Atonement (8 page)

Mickey was suffering more combined pain than he had ever experienced in his life.  He had thought that this guy was just a drifter; an easy mark.  Now he was severely injured and facing torture.

“Okay,”  Mickey sobbed.  “I’ll talk.”

“Good decision,”  Logan said.  “Let’s start with your name.”

“Mickey Morgan.”

“Where do you live, Mickey?”

“Grand Junction.”

“And you’re a hitman, right?”

Mickey wanted to deny it.  But why else would he have been here with a gun fitted with a suppressor?  He couldn’t very well say that he’d been hunting game.  “Yeah,”  he said after a ten second pause.

“Who hired you?”

“A guy in Denver.  Wade McCall.”

“And why does he want me dead?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the truth, I swear.  He gives me a name and details.  I don’t ask why.”

Logan believed him.  Hitmen killed for money.  They didn’t need to know the reason.  “Tell me about McCall.”  He said.

“He’s a gangster.  Into everything illegal you can think of.”

“I need his description and an address.”

Mickey told Logan everything he knew.

“How many hits have you carried out for him?”  Logan said.

“About thirty,”  Mickey said.  “Why?”

Logan whipped his hand out.  The blade of the knife severed Mickey’s left ear from his head without the slightest resistance; just cleaved through the flesh and cartilage as if it was no more solid than butter.  The now detached organ dropped down and came to rest on Mickey’s thigh.  He stared at it in horror and disbelief, as if it were a deadly scorpion.

“I ask the questions, Mickey,”  Logan said.  “Where’s your car?”

Mickey’s bottom lip had taken on a life of its own.  It was visibly trembling, and saliva was drooling from the corner of his mouth.  “It…It’s a hundred ya…yards south, in a p…parking area,”  he whined.

Logan thought it through.  The Marine in him had a small mini battle with the homicide detective he had subsequently become.  But once a Marine, always a Marine.  This piece of shit was the enemy; a lowlife that had admitted killing thirty individuals for just one man.  God knows how many lives he had prematurely ended in total.

Logan brought the hunting knife up underhand and drove the long blade through the fleshy part behind the jawbone; up through the mouth, tongue and upper palate and into Mickey’s brain.

Withdrawing the knife, he wiped it clean on the hitman’s coat and returned it to the sheath.  He took no pleasure in watching the self-confessed assassin jerk and go into spasm as he emitted noises that could have been the snorting of a distressed horse.

It crossed Logan’s mind that his capacity for violence was another valid reason not to become involved with women like Kate.  He was much more than they could ever properly imagine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Logan
found the Nissan and drove it back to the clearing in front of the house.  Picked up the deadweight of Mickey Morgan as if it were no more than a bag of feathers and folded it into the trunk, before driving three miles to where a faded sign indicated that there was a disused rhodochrosite mine a half mile back from highway 67.

Parking in front of the gates, Logan used a large rock to pound a rusted chain that was holding the gates together.  The chain held, but the hasp of the padlock it was attached to sprung loose after several blows.

With the car parked behind a large corrugated steel building, Logan searched the vehicle and found a wallet under the driver’s seat and a cell phone in the glove box.  He transferred them to his pockets and then set off to explore the immediate area and found a coil of old hosepipe fitted to an external faucet, and cut a three-foot length out of it with his knife.  And from a large junk pile inside the building he picked up a plastic bucket with no handle and a crack in its side.  It would serve the purpose.

He knelt next to the Nissan with the hose in the gas tank and sucked until his mouth was filled with fuel.  He spat it out and transferred the end of the tube into the bucket and filled it. Repeated the exercise three times, emptying the contents into the interior of the car, its trunk, and over the corpse.  He then spun the wheel of Mickey’s Zippo and backed-up a few feet before tossing the lighter into the now open rear window of the car, to then turn and jog away from the scene, to stop a hundred feet away and watch as the initial small explosion from the ignition of the fumes died down and the vehicle began to burn up.  Once satisfied that the Nissan would soon be a blackened shell, and that all that would remain of the second-rate hitman would be a charred, twisted and unrecognizable skeleton, he jogged back towards the road and considered the consequences of his actions.  The car would no doubt be discovered, but there was nothing to link it to him. And partially cremated bodies were usually impossible to retrieve any viable evidence from. Morgan would just be a John Doe that would prove hard to identify.  And even if he had done time and his DNA profile was on record, Mickey Morgan – if that had been his real name – was unknown to Logan.

Keeping east of the road, Logan headed north using trails where he could find them.  The forest floor was easy to negotiate; pine needles and cones and twigs had formed a thick mat to walk on.  Burning the body of the hitman was uppermost in his thoughts as he strolled through the trees. It brought to mind the burning of another body; that of Sal Mendez, a contract killer intent on tracking down and murdering Rita and Sharon Jennings.  He had ended up in a life or death struggle with Mendez, had mortally wounded him, and then dropped the corpse down the shaft of a mine and set it on fire.  The unofficial cremation had been, as in this case, distasteful, but necessary to protect his identity from subsequent forensic investigation at the scene.

