12

There was no point in dragging Lorne along with him - or Thrak, for that matter - so Logan had them drop him off in Chinatown, and told them it would be best if they got lost in a hurry.  Although Lorne looked dubious about that, Thrak didn’t need to be told twice - he took off like he was late for a high speed chase on Cops.  Judging from the Evil Lorne’s blasé reaction to getting his arm lopped off, Logan guessed that Lorne’s people weren’t all that phased by dismemberment, which was probably a good thing since he was still Thrak’s passenger.

It wasn’t a weekend, but that didn’t matter too much. It was night, and the streets of Chinatown were crowded, much more than they had been on his previous visit. It was easy to get lost among the pedestrians, and the air was filled with things threatening to clog his senses. Normal smog, exhaust, and automotive noises were being drowned out by the scent of various foods and the sound of music and karaoke bleeding from the bars and restaurants. Although the crowd was predominately Asian, there
were still a lot of other races around, and he didn’t stick out so much, which was a shame.

He made sure to walk on the right edge of the sidewalk, the one closest to the street, for maximum exposure. He was trying to figure out which bar would be his best bet when he picked up on his tail - a Chinese man in his late twenties, in an off the rack charcoal suit and white shirt with a pale gray tie. Boy, that didn't take long, did it?

He smiled to himself and kept going, pretending he hadn’t noticed his shadow. The kid wasn’t bad really; he kept a good distance, and even when Logan turned just enough to catch him in the corner of his eye, he turned away, but he was just too obvious, even in this crowd. Besides, Logan was convinced he’d know when he was being followed no matter the circumstances. Paranoid radar, perhaps.

He wasn’t sure where he was going, he just kept walking, waiting for the tail to signal his friends and make his move, and finally, just as he came to the end of his third block, a sleek black sedan with black tinted windows, one of which was already down, revealing a stone faced Asian man sitting in the back. The tail made his move then, coming up behind him and pressing what felt like a gun in his back. “Get in the car, or a lot of people on the street are gonna die,” he hissed in his ears, his breath betraying a hint of liquid courage. Whiskey specifically, and not a very good brand either.

He had to admit their switch of tactics was interesting. They must have known threatening him physically was a little pointless, so they decided to threaten civvies on the assumption he’d rather not see them hurt. A good bet, and one that suggested they were getting smarter, which was troubling.

The man in the back moved over, making room for Logan, and as he got in, he shot him in the throat. From the minor sting - a pinprick really - it was some kind of drug cartridge, and he pulled it out as he collapsed on the leather seat. “That’s not a very warm welcome, is it?” He said in Cantonese, startling the stone faced guy slightly. “So what, you’re gonna wrap me up nice and hand me over to the Yakuza as a kiss up gift?”

They were also smart enough to use a new drug, one his system had yet to encounter before; he could feel it coursing through his veins like a slow poison, although not nearly fast enough. He had time, if he wanted to, to rip through him, the gunman behind him, and possibly the driver. But because this was exactly what he wanted to happen, he let it happen and didn’t fight it in the least.

In a way, it had done him a favor. He hadn’t figured out how to fight so ineffectually as to make their capture of him believable. Taking him out with a heavy duty anti-psychotic also took care of all of his problems.

****

He didn’t expect the loggers to be happy to see him or be otherwise cooperative, and there they didn’t disappoint.

But he really didn’t need their cooperation. He walked around the camp surreptitiously sniffing for blood, aware that no one could have come from that bloodbath and not taken a trace with them, and while most people would wash up straight after, most people didn’t bathe as well as they thought. Blood could linger, spots and odors too faint for a regular Human nose to pick up. He knew Glenn was bringing in bloodhounds to try and find a trail, but he also knew that they would probably be a wash - there were too many competing scents in the forests, too many sloppy hunters and trappers who left other kinds of blood behind, and the dogs would lose the trail just as he had. And it bothered him that he could equate himself with a bloodhound, but there was no help for it now.

