Even Steven (29 page)

Logan turned back to face his lieutenant, his eyes hot. "What I want," he said carefully, his voice quivering with rage, "is for that son of a bitch to be dead. I want him hurt. I want him to beg like a woman for his life, and I want him to know that you never fuck with Patrick Logan and get away with it. I want the whole fucking world to know that."

"That doesn't answer-"

"Fuck the others, Ricky!" Logan boomed. "Fuck 'em all! I don't give a shit if they come and work for me, or if they go and work for the fucking CIA, okay? I've got my business here, and it's about goddamned time for me to start running it the way I want to run it."

Ricky saw what Logan couldn't-or maybe what Logan did see and just didn't give a shit about: that this was all about revenge, and revenge was a piss-poor way to run any business. "They'll come at you, you know. All of them. And I don't just mean Ortega's commandos. I mean that every swinging dick that has an interest in business on the street is going to see you as their prime target. And every one of them will assume that they have the full support of the others. Why do you want to do that to yourself?"

Logan shook his head emphatically. "No, they won't. Every one of them will think they owe me the fucking world for getting that leech off their backs. Like you said, there's not a street boss out there who hasn't had this very conversation. They all want him dead."

"But not bad enough to kill him."

Logan paused. For just a second, Ricky thought that maybe his argument had broken through, but then the big Irishman righted the chair near the door, pulled it in close to the sofa where Ricky sat, and then lowered himself easily into the seat. He crossed his legs. "Killings not about hate, Ricky. And it's not about anger. It's about guts. Carlos Ortega is alive today because no one's ever had the guts to do what needs to be done."

Ricky's shoulders drooped, as if deflated.

"Well, I have the guts," Logan went on. "And I think you have the guts, too, because you know that if we don't act first, Ortega is going to come at us."

Ricky's head snapped up, his face a giant question mark.

"That kid," Logan said. "The fucking thief's kid."

"You're not giving him back?"

"Hell, yes, I'm giving him back. I'll have the bones in one bag and the guts in the other."

"Jesus, Pat, you heard what Ortega said about-"

"Would you shut the fuck up about Ortega, for Christ's sake? Ortega's dead, okay? He doesn't matter anymore. Come tonight, you'll be quoting a fucking ghost."

"But about the Simpson bitch-"

"She's dead, too. And her husband, too. The whole fucking family. I'm tired of this shit." Logan stood abruptly and again turned his back.

This time, though, from the set of his boss's head and shoulders, Ricky knew that the final decision had been made.

"That's a lot of bodies, Patrick. The cops are gonna go ape shit. They're gonna clamp down on us like a fuckin' anaconda."

Logan shrugged it off. "Just for a while. Then it'll be back to business as usual. They won't care about a dead spick after the papers stop running the story. A month, maybe. Two months, max. After that, it'll be like nothing ever happened."

Ricky sighed. In Logan's mind, this was all a done deal. The rest was all details. "So, how are you gonna do it?"

"You know what, Ricky?" Logan continued as if he'd never been interrupted. "If we do this right, the cops never have to know a thing. We keep this just between you and me, we take a few precautions, and nobody knows a thing."

"The cops are still gonna come after us."

"Well, shit, Ricky, they're gonna come after everybody. Not just us. They're gonna come after Bauer and Jackson and Hernandez, too. Christ, there'll be a fucking witch-hunt. So what? Nobody'll see a thing. At least, not that they'll report to the cops. They'll know better. Or we'll teach them."

This kind of bravado made Ricky nervous as hell. Logan always assumed that everything would go his way-hell, nine times out of ten he was right-but the stakes here were huge.

"You're afraid of gettin' caught, aren't you?" Logan asked, reaching right into Ricky's head and grabbing a fistful of his thoughts. "Is that what's got you looking so peaked?"

Ricky shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. "That's part of it. Plus, I'm not so hot on doing the kid. That's not my thing."

Logan chuckled and shook his head, as if this were the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. "First of all, you don't have to do the kid. I got other people to take care of him, okay? That leaves you to take out the Simpsons, and me to do Ortega. We can be done and home by nine o'clock."

Ricky let out a breath he didn't even know he'd been holding. It Wasn't as if he hadn't killed before; but every other time, he'd had a chance to plan and to make sure all the loose ends were tied. Most of

those poor, dumb assholes on the street cap somebody and they're in jail twenty minutes later. The public liked to think of that as great police work when, in fact, it was just the stupidity of the shooters. In neighbourhoods like the ones where they did business, cops didn't exactly lose sleep if a murder went unsolved, any more than the police department shelled out any real money for investigations. That stuff was all for the rich neighbourhoods and the television cameras. Out here, if you took a few reasonable precautions, you could get away with just about anything. But this business of killing children was not his bag.

"Okay," Ricky said, musing. "Okay, so I only have to worry about that fuckhead and his wife. You're gonna have a hell of a lot tougher job than me, Pat."

Logan smiled. "And here I thought you were going to be mad for me hogging all the fun."

"We'll need alibis."

Logan laughed. "Fuck alibis. We were together, playing cards over at Champ's. Hell, Champ'd testify that he flew the space shuttle with us if I told him to. This isn't a problem. And, hey, about getting caught? You're lookin' at life just for what you do every day. The worst they can do to you here is death. What's the big deal?"

Ricky's eyes hardened. "When did I ever say I was afraid of going to jail? I just don't want people on the street talking about how fucking stupid we were when we pulled off the highest-profile hit this city has ever seen." And I got better things to do right now than get executed, he didn't say.

"When we're done, everybody's gonna be suspecting everybody else," Logan grinned. "You see, Ricky, I don't want to be another Ortega. I don't want to run everybody's business. I don't want to be no fucking father figure to anybody. All I want is to do business the way I want to do it. That's all. That and make sure that I hurt that son of a bitch bad before I kill him. Fucker's gonna know he tried to strong-arm the wrong guy."

