Deadlock (41 page)

“Daddy!” Logan said. “Oh, Daddy . . . Daddy!”

Hutch kissed him on his cheeks, his nose, his chin, his forehead. He squeezed him in his arms. He had to force himself to break away.

“Hey, you know,” he said, “it's kind of cool, you tied up like this. I get to kiss you all I want.” He smiled and wiped tears out of his own eyes. “But I guess that's kind of unfair, huh? Hold on a sec.” He started to stand.

Logan grabbed his arm. “No, Daddy, don't go!”

“Look, my arrow's right there, on the roof. I'm going to cut you free with it. Okay?”

Logan looked. He tried to say something, but could only hitch in short breaths. He moaned and released Hutch's arm.

Hutch ran his hand over Logan's hair, pressed it against the side of his face. “I'm so sorry, Logan. I am. I . . .” He stood, retrieved the arrow, and returned. He sat in front of Logan and sawed at the rope with the broadhead.

“You're . . . you're bleeding,” Logan said. He was looking at Hutch's knuckles.

“That's nothing. Look at this.” He shifted his leg to show Logan the bloody pant leg. “It's not too bad either, really. You're bleeding too.”

The rope had fallen away, revealing torn, bleeding wrists. The skin around them was red and bruised. Hutch held one of Logan's hands and gently fingered the flesh surrounding the wound. “Can you move your wrists?”

Logan did. He tried to lift an arm. His face twisted up. “My arms and shoulders,” he cried out.

“No kidding,” Hutch said. “Hanging like that, I can just . . .” He rocked up onto his knees, leaned into Logan, and hugged him. He ran his hands over the boy's back and head.

Logan felt so good, so alive. He pressed his palm into his son's shoulder blade until he felt Logan's heart beating under it.

Logan encircled his arm around Hutch and pressed his face into his chest. “I thought I was going to die,” he said. “Then I saw you on that thing across the street, getting shot at. I thought
you
were going to die too.” He started crying again, deep sobs.

Hutch didn't have anything to say that his embrace couldn't say better. After a while, they released each other. Hutch stood, then sat down again. “I just want to look at you a minute longer, that okay?”

Logan nodded. He used his fingers to wipe his eyes and nose. He rubbed his fingers on his pants. He prodded his lips gingerly. “I can't feel them,” he said.

Hutch nodded. “You're a handsome boy, you know that?”

Logan shrugged, grimacing as he did. “I heard Abbie Walters told one of her friends I was.”

“She did? Who's this Abbie girl? Do you like her?”

Another shrug, another grimace.

Hutch slapped Logan's knee. “Hey, I was just kidding. About Big Macs, I mean. You can have anything you want. Really, you name it.”

“Okay,” Logan said. He blinked slowly.

“Tired?”

“Dead . . .” He frowned. “I mean,
really
tired.”

Hutch hoisted himself up. He walked behind Logan, put his hands under his son's arms, and helped him up. “Can you walk?”

Logan appeared a bit shaky, but he began walking slowly toward the roof door. “I'm all right,” he said.

Hutch picked up the bow bag and caught up with Logan. He put the arrow inside and slipped the strap over his head.

“Hey,” Logan said, pointing.

The bag had a perfectly round hole in it, the size of a dime. Hutch reached in and pulled out the ballistic vest. He held it up, turned it around. Near the edge was a larger circle where the covering material had been torn away, exposing wire mesh.

“Wow,” Logan said.

“I guess these things work.” Hutch felt around the inside the bag and held up a flattened slug.

“Keep it,” Logan said. “It's cool.”

Hutch nodded. He dropped the slug into his pocket. He replaced the vest, picked up the bow, and pushed it into the bag. At the door, he gripped the arrow that was sticking out of the frame and worked it loose. It went into the bag. He played his eyes over the rooftop, not sure what he thought he'd find.

More to himself, he said, “Leave it to Brendan Page to come alone.”

“There were two of them,” Logan said.

Hutch's stomach tightened. He willed himself to relax. If the other soldier were around and wanted to hurt them, he'd had plenty of chance to do it by now. He said, “I guess the cops scared him off.”