It took Logan almost an hour to reach the pickup at the Carver place.  Twenty minutes later he was in his room at the Pinetop, standing under needle jets of piping hot water from the showerhead, soaping himself to get rid of the stink of gasoline.

Dressed in fresh clothes, Logan thought through what Morgan had told him.  It was evident that whoever had murdered Tanya had decided that Logan was a threat to his continued anonymity, and had contacted a gangster up in Denver to have him eliminated.  The problem was that after disposing of the paid killer, he could not approach Lyle Bumgarner with the new information he now had.  Torturing Mickey Morgan was obviously an illegal act that he could not admit to having committed.  Killing the guy may have been a little excessive, but he would not have felt good about letting a piece of work like that live.  He had confessed to whacking a lot people.  And like the phrase from the bible said in slightly different words, ‘those that live by the sword, die by the sword’.  He felt no remorse for taking the life of a man who treated cold-blooded murder as a profession.  In fact, what he had done gave him a degree of satisfaction.  And he did not dwell on the right or wrong of it.  During his time as a marine he had killed whoever his government deemed to be the enemy, with no qualms.  He had never been a pacifist in his life.  Some people just didn’t merit their place on this crazy spinning ball.  He didn’t go out of his way to look for trouble, but if it came knocking at his door he was prepared to terminate any threat with extreme prejudice, if necessary.  If that was wrong, then so be it.  He could live with everything he had done so far in life.  What others thought was their problem, not his.

Drinking coffee, and still able to taste the residue of the gas from the Nissan’s tank, Logan recalled a neighbor of approximately the same age as his parents, back in the house on Washington Street in Staten Island, where he had spent his formative years.

Ethel Grimaldi had been a widow, living with her nine-year-old daughter, Nina, and at least eight cats.  Her late husband, Paul, had worked in construction and had died as a result of the cable of a crane snapping, to deposit a two ton steel girder from a hundred feet, which scored a direct hit and squished Paul like a bug.  That had been a closed casket sendoff, Logan’s mother had told him years later.

Ethel was a devout catholic, though, and was convinced that God, though working in very mysterious ways, had need of Paul in a far better place.  She also abhorred violence in any shape or form, and lived by the credo that there was never a good reason to resort to it.  It had been three years after Paul had died that Nina was hit by a drunk driver and killed as she walked back from the local store with her mother.  Long story short in Logan’s mind; Ethel had been outside the court when the guy got bailed, and put six bullets in him, using an old .38 revolver that she had purloined from a friend’s house.  So much for being a pacifist.  When it got really personal, nearly everyone wanted payback.

Logan had once thought that his capacity for violence may be some kind of personality disorder, but had long since come to appreciate that it was just a reaction to unwarranted aggression against him by others.

He sighed.  It seemed as if he couldn’t live his life without trouble seeking him out; it followed him like the sharks that in the past had been attracted to slave ships, patiently waiting for garbage and the dead or dying to be thrown overboard.  He supposed that he had the choice to walk away from any conflict, but had never backed away from any adversity in his life. He recognized a need in him to resolve incidents that presented themselves.

Sitting on the queen-size bed nearest the door, he picked up and opened the dead man’s wallet.  There was a mix of fifty and twenty dollar bills totaling six hundred bucks.  He withdrew them and put them in one of his pants’ pockets.  The cell had just four stored numbers.  One was for someone called Wade.  He thought about removing the battery and SIM card and trashing it, but decided to keep it.  He was all set.  His plan was simple.  Find out from Wade McCall who had put a contract out on him.  He knew that it would be the local killer in the Creek.  There was no rush.  He determined to drive up to Denver in the morning to the address that Mickey had given him.  He would ask Clifton to let him use his p.c. to check out Google, look at maps of the city and become familiarized with the area around where McCall had his office, and then follow the gangster out to his home address.  It went without saying that the hoodlum would have guys round him, but that was of no real concern to Logan.  There was only one way to go.  And McCall would not expect him to still be alive, let alone intending to pay him a visit.

When Logan went over to the house, Clifton seemed more down than previously.  He couldn’t connect with Ray.  His son had withdrawn into himself, and the guilt that he felt was mushrooming, almost out of control.  His life seemed to have dead ended, and the bright future that he had anticipated now appeared to be a bleak and dismal proposition. The joy of youth had been totally obliterated, and his heart was broken.  He did not yet have the capacity to deal with such an overload of grief.

“Hi, Logan.  Come on in,”  Clifton said, turning and heading for the kitchen, leaving Logan to enter and close the door behind him.

Without bothering to ask, Clifton poured coffee for them both.  “You got any news?”  he said as they sat at the table.

“I’ve got a lead,”  Logan said.  “Whoever killed Tanya decided that I’m a threat to him.  He contacted some gangster in Denver to arrange for me to meet with an untimely end and vanish.”

“How do you know that?”

“Best that you don’t know, Clifton.  But once I get a name it’ll be game over.”