He found no good suspects, and when Berenson, leader of the camp, asked him what this was all about, he lied and said “equipment theft”. Yes, they’d discover the truth shortly, but he didn’t tell him the truth because he didn’t like him, and they didn’t need to know right now anyways.

Heading out, he took Millie along a different route to the crime scene, passing Crystal Creek and the pond where it came to an end ( a smaller creek ran from the pond on its northwestern side, but for some reason that was called Mud Creek, even though it was generally clearer than Crystal). And it was there that he scented blood.

Dismounting Millie, he took a closer look, and found some lingering traces of blood in a muddy patch on the left side of the pond, as well as an indent that was probably a partial footprint before it filled up with water. So the killer was aware enough to come here and wash up before they went back to wherever they were supposed to be. They couldn’t have done a very good job, just a hasty removal of surface blood, but it would have been enough to avoid tracking it with them until they got to camp, where they could scrub up properly. That proved they had some elemental level of awareness, despite their murderous rage. Assuming, of course, it was done in a murderous rage.

What if it wasn’t? What if it was a cold, calculating rage? What if this attack, as random and feral as it looked, had been planned? If so, he was dealing with an unbelievably dangerous person. Someone who knew very well what they were doing, and knew they could, in all likelihood, get away with it.

He stood close to where the footprint had been, facing the same way the killer had faced, and realized that, beyond all the thick pines and shrubs, they were facing toward Frontier. Coincidence? They just got out of the pond on this side?

(“No one from your town could have done this, could they?” Glenn had asked.)

No. He knew those people as well as he could on a surface level, and no one was capable of this level of violence. But who knew what people were hiding really? Did he think he could dig up every single fact about everyone? After all, they thought he was an ex-cop, eccentric (he lived alone and far away from everyone else), but straight up and reliable, normal like them. But he had not technically been in the RCMP, nor was he anything approaching normal, even though sometimes he wished he was. He was a liar and a freak, who just had some friends - well, casual acquaintances really - in places that counted. If he could hide those truths from all of them, why couldn’t one of them hide something from him? He didn’t want to think it was true, but he was not perfect. Maybe his sense couldn’t normally be fooled, but he was ultimately human, therefore prone to mistakes.

He was a liar; he should know other liars. He should know when people other than himself had something to hide, no matter how good they were at it. And Frontier was nothing but a town full of people who were hiding something. He had assumed their secrets were benign, but were his? He was fooling himself; someone in Frontier had a dirty little secret, something that had exploded in a terrible moment of carnage.

As he rode Millie back to town, he realized he had smelled something familiar at the pond, something beyond the blood, but that and some stagnant water had buggered his attempt to figure it out. He also remembered that “Father” Olson had his nephew Rudolph living in an outbuilding behind his “church”. He hadn’t thought about Rudy simply because he didn’t see him much at all; he kept to himself, and didn’t get out, except when he went off hunting, and even then he did it in the early morning hours so he didn’t encounter anyone.

Early morning hours …

Rudy went hunting with a shotgun, and he only used knives to skin and dress what he caught, which was basically his food supply, as he liked being self-sufficient. But killing men, many men, with knives, hatchets, axes, and any other tools they could get their hands on, was not indicative of a man who was skilled at killing. Of course, they could have done that to be deliberately misleading, but now he was thinking in circles, and it would drive him crazy. He had to investigate first.

It was going on night now, the sky turning a curious shade of lavender-blue that you could only see here in the less developed higher elevations, and he returned Millie to the paddock before going on foot to Olson’s, cutting through the woods so he wouldn’t be seen. He went around the long way, so he approached from the back, coming to Rudy’s shack first.

He listened carefully, sniffed around, but he wasn’t in it. He saw lights and heard voices in Olson’s cabin, so he figured he was in there. Approaching from the far right, so he couldn’t be seen from Olson’s windows, he went into Rudy’s shack.

