Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (23 page)

‘He’s got to know you’re watching him,’ Lock said.

‘Maybe he doesn’t care.’ Hill walked out on to the deck and started making calls, pulling the heavy glass door shut behind him. Lock watched him pace up and down, one hand in his pocket: Mr Cool, Calm and Collected.

Ty clapped a hand on Lock’s shoulder. ‘Are you for real? We’re sending her into the lion’s den.’

Lock smiled. ‘No, we’re not.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ty asked.

Raven flicked a stray strand of jet-black hair away from her face. ‘Yeah. What do you mean?’

Lock stared at her, the smile gone. ‘You’re not going into any lion’s den. Trust me.’

Ten minutes later, Hill stepped back inside. ‘All set.’

‘What’s his name?’ Raven said suddenly.

Lock, Ty and Hill all turned to look at her.

‘I already said,’ Hill said. ‘I can’t tell you that yet.’

‘This guy has been making my life hell. I want to know what his name is or the deal’s off. I’ll sit here until you work out what you want to do.’

Hill looked at Raven, then at Lock, and then back at Raven. ‘Clayton Mills.’

‘And you think he’s the guy who’s been sending the notes?’ she asked.

‘We know he made the phone call and he knew about the dress. The dress wasn’t information that ever went public, so—’

‘Jesus, why did he pick me?’ Raven broke in, her voice cracking with strain. ‘There are lots of girls who do this. Why me?’

Hill gazed at the dark hardwood floor of the kitchen. ‘We’ll be able to answer those questions once we have him in custody.’

‘You think he won’t know he’s been set up?’ Lock asked. ‘If he’s been obsessing about Raven all this time, what’s it going to be like for him to be talking to her?’

Hill grunted noncommittally. ‘The honest answer is, we don’t know.’

‘And what if he tries to hurt me?’

‘We’ll have armed officers everywhere. He makes a move to harm you, he’s dead meat.’

‘He is?’ Raven asked, her brow furrowed.

‘He’s a cop killer who’s going to be surrounded by cops,’ Hill said. ‘No one’s going to hesitate to take him down if there’s an excuse to do so.’

Raven sighed, then made for the door, shoulders hunched. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’

46

The sun was starting to set as they arrived at a cafe in West Hollywood. It was a few blocks away from where the police knew Clayton Mills was living and where the surveillance team had observed him eating. Hip West Hollywood with its large gay population was not an area that Lock would have associated with this type of predator but, then, nothing about this job had been normal so far.

Lock and Raven sat down, ordered coffee and scanned the menu. Lock was nervous. This was not his plan, and even though there were maybe two dozen cops all around, including a couple of undercover officers at nearby tables, he knew that if Clayton Mills was here or walked in, and if he sensed some kind of betrayal, his and Raven’s lives could be snuffed out in a matter of seconds.

He scanned the other patrons. There was a man sitting inside on his own. He was wearing a cut-off wife-beater-style T-shirt designed to showcase his massive biceps.

Clayton Mills, Lock said to himself. It was the arms. They were prison-muscle. No tone or definition to them, just bulk. The kind of arms you got from a bad diet and lots of big weights.

Lock saw a slight tremble in Raven’s hands as she rested them on the table. He had no gun but he did have his Gerber knife tucked into a pocket, ready to jam into Mills’s neck at the first sign of any aggressive move on his part. While the LAPD had shown little respect for him, Lock had equal distrust for their abilities in a situation like this. Their focus was on making sure they had their suspect. Lock’s focus had to be on making sure that Raven walked away in one piece. Difficult when she was being dangled like a piece of bait in front of a man who had already slaughtered several people in cold blood.

‘You okay?’ he asked Raven.

Fear, and proximity to the man who had made her life hell, would be a powerful gravitational pull, and her desire to look at Mills must be strong. Yet they both knew she had to pretend he didn’t exist.

‘Fine,’ she answered, shoulders rigid with tension.

‘So, what you gonna have?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Lock glanced at the two men at the table directly to their left. They were tucking into their meals with a relish not often seen in a part of town so obsessed with appearance. ‘The eggs look good.’

Raven scrunched up her face. ‘I hate eggs.’

An avenue for small-talk. ‘How come?’ he asked.

Raven made another face, carefully plucked eyebrows darting upwards for a split second. ‘You really do not want to know.’

