Atonement

by Michael Kerr

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Vicente hoped that Horton would soon reach his destination. The pale light of the winter sun was smothered by the thickening fall of snow, which would soon make driving difficult. Within a few hours the temperature would drop and the snow would freeze. And if in the meantime the wind got up, drifts would build and make following the 4x4 impossible.

  With wipers on fast and the heater on defrost; Vicente hunched forward, squinting out through the windshield at a swirling wall of whiteness; billions of separate ice crystals that coalesced like an infinite beast of many parts. Snow was beautiful, but as cold and dangerous as many of the women he had been stupid enough to have had a relationship with. He smiled and lit a cigarette, ignoring the No Smoking stickers within the rental. Taking a deep drag, Vicente fondly appraised his last conquest with Gina, a fiery bitch of Italian descent. He had picked her up in a downtown bar on Capitol Avenue in Cheyenne, and subsequently took her back to his apartment. They had snorted some coke and shared a bottle of eighteen-year old Chivas Regal, which was probably almost as old as Gina.

  Maybe he would have seen her again, he thought, if she hadn’t slipped out of bed at four in the morning and decided to leave, taking his billfold with her.

  Birds should not shit in their own nests. Vicente had hit her a great many times, and very hard, but had not struck her in the face. Had he not been at his apartment, or been seen in her company at the bar, then he would have killed her. She was a very fortunate girl. After the beating, he had taken his gun from where it was stashed in a wall safe in a bedroom closet, attached a suppressor and pressed it up against her temple.

  “You got any prayer or last words to say?” he said.

  Gina had cried a lot and thrown up on the carpet, and begged him not to do it. He had pulled the trigger, but with no mag in the weapon it just made a metallic click, which in itself was enough to cause Gina to piss her pants.

  Vicente laughed aloud at the memory. Sometimes inciting intense fear was more rewarding than actually killing someone. He had taken Gina’s cell phone with all her contact information in, and told her that if she mentioned what had gone down that evening to another living person, then he would eliminate everyone that she cared for, starting with her parents.

  The tracker signal stopped moving on his screen. He slowed down, proceeding at little more than walking speed as he homed in on where the SUV was.

  A half mile ahead, Larry pulled into the driveway that led through a natural gap in an escarpment of rock to where Miriam’s timber lodge seemed to grow from the patch of land it had been built on.

  As he climbed out of the vehicle with Bama close on his heels, Miriam opened the front door and stepped out onto the roofed porch.

  “Hi, Auntie,” Larry said as he approached her. “I was in the area, so thought I’d drop by for coffee.”

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Larry,” Miriam said. “And don’t call me Auntie; it makes me feel older than I already am.”

  “You look fine to me, Miriam. This rocky mountain lifestyle and fresh air must be some kind of elixir.”

  “Same old BS, Larry. You don’t change. And is that critter with you house-trained?”

  “This is Bama,” Larry said. “And he’s cleaner and has better manners than a lot of people I know.”

  “Best come in out of the snow and tell me the real reason you’re here,” Miriam said as she turned and went back inside the house.

  Larry made two trips to unload the Silverado. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting at the kitchen table nursing a mug of coffee. Bama had eaten some canned meat, drank a pint of water and was now asleep next to the wood burning stove, snoring like an old man.

  “I needed to vanish for a few days, Miriam,” Larry said. “It’s no big deal, but the less you know the better.”

  “It’s obviously a big deal to someone, Larry. This isn’t the dark side of the moon up here. We have TV and all mod cons. I’ve seen the reports on what’s been happening in Carson Creek.”

  “It’s complicated, Miriam. The mob is involved, and there has been an attempt on my life. I needed a safe place to go, that no one knew anything about.”

  “What if you were followed?”

  “I wasn’t. I made sure that no one saw me leave the Creek. And I’ve been checking for a tail all the way here.”

  “Okay, Larry. You can stay. I could use the company.”