The only blood he smelled inside was animal - deer - and old, by a couple of days. There was a recently tanned deer hide hanging on the wall, and the acrid smell of the tanning chemicals made his eyes water, and threatened to drown out all other scents. There were some knives, but they’d been cleaned a couple of days ago, and hadn’t been used since.

It was a very small place full of animal hides, with a small wood stove and a cot, and not much more. It looked more like a tanning shed than anything else, more a place of storage than a place where someone lived. Curious.

Not scenting human blood or pond mud, he crept out and started scenting the surrounding grounds, seeing if he could find anything. He smelled nothing like what he was searching for, nor did he see anything unusual. Rudy was still his best suspect - no one would know how to clean up after a kill better than an experienced hunter - but he had not a shred of evidence.

He decided to question him, find out where he was at the time of the crime, so he went up to Olson’s house, taking a cursory glance in the window before he knocked on the back door. And he was glad he did, as it answered a couple of questions.

Olson and Rudy were inside, all right, kissing rather passionately, Olson pulling at Rudy’s shirt, trying to take it off. Although he was momentarily surprised, he decided he’d come back tomorrow and left without knocking.

So that was Olson’s big secret? Rather pedestrian, really. He figured, since he’d become so rabidly religious, he might have committed a felony at some point and felt so bad about it he went overboard - becoming a zealot because of some sense of shame or self-loathing was just kind of sad. But it explained why Rudy’s shack seemed hardly lived in, and why Olson did his best to steer everyone away from Rudy, who was probably not his “nephew” at all (well, one would hope not…) - and it threw everything else he had said about him into the dubious category. After all, he was trying to hide the fact that he was his lover, meaning he could have made everything up, including his name.

He didn’t make up that he was a hunter, though, and he was still his main suspect, as being Olson’s inamorato didn’t let him off the hook. It just meant he had to assume that everything Olson said about Rudy was a lie, simply because he didn’t want his “secret” getting out. And why? He didn’t understand why anyone cared what two legal, consenting adults did out of public view. But then again, why would anyone care if he was a freak with the nose of a bloodhound, and worse? Maybe people shouldn’t care, but they did, and as long as they did, people like him - and Olson - were in hiding.

He walked back to his cabin, avoiding Main Street, coming up with a mental list of suspects. He started eliminated people he knew couldn’t do it: the couple of young kids, the old men (not enough strength - and by the same respect, the women, although Maddie was pretty strong), and the men he knew to be too squeamish or passive to kill even one person, not to mention a whole entire camp. There were actually a couple of those.

What about Joshua Cloud? A sturdy young man who kept to himself most of the time, although he was good friends with the Hellers, he sometimes picked up a bit of work at the camps, but he stayed around the area. A bit quiet but not anti-social, he knew many of the loggers, and probably would have been welcomed into their camp without suspicion. But why would he snap and kill them all?

Unknown, but, as quiet and seemingly passive as Cloud was, he was known to have a temper as explosive as Logan had been accused of. One time he broke four of a man's ribs seemingly for no reason, although it was later revealed the man had been slurring his Indian heritage. And although he had never seen it personally, Cloud was supposedly a very mean drunk.

Cloud was also very muscular, in good shape from working itinerant logging and building his own cabin; he not only could have done it, but would've known the layout of the camp quite well.

Of course this was all circumstantial at best - not even that, really; now it was mostly innuendo. But at least he had some place to start. Tomorrow he would talk to Rudy and Cloud, and decide if they were prime suspects or just convenient scapegoats. It was arrogant of him to think, but he really thought he would know the killer when he confronted him. Not just due to smell, but because of the look behind their eyes. He knew from the war that there was something in a killer's eyes that could chill you to the bone. Not just a person who committed a crime of passion or a soldier ordered against his will to kill - those looks were different, frightened, panicky. The ones who enjoyed killing ... there were no words for it. It was like a hollow in the pit of the soul, an inner darkness that you could glimpse if you just looked hard enough, although something in you didn't want to look that hard.

