My thanks as always for all the lovely feedback.
Special thanks to Alaidh for her invaluable expertise and patience with the auto correct function.
A/N: I did search the internet for South American spiders, but I couldn't find any quite to my liking so I took the liberty of making this particular species up.
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CHAPTER 9
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The first thing Logan noticed was the gun.
The second thing he noticed, a little disconcertingly, was the manner in which the gun was pointed unwaveringly in his direction.
"Don't you think that's a little excessive for a social visit?" he queried dryly with raised brows as he kept his eyes cautiously fixed on the weapon.
"Shut up and get your arms up," Sheriff Bowie told him tersely.
"I could possibly do one arm, but two could be a bit difficult," Logan answered matter-of-factly, hoping he sounded truthful and wondering just how much trouble he could possibly be in.
"Don't be a smart-ass, boy," the sheriff snapped back. "You've got yourself in what I'd call a compromising position."
"There's a gun in my right pocket," Logan told him quietly. "It hasn't been fired, and yes, I have a licence for it."
The sheriff listened without expression as Logan continued in an even tone. "I'll put my hands further behind me, rather than up in the air, then you can remove it from my pocket."
Sheriff Bowie remained silent, but his eyes, that had seemed so genial yesterday, now looked from Logan to the body on the bed behind him with a razor-sharp glare that looked like it would miss nothing.
Following his own instructions, Logan slowly inched his hands behind him until he was half leaning back, then waited while the sheriff cautiously took the gun from his pocket. He kept his gun trained on Logan until he'd completed a quick search of his body with his left hand.
"So, no other weapons," he commented finally.
"Not even a Swiss army knife."
"You the only one here?" the sheriff asked in a business-like tone that mirrored the competency of his body search. There was no hint of the cordial tone he'd previously used when he'd met Logan by the river. Instead, the gun remained firmly focussed on Logan, even though his eyes swept the campervan with well-trained efficiency.
"Were you expecting a welcoming committee?" Logan asked, ignoring the other's question, not sure that he was ready to admit to the fact that he was alone with a corpse.
The sheriff's response was an infinitesimal narrowing of his eyes, but at last he lowered his gun, and his shoulders seemed to relax the smallest amount.
"Where are the others?"
Logan shrugged, shifting his right hand forward again as he felt something sharp digging into the palm of his hand.
Apparently finally convinced that Logan wasn't about to jump him, the sheriff holstered his gun. In a surprisingly quick movement, he jumped up into the campervan, nimbly stepping around Logan, then stood for a few moments by the bed in quiet contemplation.
Logan sat up further and twisted around to watch the sheriff examine the body, lifting himself up a little from the floor of the van to change his position and see fully onto the bed.
Logan couldn't put a finger on it, but Poggs's face, which had looked so peacefully natural only a short while before, had now assumed a slightly, sunk in, almost hollow expression – now clearly a body that no longer held the spark that had made Poggs who he was. Logan slowly lowered himself to the floor again, suddenly struck by the finality of his observation. He found it depressing how quickly life could be extinguished.
With a dark expression, he watched the sheriff sit stony-faced beside Poggs and perform his duty. He was surprised to see him take a cursory pulse check and little else. Nor did he bother to don rubber gloves or be overly cautious about what he touched or moved. Logan had assumed there'd be formalities to be performed, reports to write, maybe lies to be told, he now added with a resentful glare at the sheriff's broad back before turning away.
Was there anything I could I have done that would've made a difference? he wondered with tight-lipped frustration -maybe tried harder to convince Poggs to come clean with him when they'd spoken last night by the fire. Eyes Only is meant to make a difference, he reminded himself, feeling right then as though he did anything but that most of the time.
Suppressing a disgruntled sigh, Logan stared moodily out the door for a few moments before murmuring in a quietly sarcastic tone, "You know that 'big-city trouble' you were aiming to keep out of Murchison Woods…seems like it's already here."
Sheriff Bowie turned and looked down at Logan with something like a scowl. "Is that so?" he barked before turning back to the body.
Finally he made some sort of a sound in the back of his throat as if a definite conclusion had been made, then turned on his haunches to face Logan, who was silently regarding him.
"You might want to tell me what you're doing here…Mr. Cale."
