A very big thanks to all those who reviewed - I love getting your feedback.
Sorry about the delay in this chapter but Alaidh has had computer issues, which weren't helped by some of my rewrites, and at the last minute Kyre very kindly stepped in once more to beta.
So a very big thanks to both Alaidh and Kyre for the work they did on this chapter.
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CHAPTER 17
"Bling?"
Max, looking clearly puzzled, walked into Logan's apartment, then through to the kitchen where she found the therapist.
"Where's Logan? I was on my way back here when he paged me."
"He didn't catch up with you?"
Max stopped short at that. "What do you mean?" she asked sharply.
Bling looked a little uncomfortable under that piercing stare. "He went after you. Said he wanted to talk to Seth himself. He was gonna page you when he got down there."
"Damn, I missed him," she frowned as she went across to his phone and dialled his cell phone number.
"You didn't find Seth, then?" Bling asked her.
Max shook her head as she walked across to the windows, waiting for Logan to pick up. Bling followed her through from the kitchen, a worried frown on his usually relaxed features as he watched Max press redial with a hint of frustration.
She looked across at him uneasily. "He's not answering."
"There could be plenty o reasons for that," Bling said reasonably.
Max shook her head as she pressed redial yet again. "He would have been expecting me to call him back. You know what he's like – he puts the phone on his lap if he's expecting a call." She suddenly stared at the phone before hanging up. "That's whack!"
"What?"
"He answered, then hung up before I had a chance to talk."
Max looked up to see what she felt inside mirrored on Bling's face.
"I don't like this. I'm going back out there," she said curtly, heading over to Logan's computer as she spoke. "Did he tell you where exactly he was gonna head to?" she asked as she searched for the program she required.
"Uh-uh. Just that he wanted to talk to Seth. He was kinda determined."
"Tell me about it," Max murmured as she entered the relevant information, wishing she'd been more considerate in regarding Logan's feelings about the whole meet-Seth dealio.
"What's this?" asked Bling quietly, coming up behind her and staring at the screen.
"It won't find Logan directly, but it will give us details of any numbers dialled from his phone. Could be another lead if we need it."
Her tone told him that she hoped it wouldn't come down to that.
Max let her eyes do a quick sweep around the apartment. With a pang she noticed that it already seemed a little empty or strange because of Logan's absence.
Catching a slight sound near the kitchen, Max turned quickly, only to relax as she saw Genevieve. Her hair was tousled and her pretty features were slightly scrunched, with the look of someone who'd just been unpleasantly disturbed from her sleep.
"You're up late," Max told her, going across to the child and looking carefully at her face.
"Is Logan in some kinda trouble?" the child asked quietly.
"I hope not," said Max lightly. "It's late. You should be asleep," she added with a smile that she was far from feeling.
The child didn't look the least bit comforted by her words, but stood there silently, looking up at Max with large eyes that reflected the horror of what she'd been through the last few days.
Max instinctively knelt down in front of her and took both her hands in her own warm ones. With a frown, she felt Genevieve's arm. The child was trembling and felt cold through her lightweight pyjamas, even though the apartment was warm.
Max didn't know what to say. Logan's injury and the events of the last few days had made violence and death a reality to her – not just something that was seen on T.V.
Genevieve spoke with a quiet conviction. "There are bad men out there. The bad men hurt him last time."
For a moment, it seemed to Max as if the blue eyes were looking at her with reproach.
"I wasn't there last time," she said with a hard voice. "I won't make that mistake again." The intensity of her promise made Genevieve look at her with a tinge of awe.
"You'd better get back to bed," Max told her a little stiltedly, looking up as Bling came through.
Genevieve looked toward the couch.
"Can I sleep out there?" she asked in a small voice.
Max looked at Bling with a small smile. "You wanna give up your bed?"
"Don't plan on sleeping 'til Logan's back anyway," Bling said lightly. "Go grab your pillow an' I'll get you a blanket," he grinned at the child.
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Max's footsteps sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness of the underground parking lot.
She took her glasses from her jacket and slipped them on as she walked across to her Ninja, purposefully ignoring the empty space where Logan usually parked his car. Instead of her usual grin of satisfaction as she felt the power throbbing between her legs when the Ninja roared to life, her face bore an unusually grim expression.
You're not the only one who thinks they screwed up that day, Logan, she said to herself as she roared out into the rain-spattered night.
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Left in near-total darkness, Logan struggled up on his elbows, unknowingly holding his breath as his ears strained desperately to hear any form of sound from outside the door. The only thing he eventually heard was his own grunt of disgust and dissatisfaction with himself that he'd let Seth grab him so effortlessly.
