part0029

YUMA had parked the SUV across the street in a space between two other vehicles in the now deepening gloom. From a distance, he and Jimmy could see the Chevy Tahoe in a slot of the pizza parlor’s lot. They watched as three young guys – that they rightly branded as being punks up to no good – sidled into the lot and gathered around the Chevy.

“What do we do?” Yuma said. “If they steal the car, we won’t be able to track the guy to wherever he’s heading.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. “When Palmer comes out, we can shoot him and then dump Ben and Lester’s bodies somewhere on the way back to Phoenix.”

What transpired over the next couple of minutes was interesting. Palmer came out of the pizzeria accompanied by a teenage boy, and they saw him direct the lad back to the entrance, before he approached the three guys. Words were spoken, and then two of the would-be car thieves made their play, only to be taken out in seconds and hit the ground.

“He can handle himself,” Yuma said.

“Not against bullets,” Jimmy said.

“Do we do it now?”

“No. Someone in the diner could’ve seen what went down and phoned the cops. We’ll just keep on Palmer’s tail, well back, and see if he stops somewhere for the night.”

Within ninety seconds of the altercation with the inept threesome, Logan was driving south on S Salt Mine Rd, keeping a lookout for somewhere to stay. It was too late to find and knock at the door of Rod Goulding’s ranch. The next morning would be soon enough to find it and hopefully reconnect with him.

An arrowed sign at the head of a gravel road advertised Cady’s Cabins, stating that its rates were forty dollars a night and that it had Wi-Fi, plus free in-room coffee and donuts, which suited Logan just fine.

The cabins were a half mile down on the right, set back from a blue neon sign set atop a tall pole, with letters that blinked intermittently. And they were not separate cabins, just a line of twelve linked, timber rooms behind a railed walkway.

Parking up, Logan left Will in the vehicle and walked over to the lit up office at the end of the line, to enter it and hit the bell on the counter, behind which a young guy had his back to him and was totally engrossed in playing some video game, to jump in his chair and spin around as the strident sound surprised him.

“Help you?” Donny Martinez said to the extremely tall guy that stood in front of him.

“A room for the night,” Logan said to the eighteen to twenty-year-old, who had long, dark hair and wide eyes as black as midnight.

“No problem,” Donny said as he picked up a registration card and ballpoint pen and pushed them across the counter. “Just fill that in and we’re good to go.”

Logan used block capitals to sign in as V Palmer, adjusted the plate number of the Tahoe by a digit, and made up a home address in Amarillo, New Mexico. A lot of cheap motels didn’t give a shit what you wrote down, they just conformed to regulations without asking for ID. He could have put Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, UK, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Logan paid cash, took the key for number eight and went to get Will and his backpack as Donny returned his attention to gaming.

Joe took the coffeemaker into the small bathroom to wash out and fill with fresh water. Will then took a shower while Logan brewed coffee.

The tracker pinpointed their quarry’s vehicle. Jimmy told Yuma to drive by the motel and then turn around and head back to the main road and find some place that they could get a drink and a bite to eat. He had decided to give the guy and the youth with him time to settle before moving in fast and hard, and eliminating them. Palmer was armed, and that made Jimmy duly wary. The advantage they had was that he had no idea that they had him on a string; able to tail him wherever he went without having to be in sight of his vehicle.

“After we hit the marks, where are we going to get rid of Lester and Ben?” Yuma said as they sat at a corner table in a small roadhouse, sipping beer and snacking on grilled cheese and ham sandwiches.

“We’ll take a backroad up into the hills in the middle of nowhere, find a really deep, narrow crevice in the rock and drop the bodies down into it, after we’ve taken their wallets, cells and any other ID that they have on them. Chances are they’ll never be discovered.”

It was late when Yuma parked the Caddy XT4 at the side of the gravel road no more than fifty yards from the sleazy looking motel that was erroneously advertised as being cabins. The neon sign had been switched off, and there were only three vehicles standing in slots outside rooms. A solitary light was shining from within an office at the end of the row, nearest to the entrance.

“There’s a night manager,” Yuma said as he screwed a suppressor on to the barrel of his Glock 17. Do we whack him?”

Jimmy nodded as he climbed out of the car. He could see Palmer’s Chevy facing the door of a unit, so they didn’t need to verify which room he and the kid were in. They needed to get the job over and done with. Palmer obviously had some connection with Mitchell, so the last thing he would do was contact the police. Jimmy was not a gambler, though, so only dealt in certainties. Far too many people fucked up their lives by hoping that Lady Luck would strike them as they feverishly attempted to buck the odds by throwing good money after bad.

Yuma pulled on a pair of thin, black leather drivers’ gloves. He would not be leaving any prints at the scene.

Donny had been so engrossed with playing Call of Duty: WW11, that he had forgotten to lock the office door, which was a regular occurrence. Cady’s Cabins was out in the back of beyond; a nowhere kind of place that only just paid its way with passersby that saw the sign and were attracted by the low rates, or were from Camp Verde and drove out to enjoy an assignation beneath the sheets with someone else’s husband or wife for a few hours.

Donny was about to pass from life to death without any awareness of the event. He had his back to the door and did not hear it open, or the sound of footsteps approaching the counter he was sitting behind. The rattle of gunfire, exploding shells and war in progress from the speakers of the game console overrode any slight noise that his executioner may have made.