Careful to keep the sudden feeling of trepidation from showing on his face, Logan answered easily enough, "What, you want me to give away my little secret… that I come up here and murder people in my spare time?" He'd never introduced himself yesterday – that meant the sheriff had been doing some checking of his own…running licence plates…reading files…who knows what else.
"Stranger things have happened," the sheriff replied unequivocally.
"Well it'd be kinda hard to do," a voice outside the van interrupted in a tone steeped with sarcasm, "seeing as how he's been with me all morning."
"Obviously you haven't been here the whole morning yourself," the sheriff shot back with no sign of surprise at her presence.
Max shrugged her shoulders with a half-smile. "When a girl's gotta go… You know, the bathroom facilities at this park reeeally suck. I'm thinking of writing a letter to my local politician…give him the heads up. Looks to me like they've been forgetting to put my taxes to work up here," she told the sheriff, with a casual touch of righteous indignation that brought a glimmer of amusement to Logan's expression.
"Thought a young think like you'd be more upset about finding a dead body on your doorstep," the sheriff responded dryly, returning his attention to the dead body.
"Life's cheap nowadays, haven't you heard?" Max shrugged, her large, brown eyes sweeping the interior of the campervan, narrowing slightly as they rested on Poggs's body, then finally resting on Logan with an enquiring look.
Logan barely had time to raise one brow in return before the sheriff jumped down from the van and stood in front of Logan, pinning him with a sharp look. "You know what he died of?"
"Not a clue," Logan replied evenly as he looked up at the balding sheriff, clearly not intimidated by the other's stand-over tactics.
"You wanna tell me what you're both doing up here?"
"We just came for the fresh, mountain air," Max put in promptly, pushing Logan's chair back within his reach.
"I mean what are you both doing in this van?" the sheriff shot back tersely.
"We came to help," Logan put in dryly. "The two girls came running to us…one of them was nearly hysterical."
"You two touch anything here? Until I've established the cause of death, this is a crime scene, you know."
"Really?" Max chimed in with polite interest as she lounged against the doorway.
Sheriff Bowie simply glowered at her, then turned his attention back to Logan who was transferring back to his wheelchair. "I may have to close the park. You two should return to Seattle. Until I find out what this boy died from, I can't guarantee that the same thing won't happen again."
"We'll take our chances," Logan responded lightly as he flipped the brakes up to release them and swung his chair around, deliberately ignoring the disapproving frown the sheriff was directing at him.
"You'd be real wise if you kept your nose out of this and headed back to Seattle," the sheriff called after him as he watched Logan push down hard on his wheels to get his chair moving over the uneven surface.
Max favoured the sheriff with an airy wave, then followed Logan towards their own campsite, admirably managing to hold her tongue until they were out of earshot.
"Sweet. You manage to get jammed up in a murder and wind up the suspect – all before we've even had breakfast," she finally murmured admiringly as she walked by his side along the main road of the camp.
"I'm not a suspect," Logan contradicted her. "He didn't ask nearly enough questions. I'd be surprised if he thought we had anything to do with it at all. I suspect most of that was nothing but show."
"You wanna fill me in on what happened?"
Logan gave her a quick rundown of events, but when he came to the part of Lucy's farewell kiss, for some reason he felt uneasy and skipped over that part, telling himself that Max didn't need to know absolutely everything that went on.
"So, you have any idea who did it…or even how?"
Logan grunted with exasperation as he swung his chair to avoid one of the many large potholes that dotted the roadway. "Don't I wish."
"Well, a guy his age rarely just drops dead all by himself without a little help."
"Mmmm. Told his girlfriend that he couldn't sleep, went for a walk, had a swim, came home tired…unusually tired so Lucy said, then went to sleep…"
"Only he never woke up, huh?" Max added, sticking her hands in her jacket pockets.
"Right."
Something in his tone of voice made Max quickly turn her head in his direction. She noted the frown above his glasses and the narrowing of his eyes as his long fingers alternately gripped and pushed down on the metal rims of his chair in a movement that had become second nature to him now.
"Well, the guy was seriously jammed up, Logan. He was strung out on an experimental, untested weed that he told us induced extreme paranoia."
"He told Lucy he wanted to straighten out his life…maybe go back to med school."