Logan let his head hang back and let go another sigh. He kept his eyes tightly shut to somehow block out his own stupidity and the look of scorn on Max's face that he saw so clearly in his mind.
Two thoughts popped into his head almost simultaneously at the thought of her. Firstly, he was not looking forward to her 'I told you so' attitude when he explained his predicament. The second thought, however, proved to be even more unwelcome than the first: his phone was now somewhere out on the roadway with his wheelchair and gun, and who knew where his glasses had ended up. He couldn't remember when they'd slipped off the bridge of his nose; all he knew was that they were not there now.
"Dammit," he gritted through clenched teeth as he pushed himself upright.
The darkness in the room was so intense that he could hardly tell any difference between having his eyes open or closed. For a moment, he understood the fear and confusion that a pilot must feel when encountering zero visibility.
Trying to calm his breathing, he told himself reasonably, "Okay, I just gotta work this out." He wondered why these calm words did little to quell the waves of self-reproach that continued to wash over him as the seriousness of his situation began to sink in: he was stranded on what he took to be a bed, without his wheelchair, phone or gun, in a room so dark he couldn't see his own body.
"First things first," he stated decisively, his voice sounding unfamiliar in the gloom. He inched his hands around to ascertain that he was, in fact, on a bed. Deciding that his first assumption had been correct, he eased himself backwards, hoping to find a wall or headboard to lean against.
Feeling relieved when he touched a pillow, he felt around and found what he concluded to be a headboard. He propped the pillow behind him, now at least able to lean back with comfort, which he did thankfully, taking a few deep breaths.
"Now, if I could just find a light. I don't suppose..." he muttered, hopefully reaching his hands out in the darkness. His right hand encountered a cold, damp wall, but his left hand found what seemed to be a bedside table and--to his great relief--what he swore felt like a lamp.
"Come on," he muttered, biting his lip as he pressed what he hoped was a switch.
Instantly, the room became a reality as a rather pathetic, but nonetheless welcome, yellowish light lit up the area around the bed. Logan let out a long breath of relief as he looked around.
He found himself in a run-down single room apartment which was as close to the bottom end of the scale as his apartment was to the top. The room was small, not much bigger than a large motel room. There was nothing stylishly retro here – the few pieces of furniture were just plain 'old,' ugly and well-worn.
The bed on which Seth had dumped him was opposite the door, flush to the wall. To Logan's left was a window, and further over, a small kitchen area with a sink and an ancient-looking gas stove. The only other furniture consisted of a rickety wooden table with two wooden chairs that weren't a pair, a faded and threadbare sofa that had been a bright, floral blue many years ago, and a TV set sitting on a wooden crate.
"Nice," he murmured to himself.
He realized now why it had been so dark in the room – the window had been covered with thick, black plastic. He looked at it thoughtfully, wondering if it was there to cover a hole or to keep out the prying eyes of the hoverdrones. He couldn't imagine who or what else would be peering through windows this many floors up.
"This is just great," he said to himself aloud, his voice heavy with sarcasm as his eyes swept the room for inspiration.
Either the walls were incredibly thick or the adjoining rooms were deserted; all he could hear was the continual drip, drip, drip from the faucet as drops of water beat a steady tattoo on the sink below. He couldn't make up his mind whether to be comforted or annoyed by the sound. At this point he was leaning toward the latter.
His gaze falling on his outstretched legs, he quickly swallowed down the frustration that was building in his throat and tried to focus instead on his options.
Options--that's a good one, he thought wryly. The only scenario he could think of entailed dragging himself across the floor to the door, and banging on it with something like a chair leg to try and attract someone's attention. What were the chances of someone coming by? Even if they did, in a place like this where crime probably abounded, would they be likely to stop and see what the noise was?
On the other hand, he wasn't sure if he felt desperate enough yet to totally surrender his pride. The thought of being discovered on the floor held little appeal to him, and the difficulty of coming up with an explanation that didn't strain the bounds of credibility as to why he'd been abducted from his wheelchair and carried up however many flights of stairs and dumped in a room...Well, he'd rather take his chances with Seth. In spite of all that had happened, he was sure the boy had meant him no harm. He just hoped that Seth would realize that Logan couldn't stay here indefinitely. Overnight, fine, but if he didn't come soon after that...Well, thought Logan wryly, he guessed that would be the point when his degree of desperation would slip up a notch or two. The bag he carried with him for emergencies might as well have been in Canada for all the good it would do him in the car.
He glanced down at his watch and was surprised to see that it was already well after twelve. Time certainly flies...he was musing ironically when his eyes fell on his left hand – the one that Seth had grabbed when he'd pulled him from the chair.