“His name was Emile,” Logan said. “He picked up the older guy earlier today. I was in . . .” He started to cry again.

It was all so right there, so fresh, Hutch thought. He rubbed his son's back and said, “It's okay. You don't have to talk about it.”

“They tied me up in the back of a van, with
dead bodies
.” Logan dropped his head, covered his face.

Hutch held him. He had hoped to bring a little normality back to Logan with the casual chitchat about Big Macs and how handsome the young ladies thought he was. If only things were that easy.

Naive me
, he thought.
I have a lot to learn about so many thing
s. Two of them were his kids. For their father, he didn't know nearly enough about them. Laura's and Dillon's smiling faces appeared on the screen of his mind, fading in like in a Hallmark commercial. Yeah, them too. This time it was Page who left a void in his obsessed personality. Hutch wouldn't mind at all if these four people filled it. That was an obsession he could handle.

“Do we have to talk to the cops?” Logan said.

Hutch thought about it. He heard Ricky Ricardo's voice in his head:
You gotta lotta 'splainin' to do!
But nothing was going to help Larry, and his killer was dead.

He said, “We will, but not right now. Let's go get your sister, and Laura and Dillon. They gotta be going crazy about now.”

“Can't we just go home?”

“As soon as we pick up the others, okay?” Hutch said. “They're not too far. And if the cops want to talk, they can come to us, can't they?”

Logan hugged him.

They left the building through a back door.

SIXTY-SEVEN

In the locker room, Julian pulled handfuls of paper towels from the dispenser. He soaked them in one of the sinks, then covered the floor drains with them. The clumps appeared too flimsy to withstand much water. He pulled off his shirt, pants, and socks, and added them to the plugs. He stuffed more paper towels into each of the sink drains. Five faucets: three sinks and two showers. He turned them all on, full blast.

Then he backed into the short hallway that led to the Void.

He leaned his shoulder against the wall, crossed his arms, and waited.

Hutch and Logan walked west on Colfax Avenue, staying close to the buildings and turning away whenever a vehicle passed. Hutch thought they must have looked like the poster family for Denver's homeless and destitute: father and son, limping along, supporting one another; their clothes stained and tattered; carrying a duffel-like bag stuffed, undoubtedly, with all their worldly possessions; shielding themselves from prying eyes.

Cruisers flew by, heading toward the
Denver Post
building. Hutch's brain seemed to throb in time with their sirens. Their strobing lights jabbed at his eyes. But it was all right. He had Logan. If he were walking the Via Dolorosa, carrying a cross and ducking from a thousand thrown stones, he would take it all with a grin because he had his son.

He spotted a cab and nearly leaped in front of it. The driver took one look at him standing at the front of the hood and shook his head. Hutch pulled out the wad of money Larry had gotten for him and fanned the bills for the driver to see. The driver jerked his head, gesturing for them to get in.

“Go ahead,” Hutch told Logan. Only after the boy opened the rear door and started inside did Hutch move from the front of the car. With the cops on full alert, another Outis soldier somewhere on the loose, and Macie, Laura, and Dillon not yet within his reach, he didn't want to be stranded in the street.

He pushed in beside Logan, set the bow bag beside him, and handed the driver two twenties. “Casa Bonita,” he said.

Logan laughed, what little he could, and said, “I guess you were serious about taking me there.”

The driver eyed them suspiciously. He said, “What happened to you two?”

“Rough day,” Hutch said. He couldn't help himself from looking through the rear window to the convergence of Denver's finest several blocks away. The
Post
building was just out of sight where the road curved around Civic Center Park. The lights, however, flickered and flashed on the surrounding buildings as though a bonfire had erupted.

“What's going on back there?” the driver said. “You part of that?”

“Just curious,” Hutch said. “What do you say we get going, huh? Casa Bonita.” He considered peeling off another twenty and pushing it in the guy's hand, but he figured that would be about the same as telling him to drive them back to the cops.

The cab pulled away from the curb, and Hutch felt the tension in Logan's muscles relax a little. His son was leaning into him, one hand draped over his shoulder, the other crossing Hutch's stomach to grip his side. Hutch pulled him closer. He brushed Logan's bangs off his forehead, let them fall back, and did it again, over and over.