"Guess he left it too late," Max murmured, thoughtfully remembering Logan's words by the campfire the night before. "You don't suppose he was planning to drop a dime? Maybe he finally came real…if Lucy seemed to think he'd had a sudden change of heart…" She let her words trail off a little as she realised Logan was unlikely to feel that he'd done anyone a great service by encouraging him to go straight and then finding that he was killed because of it.
"The only ones who would've known that were the ones in the van. That would make one of them an informer," Logan answered, his distaste at the possibility evident in his voice.
"Who better to be a mole than one of your own peeps," Max remarked flippantly.
"Or the van was bugged," Logan suggested. "Maybe that's how our industrious sheriff was on the scene so fast."
"Stands to reason whoever's growing the stuff would want to protect their investment…keep tabs on their staff."
"What about kill their staff?" Logan added with a suggestive raise of his brows.
Max sighed inwardly. She could see where all this was heading.
"Well, they've all very sensibly hightailed their asses outta here…which is what we oughtta do."
"All the more reason to make sure it's not too late for the next crop of addicts they trick into coming up here."
"What makes you say there'll be more?"
"Isn't there always?" he asked cynically.
"So, you think it's the drugs that killed him?"
Logan paused while Max took hold of a large branch that was in their way and tossed it to the side.
"The others all smoked it and they're not dead," he pointed out as he watched her effortlessly dispose of the huge limb.
"Leastways, not yet," Max reminded him, brushing her hands together to remove the dirt. "Besides, there are plenty of other ways to grease someone that don't leave an obvious trace."
She spoke with such conviction that Logan queried, "Was that big on the Manticore curriculum?"
"Course - we majored in death," she told him brutally, "in a forest just like this one."
Logan looked up at her, more than a little surprised by the sudden harshness in her tone.
"You've left all that behind now," he told her purposefully.
"You might want to tell Zack that," Max retorted.
"So, you saw him?" Logan asked casually, but there was a hard line to his jaw as he set his chair in motion again with a vigorous push.
"Yup."
Logan pushed on, waiting for her to elaborate on her monosyllabic answer.
"And?" he eventually prompted.
"It wasn't about Brin," Max told him flatly.
"I'm sorry," Logan replied quietly, quick to pick up on the note of disappointment in her voice that she'd tried to hide.
"Yeah, well, win some, lose some, I guess," she shrugged.
Logan was undecided as to whether he should feel relieved that she hadn't elaborated on her meet with Zack, or if it meant that all his worst fears had been realised. The blonde ex-Manticore soldier had made his feelings regarding Logan more than clear the few times they'd met. Still it's better to know…
"Max…" Logan began.
"We're being watched," Max interrupted him in a cool voice without breaking her stride.
Having just spent much of the morning with the body of a man who was inexplicably dead, this information was hardly gratifying. "That's just great," he muttered.
"You have your gun?" Max asked quietly, her lips barely moving.
"Yeah," Logan replied quickly, only to just as quickly change to, "No."
"Well, which is it?"
"Sheriff took it," he grunted with a quick upward glance at her as he tried to ignore the almost overpowering temptation to look into the forest and try to see what she had seen.
Max rolled her eyes. "Sweet."
"Thought you didn't approve of guns," Logan reminded her, a little nettled by her sarcasm.
"What I don't approve of is some whack-job stalking us in the forest," murmured Max. She seemed casual as she sauntered beside Logan, but her mind was racing. The forest to their right, where she'd caught sight of the figure, was beginning to thin. In only a matter of feet he'd have no more cover. "Time for a little role reversal," she muttered to herself, suddenly turning to Logan and pointing with casual surprise while saying, "Spider on your shoe."
"What…?" Logan began, at first a little confused by her change of tack. Then, as the word 'spider' registered in his mind, and with it the vivid recollection of the spider crawling from Poggs's ear, he hastily bent down to brush the offending specimen from his foot.
He'd no sooner bent down, when he had a vague sensation of a figure hurtling over his head. Turning his head to the side, he was surprised to see his visitor of yesterday, Tex, lying half-stunned in a heap on the side of the road.
"You!" he uttered with surprise as he pushed himself upright once more, then added, "Max, wait…" as he saw her grab the ex-soldier and drag him to his feet before ruthlessly bending his arm behind his back. "This is Tex. The man I met yesterday morning."
