Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (25 page)

‘Watch me,’ said Lock, slamming the door. ‘Ty’ll give you a ride home. Call him.’

52

Lock drove less than six blocks, and pulled into the rear parking lot of a small antiques store. Far enough away that neither Raven nor Hill and the cops would see him – at least, he hoped they wouldn’t because he needed to be alone for the next part, and unless he got lucky it would take some time.

He opened the centre console again and retrieved the laptop, then powered up the wireless Internet router, which pulled signal from whatever was closest. As he waited for a connection, he opened the photo he’d saved on the desktop and studied it a little longer.

Raven was receiving mail at a second mailbox location that she had told neither him nor the LAPD about. But before he could figure out why, he first had to find it. The photograph was the only clue he had.

Like someone solving a jigsaw puzzle, he worked from the edges of the frame in, searching for clues to its location. Although it was daylight there was no sky in the picture, which wouldn’t have been a problem if Raul’s framing hadn’t also omitted the store front’s signage. Lock groaned. Knowing what the place was called would have made his task a lot more straightforward. There was a large Federal Express notice in the window but that didn’t help as those signs were promotional giveaways used by a lot of mail-collection businesses.

At the top of the glass door there was a street number, but no street name. A parking meter bisected the glass store front almost exactly down the middle. That was it. Not a lot to go on.

He opened the browser, pulled up Google Maps, then Raven’s home address. He began to search for mailbox services, methodically pulling up the street-view picture on each one and comparing it to the image he had.

The process took him back to his Military Police days when he had worked on criminal investigations. Seconds spent crashing through doors to give a bad guy the good news, but days occupied with the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair, grinding through thankless tasks.

Nothing turned up in Raven’s immediate neighbourhood so he kept moving outwards. North a few miles. Then south a few miles. Then east. Then finally west. Each time he inched a mile further outwards.

West finally worked. The mailbox was in Encino, the other side of the 405 freeway from Raven’s home. From the street-view image on Google it looked like a little mom-and-pop operation. It was on a busy street, with a Korean restaurant on one side and a chiropractor’s office on the other. Lock got the directions, packed everything away and switched off the wi-fi. He’d have to move fast. It was getting close to rush-hour and it was an hour’s drive.

He decided to take surface streets. You hit the lights but it was better than the relentless grind of sitting stationary for minutes at a time on the freeway as you approached an off-ramp only to get up to a less than exhilarating thirty miles an hour before a shoal of red brake lights brought you back to a standstill. At least with the streets there was a feeling closer to perpetual motion.

About halfway there, as he pulled out of a side-street and back on to Ventura Boulevard, Ty’s name flashed up on his cell phone.

‘What the hell did you say to her, man?’ Ty asked, skipping the pleasantries.

‘She came on to me, asked me to take out the guy the cops had in the frame.’

There was a moment of silence before Ty spoke again. ‘You know, it would kind of make sense.’

Lock spun the wheel, pulling over into a parking space, and took the phone off speaker. ‘Ty?’

‘I’m here.’

‘I’m going to forget you said that. Okay?’

‘Only saying,’ Ty said, a hint of injury creeping into his voice. ‘Anyway, it might not be our problem for very much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lock asked.

‘Well, she’s talking about replacing us. I mean, I tried to smooth things over but I think she’s serious. She’s already made a couple of calls.’

‘Then let her,’ said Lock. ‘Tomorrow you can get back to your vacation and Carrie and I can head for New York. The deeper I go into this, the less I like it.’

‘What do you know that you’re not telling me, Ryan?’

‘Right now? Nothing very much. But I’m working on that.’

53

This one had taken some tracking down. With Stanner it had been easy. Cops don’t usually look out for someone following them home. Not if you were careful about it, anyway. Apart from gangbangers and morons, people generally don’t kill cops, not unless one walked into a liquor store when it was in the middle of being held up or something. Even then a lot of the cops he had met would most likely have walked outside and called it in, waited for someone who was being paid to turn up and deal. So, yeah, finding Stanner’s home had been easy. Same went for Vice’s. But this one – this one had been a lot more difficult.

He had got there in the end, though. And now here he was. Parked up outside. Waiting. Watching. Choosing his moment.

He liked to get a feel for a place before he made his move. He liked to see who was around and who wasn’t. You could learn a lot just by sitting quietly. He’d realized that as a teenager rolling drunks in Arkansas. You could always tell the ones who would put up a fight and the ones who wouldn’t. He’d seen some supposedly reformed criminal on one of these talk shows telling all the squares in the audience about how he’d always selected his victims.