Quite clearly he could see part of his hand covered in a smeary dark stain.
Logan quickly checked the whitish/grey part of the sheet where his hand had been resting. There was definitely a smudged, red stain there as well. He let his mind go back to the events of the last half hour or so.
He could see Seth squatting beside the body of what he was almost positive had been a man in a suit. When he'd called to Seth, the boy had said, "You shouldn't be here, Logan."
Logan thought back carefully. Was there any intonation to the words? Was there something he'd missed? The boy always spoke in a relatively expressionless tone. As hard as Logan tried, he couldn't remember detecting anything threatening or otherwise in Seth's voice.
Shaking his head a little, he frowned as he went over all that had happened in regard to Seth the past week. Everything he came up with was inconclusive. Getting angry because people tease you doesn't make you a murderer was his only decision.
Feeling like he was getting nowhere with this train of thought, he let his head rest for a moment against the wall.
The adrenalin that had been coursing through his body had receded, leaving him strained and tired, and reminding him of the inadequate amounts of sleep he'd been getting lately. The thought of the pillow behind his back was incredibly tempting.
Suddenly he realized that, regardless of the situation he found himself in, he could barely keep his eyes open. I don't care what Max says - I doubt that Seth plans to kill me in my sleep, he murmured.
Max.
He wondered what she was doing. He wondered what she'd do when she called his phone and he didn't answer.
He wondered if, somehow, she would find him.
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Logan didn't know how long he slept, but his return to consciousness was so quick that it left him disoriented and dazed for the briefest of moments. The sudden awareness however, of the feel of cold metal pressed against the side of his neck quickly cleared his mind.
"You wanna tell me why you're looking for me, rich boy?"
Logan instinctively turned his head a little, his face expressionless as he looked up into the eyes of Emma Belding.
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Max's first stop was Murdoch's.
Her eyes quickly scanned the crowded bar again. For once she was thankful for the Manticore training that had automatically kicked in, forcing her to focus on the solution and not the more worrying possibilities of what could have happened to Logan. She felt a twinge of disappoint that he wasn't in the bar.
She spied a phone in the corner and gave Bling a call just in case he had any news on his end, but she wasn't particularly surprised when he answered in the negative.
"Maybe he caught up with Seth himself," Bling suggested hopefully.
"Yeah, or maybe Seth caught up with him," Max murmured darkly.
"I shoulda tried harder to talk him out of it," Bling's voice came back to her from the other end, reminding Max of Charlie's words – You like to get your own way, and you usually do.
"He's a big boy," was all she commented, uncomfortably aware of a tightening in her own throat. "I'll keep searching here, ask around a little. We may get lucky. Maybe someone saw him. That's one good thing about a wheelchair - it's kinda noticeable," she added dryly, not feeling the least bit comforted by the thought.
She hung up and looked around with distaste at the assortment of customers in the bar.
Her eyes glinted wickedly as she thought of a number of smart-ass comments she would have liked to share. The thought brought her up short as she realized there was really only one person she would have cared to share them with.
Fending off several offers to spend the evening with particularly undesirable men, Max questioned everyone at Murdoch's.
No one had seen a man in a wheelchair.
Max tried hard not to analyse her findings. There was nothing to indicate either way whether this knowledge was good or bad. Nonetheless, it was with mixed feelings that she walked out of the smoke-laden atmosphere and into the refreshingly chilly night air.
"Logan Cale," she fumed as she swung a black-clad leg over her motorcycle, "I'll..." She suddenly stopped as she realized she didn't want to do anything at all, except find him in one piece, defiant and unharmed. This was one time when she had absolutely no desire to be proven right.
Her dark brows drawn down in an ever-deepening frown, she rode slowly down the road, eyes checking with military precision for anything that would give her a clue as to his whereabouts.
She had only gone a few hundred yards in the direction opposite from the way she had come when she saw Logan's Aztek, looking rather lonely by itself beneath the solitary streetlamp.
Max checked it thoroughly with a stony expression. She could find no sign of a hasty departure or anything else untoward.
"So," she told herself bracingly, "you got this far, Logan."
At the back of her mind, she still held some vague hope that there was a simple explanation for his absence, but the thought nagged at her that once he had paged her, he would have been expecting her call. Even though he could be incredibly obsessed once he was caught up in something, she couldn't believe for a moment that he wouldn't have made sure he had his phone at the ready to receive her call.
The beeping of her pager suddenly cut through her thoughts and she grabbed it with alacrity as soon as she heard the noise.
The readout told her that it was Bling, not Logan.
Repressing a sigh, she looked around for a phone, hesitating as she spotted one close by.
"Logan, answer," she'd pleaded fruitlessly.