"Cool," smiled Max, tight-lipped. "We won't have to mess with introductions and Tex here can explain to me what kicks he gets outta stalking us."
"Not stalking, girly," Tex replied over his shoulder with unruffled composure, despite the tight grip on his arm. Looking back to Logan, he said, "So, I see they got another one."
Logan's eyes narrowed, but before he had a chance to comment, Max gave the man's arm another shove higher behind his back and snapped, "Spill it! What do you know about all this?"
"Only that you two should get outta here."
"That doesn't exactly answer our question," Logan responded tersely, eyeing the grey haired man curiously. His manner was remarkably relaxed for someone who'd just been tossed ten feet or more by a girl a good deal lighter and smaller than him.
"Well, I talk a whole lot better when I've got my arms freed-up," the old soldier shrugged, directing his shrewd eyes on Logan.
Logan raised an eyebrow at Max who in turn didn't budge from her stance in the slightest.
"You've gotta admit, your actions appear a little unusual," Logan commented instead, adapting a somewhat more conciliatory tone.
"I'm not the one that fool Bowie found next to a corpse."
"You seem to be remarkably well-informed considering the circumstances."
"If you wanna stay alive around these parts, you need to be," Tex replied before turning his head slightly and spitting some of the forest floor from his mouth as if it were chewing tobacco.
Logan thoughtfully studied the old soldier for a moment. "Just how much do you know about all this?" When the other man stared blankly ahead, he added sharply, "A man died here this morning, and from what I've heard, he's not the first to die in these woods under suspicious circumstances."
"Well, you've got that part right," snorted Tex, grimacing a little as Max gave his bent arm another upward shove.
"How do we know you're not some crank who gets their kicks outta roadkill?" she asked him in a low, menacing tone.
"That's just it. You don't," he replied, unperturbed.
Max gave his arm another hard shove. "It'd only take me a coupla minutes to shake something loose from him, Logan," she offered helpfully, sounding as though she'd enjoy the prospect.
Logan sighed and released his brakes with a snap. He had nothing concrete against the other man, other than the fact that, like themselves, he happened to be at the campsite the same time a man had turned up dead. Why Tex would be so recalcitrant he had no idea. "I need breakfast," he muttered, disgusted with the lack of co-operation from the other man. "Let's go eat, Max."
Max frowned at him for a moment as he swung his chair around to continue towards their campsite, then, a little reluctantly, let go of the older man. Tex ignored the black look Max was giving, gave his jacket a quick tug back into shape, then immediately headed off in the opposite direction.
Max, with some misgivings, watched him go, then turned to follow Logan. If I'd had my way…
"There is one thing I can tell ya…"
Tex's words carried clearly through the forest and abruptly halted Logan's progress. Without turning, he called back in a sceptical voice, "Yeah?"
"They'll be coming."
Logan twisted around to look behind him. There was no sign of Tex.
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Logan pushed on over the rough terrain, a deep frown etched in his forehead above the small, steel-framed glasses.
He tried to dismiss the unpleasant sensation that had travelled up the back of his neck at Tex's parting words. Maybe Max was right – he's probably a crank.
"So, you think Tex is a whack-job?" asked Max, unerringly breaking the silence on exactly the same wavelength that he'd been on.
Logan wanted to answer 'yeah.' That would be so easy, but contrarily his conscience spoke up instead. "He seemed to be pretty on the ball when I spoke to him yesterday."
"They always seem like that," replied Max with a knowing glance at Logan, "until you get to know them, that is…then you come real that they're complete flakes."
"Chad said the same thing… he said that someone was gonna come. That's why he was in such a hurry to get outta here," Logan murmured thoughtfully.
"Sounds like a plan to me," Max commented meaningfully.
"I don't like it, Max. There's something really strange about all this."
"There's something else that's really strange, too."
Noting a change in her voice, and seeing that Max had stopped, Logan abruptly brought his chair to a halt and swung around to see where Max was going. She was already ten or so feet away from him, squatting down and staring intently at something on the forest floor.
With some trepidation, Logan followed her, heading off the path to a small clearing between the trees. At first glance he could see nothing out of the ordinary – simply the deer-cropped grass covered with numerous leaves and some sort of trailing plant.
"Max…?" he began, then all of a sudden he too was leaning forward, arms on knees, and staring with fascination at the ground.
