Atonement (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Howard
came round slowly.  Didn’t know where he was for a few seconds.  He spent a lot of time on the road, moving from town to town, motel to motel. It had become a blur after a few years.  And the scotch didn’t help.  He’d woken up in a Best Western in Cheyenne a few days ago and thought that he was in Pueblo.  Maybe he would cut back on the booze.  It was pickling his brain as well as his liver.

“Who is it?”  Howard said from behind the locked door.

“My name is Kate.  I’m staying in the next room.  I need some help.”

Howard pulled back the door latch and looked out through the gap.  Liked what he saw.  “What exactly is the problem?”  he said.

“My sister just phoned me.  She was on her way here, but the car has broken down just a few miles out of town.  I need to get her out of the freezing cold.”

Howard didn’t want to get involved, but he was basically a decent man and could not just say no and shut the door.  He decided to take a risk.  “Show me some ID,”  he said.

Kate went back into her room and took her drivers license out of her purse.  Returned to number nine and held it up for Howard to see.

Howard studied the license.  The photo was a match for the attractive woman. Her name was Kate Donner.  “Tell you what, Kate,”  he said.  “I’ve been drinking, so I’ll give you the key to my vehicle, and you leave your license with me till you get back.”

“What’s your name?”  Kate said.

“Howard.”

“Well, thank you, Howard,”  Kate said, handing him the license.  “I really appreciate this.”

Howard took his apartment keys off the fob and handed it to Kate.  “Be careful,”  he said.  “The roads are really icy.”

Kate thanked him again and went back to her room for the shotgun and her purse.  She held the weapon down by her side out of sight as she unlocked the car door with the remote and got in.

Howard closed his door after waving, as Kate drove out onto the highway to head up to the mountain to the address that she believed Logan would be at, not knowing what difference she would or could make if he was in trouble, but knowing that she would not be expected.

The minutes dragged by.  Larry and Vicente had expected to hear screams or gunshots, or both.  But the only sound they heard was the wind whistling through the trees.

“So where the fuck has your dog got to?”  Vicente called through from the front reception room he was in.

“I don’t know,”  Larry answered.  “He must still be lookin’ for him.”

“Go out and find him,”  Vicente said.  “I’ll watch your back.”

Larry thought about it.  If Logan was outside, then he would at some point attempt to gain entry to the house.  Maybe being outside was safer.  He put his coat, a watch cap and his left-hand glove on and made his way through the mud room to the integral garage with his pistol in his right hand.  Vicente followed him.

“I’ll run diagonally across to the tree line,”  Larry said.  “If he tries to close in and approach the house, we’ll have him in crossfire.”

Vicente patted him on the shoulder.  “Keep under cover,”  he said.  “And shout if you’re comin’ in, because if I don’t know that it’s you I’ll open fire.”

Logan looked straight down into Bama’s upturned face.  The dog was sitting at the bottom of the tree, no more than twelve feet below where he had climbed up to balance precariously on a thick limb of the old fir.  Blank, dark eyes stared up and made full eye contact, and the black, glistening lips were pulled back in what appeared to be a grin, displaying a lethal armory of teeth.  It was unnerving.  The brute didn’t make a sound.  A normal dog would be running around the base of the tree and panting, barking and generally raising Cain.

Logan felt like a treed squirrel.  He needed to be down on the ground, before Horton and whoever was with him made a move.

Pulling a large cone from where it hung next to others in a clump, Logan threw it as far as he could behind the dog, and as it bounced off a rock with a loud, dry sound, spilling its seeds, Bama turned in the direction of the noise.

Logan dropped from the tree, to land on the dog’s back with his full weight, taking Bama down onto the ground.

The dog’s head speed was a blur of movement.  Logan felt the jaws lock on his left upper arm.  Bama’s massive head whipped from side to side and came away with a large portion of the parka and underlying foam filling.

Logan felt that he had no options to consider.  As the dog regained its feet, he brought the two-foot long piece of branch that he had broken off the tree sideways in an arc, using all the strength that he could muster.

Bama became rigid for a few seconds, as if pondering what the impediment sticking out of its chest could be.

Logan took the handgun from his pocket and pointed it at the wounded dog, but did not want to fire the weapon and disclose his location unless absolutely necessary.