When he thought the boy had fallen asleep, Logan whispered, “We had an adventure, didn't we?”

“Did we ever.”

“Like you and Dillon?”

Hutch caught the faintest scent of Logan's meaning, like knowing a fire was nearby, but not yet comprehending its implications. “Something like that, I guess.”

“So . . .” Logan shifted against Hutch. “So, will you talk about
me
, now? Will you tell everybody how we got through this together?”

Hutch felt that his heart and not his leg had taken Page's bullet. Had he been that callous, that superficial, that Logan felt unloved because he had not experienced all that had happened in Canada? Did Logan really believe that it took being kidnapped and almost killed to stake a claim in his father's life?

Hutch closed his eyes tight, knowing he had asked the wrong question. It was not whether Logan believed that, but whether it was actually true.

“Oh, Logan.” He pressed his cheek to Logan's head, turned and kissed his hair. “You have always had my love. We've always shared the greatest adventure there can ever be. We share each other's lives. I'm sorry I haven't made you feel that way.”

As his mind searched for the words that would express how he felt, but did not always behave, Logan relieved him of that duty. His son hugged him tightly, as though he wanted to pull himself right into Hutch's chest.

“Thank you for saving me, Dad. I love you.”

Hutch's inclination was to recite the words back to Logan, but he stopped himself. He knew that on Logan's tongue those three words were precious and as weighted in meaning as they were intended to be. But Hutch had tossed them around like treats to a dog without supporting them with his time and attention. Over the past year they had become cheap, costing him nothing.

He worked with words every day. He knew they had power, but by using them without tethering them to the objects they described—in this case to his heart—they just floated away, so much air. Even now he wanted to caress his son with words, to wrap a blanket of
I love you
s and
Here are all the things we're going to do together
around him. But he had no right to expect those words to mean anything to Logan. All he could do was
do
. One hug at a time, one day at a time—one day of giving his children everything he had.

He squeezed Logan now and kissed him again. It wasn't enough, but he hoped his son understood.

The driver hitched his elbow over the seat back and looked at his watch. “Casa Bonita at twelve thirty in the morning? It's closed, dude.”

“That's all right,” Hutch said, peering through the windshield as the cab pulled into the near-empty lot. In truth, he hadn't thought about the restaurant being closed. Traveling all night and sleeping all day had knocked his biorhythms out of sync. It had
felt
twelve hours earlier when he'd told Laura to take off and meet him here. Somewhere in his head he had pictured Laura, Macie, and Dillon munching on sopai­pillas until he and Logan arrived.

He tapped the driver's elbow and pointed. “See that SUV? Drop us there.”

The XTerra was parked at the far end of the lot behind a large Dumpster-like box designed to receive donations of clothes and other items that could be sold. Leave it to Laura to park out of sight from the street. A pursuer would have to pull into the lot to spot the vehicle. When he had last talked to her, Larry had just been shot and hell was breaking loose. She had left in a panic and would have had no way of knowing who had won: Hutch or hell.

Hutch watched the taxicab pull away. He said, “We better hurry. They must be worried out of their minds.”

“What happened?” Logan said, putting his finger in one of the bul-letholes. He poked at a shattered window. Safety glass cascaded over the sheet metal, tinkling musically. Hutch had taped cardboard behind the broken glass, but had not bothered to clear the rest away.

“The guys who took you had friends,” Hutch said.

He and Logan simultaneously pressed their faces to the rear-door window, the only one not broken on the driver's side. They cupped their hands around their eyes to block the reflection of a nearby sodium vapor lamp.

“They're not in here,” Logan said.

Hutch turned to stare at the restaurant's big pink facade. He said, “She probably figured it was safer inside.”

“But it's closed.”

Hutch shook his head. “That wouldn't stop Laura.” He gently slapped Logan on the shoulder. “Let's go see what's what.”

The fountain out front had been turned off, but lights in the portico's ceiling cast a dim, yellow glow over the entrance area. Hutch pulled on one of the doors, then another. “Locked,” he said. He walked out from under the portico to survey the building. “If I know Laura, she would keep looking until she found a way in.”