"Don't think I've seen that before," Max commented, turning to Logan with raised brows.
"Can't say I have either," Logan agreed quietly, watching Max as she stood up and walked over to one of the still forms and turned it over with her foot before moving on and doing the same thing to another and then another.
"Looks to me like they've got a lot in common with Poggs," she finally announced, surveying the tiny corpses before her. There must have been at least fifteen of the lifeless, forms, as lifeless as the dead leaves they lay amongst.
"Looks like they've just dropped right outta the sky." Logan muttered, looking skyward with a puzzled glance.
Max reached down and picked one of the still forms up with a gloved hand. The tiny head of the bird lolled back unrestrained.
"Do you think you should do that?" Logan asked her, a little worried. "They've probably died of some disease or something."
"Or something…" Max agreed dryly, "just like Poggs. It's cold," she added in a matter of fact voice after slipping a glove off and tucking it under her arm so that she could examine the bird further. "Musta been dead for some time."
A sudden wind swept through the clearing, ruffling the feathers of the sad, still forms. Max shivered almost imperceptibly. She didn't like this one bit - first Poggs turning up dead, then Tex muttering about aliens or something…now this. "I thought the birds were a bit quiet this morning."
Logan made no reply. His gaze was still directed at one of the birds, but his thoughts were clearly moving at a rapid pace.
Max sighed. "I knew I shoulda made Tex cough up the juice. He was hiding something, Logan," she told him, almost accusingly.
Logan released his brakes with a snap and a dark look in her direction. "In case you hadn't noticed, Eyes Only doesn't usually resort to torture to elicit information."
"Well, I hate to diss on Eyes Only's methods, but maybe he oughta change his style," she retorted, "particularly when he happens to be smack-dab in the middle of something screwy like dead bodies turning up everywhere he goes."
"We've had one dead body," Logan corrected her, heading back to the path.
"You expect me to believe that the carcasses of those birds are nothing more than a coincidence?"
"I'm not asking you to believe anything, Max," Logan snapped back, this time bending down himself to clear the path of a small branch. As he sat up again, he looked at Max with a sudden, annoyed look. "Which reminds me…there was no spider on my foot," he accused her.
"Made ya look," she shrugged, unrepentantly. "Does this make up for it? There's one crawling on your leg now."
"You think I'm gonna fall for that one twice?" Logan asked as he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the face he found so distractingly beautiful.
"It's a funny colour - kinda orangey," Max remarked casually, her eyes fixed with polite interest on his leg.
Logan's gaze suddenly slipped sideways as he froze for the merest second, then let his eyes slip down to his leg. Sure enough, a spider, the same type he'd seen on Poggs's face, was lurking on his knee.
"Boy, that was almost Manticore speed," Max remarked admiringly as she watched him brush it from his leg with alacrity.
Drawing a breath, Logan told her with as much tight-lipped patience as he could muster, "Next time you see one on me… just brush it off. Okay?"
"I've never seen a spider with that colouring before," Max remarked with a frown.
"That's because they've apparently hitched a ride here from South America," Logan told her dryly as he set his chair in motion again, wondering by this time if they'd ever make it back to their campsite before nightfall.
"They came on the plants?" Max asked.
"That's what Lenny told me. I found one crawling on Poggs."
"I hope it didn't bite you," she said, now looking at his leg with concern.
"Well, seeing as how I can't feel it, I wouldn't have a clue," he pointed out to her dryly. "Lenny didn't seem to be too worried about them," he added with a shrug.
Max pressed her lips together. She was beginning to wish she'd never agreed to Logan's suggestion of taking her camping in Murchison Woods. More like Murderous Woods, she thought, adding darkly, it'll be all Zack's fault if Logan gets jammed up in all this mess. He's the one who had me come up here in the first place.
By this time, Logan could finally see the welcome sight of the Aztek. His body had begun to protest sometime ago about all this activity on an empty stomach and the thought of a hot coffee and something to eat had become something of an obsession in the last ten minutes or so.
Unfortunately, there was one more important thing he had to attend to before he could relax and fill his stomach.
He'd just reached into the back of the Aztek for the backpack he hung from his chair, when Max said, "Don't move."
Immediately leaping to the conclusion that at least ten of the orange spiders must be crawling up his back or some other part of his body, he froze instantly, half expecting Max to sweep in and brush them off.