“Have you told this to Lyle?”

“No.  I’d have to explain how I got the information, and I can’t.”

Clifton was quick on the uptake.  He thought, rightly, that whoever had been sent to deal with Logan had come off second best and given up the name of the guy that had sent him.  He had the feeling that it was the hitman that had wound up disappearing, and that he would not reappear.

“You killed him.”  Clifton said.

“Let it lie,”  Logan said.  “I did what I needed to.  The important thing is to find the murderer in town and make sure that Ray is fully exonerated.”

“So what will you do now?”

“I want to check some stuff on Google.  I’d like to use your p.c.”

“Fine,”  Clifton said.

Logan drained his cup and changed his mind.  “On second thoughts, it’s a bad idea,”  he said.  “Depending on what goes down, the police may get round to checking your computer.  I wouldn’t want them to think that you were involved in this.  I’ll use an internet café in Denver.  And I won’t use your pickup.  I’ll let you drive me out to I-25.  I can hitch from there.”

“You sure you want to do this, Logan?”

“Yeah.  Especially since the killer made this personal.  I like to wrap things up and put them to bed.”

“What if…if you don’t make it back?”

“Then tell Lyle that there’s a connection between whoever killed Tanya and a gangster by the name of Wade McCall in Denver.  He’ll have to join the dots if I go missing.”

“When do you plan on leaving?”

“Dawn.”

Logan was good to go before daylight.  He had packed everything in his rucksack, not knowing whether he would ever return to Carson Creek.  It would all depend on what happened up in Denver.  He felt confident.  He had the late hitman’s gun, and the knife in its ankle sheath, and plenty of money.

After a quick coffee, he went over to the house and knocked at the door.  Clifton came out and headed over to the pickup.  They said little on the drive through the mountains to the interstate.

As they arrived at Castle Rock, Logan said, “Here will be fine,”

“What do I tell Kate or Lyle when they ask where you are?”  Clifton said.

“That I asked you to drive me out here,”  Logan said.  “Tell them that I said I had business to take care of, and that I expected to be back in the Creek in under forty-eight hours.  I’ll give you a call if that changes.”

Logan got out and slung a strap of his rucksack over his shoulder.  Clifton held his hand out, and Logan shook it

“Thanks for what you’re doing,”  Clifton said.

“No problem,”  Logan said and headed off to the bottom of the northbound ramp of the interstate.

Within ten minutes he had a ride.  A thin old guy with a gray brush cut and matching stubble on his face stopped in a beat-up Mustang and asked him where he was headed.

“Denver,”  Logan said.

“So climb in.”

Logan tossed his rucksack into the rear, got in the car and adjusted the seat to give him more legroom.

“I’m Ralph.  Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.  I’m Logan.”

Ralph Maskell put the Mustang into drive and accelerated up the ramp and joined the northbound traffic.  “You visiting Denver on business or for pleasure?”  he asked.

Logan smiled.  “You reckon I look like a businessman, Ralph?”

“Heck, no, I was just being polite and starting up a conversation.  You look like a drifter, but with purpose.  If you were twenty years younger I’d take you for a soldier coming home.”

Logan smiled.  Though not a social animal by nature, he enjoyed talking to strangers who seemed personable, and Ralph gave the impression of being the type of guy that had earned every one of the wrinkles that lined his face.

“I take it you’ve been in uniform,”  Logan said.

Ralph nodded as he lit up a Camel and then opened his window a couple inches to let the smoke escape.  “Nam,”  he said.  “I’m one of the relics of a war that left a bad taste in most Americans’ mouths.  We did our duty, and came back to a country that seemed to condemn us for it.  Maybe they were right.  Politicians rule the roost.  How about you?”

“Gulf one, and a few other places,”  Logan said.  “I always avoided having an opinion on the merits of it.  Just followed orders.  I signed up, so lived with it and did what needed to be done.”

“Marine?”

“Yeah.”

“Semper fi, Logan.”

“Back at ya, Ralph.  Loyalty is a code to live by.”

“True.  So what are you visiting Denver for?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Ralph chuckled, but thought that Logan actually half meant it.  There was ice in his gray eyes.  He was like others Ralph had met, back in the day.  Not a guy that took any pleasure in killing, but one that could do it with no more remorse than if he had inadvertently stepped on a bug.  The memories of the horrors in Vietnam had stayed with Ralph.  Almost forty years on he still sometimes woke up in the dead of night in a cold sweat.  Seeing friends and comrades die left an indelible impression on many soldiers’ souls.  But he was positive that Logan could sleep well, and had not let what he’d lived through affect him.

“What do you do, Ralph?”  Logan inquired.  “Or are you a retiree with a pastime to keep your mind occupied?”

“Use your nose, Logan,”  Ralph said.

Logan could smell the tobacco smoke that had darkened the interior of the car in a patina of nicotine, and a faint scent of lemon that he guessed was from the soap Ralph had used to wash his face with that morning.  But the underlying odor was of an animal.  “You keep pigs,”  he said.