No Going Back (28 page)

Samuel knew he looked sinister, with his bruised eyes and nose, and his grin didn’t do much to allay the man’s fears. Samuel held out the wallet.

‘Sir, you were sitting in the garden over there and as you walked away I noticed you’d dropped this.’

The man did what anyone would do, his eyes went to the proffered wallet, and Samuel knew that he was contemplating whether or not to take it. Those of an avaricious nature would wonder if the wallet contained cash and if they were on to a good thing by lying and agreeing that it was theirs. An honest person would deny it belonged to them. The man, it seemed, was honest.

‘Thanks, but it isn’t mine.’

While the man was still studying the wallet, Samuel took a discreet look around. Nobody was paying them any attention.

‘Are you sure, sir?’ Samuel asked.

‘I’m positive.’ The man dropped his guard, and his right hand sneaked round to touch the wallet in his back pocket. ‘Mine is right here.’

Samuel shrugged. ‘Oh. Then I wonder whose it is?’

‘Sorry, but I can’t help you.’

‘OK, sir. I guess I should take it to the police.’

‘Maybe you should.’ The fat man stepped past and Samuel twisted his torso as if to allow him passage. Samuel’s left hand blocked the man’s pudgy left wrist. It was an innocent enough collision and the man didn’t immediately respond. Then Samuel snaked his strong hand back through the gap between the man’s arm and rotund body. Because he was still blocking the man’s wrist he helped rotate it so that he could place his right palm over the back of the man’s hand and clamp on to the flesh nearest his pinky finger. Samuel immediately reversed the movement, twisting the man’s trapped hand with him. The action locked both the wrist and elbow and brought the man up on his toes. He began to yelp in pain, but already Samuel had nudged his shoulder into the man’s elbow and he both turned him and propelled him over a small wire fence towards an embankment sloping into the construction site. At the last second he released his grip, but there was nowhere for the fat man to go but down.

The embankment extended a good few yards into the site, and was pitched at a forty-five-degree angle. Even an agile person would find it hard to check their fall. The fat man didn’t stop until he’d rolled all the way to the bottom. Samuel took the time to check no one had noticed, then stepped over the small fence and followed him into the pit. By the time he’d reached the bottom, the man had just lifted his face from the dirt. He was plastered in damp clay. Samuel had intended stealing his suit, but that wasn’t a consideration now. Samuel forced the man back down into the muck, pressing him down with a heel on the back of his neck. The man struggled and he was stronger than his unhealthy weight would suggest, so Samuel decided for a quick dispatch. He raised his foot then stamped down at the base of the man’s skull. The struggling stopped. Samuel stamped twice again for good measure.

He rifled through the pockets of the suit and found what he required: a wallet and keys. A quick check inside the wallet identified the man as Roger Hawkins, and his address was nearby. Samuel thought there was no way this man had walked a great distance to work each day.

Samuel checked all around him but the racket from the site, the billowing dust, had all concealed the mugging from the workers. He grabbed Hawkins by his ankles, and, though it was a struggle dragging him and likely played havoc with his injured ribs, he placed him at the edge of the embankment. There were sheets of board stacked nearby, as well as other random pieces of junk that Samuel piled over the corpse. Hawkins wouldn’t remain undiscovered for long, but Samuel trusted it would be enough time to visit the man’s apartment. He bounced Hawkins’s house keys in his good hand, then went back up the embankment.

All being well he could be back in Holbrook and ready to take Jay Walker by the end of the day.

33

‘You think your idea will work?’ Rink asked.

I was sitting on the balcony outside my room at the Tipi Hotel, strategically placed so that it was adjacent to the one Jay and Nicole now shared. Earlier I’d called at the Fed-Ex depot and collected the items that McTeer had shipped there. Sealed in boxes was a SIG Sauer P228, as well as a Ka-bar combat knife. I’d taken them out on the balcony while cleaning and prepping them, and now had a recently purchased ‘pay as you go’ cellphone to my ear. I kept my voice lowered so I didn’t wake the women. Exhaustion had finally caught up with them and while their parents were taking dinner in the hotel’s restaurant they’d both retired early. I’d followed them back up, because the police guards had been recalled to other duties now that Samuel Logan had fallen off the face of the earth.