"Someone's been here while we were gone."
"You sure?" Logan asked tensely, his own senses suddenly heightened as a rush of adrenaline surged through his body.
Max moved towards him silently, signalling with her hand for him to move away from the back of the car.
Logan had just dropped his hands to his wheels when he his ears picked up what he was almost sure was some sort of unidentifiable sound coming from the tented area at the back of the Aztek.
Max must have heard it too, because suddenly she grabbed hold of the back of his chair and pulled him well away from the car with one swift pull.
Before Logan even had a chance to protest, she'd jumped up onto the tailgate and disappeared behind the 'door' of their tent.
Logan waited expectantly, and without thinking, pushed himself back closer towards his car.
The silence was unnerving.
Had Max been knocked out as soon as she'd entered? Had she collapsed like Poggs, was his next, even more anxious thought. Dammit.
A strange kind of scuffling noise from within made his heart rate surge and had him scanning intently with his eyes for something he could use as a makeshift weapon. Suddenly the opening flap of their tent was pulled back from inside and Logan held his breath…then let it out slowly.
"We had a visitor," Max told him, as she jumped down from the car. She refrained from rolling her eyes as she noted his close proximity to the car once more.
Logan stared at the recalcitrant, wildly struggling, bundle of fur, about twice the size of a cat, that she held tightly in her arms so that it wouldn't escape. "A raccoon," he said, letting out a relieved laugh as he watched Max set it down a little away from the car, amongst the trees.
"Looks like he wanted this," she said, holding up a pack of her cherry chewing gum. "I caught it just in time before it made too much of a mess in there," she told Logan as she reached in under the tent flap and took out his backpack. "You were wanting this?"
"Yeah. Thanks," he acknowledged as he reached out and grabbed it from her. "I'm just heading to the bathroom."
"I'll start on the coffee if you like while you're there."
"Sure," he agreed.
"Hey, watch out for dead birds," she warned him with a sexy lift to one eyebrow, thereby eliciting a reluctant grin from him.
Max smiled back, thankful that 'his grumpiness' seemed to be back on an even keel again. "I may even surprise you with breakfast," she warned him.
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Logan barely noticed the time it took him to get to the men's bathroom; his mind was far too full of the images of unexpected death.
It wasn't something he'd witnessed too often first hand. There'd been his parents' deaths, of course, but in his experience, death and hospitals, white starched linen and unpleasant chemical smells all went hand in hand – you either made it out, or you didn't. To this day he was still a little surprised that he'd made it out. Okay, he wasn't exactly one hundred per cent, but with a little persuasion and a few threats from Bling he'd slowly come to realise, most days at least, that things could have been a lot worse. Had the bullet entered just a few inches higher, he could have lost all his independence. The word paraplegic had been terrifying enough, but he had no doubt that the word quadriplegic softly spoken from Sam Carr's lips would have been a far more terrifying sentence to have to endure.
Poggs, on the other hand, had simply gone to bed and then never woken up. Sudden, unexpected death left a far more bitter taste in the mouth – it left the taint of unfulfilled dreams and unresolved issues. Poggs had had dreams, intentions…maybe even some hope when he'd lain down on the ancient campervan bed and put his head on the dirty pillow. Someone had snuffed them and him out. He couldn't hold back a sigh - it was all so wrong.
Logan stopped for a breather, absently staring at a crater that loomed ahead in the crumbling road, while his thoughts rambled on.
The spider had been disturbing – talk about strange bedfellows. Then there'd been the kiss…Lucy's lips on those of Poggs…
Suddenly, he was back in his dream, pressing his lips to those of Max, expecting to feel the moist warmth or her lips in return, taste her amazing vibrancy…
A sudden flicker of pain flared in his intense, green eyes. What good is a kiss, the caress of lips to lips, if the rest of your body is dead to the sensation? And what the heck am I doing even thinking about kissing Max, anyway?
"Hey!"
Startled from his morose thoughts, Logan looked up to see the sheriff had pulled up some way ahead of him, having travelled cross-country presumably from the campervan.
Bowie had stuck his balding head out the window of his beat-up looking, brown Ford Ranger and was now calling to him. Apparently he wanted Logan to travel the twenty or so yards to his car.