Bama stared at him with a look of surprise; now panting rapidly with its tongue lolling out to a side and spraying droplets of blood from its mouth.  The big dog quivered as it made to continue its attack, but keeled over onto its side, driving the branch further into its muscular body.

Logan felt a stab of sorrow.  He liked dogs, and knew that this one had been trained; programmed to be vicious.  The fault for its aggression was the sole responsibility of Larry Horton.

“Don’t move a fuckin’ inch, Logan,”  Larry said from ten paces behind him.

Logan immediately threw himself forward over the dog, turning and firing as he hit the ground.

Larry snapped off a couple of shots, but handguns and moving targets in semi-darkness were not ideal. He thought that he had hit Logan, but was not sure, so stepped back behind the trunk of a tree.  He had been lucky. One of the slugs from Logan’s gun had clipped him, taking off the lobe of his left ear.  He could feel blood dripping down his neck, but adrenalin negated any immediate pain.

Ever so slowly, Larry edged out, holding his pistol two-handed and aiming at where he could see the dark shape of his beloved dog.

“You’re going to fuckin’ die, Logan,”  he shouted, to be heard above the strengthening wind.

“We all are, eventually,”  Logan said from just a yard to Larry’s right.  “Lose the gun, now, or I’ll shoot you in the head.”

Larry wanted to take his chance.  He had no idea how Logan had moved with such speed, as he had ducked back behind the tree and lost sight of him for no more than a few seconds.

“Okay,”  Larry said, and tossed the weapon away from him.  “Now what?”

“You call whoever is in the house.  Tell them that you shot me; that it’s over.  And remember, Larry, the gun is on you.  Any more shooting and you get to be the first casualty.”

“I got him,”  Larry shouted.  “Logan’s dead.”

“Good job.  Come on in.”  Vicente replied, but knew that it was a lie.  He had heard an inflection in Larry’s voice that switched on a bright red warning light in his head.  The tone was wrong.  Larry would have sounded jubilant at taking out the guy that had caused him so much trouble.  There would also have been a quality of relief.  But Larry sounded tense.

Opening the front door just wide enough to squeeze through, Vicente made his way in a big loop around the side of The Lodge.  Keeping low in a crouching jog, he soon spotted the two figures walking slowly towards the rear of the house.  He stepped behind a low, timber built log store and waited until the two men were parallel with him and no more than thirty feet away, before stepping out with his gun raised, ready to fire.

“Hey,”  a voice shouted from behind Vicente.  He turned and saw the yellow blast erupt from the muzzle of the shotgun, and seemed to be instantly on his back, watching his Sig Sauer pinwheel into the air, to land in the snow fifteen feet from him.

Kate worked the action on the shotgun and kept it pointed at the fallen man as he attempted to rise up, only to collapse back down and begin to moan.

Logan and Larry were both taken completely by surprise at what had happened.  But Larry was marginally quicker to take advantage of the situation.  He bolted for the cover of the trees again.

Logan could have taken a shot, but was loathe to shoot a fleeing, unarmed man in the back.

“Don’t take your eyes off that guy,”  Logan shouted to Kate as he took up pursuit.

Larry jinked left and right through the trees, initially expecting to be hit by a bullet every second, and then growing in confidence with every stride that took him into the darkness and away from Logan.

Logan followed the crunching sound of footsteps on snow that was beginning to freeze, and the snaps of brittle twigs breaking and cones being crushed underfoot.  “You’ve got nowhere to go, Larry,”  he shouted.  “Give it up.”

Larry came out through the trees to be met by a steep rock face that stretched both ways for as far as he could see.  He turned right and ran along the bottom of it until he came to a two foot wide fissure that split the rock.  Squeezing into it, he found that it opened into a large cavern.  He took deep breaths and came up with a plan as he saw rocks of all sizes littering the ground.

“Help me,”  Vicente said to Kate.  “I’m bleedin’ to death here.”