It had been sunny that morning – but by evening, the clouds had rolled in and the heavens had poured forth with a vengeance. It had been so appropriate, she remembered. It would have been so wrong if Seattle had smiled when fate was asking her to give up the only life she had ever enjoyed and the only man she had ever...
"Logan," she murmured, almost in spite of herself.
Max took a deep breath and walked over to the phone. That day had turned out all right, she told herself. The storm clouds had lied – they'd been wrong about Logan.
"Bling, it's me," she spoke coldly into the phone.
"Someone's using Logan's phone. They're calling a number near you. I got an address on it. Seventy-five Morton Street."
"That's just behind Murdoch's," Max told him quickly, clamping down on the surge of hope she felt.
"I'll check it out," she said curtly as she hung up.
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"You don't have to jab that thing so hard. I'm not goin' anywhere," Logan pointed out mildly, careful to not make a sudden movement.
Several seconds later, the pressure on his neck was relieved by the removal of the gun, and he let himself start to breathe more evenly.
He put a hand up to rub the spot where the gun had ground into his skin and looked with interest at Emma Belding. A little irritably, he wished he had his glasses – after looking for her for almost a week, it was annoying that his first sighting of her should be a blurry one.
She stood back from him now, staring at him implacably, the gun held in a steady hand. Feeling a little self-conscious under her cold scrutiny, Logan scooted back a little until he was more upright.
Hard to appear cool when you're stuck on a bed with a gun pointing at your head, he mused wryly.
"You haven't answered my question," Emma prompted him sharply.
Wondering if he was imagining it, Logan noted that she looked older than she had in the photo, and somehow more hardened. Gone were the similarities to the sweet little girl who'd lived next door.
The hair that had been long and wavy was now cut short in an almost boyish style. The hazel eyes that stared at him suspiciously were underlined by dark circles that told of days, perhaps weeks of strain.
She was thin – a little too thin, he thought. Her hip bones were clearly visible even through her jeans. She wasn't dressed to attract attention, though – there was nothing fashionable about her appearance. It was plain and understated, but what he did notice were her fingernails. They were long, shapely - perfectly manicured. Max had been right. He supposed everyone had their point of pride.
"Martin asked me to," he told her briefly, sincerely hoping that Martin was as good a judge of character as he bragged he was. Looking at the gun, Logan was beginning to have second doubts.
At the mention of his cousin's name, she held the gun with even more determination than before.
He didn't like the way she held it - she was too smooth, her stance too comfortable. He had to assume uneasily that she'd done this before.
"That hardly fills me with relief. He was working for them," she spat out, taking a step closer.
"Not of his own choice," Logan told her quickly.
"I'm not really interested in his reasons or excuses," she replied coldly. "Next you'll be telling me he sent you here to beg me to come back to him."
Logan bit his lip at that. "Ah, no...not really," he admitted hesitantly, "but he was worried about you."
"How touching."
He found himself in a difficult predicament. It didn't appear as though Martin had made the impression on her that he thought he had. Emma Belding appeared to be anything but grateful for Martin's involvement.
Logan couldn't help but smile a little to himself.
Max would feel vindicated – nothing like making an ass of yourself trying to rescue a girl who doesn't want to be rescued.
"What are you smiling at?" she suddenly asked suspiciously.
"I'm just thinking that sometimes I'm a slow learner," he told her cryptically, staring into space. The irony of the situation was not lost on him as he wondered why he hadn't learned his lesson from Alina Herrero.
Looking up at her after a few moments, he noticed that she was looking distinctly uneasy. She kept glancing at her watch and casting glances towards the door as if someone was expected.
"Something bothering you?" Logan asked her with slightly narrowed eyes.
Emma merely gave him an annoyed glance, as if she were irritated that he'd broken in on her thoughts.
"Seth?" Logan murmured with sudden insight.
Ignoring his question, she said instead, "So, you really Martin's cousin?"
"Should I admit to that?"
"So why did he get you to look for me?" Her tone was hard, full of mistrust.
Logan took a deep breath. He suspected he had only one way to get out of this mess – and even then...
"He got in over his head gambling. Lost big, owed money," he said simply.
"So they got him to spy on me?" This time she spat the words out.
"To his credit, he did eventually feel guilty about it. Guess he has some conscience...somewhere," he finished dryly.
"Why should I believe you?" she snapped, moving across and checking the door, careful to keep her gun aimed at Logan.
"Seth knew you were here all the time?"
"Don't mention his name," she suddenly spoke with intensity, a hint of wildness in her eyes. "They warned me," she muttered, full of self-reproach, "and now you know too much too!" she finished, looking at him accusingly.