Logan looked at the distance. He also noted a large branch that looked to have come down the last time wild winds had blown in the park and now separated him from the sheriff's car. He then considered the fact that the sheriff was not in the direction he intended travelling and held out both hands to the sheriff to signify politely that he had no intention of going to so much trouble.
The sheriff seemed to hesitate, then to Logan's surprise he got out of his truck and came across to him.
"Figured I'd better give you your gun back," he muttered grouchily as he approached Logan, taking it out from the large, inside pocket of his jacket.
Logan took his gun as the sheriff held it out to him, checked to see that it was still loaded, then reached behind for his bag. "Does that mean I'm no longer a suspect?" he enquired cynically as he shoved it in the bag and re-zipped it.
Bowie looked down at him seriously for a moment. "I know you're a journalist," he told him abruptly.
"That a criminal offence nowadays?"
"I've looked at some of your work. You don't strike me as the type to write sensationalist crap for the tabloids."
"That's probably because I'm not."
"Aren't you at all worried by the fact that someone died here this morning?"
"That's exactly what I'm worried about," Logan retorted. "It always worries me when innocent people appear to die for no particular reason."
Sheriff Bowie stared at the resolute expression on the man in front of him, looked like he was about to say something, then lifted his eyes to stare behind Logan at the river now sparkling in the early morning sunshine.
"Doesn't it worry you? I would have thought that's why you became a lawman," Logan continued, hoping to badger him into some sort of information.
Bowie brought his gaze back to Logan, unable to totally hide the fact that the other's barbs had found their mark. "I've got a body to take to town," he snapped, turning abruptly on his heel, but he'd only gone a few feet before he turned back again and said in a warning tone, "If you think that chair is gonna protect you, you're wrong. For all I know, it might even make things worse."
Logan's jaw clenched at the unexpected warning, but before there was any chance of a comeback, the sheriff turned once more and continued doggedly on his way.
Logan leaned back. His eyes narrowed with a thoughtful expression as he watched the other man stomp back to his truck, then quickly turned his head as he noticed some movement to his right.
"What's his dealio, now?" Max frowned, her dark eyes awash with suspicion.
"He's taking the body into town. Gave me back my gun," Logan drawled, still watching the truck as it drove off. "Guess a dead body up here doesn't rate a visit by the coroner's department. What're you doing here?" he suddenly asked, turning to Max with a frown and wondering how much of the sheriff's cryptic warning she'd heard.
"I got lonely," she quipped lightly.
He raised both brows sceptically at that. "Thought you were making breakfast," he reminded her as he released his brakes and set his wheelchair in motion once more.
"I made the coffee," was the best she could offer him with a cajoling smile as they approached the dilapidated, graffiti adorned building. "Then I decided that I'd visit the vermin in these 5 star amenities, too," she added with a nod in their direction. And you were taking so long I wondered where you were.
Logan made some sort of a sound that could have signified either annoyance or understanding and then turned to push his way through the entrance on the men's side that had once held a door.
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"Our supplies won't last much longer," murmured Max as she watched Logan take the last bite of his fried egg and follow it with a gulp of coffee.
"You can always catch us some more fish," he replied absently as he put his plate on the table then inched backwards to reach into the Aztek and bring out his laptop.
"You still couldn't get through to Bling?"
"I was lucky to get through yesterday. The line kept dropping out, he could barely hear me," Logan told her as he booted up his laptop.
"Wathcha doin'?" Max asked him curiously.
"I'd downloaded what little information I had about the deaths up here and some stuff on Murchison Woods themselves."
"Anything about unexplained roadkill?" asked Max, squatting beside him with a hand on his wheel to look at the screen.
Logan's eyes intently scanned the few documents he had, but in only a matter of minutes he looked down at her and shook his head.
"They're hopeless. Not much about anything," he told her with a disgusted expression as he closed his laptop with a snap.
"If some whack-job has been killing people up here, how come it's all so hush-hush? You would've thought someone woulda leaked the 411 before this."
Logan turned to her, feeling annoyed. "Why are you so concerned about the dead birds, anyway? We don't know if that's got anything to do with other events up here."
"Dunno – it was just so… creepy. Kinda weird wouldn't you say – all those birds dropping outta the sky like that."