‘Try me.’

‘It’s gross.’

Lock had once had to scoop a friend’s lower intestine back into his abdomen. It was like gathering slippery rope. He didn’t get grossed out easily any more. ‘Go ahead. I love gross stories.’ Behind them, through the murmur of cafe chatter, he picked out the man he had down as Clayton Mills talking to one of the waiters. Now, from the tone of the man’s voice and how he was speaking, he was sure. Ex-cons were nothing if not direct.

‘You started work here today?’ Mills barked, interrogating the waiter.

Jesus, thought Lock. The cops had put one of their guys in as a waiter. It was about as newbie a piece of police work as Lock could imagine. It came down to the same rule that Lock applied in his job: what do you look for in a situation that tells you things are off? The absence of the normal. The presence of the abnormal. The bad guys looked for the same thing as the good guys.

Putting Raven in here was pushing the second part. Throw in a new waiter, and you might as well have replaced the faux-fifties neon sign hanging outside with ‘Police Stakeout In Progress’.

As Clayton Mills’s voice rose in volume, an embarrassed hush descended around them. Lock reached for the handle of his knife, the fingers of his right hand closing around it as he watched him continue to remonstrate with the undercover cop doing a bad job of playing a waiter.

Lock kept his eyes on Raven. If she reacted, he would move.

The intensity of his focus meant that the big guy coming down the sidewalk towards them was less than ten feet away before Lock recognized him. It was the bodyguard from Las Vegas, the guy doing the security for Raven’s Russian client.

He winked at Lock as he passed, then took a seat at a table in the middle of the caf8E, as a few more pieces of Lock’s puzzle fell into place. Lock’s knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on his knife. Violence crackled in the air. Someone was about to get hurt – badly. The only question now was who.

47

Ty stood back as Wendy pushed open the front door. She and Kevin hugged, Kevin planting a kiss on Wendy’s cheek as her mother watched. Whatever went down in West Hollywood, whether the stakeout worked or not, Ty knew that they finally had an opportunity for Wendy and Kevin to meet up without looking over their shoulder too much. Wendy’s mother had taken a lot of persuading, but Ty, with a little help from Carrie, had broken her down. The plan was for Ty to drop the kids off at the mall, then leave them for a while so that they could catch a movie together and get something to eat. Alone. Without someone monitoring their every move. Like regular seventeen-year-olds did.

Kevin, freshly showered, his hair still a little damp, kept his arm round Wendy. One of the things that Ty had noticed about him was how tactile he was, with none of the inhibitions that seemed to affect kids as they grew into their teenage years when parental contact was about as welcome as herpes.

Wendy’s mother hovered inside the hallway, arms folded, eyes filled with uncertainty. Ty smiled at her. ‘They’ll be fine. You have my guarantee.’

‘They’d better be,’ she said firmly.

Ty knew better than to argue. He’d rather go ten rounds with a field full of Taliban than an overly protective Valley mom.

‘You crazy kids ready?’ he asked Kevin and Wendy, who were already hand in hand, consumed not so much by a teenage surge of lust as by a simpler delight in each other’s company after an extended separation.

On the way out, Wendy’s mother pulled her daughter to one side, drawing an eye-roll and ‘Mom!’ as they ran through a checklist of ‘Do you have your cell phone?’, ‘Okay, keep it on silent in the movie theatre’, along with what seemed to Ty like a thousand other rules and strictures. After the fourth or fifth do or don’t, he tuned out, keeping his eyes on the quiet suburban street behind them, with its neatly trimmed lawns and American flags snapping tight in the warm Santa Ana winds.

Finally, she was done, and there was a hug for both Wendy and Kevin. ‘Remember what I said,’ she said sternly, to all three of them.

‘It’s burned on to my mind, ma’am,’ Ty said.

In the car, Wendy and Kevin rode together in back, Ty doing his best to keep any rear-view glances disguised behind his sunglasses. He kept his eyes on the traffic around them, alternating his speed. A car full of
cholos
dug past, with a dramatic blare of its horn, as they drove down Van Nuys Boulevard, its occupants’ arms dangling out of windows, a gang sign thrown by one, the kid’s fingers contorting into an unlikely tangle as he showed his allegiance.