Ricky nodded. His boss's arguments had merit. With Ortega out of the way, profits would be higher, and they wouldn't have to jump through all the ridiculous hoops that Carlos put in the way of everything. They'd sell what they wanted to whomever they wanted and not have to worry about pissing off the franchiser. That's what Carlos like to call himself-The Franchiser. What a dick.

"Okay," Ricky said finally. "I think we can do this. Just do me one favor, okay?"

Logan's face remained passive.

"Just let me make all the preparations. You don't touch the guns, you don't touch the bullets, you don't say nothing to anybody else. I'll take care of all that stuff."

Logan shrugged. "I wouldn't have it any other way, Ricky."

Tim Burrows watched as Henry Parker supervised the cataloguing of the evidence they'd collected that day, silently wondering how such a mountain of a man could move with such easy grace. The evidence bags-either plastic or paper, depending on the contents-were logged onto a master sheet, which in turn was carefully verified by a second technician, and then placed into various bins, for transport either to the Charleston field office, or back to headquarters in Washington.

Watching the way that Parker interacted with his people strummed a chord of jealousy in Tim. Parker's technicians listened to every word he said, then put themselves through extraordinary efforts to comply with his wishes. Even wizened dickheads like Coates held the gentle giant in a kind of awe. The odor of smoke in the air made everyone move a little more quickly, though. About an hour ago, they'd received word of a forest fire at the far end of the park, along with assurances that they had nothing to worry about there on the Powhite. Instantly, all vestiges of the National Park Service had evaporated from Tim's crime scene, scampering off to do their real jobs, but now that the rangers were finally out of his hair Tim found himself wishing he had more current information on the course of the fire. Judging from sirens alone, things were far from being under control.

"Hey, Agent Burrows!" someone yelled from behind.

Tim pivoted to see Homer LaRue on his way up the hill, waving a thin file folder from his right hand. Now there was a guy whose typecasting was dead-nuts right on-the hillbilly hick with a large caliber sidearm. Tim strolled down the path to meet the trooper halfway. "How close are we to being burned up?" He asked the question as off-handedly as he could.

Homer made a face. "Closest spark is still three miles from here. Relax. Take a look at this. We found out who the stiff is," Homer announced. "I mean, was."

Tim opened the folder Homer gave him and read for himself what LaRue told him anyway.

"It took the computer a little while to spit out the identification from the prints we took, because it looks like the guy tried to carve 'em off a few times."

Tim nodded as he paged through the report.

"Anyway, his name popped out as Jacob Stanns, from up in Wetzel County, near the Pennsylvania border. He was in and out of trouble a lot as a kid, and on into his twenties. Had a thing for weed and for boosting other people's wheels. He was arrested about fifteen years ago on a charge of murdering his father, but the state's attorney let him walk for lack of evidence."

Now, Tim's eyes came up to stay. Nothing like the mention of a previous murder to get his attention. "How did he die? The father, I mean."

Homer shrugged. "Best as I can tell, they found his body in the rubble of a burned-up chicken coop. The coroner found evidence that his head had been bashed in, but nobody could say for sure whether it was done by the son or by a fall of some sort."

Tim thought it over. The details were interesting, but he wasn't sure if any of this progressed the investigation very far. "So, is this"-he referred back to the cover sheet-"Jacob Stanns married?"

Homer shook his head. "Don't think so. The file says he lives with his brother Samuel out on the family farm. Samuel, apparently, is a few cards short of a full deck. That's one of the reasons they went easy on that murder charge. Seems if Jacob went to jail, there'd be no one to take care of the brother."

"Is he a little kid?"

"He was then, I suppose. Now he's about thirty."

"And no other trouble from Jacob since the murder thing?"

"Not a peep that made it into the file."

Tim stewed on that. Why would someone on the straight and narrow go to the pain and the trouble of carving off his fingerprints? Christ, think what that must feel like!

"What do we know about the brother, other than the fact that he's a little slow?"

Homer shook his head. "Nothing, really. We know he doesn't have a record, though we do know that a social worker went out to their house a million years ago to check up on a report that the parents were hurting the kids. Hell, that was probably in the eighties sometime. Maybe even the seventies, I don't remember. Anyway, it was before people started taking domestic shit so seriously. The file didn't say what became of that, but obviously not a whole lot, right?"

Homer related some more about the results of Jacob Stanns's autopsy, getting into the details of impact angles and time of death, but none of that was anything that Tim hadn't either suspected or figured out for himself. He found his mind wandering back to the footprints in the woods; that separate set, where someone just stood and watched. What if that other set of prints belonged to the brother? What if, for some reason, he had just stood out there in the woods while his brother was shot to death? What would that mean?

Well, for one thing, it would mean that they needed to talk with this-he consulted the papers yet again-this Samuel Stanns. Frankly, this was looking less and less like any scenarios they had constructed before. The rape was certainly out, as was the scenario where the decedent was an innocent victim. Tim didn't even like Russell Coates's pet theory of the foiled kidnapping. It's a huge deal to have someone try to nab you, and an even huger deal to shoot a man. Why, then, didn't the camping couple report it? Why didn't they go screaming to the nearest park ranger and tell him all about it? Why didn't they run for the safety of the ranger station, where they might at least be protected from further attack?

"Agent Burrows, are you even listening to me?"

Tim snapped back to the present and smiled sheepishly at the big trooper. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I guess I blinked out on you there for a minute. I was just thinking things through."

LaRue frowned and sighed. "You know, I don't have to share any of this stuff with you out here. I could make you go through all the bureaucracy to get the reports through channels."