‘He isn’t like the others we’ve fought in the past,’ I said. ‘Tubal Cain, Dantalion, Rickard, they were all pros in their own right. You ask me, Samuel Logan’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I don’t think he’d have the capacity to find us if we didn’t hang around and wait for him.’

‘He’s maybe dumb, but it doesn’t make him any less dangerous.’

I thought of the pain in my body, a dull ache by now, and had to agree. ‘I’m not going to underestimate him, Rink. In fact, if anything, I have to be extra careful. Cain, Luke Rickard, they had similar backgrounds and training to us and because of that we could sometimes predict their movements. It’s different here. Samuel Logan, I don’t know what motivates him, and it’s difficult to second-guess him.’

‘What if he doesn’t go there?’

‘Then I find some other way to bring him to us.’

‘You lookin’ for another stand-up drag-’em-out brawl?’

‘It’s a case of heart versus mind. I’d love to go at him man to man, but no. Soon as I get the opportunity I’ll put a couple of rounds in his head.’

‘Make sure you don’t miss this time.’

‘That’s the thing, Rink. I’m sure I didn’t miss last time.’

‘So you’re fighting Superman?’

‘No, not Superman. But there’s something unnatural about him.’ I told Rink how I’d repeatedly smashed Samuel’s face with my fists and forehead and he’d barely reacted.

‘You know the deal,’ Rink said. ‘When the blood’s up, you sometimes don’t feel the pain until after. I can guarantee he was swallowing Tylenol like they were M&Ms later on.’

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no maybe. When I was fighting in those knockdown karate tournaments, I saw guys breaking their shins against each other, but they carried on to the end of the fight. Broke my wrist once, but I still won. Tell you what, though . . . later on I was moaning like a bitch in heat. It’ll have been the same with that nut-job. Guarantee it, brother.’ Rink paused and I knew he was considering taking the next flight out here. ‘An’ if I’m wrong, let’s see how he gets on with a load of shot up his ass.’

‘You’d have thought a couple of three-five-sevens would have put him down for good.’

‘So maybe you missed.’

The conversation was going round in circles.

‘Won’t next time,’ I said, trying my best to put a lid on it.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘There’s too much at stake there.’

He was right, this wasn’t just about me. Because I was leading their tormentor directly towards them, my crazy plan was a sure way of causing Jay and Nicole further nightmares. Not that I intended placing either of them within his grasp, but what if Rink was wrong and there was more to this man than met the eye? OK, he was no Tubal Cain or Luke Rickard, but he was a determined and violent antagonist. In fact, his unconventional style might prove to be more dangerous than any of the professional killers I’d faced in the past.

I experienced a slight fluttering in my guts, the first trickle of adrenalin as I responded to the challenge. Rink has often accused me of getting off on the thrill of battle; maybe he had something. I was looking forward to meeting Samuel Logan and the sooner the better.

The silence at the other end of the phone had grown palpable.

‘What?’

‘Take it easy, bro.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t let this frog-giggin’ sumbitch draw you into his world.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘I don’t need to be looking at you to know you’re wearing your war face. Shit, man, you ask me you’re fixating as hard on Samuel as the Logans did on the girls.’

‘I think that my kind of fixation’s a lot different from theirs.’

He breathed heavily into the mouthpiece. ‘Whatever. But it’s still unhealthy . . . whichever way you look at it.’

‘You turning into a shrink these days, spouting all this psychobabble?’

‘Ain’t spouting nothin’. Just offering the voice of reason, you understand?’

‘As long as you don’t start feeling my bumps, Rink.’

‘I might give you a couple bumps when I see you. It’s the only way to knock some sense into your fat head.’

We both laughed, and it was a good point to ring off. I was looking forward to personally finishing things with Samuel, but, truth be told, it would make sense if Rink was there to watch my back. If I had my way that wasn’t going to happen though, not this time.