Logan looked at her carefully, trying to gauge what he should say...what he could do.
"We've gotta get going," she said suddenly having come to a decision. "After what happened tonight, who knows who's out there."
Logan frowned, trying to make sense of all this, but he was a little thrown by her next words.
"Get going," she told him, motioning with her gun. "And don't try anything!"
Logan merely looked at her for a second, his mind blank, feeling a little foolish.
"Seth didn't tell you?"
Looking tenser by the minute, she just gave him an impatient look. "Look, I don't know what game you and Martin are playing, but until I know more about you, you're just gonna have to do things my way."
"I can't walk," he got out quickly, frowning a little as he felt the familiar surge of embarrassment.
He certainly had her attention now. Logan could see a dawning understanding in her eyes.
"Seth brought you here?" she almost whispered.
At Logan's nod of assent she said, "I wondered why he said ..."
She abruptly closed her mouth, leaving Logan to wonder just what it was Seth had said.
She looked at him with more of an apologetic manner now. "Seth wouldn't think to mention it unless I asked him directly. It's how his mind works," she explained, obviously thrown by his revelation.
Logan nodded. "I can understand that. Only thing is he didn't bring my wheelchair up here," he murmured, shrugging a little.
Emma just looked at him for a moment, then in an instant, she dropped all pretence, letting the hand that held the gun drop toward the floor. Her shoulders sagged with the weariness of anxiety. She stood before him now a confused and worried young woman.
Logan began to relax, pleased to see the gun no longer aiming at his head. He admitted wryly to himself that it would have taken much longer to convince her of his sincerity if he'd been able to walk.
Logan spoke quickly, using her uncertainty to his advantage. "Look, Martin was genuinely concerned that you were in some kinda trouble. I'm just a journalist. He thought I might have some contacts...maybe I'd be able to turn something up on you."
A small, scraping sound at the door had her turning around with a look of stark relief.
"Seth," she called out, running to open the door.
Logan suddenly sat up straighter on the bed, his own gaze intent on the scene before him. Emma Belding was now walking backwards into the room, the gun still hanging uselessly in her right hand.
"Throw it down, Emma," commanded a voice that Logan recognized.
Very carefully, she dropped the gun to the ground, then continued backwards, closer to Logan.
He had the sense in that instant he'd become an ally to Emma rather than a possible threat. Either that, or she simply figured that she had less to fear from him than she did from the man Logan recognized as George's well-spoken CO from the market six days ago.
The cold, blue eyes swept over Logan.
"Mr Cale," he announced in a polite, slightly ironic tone. "So you found Emma first after all."
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Max had driven halfway down Morton Street when her attention was caught by some figures on a dilapidated basketball court. She left her Ninja a short distance away and approached noiselessly on foot, hiding in the shadow of a neighbouring building while she surveyed the court.
The frown on Max's forehead deepened as she watched from her vantage point, feeling as though some of her worst fears had been realized.
In front of her were five youths, all particularly drunk, judging by their uncoordinated behaviour.
Max's lips curled with disgust for an instant
Even as she watched, one of them tipped back in the wheelchair and ended up on the wet ground, while the others roared at him with laughter, shrieking obscenities.
One of the boys, who'd been standing there laughing at his friend's lack of co ordination, suprisingly found himself crying out with pain. He didn't know what had happened to him – all he knew was that suddenly his arm was almost breaking, and he screamed out in pain accordingly.
The shouts of laughter stopped of a sudden and the other four boys all looked around with considerable surprise.
The smile Max threw them was dazzling yet mirthless as she continued to twist the boy's arm behind his back, her other arm now encircling his throat.
"Now I'm wondering to myself what five fine specimens like yourselves would be doing with that," Max told them, carefully emphasizing the last word.
The one on the ground jumped up, while the other three either shuffled around a little awkwardly or tried to act cool.
"What is it to you?" one of them finally muttered, his eyes glinting menacingly in the dark.
"It happens to belong to a friend of mine," Max replied coolly, resisting with effort the temptation to pull them apart one by one until they told her where Logan was. Instead, she managed to relieve some of her stress by twisting a little tighter the arm she held. "You see, my friend needs that to get around," she told them with deceptive mildness, "so now I'm wondering to myself what it is you've done with him."
"Well, maybe you'd just better keep your pretty little nose out of our business," the same boy spoke again, this time feeling especially brave with what Max recognized to be Logan's gun in his hand. The fact did nothing for her present frame of mind.
Releasing her hold on the boy she held, she flashed forward with X5 speed. Her right leg kicked up and knocked the gun from the boy's hand into her own left one. In almost the same movement, her right hand shot out and grabbed him fiercely by the neck, lifting him briefly off the ground. He clawed desperately at her vice-like grip, eyes wide with terror as he struggled for air.
