TWENTY-NINE

YUMA was wired.  This was what he considered to be a walk in the park. He tiptoed along the landing, paused outside the first door on the left and listened for any untoward noise.  Nothing.  It was as silent as the grave. He was one hundred percent positive that he could take out everyone in the house without a hitch.  Regular folks did not spend their time expecting trouble to come to their door, especially when they lived out in the rural boonies.

Yuma had been raised on a reservation west of the city, but had walked away from his drunken father, junkie mother and four siblings when he was thirteen years old.  He had got in with young guys that were members of a street gang in Central City Village, downtown Phoenix, and at just fourteen had walked into a Chick-fil-A family restaurant on N 44th St and shot three cops that were eating breakfast.  Two of them had died, and the third would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down.  That had been his initiation and had given him full membership of the gang.  Selling drugs, running a string of prostitutes and carrying out hits at the same time as feuding with other gangs was a way of life. Yuma had matured as the years went by, though, started to think about how fragile his future was, and had eventually connected with Jimmy Samson and gone to work for him as part of the security of the Cochise.  He had escaped the vicious street life and now enjoyed an easier time, with a good salary and better and safer future to look forward to.  He was without empathy for anyone or anything.  His soul, if he possessed one, which he doubted, was utterly immune to giving a tinker’s damn about any other person’s feelings.  He had killed a lot of people during his thirty years on earth, and had no sense of guilt or remorse.  Life was no big deal.  Kids died of Leukemia at five years old, and adults could be stricken with all kinds of terminal illnesses that just manifested out of the blue.  There were more than seven billion people on the planet, and so the handful or two that he had personally taken permanently out of commission counted for nothing.  Disease, RTAs, drug overdoses, suicides and many other causes took their daily toll.  Death was a normal occurrence as the passage of time erased life as it crept interminably by.  To Yuma’s way of thinking you had to just take what you could from life and not worry about what the future held in store for you.

He slowly twisted the round porcelain knob and pushed open the door.  There was no squeaking of wood or creaking of floorboards.  At the far side of the room he could see that another door was open, and beyond it was a wide balcony.  Pale moonlight pierced through to aid him in seeing the bed.  No one was in it.  And even as he decided to back out and move along the landing to the next room, something solid and cold was pressed up against his right temple.

“Drop the gun or I’ll—” Logan said, but had no time to finish the sentence.

Yuma didn’t think; just reacted immediately, bringing his pistol up with all the speed and force that he could muster, to feel the suppressor and barrel connect with flesh and bone.

Logan grunted, losing his grip of the Glock as the numbing blow to the underside of his forearm caused him to drop it.  And as the broad-shouldered man, who was at least a half-foot smaller than him, swung around and raised his weapon, he swept it aside with his left arm and drove his fisted right hand into the face of the would-be assassin.

Yuma felt as though he had been kicked in the head by a mule.  He reeled backwards into the edge of the open door, to slide down to his knees, dizzy and almost unconscious, but self-preservation and instinct kicked in and he threw himself forward, even as a booted foot dislodged the nine-millimeter gun from his hand.

Logan lashed out again with his leg, but the guy was lightning fast and feinted to the side and landed a punch in Logan’s chest that knocked the breath out of him and caused him to stagger back and fall on to the bed, to spring back up into a sitting position and face who he could now see was a stocky Native American with a half-smile on the chiseled features of his face.  They were now both unarmed.  The two handguns lay six feet apart on the varnished floorboards, and neither of them had the time to make a move for them.

Logan drew the rosewood-handled lock knife from the side pocket of his Chinos and flicked the stainless-steel blade open as he got to his feet.  This was a life or death confrontation that he did not intend to become the victim of.  He knew that he would have to kill his adversary, but that was not in any way a daunting proposition to him.  The men that had attacked the cabin had considered him, wrongly, to be a threat to them and had made the decision to take him out.

