Absolution (17 page)

Authors: Michael Kerr

Tags: #Crime Fiction, #Thrillers, #Vigilante Justice, #Murder, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Crime

The blade of the combat knife slid free with ease, due to the groove of the blood run which ran its length. Logan wiped both sides of the blade on the corpse’s shirt and returned it to the sheath. This was heavy shit. He had just killed a lawman, and even with Andy as a witness to the events leading up to the sheriff’s death, it would be hard to walk away from the investigation that would follow.

Locating and picking up the SMG and the cell, Logan walked over to the BMW, where Andy was still sitting in the driving seat and pointing the handgun at Carlos.

“You okay?” Logan said, noticing a couple of small cuts on Andy’s left cheek.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just got nicked by some of the glass from the window.”

Carlos looked from Logan to Andy and back again. He expected that Logan would shoot him, but said nothing. Just did the only thing he could; wait.

“You lied, Carlos,” Logan said to him.

“I did what I thought was best at the time,” Carlos said. “I planned on disappearing soon. I transferred a lot of Zack’s cash to my offshore accounts, and if this hadn’t happened I’d have been in Costa Rica in a day or two.”

Logan thought it through, dumped the gun in the car and took out his knife and saw dread materialize in Carlos’s eyes. He lifted the soaked material of his jacket, wiped the hilt clean of prints and dropped the knife on the ground. “Pick it up,” he said to Carlos, and after he did, Logan walked around the car and got in the passenger seat. “Turn it around and drive back along Main Street,” he said to Andy.

Carlos watched as his BMW turned in a tight circle and headed back through the ghost town. The brake lights came on as it stopped again a few hundred yards away. He didn’t move, just stood with the knife in his hand and waited. Saw Logan get out and go into one of the buildings, to reappear a few seconds later and climb back in the car, which immediately sped off into the night.

Logan tossed his rucksack on to the rear seat, and then ticked off a mental list as Andy drove back along the dirt road toward the highway. He had cell phones, weapons and Carlos’s car to dispose of. He had wiped his prints from the Kia, and was positive that there would be no physical evidence to link him to the incident.

“Where are we headed?” Andy said as she drove.

“Nowhere yet,” Logan said. “Park the car and turn the engine off.”

Andy frowned but stopped, not bothering to pull over to the side of the track, because there was no traffic at all. This was a region where only the occasional hikers or tourists visited and looked around, mainly at weekends.

“Why have we stopped?” Andy said.

“You’ll know in a minute.” Logan said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Carlos
walked across to the Kia. Zack was staring at him wide-eyed and shaking his head violently from side to side, grunting indecipherably through the duct tape that covered his mouth.

Carlos could see that Zack’s swollen hands were also taped, to the steering wheel. Perhaps that was why Logan had given him the knife, to cut Zack free with.

He reached out with his left hand, pressed the button on the door handle and pulled it open, and the world immediately turned to a bright orange.

Zack had known what was going to happen. Earlier, as he had walked out on to the street, Logan had struck him from behind. He had come to in the driver’s seat of the Kia, gagged and bound. And there was something strapped around his waist, under his jacket. It didn’t take him long to work out that it was some kind of IED; an improvised explosive device, or maybe an anti-personnel mine. A wire snaked out from his jacket to where it was tied off to the inside door handle.

Outside the car, Logan just smiled in at him and then walked away.

Zack knew exactly what Logan’s plan was. Whoever opened the door to release him would not be saving him, they would be unwittingly killing him, and probably themselves at the same time. And there was absolutely fuck all he could do about it.

Zack watched events unfold around him, looking out through the windshield and the side window. He saw Carlos arrive, and then Clay Manders, whom he thought might take Logan down. But none of that mattered. He worked at the tape with his mouth until his jaws ached, but it remained in place. It was not just one length of the silver duct tape; Logan had obviously wrapped it around his head at least a couple of times, and if he couldn’t warn whoever came to his aid about the device, then he would not survive.

Zack’s eyes bulged as he attempted to scream, but Carlos reached out and opened the door, and the tension on the wire triggered the device.

