Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4) by Michael Kerr Read Free Book Online

smiling, red-lipped Playmates around him.  He was fondling them, and they were pleasuring him.  One was giving him a blowjob, another was straddling his face, and his tongue was darting in and out of her hot, wet cooze.  He heard a noise, but decided that it was from outside the mansion he had fabricated in his mind, and that they were probably builders working on an extension to his castle of love.
    Logan moved to the side, closed the broken door as best as he could behind him and listened.  He couldn’t hear a thing, but could smell the pungent odor of marijuana in the stale air.  He moved with the stealth of a leopard stalking its prey, entered the small bedroom and saw the figure lying on the bed.
    At first, Logan thought that he was viewing a corpse.  The slim male was unmoving, pale-faced, with sunken eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling in the gloom.  Stepping closer to the bed, he reached out with his left hand, gripped the guy’s ankle and shook it hard, and then backed-up quickly as the figure shot up into a sitting position.
    Benny was coming down.  His flight of weed-induced imagination plinked out of existence, and instead of being in a large, sumptuous chamber being pleasured by several women, he was back in the real world and lying on his own sweat and semen stained bed.  And he could make out the shadowy form of a very tall guy standing motionless with a gun in his hand.  Paranoia and panic melded in his brain.  Trask had obviously had someone watching the house, front and back, just in case he returned.  He had been stupid to think that he was in the clear.  Like a dumb critter he had slunk back to his lair in what he had thought was the safety of darkness, and the hunters had known that, given time, he would.
    Logan said nothing.  Just kept the Glock trained on the now twitching, agitated young guy and waited.
    “Don’t, please,” Benny whined, and a stain appeared at the crotch of his pants and began to spread as his bladder voided.  “I won’t say a word to anyone.  Let me talk to Mr. Trask.”
    “Mr. Trask wants you whacked, Benny,” Logan said.  “You know too much.”
    “I don’t know fuck all, man.  I just do what I’m told and keep my mouth shut.”
    “So what went down at the pier?”
    “I got lifted out on the street, and was told to arrange a meet with the cop.  He turned up at the pier and all hell broke loose.  I panicked and jumped in the river.”
    “So you sold your handler out?”
    “I’m not a fuckin’ animal,” Benny said, finding some resolve from the residue of drug in his brain.  “Nobody handles me.  It was business.  He paid me for information, is all.”
    Logan moved in quick, grasped Benny’s right hand, which he had raised up to wipe his running nose with the back of, and selected the index finger and bent it backwards till Benny howled. He had measured the force he applied, tearing the connective tissue around the middle joint but holding off dislocating or breaking it.
    “What you need to know is that I don’t work for Trask, and that Arnie Newman is my friend,” Logan said.  “You have a choice, talk to me, help me, or die where you lay.”
    It took Benny a minute to assimilate the pain and find a small measure of composure.  His finger had already swollen up like one of the blood sausages that his grandmother had served up regularly when he was a kid.
    “Y…you broke my fuckin’ finger,” Benny whimpered.
    “It’s just badly sprained,” Logan said.  “And it’s the least of your worries, believe me.”
    Benny looked up into the man’s eyes.  They just stared back at him, unblinking and full of menace.  “What else can I tell you?” he asked.
    “Everything you know,” Logan said.  “And if I think you’re lying to me I’ll tie you up, give Trask a call and tell him that you’re at home and receiving visitors.”
    “All I’ve done is small stuff for Trask,” Benny said.  “Followed a couple of guys