Yuma put a bullet in the back of Donny’s head from no more than three feet away, to watch as the monitor in front of his victim was spattered with blood as the nine millimeter round blasted an exit hole in his forehead, to shatter the screen and bring an abrupt end to the game. Yuma put another round into the back of the already dead man’s neck, as the corpse’s head was propelled forward and down to slam on to the desktop, prior to the body sliding off the swivel chair onto the floor in a tangled heap. Yuma smiled as he retraced his steps, switched off the office light, closed the door, and rejoined Jimmy outside. There was something very meaningful about killing people. It was a pure and wholly satisfying act that he never ceased to enjoy carrying out. He had a hard on as they strolled along the covered walkway to the door that the Chevy Tahoe was parked outside.

“We’ve got to take this guy out fast,” Jimmy said. “He’s armed and capable.”

“So are we,” Yuma said. “Let’s do it.”

The sole of Jimmy’s booted foot took the lock out and splintered the door frame as it burst open. Yuma went in low and aimed his pistol at the nearest of the two queen-size beds, as Jimmy ran his fingers up the wall, found the light switch and flicked it on.

Clifton Garvey and Julie Mellor were both in the same bed. Clifton blinked against the sudden glare of light and sat up to face a stocky young man standing no more than six feet away from him, aiming a gun at his chest.

Clifton had picked Julie up at a bar in Camp Verde. She was a hooker, and that suited him just fine because he wanted sex, not a meaningful relationship. Julie was at least twenty years younger than him, reminded him of Carrie Underwood, the country and western singer, and had screwed him every which way but loose until his dick had finally called it quits and was as limp as a wet rag.

Clifton thought it was just an opportunist burglar, until a couple of bullets drilled into his chest and blew him back against the bed’s headboard, to no longer think of anything.

Julie stretched her arms out with open hands facing the stranger that had just shot the last punter she would ever lay.

Even as the woman began to scream, Yuma put a round through the palm of her left hand, for it to obliterate her eye, travel through her brain and exit the skull with a following stream of blood, brain tissue and bone fragments.

“Terrific,” Jimmy said from behind Yuma. “You just blew the shit out of the wrong people.”

“They’d seen us, so they had to be dealt with. But Palmer’s car is outside the door to this room.”

“He obviously parked up outside it before he checked in, then left it where it was. The place is not exactly busy.”

“What do we do now, check every room?”

“No, we go find somewhere to stay the rest of the night and deal with him tomorrow when he hits the road again. He could have heard you kick the door open.”

Logan was a light sleeper. He came wide awake in an instant as a loud sound died away. It could have been anything, but the reports of what he believed to be three muffled shots from a silenced gun was enough for him to pick up the Heckler & Koch pistol he had taken from one of Mitchell’s buddies, and quickly walk over to the window and look out through a narrow gap in the drapes.

“What is it?” Will said as he climbed out of the other bed to join Logan.

“Something went down next door,” Logan said as he heard faint voices and watched as two figures jogged across the lot towards the country road, to quickly vanish into the night.

“Stay inside,” Logan said to Will as he pulled on his pants, unlatched the security chain and left the room, to keep his bare back to the wall and edge his way along it to the damaged and partly open door of the adjoining unit, number seven, outside of which he had earlier parked the Chevy and had not bothered to move it after being allocated number eight. Being parked in front of the wrong cabin had almost certainly saved his and Will’s lives. The light was on, and Logan could see at a glance that a couple had been shot to death in bed. He checked both for a pulse, even though he knew it was a futile act. Leaving the room, he headed for the office at the end of the row, which was now in darkness. Opening the door, he switched on the light and walked across to the counter, to lean over it, not surprised to see the body of the young clerk sprawled out on the floor behind it in a pool of blood.

“Time to go”, Logan said to Will as he returned to the room and quickly dressed.

“What happened?” Will said as he hurriedly put his clothes on.

“Two guys whacked the couple in the next room, after first killing the night manager. I think that we were the intended targets, due to the Chevy being parked in the wrong slot.”

“Nobody knows where we are. It could have been a robbery.”

Logan shook his head as they climbed into the SUV. He started it up and drove out on to the road, to head back to the highway. “As a rule, I don’t believe in coincidence,” he said. “We must have been followed from the cabin by the casino guys that turned up to deal with Mitchell.”

“We passed their parked vehicle. There’s no way that they could have known which way we headed when we got to the end of the dirt road we were on.”

Logan said nothing, just thought it through as he put several miles between them and the motel, before pulling in to a basic rest area without restrooms, commonly known as a ‘wayside’. The location had parking spaces for trucks and cars, plus portable toilets and waste containers, but nothing else.

“Why’re you stopping?” Will said.

“Because you’re right. There is no way that they could have tailed us, unless they have the technology. I’m thinking that when they got to the cabin, one of them placed a tracker on the Chevy, just in case your stepdad managed to make a break for it and quit the area with the money.”

“But he didn’t, so why would they want to harm us?”

“Because the guy I took down and questioned told me who they were and why they were at the cabin. I should have killed him. I must be going soft.”

Will got out of the Chevy and used the light on his cellphone to search underneath the car. He found the tracker under the rear nearside wheel arch, pulled it off, handed it to Logan and said, “Now what?”

“We find it a new home for them to follow.”

A half hour later they were driving past a Tundra pickup truck. Will wound down his window and threw the tracker into the bed of it.

“Are we safe now?” Will said as Logan slowed down and took the next turnoff onto a gravel top that was signed as a no through road, to then stop the Chevy a half mile down at the side of it on a dusty berm that was covered in long sun-burned grass.