There was no pain. Zack was blinded and deafened by the blast, but remained conscious. He was stunned, immediately overcome with shock, and knew that he was dying. He could not breathe, due to the combined results of the explosive charge and the red-hot shrapnel that had ripped his torso apart and fractured his ribs and punctured his lungs and heart. He experienced a second of utter terror before his heart became still and all awareness deserted his brain.

Although protected in part by the door, Carlos was mortally wounded. He was blown back almost five yards from the mangled vehicle, to lie in a daze as blood spurted from torn arteries in his neck. Pieces of glass from the Kia’s window had punched into his upper body, throat and face, and although he did not know it, he had less than two minutes left to live.

Andy saw the ball of light in the rearview an instant before the sound of an explosion pierced the darkness.

She watched the glow grow fainter and disappear, and then turned to Logan.

“That was Slater and Carlos going up like firecrackers,” Logan said. “I had one of the stake mines left, so thought it would be a good idea to wire it up to Slater and the door of the car.”

Andy felt a stab of guilt at being pleased that Slater was dead, and a little disturbed by the fact that Carlos was. He had seemed a reluctant participant, but the facts were that he had worked for Slater, so was a bird of a feather with the man whom she knew had arranged to have Sam killed, and had also been hell-bent on doing the same to her, Fran and Logan.

It was midnight. Logan told Andy to make a left onto a dirt road that led up between craggy bluffs that were situated in a deserted region with no visible lights from buildings. After a mile he directed her to turn right and follow a rock-strewn trail that petered out after no more than two hundred yards.

With the interior light on, Logan dismantled and wiped all the weapons, and took the SIM cards out of the cell phones, and put everything in his rucksack after first removing the rolled-up clothes and the package containing the money that had originally belonged to a lowlife by the name of Jerry Brandon in Charleston, West Virginia.

“Wait here,” he said to Andy. “I’ll only be a few minutes. I want to dump this lot where it won’t be found in a hurry.”

Climbing up to a point high above the trail, Logan found himself on a reasonably flat plateau. The rock was slippery from the rain, although the storm was much farther east now and pale moonlight lit the surrounding terrain. He stepped carefully across a foot-wide crevice and came to another one that was wider. Picking up a fist-sized rock, he held out his hand and dropped it into the fissure, to hear it hit the bottom over two seconds later. It was deep enough. He took off the rucksack, opened the top of it and tipped the contents out, for them to clatter against the rock walls as they fell and bounced and pin wheeled off unseen projections of sandstone.

Retracing his steps, he made his way back down to the car. He put his scant belongings in his rucksack and removed a matchbook from one of its zipped pockets before shrugging it on. All that was left to do was burn the BMW.

Andy helped wipe down the interior, and when they were both sure that no trace of them having been in it would be found, Logan took a can of gas from the trunk and emptied it inside the car. It was something he had now done several times over the last few years. Telling Andy to stand well back, he tore off several of the cardboard matches, struck them and tossed them through the shattered driver’s window, before making a hasty retreat.

The whoosh of the igniting fumes rocked the vehicle, and it began to burn as Logan and Andy jogged back along the trail to the dirt road.

“Is it over?” Andy said breathlessly.

“Yeah,” Logan said. “With Keno and Slater dead, we’re of no interest to anyone. We’ll get back to the highway and hitch a ride, or walk till we find a motel.”

“What about the sheriff?”

“The police will find the knife, and it has Carlos’s prints on it. They’ll never know what really happened, but will think that they have the corpse of Manders’ killer, and will have no reason to look for anyone else.”

It was almost four in the morning when the driver of a Peterbilt truck stepped on his air brakes and stopped a few yards ahead of them. Mick Wetton was happy to have company, but only stopped for women or couples, not guys. He knew that it was still a risk picking up hitchers, but old habits died hard, and he had a Colt .45 in the pocket of the door next to him.

“Where are you folks headin’?” Mick said.

“As near to Tucson city center as you can manage,” Logan said.