Kate did not reply, just pulled the stock of the pump-action harder into her shoulder and kept the barrel pointed at the man laying on the ground.  She could see blood soaking into the snow, and felt sickened by the thought that he may die, and that she would be responsible.  But a harder consideration came forward to overrule it.  He had been going to shoot Logan.  He had orchestrated a situation that had left her no choice but to pull the trigger.  For the first time since the attack and rape in Chicago, Kate did not feel like a victim.  She had found a deep well of hitherto hidden strength, and realized that she was now in some fundamental way changed, and could meet adversity with a far more positive attitude.

“Crawl over to the house,”  Kate said to the injured man.

“I can’t,”  Vicente said.

Kate pulled the trigger, and the concentrated clump of heavy gauge shot blew a crater in the ground a couple of feet from Vicente’s face.  “Just do it, or I promise I’ll finish this here,”  she said.

He read her eyes.  There was no compromise whatsoever.  She was capable of doing what most people could not.  He used his elbows and his left leg to scrabble across to the rear of the house and into the kitchen.  Somehow managed to prop himself up against the wall at the side of the door.  Blood continued to soak through his pants and begin to pool on the tiled floor.  The pain was almost intolerable, and he was close to passing out.

“Who are you?”  Kate said.

“Your worst nightmare,”  Vicente said.

Kate smiled.  “You read too much pulp fiction,”  she said.

“I’m just your average professional hitman, bitch,”  Vicente said in a whisper.  “Whether it’s me or someone else, Logan is a dead man walkin’.  And now you get to be on the list.  This isn’t goin’ to go away, ever.  All you’ve done is postponed the inevitable.”

“It won’t be your concern,”  Kate said.  “And be advised that Logan knows all about Wade McCall, and will deal with him.”

Vicente was not listening, he had passed out.

“Who is out there?”  a muffled voice came from somewhere in the house.

“I’m Kate Donner, a lawyer,”  Kate replied.  “Are you Miriam Carmody?”

“Yes.  What’s happening?”

“I have a shotgun trained on a seriously wounded man in your kitchen.  If you are not part of the problem, please show yourself.  And be advised that if you are armed I will shoot you.”

Miriam put the pistol down on the bed, opened the door and slowly walked along the hallway, through the living room and into the kitchen.

“Take a seat,”  Kate said.  “And tell me what you know.”

Miriam sat down and told Kate everything she knew, from when Larry had turned up at her door.  “Where’s Larry now?”  she asked Kate.

“He’s out there with a man chasing him.  I have the feeling that they’ll both be joining us soon.”

“And what about
him
?”  Miriam said; looking over to where Vicente was sitting with his head hung down, chin on chest.

“He’s a hitman.  My friend Logan knew that Larry had killed a girl in Carson Creek, but had no proof.  Larry knows a gangster in Denver, and so arranged to have Logan murdered to make sure that he did not become a suspect.”

“Larry admitted to me that he’d done it,”  Miriam said.  “He told me that it was an accident.”

Logan saw the footprints leading into the vertical split in the rock face.  He fired two shots into the black maw of the cave beyond it.  “I’m not coming in, Larry,”  he shouted.  “You’re trapped.  Kate will be phoning the police.  I’ll just wait out here till they arrive.”

Logan had no intention of waiting, and knew that Kate would not phone the police.  He turned sideways and moved forward, the pistol held up next to his face.

Larry was waiting, holding his breath.  The bullets had ricocheted off the back wall of the cave, and he thought that if Logan had kept firing, that one of the slugs would have probably hit him.

As soon as Logan appeared, Larry brought the football-sized rock down two-handed and raised it again as the big man went down onto his knees.

Logan grunted.  The rough surface of the rock gashed his cheek and smashed into his left shoulder, taking him down to the ground.  He twisted, rolled away and came up onto his feet searching for his target, shooting as the second attempted blow missed him and Larry fell forward as the weight of the rock and his momentum took him off balance.

Larry recovered fast, lashed out with his fist and connected with Logan’s jaw, knocking him onto his side.  He then stamped hard on Logan’s right wrist with all his weight, and saw the gun fall from his hand.

Logan actually grinned in the darkness.  He was in a position that he had been in many times before, physically up against another man; one on one.  And he was confident, up for it, ready and well equipped to not only protect himself, but to inflict severe injury on his enemy.  He had not yet come across another man that could best him in hand-to-hand combat.