Deadlock (Ryan Lock 2) (32 page)

‘You think I’m going to take you in?’ Lock asked him.

Coburn half-shrugged a ‘yes’ and clutched at his bloodied foot with both hands. ‘You’re a boy scout, Lock,’ he said. ‘Why else would you have taken that suicide mission Jalicia gave you?’

Lock took one more step towards him. Then another. Coburn’s foot looked bad, but not bad enough to kill him. Not even close. He turned over the situation in his mind, then took a breath, the stairwell seeming to tunnel in round them. A cold breeze had picked up from somewhere. It took him back to the redwood clearing where Ken Prager had been butchered before being forced to watch the execution of his wife and child.

The question facing Lock now wasn’t whether Coburn deserved to die. He did. The question was, could he kill a man in cold blood? Even a man such as Coburn.

If he did, Lock would be crossing a line into a different country. And once he had crossed, there would be no return.

He stared down at Coburn’s twisted features as he writhed in pain in front of him. He thought of Ty lying helpless on the yard back at Pelican Bay, and how Reaper and Phileas had seen Ty as less than human because of the colour of his skin.

‘See,’ Coburn said, pushing down his sock to get a better look at his wound and revealing a tiny bloodied shamrock on his ankle, ‘I knew you were a boy scout.’

Lock wasn’t sure whether it was seeing the symbol of the Aryan Brotherhood hidden away on Coburn’s ankle or the smirk on his face, but he felt something in him shift at that moment. Slowly, he raised his gun so that it was aimed right between Coburn’s eyes.

‘I’m going to tell you what I told Reaper on that plane down from Pelican Bay,’ he said softly. ‘I’m not a cop, or a Marshal, or the FBI. I’m a private contractor, and right now I’m off the clock, working on my own time, so the only person I have to answer to is myself.’

Coburn blinked, and his expression morphed from a look of pained amusement to genuine fear. ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

Lock’s index finger closed round the trigger and he squeezed off a single round, the bullet catching Coburn square in the face. His left arm twitched in spasm, his neck snapped violently back, and then he was perfectly still.

The sound of the gunshot reverberated around the empty stairwell, fading slowly away until all Lock could hear was a distant hum, overlaid by the sharp keen of sirens and his heart pounding in his chest.

‘I just did,’ he said, turning his back on the twisted corpse and starting back up the stairs.

Epilogue

Hand in hand, Lock and Carrie climbed the steps of Grace Cathedral and walked through the Gothic facade into the cool of the nave. The visit had been Carrie’s idea, a way of both of them finding some closure before they headed home, although Lock had been grateful that she hadn’t used those words.

The last few days had involved endless variations on the same set of questions. Lock’s answers had not changed. Gradually, and with no appetite to wash the ATF’s dirty laundry in public, the questions had fallen away to a distant echo until Lock was alone with only his own thoughts for company.

In the body of the cathedral was a limestone labyrinth. Unlike a maze, Carrie had explained, a labyrinth had no dead ends. You followed the path to the centre, stayed there for as long as you wanted, then followed the same route back out.

She dropped Lock’s hand from hers and stepped back.

‘You don’t want to walk it with me?’ he asked her.

Carrie shook her head. ‘I’ll be over there if you need me,’ she said, nodding towards a candle-lit area off to one side.

He watched her walk away. Calm. Composed. More precious to him than any woman he had ever known. In the days since those final moments alone with Coburn in the stairwell, she had allowed him his silences, letting him know with a look, or a hand at the small of his back, that if he needed to talk she was happy to listen, but not pressing him on it.

She seemed to understand that for him there was no release to be found in taking another man’s life, no surge of excitement from the metallic tang of blood that filled your nostrils, no joy in pulling a trigger.

Feeling more than a little self-conscious, Lock stepped onto the labyrinth and slowly began to follow it round. The past week had given him the time to think about the path he had chosen in life, the places it had taken him, and the things it had taught him about the best and the worst of human nature.