He couldn't adequately describe it, not to Glenn, not to himself. But he knew it when he saw it.

He cut through the woods quietly, heading back to his place, aware that smaller animals moved through the underbrush around him, owls fluffing up their feathers on branches over his head, and he managed to walk so quietly he startled many of them - a mouse skittered away in a panic before he could accidentally step on it. He couldn't even remember how he'd ever gotten so good at walking so carefully, softly, using the ball of his foot more than the soles, except that the knowledge had served him well on the French line. He could sneak up to enemy positions, get a head count, scan the weaponry they had on display, and sneak back to their camp to make a report. Sometimes Dubois would send him back in the very dead of night, in that sliver of time before dawn would break but the stars were in retreat, and he would sabotage equipment, or ...

No, he wasn't going to think about that now. He hated war, and all he had wanted to do was help his country. He spoke all the languages they were struggling with - Russian, German, French, Turkish, even Arabic - and when he was asked to come in as an interpreter by a friend, he couldn't say no. If he wished he had now, it was too late.

He noticed a glimmer of light inside his cabin, an oil light burning, and knew he had not left one burning. Why would he? He'd left in the morning.

Instantly on guard, he scanned his surroundings before creeping in quietly towards the door. Would the killer be stupid enough to leave a light on for him? He didn't think so, but if they were completely out of their minds, maybe it was unintentional.

After carefully glancing in a window and seeing nothing, he decided to just go in the front door. They might be waiting for him yes, with a shotgun or a hatchet, but it didn't matter. That was his dirtiest little secret, the one that made him capable of what they wanted to give him that damn medal for. During the charge at Moreuil Wood, when they all rode head long into the advancing German forces, horses and men were getting cut down left and right. His horse was cut down beneath him - he could still remember the awful noise it made as bullets severed its right front leg; it was thankfully brief, as more bullets pounded into its chest and killed it before it could even hit the ground - and yet he rolled as he went down, bullets that had passed through him burning and throbbing like bruises on top of whip lashes, adrenaline shoving it all to one side like nettle stings, he grabbed the reins of a horse that was still on its (figurative) feet but had lost its rider to a hail of bullets that had rendered him little more than hamburger. The horse had actually been shot but had a crazy look in its eyes; it was in pain, he could smell it, but it was a stallion and it was angry. Any wounded animal - even a saddle horse - could be dangerous. In fact it almost tried to buck him off as he pulled himself up onto the bloody saddle, but it obeyed him as it urged him on, and they continued the charge. Both he and the horse got shot several more times, but they didn't hit anything vital or cut through its legs, and that angry beast brought him to the German line before it was finally cut down, but it was too late for them. He was among them with his pistols, his knives, and a blind rage that he couldn't control. It was partly pain from multiple gunshot wounds, partly anger at the men and the horses that had been killed just trying to get this far, partly outrage at the brains of the man - he did not know who; he was never sure who - splattered on his back, and partly hatred for being sent there in the first place.

He had no idea how many enemy soldiers he killed or incapacitated - he wasn't the only man to crash through the German line at the beginning of the assault, but he was the only one in that initial thrust to survive. He did remember taking out one of the machine gunners - he could remember him gaping at him, at the blood pouring down his chest from the gunshots wounds, staring goggle eyed at the wound in his cheek from a bullet that had ripped it open and taken off part of his ear. "You're not human!" He'd yelled in German, before Logan had shot him almost point blank in the chest. Luckily, none of the guys who understood German were close enough to hear that.

No, he wasn't human, and that's how he survived the initial assault, the bullets ripping through his indifferent flesh, hurting but never quite killing. Even his ear lobe grew back. That's why they could stuff their damn medal where the sun didn't shine: bad enough that they had made him a killer - did they really need to confirm what a freak he was?