  Larry got up and walked around until he was standing directly behind her, and then put his hands either side of her neck and used his thumbs to massage a central spot that had always relaxed Miriam.

  Miriam sighed. “That’s so good, Larry,” she said. “You’ve always known how to make me purr like a cat.”

  “Don’t mention cats in front of Bama,” Larry said. “He thinks of them as tasty snacks.”

  Miriam turned and put her arms around Larry’s neck and kissed him on the lips. It was like old times. Miriam had been Larry’s first lover. She had seduced him on his fourteenth birthday, when she had been thirty-four years old. And they had continued having regular sex for almost five years, up until Miriam met husband number two and left Denver.

  “Maybe I’m a little too old for you these days, Larry,” Miriam said, drawing back and smiling up at him.

  “You look fine to me, Miriam,” Larry said. “Let’s go to bed. It’s been too long.”

  Logan parked on Main Street in Leadville less than thirty minutes before, unbeknown to him; Larry would arrive at Miriam Carmody’s house. He thought of the town as quaint, and it reminded him of photos of many such places as they had been back in the nineteen-forties and fifties; the kind of main street that Walt Disney had created for his theme parks.

  Leadville was small. There was a hotel, a diner and a few stores, but it was not a place that anyone could get lost in.

  Logan buttoned up his coat and got out of the pickup, leaving Kate inside with the engine running and the heater on.

  Clinton’s Pharmacy was between Doc’s Diner and a small general store. Logan went in the pharmacy and up to the counter, where a middle-aged woman with a heavily-lined face, and gray hair scraped back and worn in a ponytail was explaining to an old man what dosage of the meds he was purchasing he should take. Logan browsed the shelves and waited until the man finally shuffled out onto the street.

  “You need something?” Abigail Clinton said, almost but not quite giving Logan a smile as she took in his overall appearance, as small-town folk do with strangers.

  “Some information,” Logan said. “I’m looking for a buddy…an ex-colleague that I lost touch with.”

  “What kind of ex-colleague?” Abigail said.

  “Marine,” Logan said as he removed the photo from his jacket pocket and held it out for the woman to take. “I saw that this was processed here, so thought you might just recognize Brandon.”

  Abigail checked the back of the photo to confirm that it had been through their hands. “This is ten years old,” she said, noting the printed date. “I recognize Miriam, but not the young man standing next to her.”

  “Miriam?”

  “Yes, Miriam Carmody. She lives out on Twin Lakes Road.”

  “Maybe you could give me her address, or even phone her for me and ask if she knows Brandon Hayes,” Logan said as he took the photo back.

  “And who should I say is asking?” Abigail said, not about to give Miriam’s address to a total stranger.

  “John Webster,” Logan said. “Brandon and I served in Iraq together.”

  Abigail went through a door into a small office, looked up Miriam’s number and punched it into the phone. Logan could hear the pharmacist’s muffled voice, but could not make out what was being said.

  “Sorry, Mr. Webster,” Abigail said as she appeared again. “Miriam has never heard of an ex-soldier by the name of Brandon Hayes.”

  Logan hiked his shoulders. “Thanks for your time and help,” he said. “I’ll contact Army pension records and see if they can point me in
the right direction.”

  “Good luck,” Abigail said. “There’s something special about reunions.”

  Logan went back out to the pickup. “C’mon,” he said to Kate. “Let’s grab a bite to eat in the diner.”

  “Anything?” Kate said after they had sat down at a pine table in a corner, under a large, framed, sepia picture of Doc Holliday, after whom the diner was named. A card underneath the nineteenth century photograph gave details of how in 1883, the outlaw dentist had arrived in Leadville shortly after the infamous gunfight at the O.K Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. On August 19, 1884, Holliday shot ex-policeman Billy Allen, after Allen threatened Holliday for failing to pay a five dollar debt. Despite overwhelming evidence implicating him, a jury found Holliday not guilty of the shooting or attempted murder of Allen.