Even with all that baggage, nothing had prepared him for seeing Ken Prager and his family being slaughtered. Nothing would ever erase in his mind the first sight he had had of Ty lying on the yard at Pelican Bay. Nor would he ever forget the shiver in Coburn’s eyes as he’d watched him squeeze the trigger. All of these things Lock would carry with him – perhaps for the rest of his life.

Reaching the centre of the labyrinth, he stopped and closed his eyes, letting it all settle inside him. Then he followed the path all the way back to where he had started.

He found Carrie by a small shrine commemorating a visit to the cathedral, or church as it then was, by Martin Luther King. King had spoken of many things. Of hatred. Of fear. Of the power of love. A little over three years later, his own life had been snatched away by an assassin’s bullet.

The labyrinth had held no answers for Lock. But maybe, he thought as he watched the yellow candlelight flicker over the resigned expression on King’s face, this tiny shrine did.

There was the world as most people wanted it to exist, and then there was the world as it was, and standing in the middle, trying to make sure that people like King or the President could do their job were men like Lock.

Lock gave Carrie’s hand a squeeze.

‘Let’s go home.’

THE END

NOW READ THE NEXT
RYAN LOCK ADVENTURE

GRIDLOCK

THE CITY OF ANGELS HAS A STALKER.
ONLY ONE MAN CAN STOP HIM
BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN.

Adult movie actress, Raven Lane, is one of the most lusted after women in America, with millions of fans to prove it. But when a headless corpse turns up in the trunk of her car, she realizes that fame carries a terrible price.

Fearing for her life, and with the LAPD seemingly unable to protect her, Raven turns to elite bodyguard, Ryan Lock for help. Lock stops bad things happening to good people, but can he stop the tidal wave of violence now threatening the city of Los Angeles as Raven’s predator targets – and kills - those closest to her

As events spiral out of control, Lock is drawn into a dangerous world where money rules, where sex is a commodity to be bought and sold, and where no one can be trusted, least of all his beautiful new client. But what he cannot know is the terrifying price he’s about to pay - just for getting involved…

For a sneak preview of Gridlock read on…

www.seanblackbooks.com

Prologue

Near the end of every month, Bert Ely got up an hour earlier than usual, fumbled into his clothes in the dark so that he didn’t wake his wife, clambered into his beat-to-hell Chevy Impala and drove the eighteen miles from his house in Van Nuys into downtown Los Angeles. Getting on to the 101 freeway at six rather than his usual seven o’clock shaved about twenty-five minutes from his commute, although saving time wasn’t the real issue. The time he spent in the car on these particular days was something he looked forward to all month.

He loved the ritual of his routine as much as he enjoyed what lay at the end of it. As with any indulgence, half the fun – at least, as far as Bert was concerned – lay in the anticipation.

The 101 took him out of the San Fernando Valley, through Hollywood, the city’s degenerate heart, finally depositing him via the Broadway off-ramp into downtown Los Angeles where he worked as a real-estate appraiser for Citicorp. It was a mind-numbing job, based in a soul-crushing grey office building full of good little corporate automatons. Along with the fact that his wife no longer had sex with him, and his kids probably couldn’t have cared less whether he lived or died, Bert used the utterly mundane nature of his job to justify his end-of-the-month routine.

This morning, as he turned from North Broadway on to West 1st Street, a Los Angeles Police Department cruiser pulled out behind him. He found his heart rate quickening a little, although he had no real reason to feel guilty – certainly not yet, anyway. He supposed that technically what he would do today was against the law, but that was more to do with the thick streak of Puritanism that still ran through American society than anything else.

The rack of stop lights next to the Japanese American National Museum was at red. The LAPD cruiser pulled up alongside him. Bert glanced at the two cops riding up front. One was half twisted round in his seat, talking to a young Hispanic woman who was perched on the rear bench seat. Judging from her clothes, and her cratered complexion, over which she had smoothed a rough veneer of foundation, she was a street walker.

She saw Bert looking at her and stared back at him, like she knew what his secret was. Bert’s heart rate elevated again. The middle finger of her left hand popped up as she flipped him off, then the lights changed and the cop car continued down 1st Street as Bert made the right turn on to South Central Avenue, his heart still pounding.

