Deadlock (Ryan Lock 2) (34 page)

She pressed the button to lower her window, lit a fresh cigarette and started the car. Trembling, she pulled out from the darkness of the gas station and back on to the road.

2

Carved pumpkin jack o’ lanterns with jagged teeth and diamond-slit eyes stared blankly at Raven from the front stoops of her neighbors’ houses as she turned into the quiet residential street nestled in the foothills south of Ventura Boulevard. Still shaken by what had happened outside the club, she’d used the long drive back to calm herself. Now she was clear about what she had to do.

As she pulled into the driveway, she pressed the garage-door opener, which was clipped to the BMW’s sun shield. The door swung up. She took a minute before she drove in, idling on the street, checking to make sure the garage was empty.

Satisfied that it was, she nudged the BMW inside, purposely leaving the door open behind her, then got out and walked to the front of the house. The street was quiet. A couple of cars were parked at the kerb but they belonged to neighbors.

She walked back into the cool of the garage, opened the passenger door and took out her purse and the holdall that contained her stage outfits. As she closed the door, she glanced back at the BMW, a habit she’d developed when she’d had a bad night and needed to remind herself that her career had its compensations. It had been a gift from a man who had confused what Raven saw as a business relationship with something else. She had waited until he had given her the pink slip that transferred ownership of the car to her before letting him down gently. She couldn’t be bought, she’d said to him, with a smile; not in the way he wanted to buy her, anyway. She could only be leased, and even then you never got the full package.

Over the years, she’d learned that you had to keep something back, some small piece of yourself. If you didn’t, you got your heart broken, and Raven had experienced enough heartbreak to last a lifetime. She had shut herself off and focused instead on making a life for herself and Kevin, and no one was going to take that away from her now.

Rolling her shoulders to ease the crick in her neck, she walked through the door that led from the garage into the hallway at the rear of the house, then into the kitchen. She put her purse on the counter, took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and drank half of it.

She pulled her work outfits from the holdall and jammed them into the washing machine, then went back outside to collect the mail, leaving the door open so she could get back in quickly if anything happened. Nothing did, and the mail held no nasty surprises either. There were no handwritten envelopes, no death threats, nothing weird, just the usual junk mail and bills.

She walked back into the house and suddenly remembered something. She’d lost her sunglasses earlier in the week – she’d looked all over the house but hadn’t found them. Now she went back into the garage to check the car. Leaving the mail on the hood, she peered into the glove box, then under the seats. Nothing.

She stopped, trying to think where she might have put them down. It came to her. She had been unloading groceries from the trunk the day before and, unable to see in the gloom of the garage, she had taken them off. Maybe she’d forgotten to pick them up again.

She clicked the button to open the trunk, and walked to the rear of the car. The interior trunk light was faulty so she crossed to the light switches on the far side of the garage. The fluorescent tubes flickered into life, throwing fragments of harsh, savage light into the trunk. A horrific still image flashed in front of her. Then the lights steadied and she could see it clearly.

She stared into the maw of the trunk at a semi-clothed body, the stump of the neck covered with clean plastic sheeting, the ends wrapped tightly with string. Then she started to scream.

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