially criminals, kept things that they should not. Horton wasn’t much of a collector. There were a few paid bills and the usual dross that took up space. It was while shaking some old, dog-eared gun magazines that something fell out on to the floor that spiked his curiosity: a photograph of Larry Horton standing in front of what looked to be a small ski lodge with snow-capped mountains as a backdrop. He thought that Horton looked perhaps a decade younger. Turning the photo over, he smiled. There was a printed name and address on the back, as well as a time and date stamp. This was not an image copied from a digital card. Someone had taken a roll of film into a store to have it developed and printed. And the store was Clinton’s Pharmacy, situated in the town of Leadville, Colorado.

  It was two hours later when Logan had the gut feeling that Horton had taken off. He drove back to the trailer with the conviction that the deputy was on the run, having enough sense to know that once he was linked to Wade McCall, then everything was bound to come out.

  Kate came out of the trailer to meet him as he parked the pickup next to it.

  Logan could see the relief in her expression, and she was trembling. Maybe leaving Kate alone had been a bad idea, but he hadn’t wanted to put her in danger. And yet just by knowing her and becoming a part of her life had done that. Once again he realized why he needed to walk alone through life. He could bear the violence and jeopardy that had become a part of his existence, but did not – by association –want to bring it to others’ doors. Closeness to people involved them in his seemingly unrelenting episodes of conflict. There was a part of his psyche that would welcome a more settled lifestyle. He could visualize an alternate Logan in a long-term relationship, living in a rustic setting; a man enjoying his middle-age and becoming more than the sum of his turbulent life to date. But that was a pipedream, and he knew it. His personality dictated that he do a lot of wrong things for what he truly believed were the right reasons. He supposed that he was a man that found it easy to use violence as a tool against those that warranted it. He had spent his life drawing hard lines and never backing down. You had to know who you were and learn to live with it, he mused.