Ty thought about Lock and Raven, and how worried they were about the stalker, but the dangers in Los Angeles were more random, more casual, more mundane than any shower-scene finale in the last reel of a low-budget slasher flick. A quick glance revealed Kevin with his arm around Wendy, oblivious to anything else.

Ty smiled to himself. Young love, man.

Despite all his bravado, he regretted not having found the connection that Ryan and Carrie shared. Ty didn’t have a problem attracting women. Didn’t have a problem getting them to go to bed with him either. It was the stuff that came after that he struggled with. In his twenties it hadn’t bothered him. That was what your twenties were for. Love ’em and leave ’em, although in Ty’s case it had been more hump ’em and dump ’em. But that shit got stale. Maybe Kevin had something to teach him, not the other way around.

Kevin was at the front of the line for the concession stand, his arm still around Wendy’s waist. Cradling a big tub of popcorn, he carefully took out a twenty-dollar bill from his jeans pocket and handed it to the kid behind the counter, watching carefully as he was given his change. Ty had noticed that for Kevin everyday transactions seemed to require unflinching concentration.

People filtered past, mostly families with kids. The movie Wendy had chosen was the sequel to a huge kids’ franchise by Pixar, a selection that made Ty’s job easier. A lone adult walking in to watch the movie would stand out. The thought made Ty’s next decision easier as well. He went across to Kevin and Wendy.

‘You have your phone on, Kev?’

Kevin struggled to wrangle the monster tub of popcorn and vast container of soda to one side long enough to pat the lump in his left pocket where his cell phone was tucked away. ‘I’ll switch it off. I know the rules,’ he said, with an eye-roll for Ty, much to Wendy’s amusement.

‘No, keep it on.’

‘What?’

‘Put it on silent. I’m going to hang out here. Let you two guys have some space. You don’t want me sitting behind you like some old maiden aunt, do you?’

Kevin and Wendy exchanged a look, delight creeping in at the edges of their mouths. Then Wendy frowned. ‘But Mom said…’

Ty put up his hand. ‘I won’t tell her if you don’t. Now, listen, I’m going to be just outside the door. If anything happens you yell out. Okay?’

Kevin gave a solemn nod.

‘Okay, go have a good time.’

Kevin scrambled to take Wendy’s hand. Ty watched as they headed across, handed over their tickets and disappeared inside the movie theatre. He waited a few moments, followed them, handed over his ticket but stopped shy of the door leading into the theatre. He took a seat next to a big cardboard promotional display, featuring a family of cartoon racoons and settled in. Besides the fire exits, there was one door in and one door out. He kept an eye out for any lone adults but it was only families, or single parents with kids.

He sat back and watched a young middle-class African-American couple and their kids as they raced ahead through the door, squealing with delight, and felt suddenly empty. Man, Lock didn’t know how lucky he was.

48

Raven’s hand shot to her mouth. ‘He’s staring at me.’

Lock realized she was referring to Clayton Mills. But he was more interested in the presence of the bodyguard. ‘Ignore him.’ He put his hand out and touched hers. ‘Pretend like we’re two people having breakfast. You were going to tell me why you can’t eat eggs.’

Raven put down her menu and folded her napkin over her knees. ‘Okay, so Vince Vice, his movies went way beyond hardcore, right?’

Lock shrugged, still tense, still waiting for it all to kick off. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m more of a Tom Hanks guy.’

‘Well, they did. He got off on pushing the actresses as far as he could. The sex got violent too. He’d choke you. Force you to gag.’

Lock put down his menu on the table. ‘And that has what to do with eggs?’

‘He’d ask you to eat fried eggs before a shoot so that when you threw up it was more visual.’

A waitress circled the table. She was pretty and blonde and perky, in the way that only people who don’t really understand what the world is truly like can be. This part of LA was full of people playing at being waiters, or parking attendants, or fitness trainers or, Lock thought cynically, in this case, cops. ‘Are you folks ready to order?’ she asked.

‘I’ll take some coffee but make sure it’s really hot,’ Lock said. ‘I mean scalding.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Just some toast, thank you.’

‘No eggs?’ Raven prompted.

Lock smiled. ‘I’m not really in the mood.’

‘And you?’ the waitress asked Raven.

‘I’ll take the French toast and some coffee.’

The waitress jotted down their orders.