When one of the line medics got through after the carnage, he screamed at him to leave him alone and tend to the others, which his commander thought was some kind of bravery. All he wanted was for him to stay away; he didn’t want him to see the damage done, the wounds that were healing and the ones that were trying to. It had only confirmed his deepest fear: cut him and he would bleed … but that was all he did. He could feel organs tear, muscles rip, his body break and buckle, but it wouldn’t stop. Sometimes he would collapse, pass out, but he would always wake up better off than he had been left. Was there any injury dire enough to take him down? He wasn’t sure, and he was afraid to find out. They thought he had an “angel on his shoulder”; they thought he was the “luckiest man on Earth”.  If only the truth was that rosy.

And he had found something in himself he didn’t like. He had already known that his temper was not the best, but his pain, adrenaline, and anger had thrown him into a small, dark space in his mind, one where it felt like he’d partially left his body and his rage took over, that it was a separate beast from him and could overwhelm him any time he let his guard down. He feared he was insane, on top of everything else.

The killer could do his worst. He could shoot him, stab him, whatever. It would hurt like hell, maybe even put him down for a bit, but it wouldn’t kill him. That was his ace in the hole, the one that no one knew, and no one could predict. It would be his edge over this man, no matter what he did to him.

He glanced in a window, but couldn’t see anything, so he decided to just go in the front. He opened the door quickly but quietly, body turned to the side to present less of a target.

But it wasn’t the killer waiting for him. Sitting on the edge of his most comfortable chair was Celia, her posture tense and yet somehow defeated, shoulders slumped and arms resting on her knees. She looked up as he came in, and he could see by the lamp’s glow that she had been crying, her eyes puffy and red, and she was nervously fingering a cloth tissue held between her hands. “I hope you didn’t mind that I came in to wait for you,” she said, her voice small in the oppressive still of night.

He closed the door and warily looked around at the dancing shadows, half expecting someone else. She reeked of fear. “What’s - what’s wrong, Celia? Has something happened?”

She sniffed, wiping her nose delicately with the tissue before shaking her head. “Just me getting scared, that’s all. Matty’s staying with the Hellers - there’s so many of them he ought to be safe.  It’s a terrible thing to realize you can’t protect your child.”

“What are you talking about?”

She looked up at him, and her dark eyes were accusing. “It wasn’t a bear, Logan.” Before he could say something, she added, “Look, I don’t care what you want to tell the others, certainly I’m not going to tell them. But you could at least be straight with me.”

Oh boy. He was sure Celia wouldn’t tell anyone else, but only because she wasn’t known to be close to many people. “What did Matt tell you?”

“Matt didn’t tell me anything, or at least not anything that made a whole lot of sense. While you were gone, I thought I’d go over and …”

“Oh shit. You went to Camp Baker? That‘s a crime scene, and - ”

“I didn’t go into it,” she snapped back, irritated. “How could I? It was a bloodbath.” She sniffed and dabbed delicately at her eyes with her tissue. The bottom of it looked shredded, as if she’d been tearing it up with her fingernails. “That wasn’t a bear. Unless it was several of them.”

Glenn was getting the bodies moved out, but in the meantime they had piled them in an equipment shed and locked it, to keep predators from tearing them up further. It was cold comfort that she hadn’t seen them. “No, it wasn’t. But I don’t want to start a panic. I can find this man.”

Her look softened, becoming surprisingly weary and sad. “Does it matter? I have such a bad feeling about this. Bad things have happened all my life, and I‘ve tried so hard to save Matty from them …”

“No, Ceel, don’t think like that,” he assured her. He went to her, crouched down before her so she didn’t have to keep looking up at him. He could smell her fear, her anxiety, and see her almost overwhelming sorrow, too deep to even cry about. He was aware there was something she wasn’t telling him, something more to this fear, and he wondered if it was any relation to her mysterious scar, or Matt’s father, the supposedly dead man she never actually talked about. Was it all coincidental, or was this a hint that there was more going on than he realized? He gently clasped one of her hands in his, and told her, “Nothing’s going to happen to you or Matt. I promise.”