One of the others made an attempt to distract her, but Max merely let the first boy's feet touch ground while her left foot flashed back in a brutal kick, leaving the second boy clutching the top of his thigh in agony.
"You broke my leg," he gasped out.
"I'm gonna break your damned neck if you don't tell me where my friend is," Max grated back fiercely, not removing her hand from the youth's neck for a second.
"Okay, okay, we'll tell ya, but we didn't do nothin'," one of the as-yet unmarked ones spoke up self-righteously.
"Spill it," growled Max with determination. "Where'd you find this stuff?"
"We were just walkin' down Finch Street. We came across this stuff lyin' on the road. Honest," he added, seeing her patent look of disbelief.
"You gotta be kidding me! That the best you can come up?" Max berated them sarcastically. "You think my friend just left it there and walked away?"
"Look, we don't know nothin' 'bout your friend 'cept that we saw him a few minutes earlier when he got out of his car."
"Where was he heading?" asked Max quickly.
They all shrugged; obviously they hadn't been interested at the time.
"Did you see anyone else around?"
Just to encourage them a little, she tightened her hold on the boy's throat. His squeaky squeals seemed to have the desired effect.
"It was real quiet around here tonight. We didn't see nobody."
Max let the youth go with sudden disgust. Her gut instinct told her that they were telling the truth, but to her frustration, it brought her no closer to Logan.
"You," she said, pointing suddenly to one of the two who was still in one piece, "You're gonna lead me to the exact spot where you found the chair. Got it?"
The boy nodded eagerly, greatly relieved to have missed out on her 'ministrations'.
Max then held her hand out. "I want the phone," she stated exactingly.
The boy with the bruised thigh quickly put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the phone that she was so used to seeing in Logan's hand. The sight of it brought her up short for a moment. Where was he?
"I'll give you other boys five seconds to get your sorry asses outta here..." She left the end of the sentence up in the air, letting the veiled threat hang there. They were gone in less than five.
"Get goin'," she snapped at the solitary youth.
"It's not far. Just up ahead a bit," he motioned eagerly.
Max felt her body tensing. What would she find up ahead, she wondered grimly as she pushed the boy in front of her before grabbing Logan's chair. At least it seemed to be in one piece, she thought thankfully as she ran a thorough eye over it while tucking his gun into her jacket and slipping his phone into her pocket.
"Well, where was it?" Max prodded the boy when he eventually stopped outside a four-story building.
"Here, I think," he murmured a little uncertainly.
Max looked around, aware of a sinking sensation in her stomach as her eyes probed the darkness. Was that a patch of blood on the pavement?
"Are you sure you saw no one?" she turned to the boy.
He shook his head, but his eyes were intent on her face. A look of shame crossed his own face as he caught a fleeting glimpse of pain on hers. He asked with a sense of guilt, "Where could your friend have gone?"
"Shut up," Max interrupted ruthlessly. "Just pay attention and be sure that this is the exact spot."
The youth nodded again and watched Max as she took off one glove and knelt down, wiping a finger over the stained pavement. She was almost certain that it was blood. For a moment she let her head drop as if the weight of her discovery was momentarily too much for her.
Silly thoughts flitted through her head, like, I didn't say goodbye to him.
He'd been moody and she'd simply let herself out.
"Don't," she said to herself sharply, forcing herself to take a breath and look around.
Happening to glance up at that moment, her eyes fell on something shining in the darkness.
"Your friend's?" asked the youth as he looked at the pair of steel-framed glasses she now held in her hands.
"I thought I told you to shut up!" she snapped fiercely again as she tried to get her head around this latest discovery.
Logan's glasses had been almost at the front door to the building she now stood before.
"You - I want you to stay here and guard my friend's wheelchair for me. Do the right thing and there's a hundred in it for you."
It didn't take the boy long to decide that this was a reasonable deal and he nodded compliantly.
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Logan's calm gaze swept to the black 9mm Baretta the man from the market held in his hand, noting the silencer with an inner grimace. You don't usually carry around a gun with a silencer unless you're reasonably certain you may have to use it.
"I take it you work for Petrovsky?"
The man inclined his head in confirmation, almost proudly before turning to Emma and saying in his cultivated voice, "And he's most unhappy about his four million dollars. He wants it back, Miss Belding."
Logan quickly looked to Emma. Her eyes were wide, fear written on every part of her face.
"I don't have it. I never had it," she emphasized, taking yet another step backwards.
"Now we have the added complication that one of Petrovsky's men was killed tonight. I'm afraid this poses a problem."
