Chapter Forty-Nine

 

DAVIS

 

There's not a lot to talk about right now. Nothing changing. There's a lot I want to avoid talking about, and a lot that Ryan wants to avoid, I'd bet. He fades in and out. He smiles at me.

I don't know how to feel about the way that it makes my stomach get all fluttery. I haven't ever been that kind of girl. The kind to get weird around a boy. Maybe I should have been. Maybe it would have saved me a lot of trouble.

I feel like I just woke up, partly because I did. But it doesn't make me less tired. Just woke up, and I'm already more than ready to join Ryan in the world of sleep.

Some time, we'll need to get back into town and deal with Scheck and her guys. But that's far away, now. We're near a two-hour drive out of town, and under false names.

The odds of anyone looking for us are pretty slim. The odds of them finding us, slimmer. In all the rooms in all the hospitals in Tucson, I can't imagine that they'll find us easy.

Ryan needs time, to recover. I need time. And his brother… well, I just have to hope that he gets out of surgery soon. For Ryan's sake, for mine.

Part of me wants to figure out what happened to Logan. I haven't heard from him. Then again, I never have before, neither. I add that to the list of things I don't want to talk to Ryan about.

If he was shot, I'd have heard about it, right? There'd be something on the police scanner about it. Probably on the regular radio about it.

If I didn't hear about it, then he's probably alright. Probably. The word rolls around in my head and doesn't sit right wherever it falls. Probably fine, but not definitely. Not 'he's fine,' but 'he might be alright, depending.'

I don't like it. Don't like it one bit. Especially if it turns out that Donaldsen shot him. Sure, trying to break out of your cuffs and escape is illegal. "Resisting arrest," I suppose.

But on the other hand, so too is taking a suspect to a god damned private hotel room. He should've been in the holding cell, or the interrogation room, or perhaps the Sheriff's office.

Which begs the real question; why was he in that room?

The minute they got Ryan, they were heading to Tulsa International Airport. The very second.

Yet, they get Logan, and he stays in the hotel room. I thought it was so that they could question him about something. Where Ryan was. Or perhaps they could hope to use him as bait, to bring Ryan in.

Instead, they'd used him as bait for me, maybe, but there were no guarantees with that. They did little more than guess that I might come in and try to help him.

That's not a sure thing, and sure as hell not enough to risk what it might look like if they got caught and I slipped the trap.

As for bait for Beauchamp, they already had the Crazy Horses on top of it. So why was he in that room? If you're picking up crooks, why not arrest him and send him on to D.C.? If you're looking to bait Beauchamp, why split your forces?

None of it makes any sense, and it's starting to sit wrong. There has to be some explanation. Why in that hotel room? Why didn't he have time to call his brother before Mitch caught him by surprise?

The pieces didn't fit. None of them did. And the more that I looked at the picture, at the ways that they did fit, the less that I liked the way that it looked.

Because the only answer I kept coming around to was that none of it made any sense. The only reason that they would put him in that room was so that they could bring me into the room with him.

If they were doing that, then they were doing it to bait me into showing my hand too early. But the reasons for using Logan? There aren't any. I can't think of a single one.

The more that I try to think of one, the less that I can. There's no reason that they would have picked him up. They wanted to see something, but I can't figure out what the hell it is.

There's one thing that doesn't fit with the rest of the picture. The wedge that keeps coming in between me and a good idea. Pollack and Donaldsen had to have been gone from that room for a good thirty minutes. I was in the car with them for fifteen minutes alone. If they'd come straight there, picked me up, and driven straight back, fifteen minutes. No less.

Thirty minutes is a god damned long time. Long enough to get into a lot of trouble, if you're trying to. Long enough to cause a lot of trouble.

Logan was trapped in a position where it would take a while to get yourself out. A good, long while. But that's a while in terms of minutes. Anyone watching would be able to see you do it.

If you had thirty minutes to yourself, it might hurt like hell, but you could be out the door inside of ten minutes, with twenty more to get real gone.

So why the hell was Logan Beauchamp there when I showed up with Donaldsen?

The answers seem to all lead in about the same direction, and it's a direction I don't even want to think about for a single second. Not until I can talk to Ryan about it, talk him through everything that's happened since we last met up.

There's been a lot to discuss. Some of it, at least on my end, is going to be a little hard to believe. Scheck just let me walk right the hell out of there? Never in a million years. But it happened.

As I slowly wake up from my cat-nap, a lot of questions are starting to boil in my head. Questions I should have been asking at the time, but I was too God damned tired to think straight.

Well, now I'm thinking straight, and a hell of a lot about the past couple of days has been fishy as all hell. I don't like it one bit, and I'm going to have to get to the bottom of it.

Still, some of the things I'm thinking aren't going to be solved by just me alone. I need some kind of outside confirmation. Ryan's asleep, but he's restless. If I woke him now, he'd think he was awake the whole time.

I start to reach for him, but a noise at the door stops me. My hand jerks for my weapon on reflex, purely from being startled alone.

"How is he?" I turn. My hand goes back to the arm of the chair, real slow and real easy to see. I'm not causing any trouble, and I don't know anything. I try to look relieved.

"He's alright."

Logan Beauchamp pulls up a chair next to me and sits back in it. He looks good, considering that three hours ago he might have been dead man.

"What about you? You hurt? I know on that escape, things coulda gotten pretty hairy."

"I'm fine."

I don't like it. I don't like any of it one God damn bit, and now I've got a real good reason not to.