  “Hit the mother lode,” Logan said, which was an apt phrase to use in what had been a famous silver mining town. “All we need is the address of a woman by the name of Miriam Carmody from electoral records. She lives on Twin Lakes Road.”

  “You really think that Horton will be there?”

  “Yes, Kate. It’s in a remote area; a perfect place to hide out. If I hadn’t found the photo, then no one, including us, would have had a clue as to where he’d gone.”

  They ordered steak and eggs, drank coffee with it, and then went to the town hall and quickly found Miriam Carmody’s address, and also an exact location on a map of the area that showed her property, that was aptly named The Lodge.

  The snow had eased off, but the low mantle of pumice-colored clouds looked heavy with the promise of much more to come.

  Logan drove out of town and followed the winding road up to where he was sure he would find his quarry.

  “What if he headed south and is already in New Mexico?” Kate said as they moved ever higher along the narrow mountain road.

  “I worry about ‘what ifs’ when they become realities, Kate,” Logan said. “Till I know different, I stick with what I’ve got and follow it to where it leads. Horton is old and wise enough to wait and see what happens. No one has accused him of anything yet. If and when he feels that I’m no longer a threat to his continued freedom, he’ll go back to the Creek and get on with his life. He probably phoned Lyle and extended his sick leave before taking off.”

  “Do you think that he has arranged for McCall to send someone else after us?”

  “It’s gone beyond what Larry wants, Kate. Wade McCall wants me dead for what I did to his men, and for what I did to him. It’s personal to him now, so, yes, he’ll have a contract out on me, and maybe on you, too.”

  “Great. What did you do to McCall?”

  “Pinned his hand to his desk with a knife to get his attention and some information.”

  Kate said nothing. Knew that it would be a waste of breath, and that how things had worked out could not be altered. She was in a predicament that hopefully Logan would be able to resolve. He instilled her with confidence in him; was seemingly as hard and resolute as the towering Rockies that they were driving through; a force of nature in his own right. And yet his capacity for violence frightened her, for she knew that he would act without the slightest degree of reticence against those that he considered to be a threat to his or her safety.

  Kate lit a cigarette. She resigned herself to the fact that Larry Horton would probably die at Logan’s hands, and that the same fate waited for anyone that the gangster from Denver had sent after them. Surprisingly, calmness overrode and dissolved her fear. Logan was doing what – in his words – needed to be done, and so those that chose to bring him down deserved whatever they got. Decent, law-abiding people had nothing to fear from this man, and could only benefit from having him around to protect their interests.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Vicente drove past the driveway that he knew Horton had turned into. The tracker signal remained static.

  Another third of a mile and Vicente slowed and made a right between two broad cedar gateposts and parked in front of a two-car garage that was integral to a stone built bungalow.

  Marvin Crenshaw was surprised to hear the small, bronze bell that was fixed to the wall at the side of the front door being rung. He was not expecting company, and so with the weather closing in, thought that it must be a motorist in trouble.

  “Yes, can I help you?” Marvin said as he opened the door to be faced by a slim man wearing a suit, necktie and thin windcheater, and was therefore ill-prepared for the extremely low temperature and the blizzard conditions that were fast approaching.

  “I know you can help me,” Vicente said as he drew the .45 caliber P220 Sig Sauer from its shoulder holster and pointed it at the man’s chest. “Back up a couple of steps, nice and slow, and sit down on the floor.”

  Marvin did as he was told. His eyes were locked on the black hole of the gun’s muzzle, and his mouth was hanging open.

  Vicente closed the door behind him and locked it, withdrawing the key and putting it in his coat pocket. “What’s your name?” he asked the old guy who was sitting with his gnarled, shaking hands on his knees.

  “Marvin Crenshaw.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Marvin. Who else is in the house?”

  “Just my wife, Anna.”

  “Call her out here.”

  “She’s in bed. She has a lung condition and doesn’t get up very often.”

  “Take me to see her,” Vicente said, grasping Marvin by the upper arm and hauling him up to his feet.