"I'm no killer," she told him, her hazel eyes clear.
The man laughed at that.
"I doubt very much that you'd be able to stab a full-grown man four times," he finished, his suave manner slipping for a moment. For an instant his gaze rested on Logan, then he said, "but that huge boyfriend of yours would be a different matter."
"He's just a friend. I hardly know him," she retorted scornfully, "but he hardly strikes me as a murderer."
The other man shrugged.
"I'll let Petrovsky sort that out. We need to go. Now," he added curtly.
Logan could feel himself tensing. He instinctively pushed himself a little more upright, resisting the urge to wipe his suddenly damp hands on the sheets.
The man stepped toward Emma while Logan intently watched first his eyes, then his hands.
"If you go with him, he'll kill you," Logan told her with cold certainty.
She looked down at him, then back to Petrovsky's henchman.
"Don't be so melodramatic," the man sneered. "Petrovsky just wants his money."
"But I told you, I don't have it and I don't know where it is," Emma cried out, standing now at Logan's side, in front of the bedside table.
"What are you gonna do?' Logan goaded the other man. "You can't kill her. I'd imagine Petrovsky wants her alive."
The man was looking annoyed now.
"Stop wasting my time," he snarled, raising his gun towards Logan as he lunged forward to grab Emma's hand. "I told Petrovsky we should have gotten rid of you earlier," he told Logan with the bitterness of one who knew he'd been right all along, as his finger tightened on the trigger.
Logan's hand, which was already on the light switch, plunged the room into total darkness.
"Run!" he called to Emma, as he threw himself to the floor with little thought other than to be anywhere but where the assassin would expect him to be.
He hit the floor hard and immediately began to drag himself in what he hoped was the direction of the wooden table and chairs. Neither was particularly good as either cover or a weapon, but it was all he had.
He knew he was making reasonable progress, but suddenly he realized that when he tried to move, nothing was happening, and somewhere at the back of his mind he noted that his mouth felt uncomfortably dry.
At that moment, a rush of pale yellow light from the hallway outside flooded the room. Logan looked up to see Petrovsky's man with one foot on his leg and the Barretta now pointing unerringly at his head.
Unable to move further, Logan twisted around and looked full into the face of the man who was about to kill him.
"No!" a voice suddenly screamed from the doorway.
Logan didn't look toward the door. Instead, he reached back with his right hand and grabbed at the leg that was digging into the back of his thigh.
The first blow that hit Petrovsky's man sent the already-overbalanced hit man smashing into the table, which immediately collapsed under his weight.
Even then he kept a firm hold on his gun and attempted to get off a shot, but he scarcely had time to even start to squeeze the trigger before a black boot smashed into his hand, probably ensuring that he wouldn't be squeezing a trigger with those fingers for quite some time to come.
Petrovsky's man was tough – no cry of pain escaped the lips that were now pulled back in agony - but his face did register an instinctive grimace as he waited for the force of the fist to make contact with his jaw.
The final karate chop to the back of his neck was probably unnecessary, but Max delivered it anyway. She had a lot of stress to relieve. It seemed like as good a way as any.
"Perfect timing," Logan told her, his chest still rising and falling a little quickly from the exertion of the last few minutes.
Max had run the gamut of emotions from guilt to anger to worry to anger and then back to worry again until the moment she had opened the door and seen a man standing on Logan, gun in hand, obviously about to squeeze the trigger. She would have had to go ten rounds with Muhammad Ali to get rid of all that pent-up emotion. There was only one place left to vent it.
"What the hell did you think you were doing? I warned you about this!"
"You warned me against Seth. He wasn't the one trying to kill me," Logan pointed out to her bitingly as he twisted onto his back.
"I thought you'd agreed to leave it to me! You think I don't know how to do my job - it's what I'm trained to do, Logan!"
Enough, enough, a voice said inside her head as she saw the expression on his face.
She stopped abruptly, somewhere at the back of her mind aware that the woman and Seth were now staring at her.
"I got a coupla things that belong to you," she muttered, feeling a little self-conscious now about her outburst. She darted a look of suspicion at the woman who now stood there almost in a state of shock--whether from the violence and the danger she had found herself in, or from Max's tirade, Max couldn't be sure.
Without another word, Max held out Logan's glasses to him, never comfortable when he wasn't wearing them in public.
Now leaning against the kitchen cupboard, he took them and silently put them on without looking at her.
"Max, let me introduce you to Emma Belding," he eventually said with a touch of irony.
"So, you're the one who's causing all the trouble," Max told her in a not-altogether-friendly tone.
"Thanks for your help," Emma said quietly, pulling her eyes from the sight of the unconscious man not so far away from her who minutes ago had been such a threat.