"I'm sure there's a heap of conservationists who'll share your concerns, but I'm more concerned about the person who died," Logan replied dismissively. "Damn, I wish I had an Internet connection up here. This is hopeless," he added, grunting with frustration as he slipped his laptop back under the flap of the tent.
"I saw birds like that down by the river yesterday. You see anything else dead around here…any other kinds of animals?"
"The mice I saw in the bathroom looked pretty healthy to me," he muttered distractedly, idly watching her as she stood up and stepped away from the awning to look up at the sky.
"Granted this bird thing seems strange…" Logan began.
"Logan, what if the birds ate something…or drank something," Max interrupted him as a chilling thought came to her. "I did see them down by the river," she told him in a portentous manner, her dark eyes wide with unease. After all, it was thanks to her that Logan had swum in the river, and he'd probably swallowed a mouthful when he'd been dunked.
"We don't know that," Logan said at once with a 'let's not get carried away here' tone of voice. "Besides, you insisted on boiling the water."
"Yeah, but what about when I pulled your ass into the river? Do you think you drank any?"
"I might have," he acknowledged, but quickly continued in a reasonable tone, "but there's nothing to say it's the water that killed them. Maybe they ate poisonous berries or something," he suggested vaguely, then a little more seriously, "Maybe the drugs they're growing are poisonous."
"Or they're pumping something into the river, some kind of waste product that's killing the wildlife," Max suggested, still fixated with her idea.
"Max, if that was the case, wouldn't other animals be dead as well? Why just the birds?"
"I dunno," she snapped a little defensively. "You been feeling tired by any chance?" she asked, torn between making it sound like a joke or deadly serious.
"Max!"
"I'm serious, Logan. That's the only thing we have to go on. The way you told it, Lucy said that Poggs complained of being really tired before he lay down…and he'd just been for a swim in the river," she added hesitantly, not liking the way her theory was lining up with such precision.
"Well, we both swam yesterday and neither of us are dead…neither is Tex or any of the others who were here with Poggs."
"I don't like this," she stated finally, standing in front of him with her arms folded uncompromisingly.
"I'm sure Poggs would agree with you." The half-smile that accompanied Logan's words definitely tended towards the sarcastic rather than the amicable.
"What did he mean? Bowie," she added tightly when she saw Logan's puzzled glance. "About the chair not saving you…maybe making things worse," she reminded him sharply when he still showed no inclination to answer.
A quick flash of understanding lit Logan's eyes. "Oh. That. That's what you call scare tactics, Max."
"Works for me," she told him seriously. Reading his stubborn look correctly, she continued, "Why can't we just swing back to Seattle and you can investigate all this from the comfort of your apartment where you've got your computers and informant net?"
"Because I think Poggs deserves more that that…more than some half-baked investigation because there's no one on hand and I'm hours away in Seattle."
"Then let me stay. That's our deal…remember?"
Logan looked away from her, but not before she'd glimpsed the discontentment in his eyes. "I told Poggs that things could be different…"
"Just because you made one comment to a dead guy, it doesn't make you accountable."
"I never said it did," Logan snapped. He was never happy to have his movements dictated to him by someone else, particularly Max. When she made no answer, he felt his anger flare. "Would it be different if I could…?"
The last word died an instant death on his lips as he caught a glimpse of the probing stare Max suddenly directed his way. A heady feeling of self-consciousness assailed him, but he returned her gaze unflinchingly, as if challenging her to discover what it was he'd nearly revealed about himself in a moment of frustration.
Brown eyes locked briefly with green as Max hesitated, searching for the right words to use.
"I'm saying this because it's a bitch fighting something that's invisible," she finally said with quiet determination. "We don't have any idea what we're up against here. If no one else has been able to find out who, or what, is whacking people, what makes you so sure that you'll be able to?"
"The sheriff must have a computer…internet access. He looked up stuff about me."
Feeling Max's eyes on him, he continued quietly, "It'd mean packing up the car, but maybe if we got into town, I could use it and contact Bling…maybe Sebastian."
Max looked at their tent, not relishing the prospect of dismantling it if she only had to erect it again. Damn Logan and his crusades, she thought bitterly, rolling her eyes, both at his stubbornness and her own inability to say no to him.
"I've got a better idea," she announced to him flatly.
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To be continued.