She stared into his eyes for a long moment, as if hunting for some sign of a lie, but she relaxed as she didn’t find what she was looking for. “I don’t care about me. Promise me that whatever happens, you’ll protect Matty.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you or -”

“Promise me,” she insisted.

“I promise. Nothing’s gonna happen to Matt. They want him, they’ll have to get through me first.”

She nodded, then seemed to collapse forward, into his arms. He held her tight as she slid off the chair and on to the floor with him, burying her face in his neck. “I’m so scared,” she whispered, her warm tears sliding beneath the collar of his shirt. He could feel her trembling, and held her tighter.

“Don’t be,” he whispered soothingly, stroking her sleek black hair. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

But even as he said it, he had a sickening feeling it was a lie.

13

What kind of a fucked up mess did your life have to be that when you woke up groggy, chained to a
chair, all you could think was ‘Not this again’?  Only semi-conscious, and yet already bored with his form of captivity.  He needed a new life, or, barring that, a new hobby.

Logan sat up as straight as he possibly could, still a little groggy from the drugs, and worked a kink out of his neck while testing his bonds.

It felt like straight handcuffs keeping his wrists bound behind the chair, which was tricky - if they got him mad enough, he might be able to break them. The chair was metal, but the thin, decorative kind - it probably wouldn’t be hard to break. In fact, he might be able to do it by throwing his weight around.

There was an added complication, namely that they’d used some kind of cuff to chain his right ankle to the chair leg. It was tight, he could feel the metal biting into his skin and the heat of his healing factor getting very pissed off with it, but the chair leg was thin enough that the shackle probably didn’t matter.

“Are you wondering if the chair’s bolted to the floor?” A slightly fey male voice asked, floating out of the darkness.

He was in an unlit office, the only illumination coming from the uncovered window that took up more than half the wall. He had a pretty good view of downtown L.A., where it met the unofficial border of Chinatown, and the golden lights from the near by skyscrapers cast everything in dim shadows. But Logan’s eyes adjusted, and he could see where he was with a clarity slightly above Human average. The office looked like it belong to a lawyer, with an oak desk, a plush leather chair, and a wall of books off to the right. Maybe he was; mobsters needed lawyers too, and hadn't Chin been an attorney?  Okay, an entertainment lawyer, but it still counted.

The man in the plush chair behind the desk was the same stone faced man in the backseat who shot him with the dart. It was unusual for a big shot to do his own dirty work, so it was probably the right hand man of the head honcho of the Southern California branch of the Triad. “Wouldn’t bolts ruin this lovely carpet?” Logan replied, somewhat sarcastically. From what he could see of it, it actually was a lovely carpet, thick piled and an unusually rich deep blue color.

The man chuckled, lighting up a cigarette. In the brief flare of the flame, the crags of his face looked sandblasted. “It’s funny, but you don’t look Japanese, Mr. Yashida.” He took a deep drag, the orange tip of the cigarette glowing like an ember. “You know we’re not alone, yes?”

“I guessed.” Actually, he hadn’t. The craggy man had a smell tainted by cancer, early stage lung cancer most likely, since he smelled its distinctive sickly sweet rot most strongly in every exhale. But there were two other scents, lingering from when they’d been in and left, and probably seeping under the door from where they were standing at their posts. One of the guards was cheap whiskey guy from the street; the other wore Drakkar Noir cologne, which was probably a weapon in itself.  Logan had decided to play his cards as brazenly as possible - it might make his story seem unbelievable, but the truth was so outrageous they‘d never accept it in a million years. “You do know this is all an elaborate set up? That they’re gonna kill you all, take everything you have, and your bosses in Beijing will be none the wiser?”