Yuma had been in several knife fights over the years, and was not afraid of having to defend himself against a guy with a blade.  Palmer – who he believed the tall man’s name to be – would end up with his own knife in his heart, for Yuma had always believed in the old adage that ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’.

Logan took a couple of steps towards the Indian and then stopped and waited to see what he would do.

Yuma crossed his forearms and readied himself to repel an attack that he believed to be imminent.  Perhaps he would suffer a defensive wound to one of his arms, but was confident that he could deal with the situation, disarm the man and kill him.

Logan smiled, tossed the knife from his right to left hand and immediately feinted with it, as if to stab the intruder in the stomach, only to redirect the strike upwards in an instant and punch the point of the blade deeply into the hollow of the Indian’s throat.

Yuma became rigid for a second; still as a statue, and then made a sound like a stuck pig squealing, before reeling sideways, out through the open door leading to the balcony, to stumble across it with both hands now pressed to his throat in an attempt to stem the outpouring of blood.  Hitting the waist-high railing, he toppled over it, saved from suffocating by the headfirst impact made as he hit the hard earth of the ground beyond the first-floor porch.  Unconsciousness superseded death by scant seconds as his neck broke.

The sensor lights at the front of the ranch came on with the movement of the falling man, to illuminate the scene as bright as day.

Jimmy watched as Yuma made his swan dive into eternity from the balcony.  He hesitated, not sure what to do, but decided that he had no choice and would have to cut and run, and so ran back towards where Yuma had placed the bag of money, but became a little disoriented and had to check a half dozen trees before finding it.

Rod entered the bedroom and went to the left of the door in a crouch, his handgun held two-handed as he evaluated what had gone down.

“Bad company has come-a-calling, Rod” Logan said as he picked his gun up off the floor and went out onto the balcony.  “The lowlifes from the casino that I was convinced I’d shaken off have somehow tailed Will and I here.  I’m sorry to have brought trouble to your door.”

“How many?” Rod said.

Logan shrugged.  “There were four went to the cabin, but only two attempted to kill us at the motel.  With any luck Mitchell managed to take two of them out.  The security chief, Samson, could be the only survivor now, but that’s not a given.  I’ll check on the Indian and see if he’s still breathing, then go find Samson and finish this.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rod said.

Logan shook his head and said, “No.  Stay here and protect Ruth and Will.  OK?”

Rod nodded.  He’d rather have been backup for Joe, but knew that his ex-colleague was right.  Leaving his wife and the boy alone in the house with at least one other killer nearby was not an option.

Logan rushed downstairs and out to where the Indian was laying on the hard-packed earth in front of the porch.  He checked for vital signs, but the man was dead.  Frisking the corpse, he found a wallet and cell phone, stuffed them into one of his own pockets and made his way to the tree line, having decided that Samson and anyone else with him had backed off and would be heading to wherever they had parked their vehicle.

Jimmy made it back to the XT4, opened the rear offside door and dumped the bag on the seat.  He needed to get rid of the weapons and the two blanket-covered bodies that were beginning to stink up the cargo space. He decided within seconds to head west to California, to lose himself in LA.  Going back to Phoenix was now out of the question.  Yuma’s body would link him to the shootout at the cabin.  He would have to vanish, and had more than enough money in the duffel bag to make that possible.  With a new identity he would in due course fly out to Oahu and forge a new life in Honolulu, maybe at Turtle Beach on the north shore. He’d been there once before, several years ago, and had always planned on going back.  It would all work out for the best, he wrongfully assumed.

Logan kept low as he ran away from the ranch, keeping to the stunted grass at the edge of the driveway as he approached the highway.  At the side of the open five bar gate he saw the interior lights of an SUV blink on, and could make out the shape of an extremely tall man, who he knew to be Samson, leaning inside the open rear door.  No one else appeared to be with him, and so Logan just walked up to within fifteen feet of him, holding his gun two-handed, steady as a rock, ready to shoot if need be.