34

Samuel Logan was barely recognisable now and he felt the disguise would get him all the way to Jay’s room without alerting anyone to his true identity.

Earlier, he’d used Roger Hawkins’s keys to gain access to the man’s apartment. Though palatial in comparison to the shack he’d shared with his family, it was a soulless place at basement level, steps leading down from the street to the front entrance. On opening the door he’d found an open-plan area with hardwood floors, heavy leather furniture, a large plasma screen TV and entertainment centre, and, thankfully, no sign of a family. He wondered if Hawkins had a wife and kids who lived elsewhere and if the businessman kept this place for when he was in the city. Off the main living room was an en suite bathroom and a kitchen with appliances that he was unfamiliar with, as well as a large bedroom with a walk-in dressing closet. That was what he was most interested in and he’d found a two-piece suit not unlike the one Hawkins was wearing earlier. Shirts on hangers hung in colour-coordinated ranks and below them shoes and boots for every occasion. Samuel stripped down to his boxers, studying himself in a full-length mirror. He looked like a beer keg on legs, but unlike Hawkins his sturdy frame wasn’t formed of pulpy fat. Like his face, his body was a network of fine white scars from past injuries, whereas a couple of others – burns primarily – were lumpy with pink scar tissue. His bandages were soiled. The pink had become red, and was fast changing hue again to an ugly brown. He stank. He didn’t have time to waste on showering, so looked instead for toiletries and sprayed his body liberally with cologne from a glass bottle. Then, at random, he chose a shirt and pulled it on. It almost fit. It was tight across his shoulders and upper arms, whereas there was plenty of loose material at his waist. He then dressed in the suit. He had to add a belt to keep the trousers up, but again the jacket was snug up top. He studied himself in the mirror again, and saw that his greasy hair and roughly shaved face belied the expensive clothing, but didn’t care too much about it. There were razors and scissors in the bathroom. Hawkins’s shoes were too small for him, so he’d no option but to pull on his own boots again. He didn’t think that anyone would be astute enough to notice such detail as his work boots any way.

He sheared away the longest hair and combed it into a side parting, used Hawkins’s razor to scrape his beard off. The man who stared back at him from the mirror was a stranger. With his hair bleached and cut short he barely recognised himself, and he leaned towards the glass to check that it was indeed his own eyes staring back at him. He even went so far as to reach out and jab a fingertip against the glass, just to make sure. He left an oily smear on the surface. Samuel couldn’t give a damn for forensic evidence. The cops were already after him, and it wouldn’t matter if they tied him to the death of Roger Hawkins or anyone else: they’d have to catch him first, and when they did he didn’t expect to walk away from the confrontation alive.

He bundled some spare shirts into a leather attaché case he discovered in the living room, as well as the bottle of cologne. He expected that he would stink more as the hours progressed and the cologne would help disguise the odour.

He left the apartment and headed back past the courthouse he’d noted earlier, following signs to the Amtrak station. As he walked he checked out the other pedestrians and was glad to note that his bruised features didn’t attract as much as a glance, so was confident his disguise was working.

There were more murals decorating the walls as he’d approached the train station. One of them depicted a buffalo draped in the Stars and Stripes, and Samuel paused to study it. He thought that, should the mural become animated and the animal rear up on its hind legs, they’d share a similar body shape. He liked the analogy he conjured from the notion: that he was akin to a wild beast that symbolised power to so many people. He’d offered the buffalo a nod of respect then went on.

After everything he’d done to effect a new persona, he felt a sense of anticlimax when he wasn’t given as much as a cursory glance by the bored teller who sold him tickets for the next train west.

He found a bench where he could wait for his train.

Other passengers avoided him. It was as though an invisible bubble surrounded him, with an impenetrable wall that no one would attempt to pierce. He didn’t know if this was an effect of the cologne he’d doused his body in, or if they sensed some imperceptible warning he must radiate. He was happy with either, because he had no desire for company other than that of Jay Walker.