He shook the image of the Hispanic woman from his head as he pulled into the parking lot, a sleepy-eyed attendant handing him his ticket as soon as he exited the car with his briefcase.

The sidewalk was still dewy with the water from early-morning street cleaning as he took a left heading down towards Starbucks on the corner of South Central Avenue and 2nd, passing the Cuba Central Caf8E, and Yogurtland. Outside Starbucks a few chairs and tables were already stacked on the patio, ready to be deployed. Bert walked quickly past the three banks of newspaper vending machines next to the kerb, crossed the little patio and pushed the door open. He went straight to the counter and placed his order without glancing up at the board.

‘Skinny latte, no foam,’ he said, to the barista. ‘Oh, and gimme a blueberry muffin.’ The muffin was an everyday treat for Bert.

As he waited, he studiously avoided looking outside towards the final bank of newspaper vending machines, their metal posts planted in the sidewalk. A black one, a brown one and two red ones, the last of which held the key to his treat. Inside that machine were copies of this week’s
LA Xclusive
newspaper, although the term ‘newspaper’ was a bit of a misnomer. There was no news inside, only page after page of adverts for escorts, predominantly female but with a scattering of men and transgender prostitutes, all selling limitless variations of the same thing: sex.

It was the endless variation on a theme that captivated Bert. Not just in terms of all the different physical types, ages and races, but in the array of services they offered, some so outlandish that even the thought of them made Bert queasy. Sometimes the ads had pictures too, although he had learned from a couple of disappointing liaisons that they couldn’t always be relied upon to be accurate.

Still, contained within the pages was a wonderland of possibilities, like a huge candy store for grown-ups. Inside those little boxes was an array of women, all of whom would have sex with Bert in return for money. From corn-fed Midwestern runaways, who no doubt told themselves that what they were doing was no different from what they’d done at home in the back seat of a car on a Saturday night, through the twenty-something MAWs (Model/Actress/Whatevers), with their gravity-defying silicone boobs and jaded air of disappointment that they weren’t even going to make the Z-list, all the way to the hardened professionals, women who had long ago reconciled their hopes and dreams with the reality of making a living by lying on their backs. Over the years, Bert had sampled them all.

Recently, though, he’d begun to find a sameness to the experience, and to feel a dark, lonely emptiness once the encounter was over. Where once he’d felt satiated, now his monthly liaisons left Bert hungry for something other than sex. For intimacy, maybe?

Last month, in the awkward post-coital moments and with ten minutes still officially on the clock, he had lain in bed with a young redhead in a condo in Playa Del Rey. He’d asked her if they could spoon, cuddle in together, his arms around her. She’d looked at him like he was nuts and asked him to leave, reaching into a bedside table and producing a hand gun to emphasize that she wasn’t kidding.

Strangely, he had never felt much guilt about paying women to have sex with him, rationalizing that a real affair, one with emotions and feelings, would be far more upsetting to his wife. That was part of the reason he never visited the same woman twice. Well, that and the fact that he liked the variety. Living in LA you could sample all that the world had to offer in the way of women without leaving the city boundaries. As long as you didn’t want a hug at the end.

‘Sir? Is this to go?’

The barista’s question snapped Bert back to the tiny coffee shop, which was starting to fill with office workers.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ Bert mumbled, handing over ten dollars and waiting for change. He put the two single dollar bills into the tip jar and kept the coins, which he’d need to pay for his copy of the newspaper. Then he picked up his coffee and the brown paper bag holding his muffin and wandered back outside into the early-morning California sunshine.

He stood for a second, sorting through his change and trying to get back a little of the good feeling he’d left the house with that day; the good feeling that came from his little secret.

At lunchtime he’d sneak to the men’s room, peruse the women on offer that week, then make a phone call. With his department offering flexible working hours, he’d reclaim the time he’d banked by getting into the office early, and drive over to the woman’s apartment. He was thinking that maybe he’d try someone a little older today, someone who might not find it strange that a man of his age would trade sexual gymnastics for a hug. Or, maybe, he thought, smiling to himself, he’d find a hot little spinner and screw her until her eyes popped out of her head.