Max simply shrugged. "I didn't do this for you. We need to get outta here," she added, turning back to Logan. "He could have friends."
Logan spoke to Emma and Seth, who had stood silently by the door. "It's not safe for you here now, either. I've got somewhere safe where you could go on the other side of town."
Logan could see Emma's look of surprise and suspicion.
"Look, for whatever reason, Martin was genuinely concerned about you, and..." He paused for a moment, wondering how to best phrase the children's involvement. "There are a few loose ends we'd like to clear up," he finally added a little vaguely.
"I have no one else to trust," she replied a little bitterly. "What choice do I have?"
Logan looked towards Max. "I got a small problem."
"Oh, I got all your stuff," Max said quickly, pulling out his phone and gun and passing them to him, "and your chair's downstairs."
"That's helpful," Logan murmured dryly.
"There's an elevator," Emma put in. "It's in the adjacent building, but a door connects to it from this floor."
"Great," he nodded, but Max had caught his look of relief.
"I'll just check it's still working. It can be a bit unreliable," Emma explained to Logan.
Max turned to Logan, a look of warning on her face.
"It's okay, Max," he said in an undertone.
"We aren't about to make a run for it, if that's what worries you," Emma told her coldly. "Besides, you should be thanking Seth. He may have saved your friend's life, for all you know."
"I was just trying to help Logan. That man wasn't good," Seth stated apologetically in his gentle monotone voice.
Max turned to Logan with a look of confusion.
"Later," Logan told her succinctly, feeling a need for urgency. They'd waited here long enough. "My chair?"
"I got a kid watching it downstairs so that it doesn't get stolen – again," she added with a raise of her brows.
"Seth can get it," Emma offered.
Max hesitated. It went against every instinct to let the two of them walk out of there, but on the other hand, she wouldn't have felt confident leaving Logan with Petrovsky's ruthless hit man – who knew how long he'd be out?
She quickly glanced at the huge young man before her. After all, Logan trusted him.
Max turned to see Emma watching her with interest.
"Fine," she agreed coolly, taking out two fifty-dollar bills from her jeans pocket.
"What's that for?" asked Logan, frowning.
"That was my insurance," she told him lightly, as she turned to Seth. "Give this to the boy downstairs who's lookin' after Logan's chair. I got it covered, Logan," she said quickly, noticing his gesture of protest.
"My chair got stolen?" he asked her, understanding starting to dawn in his face as the others left the room. The knowledge put the fierce anger she'd directed at him in perspective.
"I'm sorry I put you through...all that," he told her vaguely, not wanting to spell out what he could only guess would have been some of her fears when she'd found his wheelchair in the hands of whoever had it.
Max was already feeling guilty about her outburst. She'd never wanted to imply that he couldn't take care of himself. She only had to think back to Cape Haven to know that that wasn't true.
She didn't know if she could ever explain to him that her instinctive response would always be to protect and fight for him, whether he was in a wheelchair or not. It was simply her – they'd made her that way. She was the soldier and he was the journalist.
"I thought we made a pretty good team here tonight," she smiled at him instead.
"How did you...?" he began.
"You left a trail. Found your glasses, then I found Seth."
She didn't fill in the parts in between, but he had a reasonable idea of what may have gone down.
"You'd better call Bling. Tell him you're okay," Max suggested.
She smiled to herself as he very briefly informed Bling that all was well while she checked the condition of Petrovsky's guy. He was still unconscious, but his breathing was even, his heart rate strong.
"How's he doin'?" asked Logan.
"He'll live," she shrugged, sounding a little disappointed.
"That was a pretty hard knock you gave him. I guess I should give some paramedics an anonymous tip that there's a guy passed out in the room when we leave."
Ignoring his comment, Max stood up and walked restlessly toward the door. "They should be back by now," she muttered darkly.
Logan said nothing.
"How long does it take to check an elevator and get your chair, anyway?" she continued with frustration.
"Max..." he began, only to look up with a certain amount of relief as Emma and Seth walked through the door.
Looking almost annoyed that she'd been proven wrong, Max took the chair from Seth and wheeled it over to Logan, quickly checking that it was still in one piece.
"Is there anything in here you need?" she asked Emma, "'cause you won't be coming back."
The girl grabbed a bag from under the bed. It was already packed.
"Head to the elevator, we'll follow," Max told her briefly, giving Logan a few minutes to get himself organized.
"But you..."
"We'll find it," Max told her coolly. "Just meet us at the bottom."
Once they'd gone, she turned to Logan, who was preparing to pull himself into the chair.
"I got a heap o questions for that girl."
TBC