  “Please don’t hurt her,” Marvin pleaded.

  “Behave yourself and nobody gets hurt. I just need some information, a cup of coffee, and some suitable clothin’ for this shitty weather. Are you expectin’ any company?”

  “No,” Marvin said as he led the gunman through the living room and along a hallway to a slightly open door.

  Anna Crenshaw was sitting up in a bed that was fitted with side rails. Plump pillows supported her frail body, and she was wearing a transparent mask that was linked by tube to a large oxygen bottle that was standing next to the night table. She was fast asleep with an open paperback book in her lap.

  “Okay,” Vicente said. “Let’s go in the kitchen and have that coffee.” He was suitably convinced that the old woman could pose no possible threat to him. She was a skeletal figure, somehow hanging on to life by a thread, totally dependent on the supply of oxygen that was feeding her vital organs and sustaining a life that was slipping away. Vicente found the sight of combined old-age and terminal illness to be one of the few things that actually frightened him. He was only forty, but had reached a point at which he could not help but acknowledge that he was probably halfway or more through his life, and that his youth was well and truly behind him. The only solace was that should the day come when he was diagnosed with something incurable, or his quality of life was impaired in any unacceptable way, then he could always choose the easy option and blow his brains out.

  Sitting at the diner-style booth in the kitchen, Vicente waited till Marvin had made the coffee before saying anything else.

  Marvin sat down opposite the intense-looking man and said, “What kind of information could I possibly have that would interest you?”

  Vicente took a sip of the coffee before answering. It was strong, piping hot, and warmed him. “Your neighbors to the east,” he said. “Tell me who they are.”

  “Not they,” Marvin said. “Miriam Carmody lives there by herself, since her husband got shot in a hunting accident.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s a nice lady. She’s in her late fifties, keeps to herself, but is happy to help out if she can.”

  Vicente got Marvin to make a rough sketch of his neighbor’s house. Drank a second cup of coffee, and then shot Marvin through the forehead. He would have liked to have left the couple to whatever it was they called a life, but did not want his description given to the police when they investigated what was in the not too distant future going to take place at Miriam Carmody’s home. Next stop was Anna
Crenshaw’s bedroom. He sent her on her way with a slug through her left eye. She had not seen him, but for her to wake up and be alone, or somehow stagger through the house to find the corpse of her husband, would not have sat right with him. It crossed his mind that maybe he had a sentimental side to his nature. After all, he had loved his mum, and still mourned the fact that she had died as a result of some superbug that she had contracted during a stay in hospital for a minor operation. That had taught him that life was inequitable, and that you had to squeeze every last drop of pleasure from it while you could.

  Searching the closets and drawers, Vicente found suitable clothing to protect him against the cold. He had a choice, wait outside for Logan to turn up, or knock at the door, tell Horton who he was, and that Wade had sent him to deal with Logan. He decided to walk back to the Carmody place and keep watch for a while. When he got too cold he would make himself known to the woman and the runaway deputy.

  Logan pulled off the highway into the lot of a motel that could have been owned by Norman Bates. A single storey block incorporating an office and a dozen timber clad rooms was set in front of a path that led up to a house that looked older than the mountains that surrounded it. A blue neon sign topped with two inches of snow advertised it as the Travelers’ Rest Motel.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Kate said.

  “Because this is as far as you go,” Logan replied.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Kate. I’m not prepared to have you in the line of fire if Horton decides to be stupid. Nobody knows where we are, so you’ll be safe here till I get back.”

  “I’d feel safer with you, Logan.”

  “But you wouldn’t be. I need to deal with this without worrying about you. I wouldn’t be fully focused if you were there.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  Logan leaned over and kissed her, then got out of the pickup and went over to the office. The bald guy behind the counter was chewing gum and listening to some country music station on the radio. Only his head was visible. He stood up and placed the magazine he’d been reading down on the worn wood surface and smiled at Logan.