The horror was behind them. Andy found it almost surreal to believe all that had happened to her and Fran over the past few days. Had it not been for Logan she was positive that they would have both been killed. She began to shake, and Logan put his arm around her. He knew that the relief following any intolerable situation could cause a form of emotional meltdown.

“Do you smoke?” Andy said to Mick after a few minutes, when she felt able to talk without her voice cracking.

“I have to admit that I do,” he said, smiling broadly to disclose his tar-stained teeth.

“I could use a cigarette,” Andy said. “I was planning to quit, but I’ve had a goddamn awful couple of days.”

Mick pulled a crumpled pack of camels and a throwaway lighter from his shirt pocket and handed them to her. “Light me one as well, honey,” he said.

Logan opened the window an inch as Andy lit up. He wasn’t anti-smoking; had been an addict to nicotine himself a few years back, but didn’t need to breathe in any more of the toxins than was necessary.

Mick dropped them off at the junction of I-19 and I-10. He was heading east for Las Cruces in New Mexico to deliver a load of crated white goods.

Logan paid cash for a room at the White Dove Motel, which was more of a dirty gray color and had been in need of at the very least a lick of paint for decades.

They did not shower or get undressed. Both of them were totally exhausted. Logan removed his boots, Andy slipped off her Keds, and they flopped on the old bed. Andy snuggled up to Logan and they slept like babies for over six hours.

Leaving the motel, they walked to a nearby strip mall and ate quarter pounders with cheese at McDonald’s. Logan had two, with fries and black coffee.

“I need to find Fran,” Andy said as they finished up their coffees.

“You’ll have to phone the police and tell them who you are,” Logan said. “They’ll know which hospital she’s at. And just play dumb, Andy. You don’t know anything about what went down at the cabin.”

“What about you, Logan, aren’t you coming with me?”

“No. It’s over. I’ll give you some money to tide you over for a few days.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need much. I hid the bag with the money that Sam stole at the cabin after you’d left, just in case anything happened.”

“Where?”

“In the privy, under the floorboards.”

Logan smiled. It gave the term ‘dirty money’ a whole new meaning.

Delving into his rucksack, Logan took a wad of bills from the package at the bottom and handed it to Andy under the table, after making sure that no one was looking.

A few minutes later, outside in the sunshine, Logan hugged Andy, kissed her on the cheek and asked her to say hello to Fran for him. And then he just turned and walked away.

A half hour later, Logan was sitting up front in a Jeep Cherokee, happy to be on the road again, and thankful for the cold air that was drilling into his face from a vent to dry the sweat. It turned out that the guy who’d stopped for him was also an ex-cop, so they had something in common to talk about as they headed east.

Logan thought that he may make his way to New York City and look up Arnie, but he was in no hurry to get there.

Almost everyone overlooks some fine detail, and Logan was no exception to the rule. Back in Absolution, three days and two thunderstorms later, the now rotting corpses of Sheriff Clay Manders, Zack Slater and Carlos Rivas had been picked at by coyotes and other desert creatures, but remained undiscovered by the authorities.

Donald Brennon, known to a handful of fellow prospectors as Duke, was over two miles from his shack, walking along after his mongrel dog, which he had not bothered giving a name to. Carrying an old rifle, to shoot anything worth skinning and providing him with a meal, the remains of the ghost town appeared in the distance, and he remembered when the last family had moved out, back in fifty-nine. He turned west and kept walking, to stop and raise his gun as he saw something light-colored appear from a tangle of mesquite.

It was a straw cowboy hat, that had been blown from God knows where by the wind. Duke picked it up and examined it. He liked the shape, so took off his own old felt hat and tried it on. It was a size too big, but nothing that comes free should be complained about. He kept it on and stuffed his own in a pocket of his coat.

Wandering around in a loop that would eventually take him back to his shack, Duke was oblivious to the fact that the DNA of a man called Logan was in the sweatband of his newly acquired possession. The only evidence that could have aided the law in knowing that someone else had been at the scene was now like its previous owner, in the wind.

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