But his selections had changed once he’d come out of the joint this last time. He no longer went after the weakest. Some of those he’d gone after, like Stanner, definitely hadn’t been weak. But then again, his old movements had been blurred and fuzzy, first money and then, later on, sex. But now he was working for a higher purpose. The highest purpose of all, some might say. His motive was love, with a capital L.

Right then the door leading into the next-door house opened and a woman appeared dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Man, all this dough and people dressed like absolute slobs in this neighbourhood. Although maybe, he guessed, that was the point. Make enough money and who gives a shit what other people think of how you look?

The woman was moving a trash can out to the side of the road. Guess it had to be refuse day, he thought. She couldn’t have brought her keys because she’d wedged the door open with some kind of fancy doorstop in the shape of a Chinese dragon or something.

Beyond the door there was a long narrow wooden walkway, which dead-ended with a large glass-fronted guard rail and beyond that, if he listened hard enough, he could hear the roar of the Pacific surf, sea air mixing with the exhaust fumes from all the traffic speeding past him on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Exhaling, he stretched his legs. It was almost time to make his move.

54

Lock was relying on one simple facet of human behaviour. To a greater or lesser degree, we are creatures of habit.

He was outside the mailbox store in Encino, and he was gambling on the fact that, although Raven had decided to use a different box for some correspondence, she had used the same number. With no indication on the key as to what it was, if she had switched to a different one, she risked forgetting it. It was the same for people who used the same password on the Internet, or the same PIN for bank accounts. There’s only so much stuff that we can store in our heads at any one time. That had to be the case for Raven.

The key turned first time in the mailbox lock. With a sigh of relief, Lock dug his hand inside. He had been expecting one or two pieces of mail but the box was so stuffed with letters that his palm got wedged for a second and he had to wiggle it free before he plucked out the letters one and two at a time.

When he had everything, he closed the mailbox and locked it. Unless Raven had another key secreted somewhere, it was unlikely she would be able to come here in the next few hours, open the mailbox and find it empty. Lock wanted to make sure, though.

He crossed to the counter, which was staffed by a smartly turned out Asian woman in her late forties. ‘Excuse me? Ma’am?’

She looked up from the puzzle book she was working through. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I was wondering, do you keep a spare key for the boxes? Only I lost my back-up copy.’

‘I’ll have to ask my husband.’ She went out the back to where a man Lock took to be her husband was sorting through various courier packages, which they signed for on behalf of people.

Lock waited at the counter, watching the security camera focused from behind the desk on the main body of the store. She was back in less than thirty seconds.

‘If you need another key it’ll be twenty dollars.’

Lock smiled. ‘I’m good for now, but thanks,’ he said, then headed back to the box, picked up the contents and went out of the door.

He clambered into the driver’s seat of the Range Rover, dropping the letters in a pile on the passenger seat. Most had been opened, with maybe only two that hadn’t. Opening mail and leaving it in a secure mailbox was suspicious in itself. Raven clearly did not want anyone reading the contents.

Lock drove round the corner, out of sight of anyone who might be watching him from the mailbox store. The light was gone outside now, taken by the darkness.

He flicked on the overhead console light and picked up the first letter at the back of the pile, checking the postmark. Then he did the same for a few others, building a quick timeline.

The oldest letter dated back almost four years. The most recent, one of the unopened ones, was from a week ago. The postmarks were interesting too, as were the return addresses or, in the case of the last letter, the absence of a return address. He wondered if Raven had even seen it. He thought for a second about going back to the store and asking if they kept their CCTV recording but thought better of it. Even if they did, the storekeeper wouldn’t share with him. More than likely she would just call the cops and he didn’t want the cops involved yet. Not until he had a handle on this. No, he wanted this whole deal clear in his mind before he did anything else.

He picked the first letter out of its envelope, with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation postmark embossed on the front, and started to read. Skipping through the first few paragraphs, he quickly worked out that this was not the first time this particular inmate had written to Raven or she to him. Judging from the stack of envelopes and the franks on the front, prisons had been a rich source of fans for Raven Lane.

The letter went on:

Raven, you writing me back has been about the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my hole shitty life so far. Knowing that you’re gonna be there for me when I get out, my little angel, my beautiful angel, well it makes life about bearable in this place.

Sometimes at night when everything’s about as quiet as it gets in this place, I lie awake and imagine our life together. All three of us, together. It might seem like kind of a weird deal to anyone who don’t get it but what do we care about what anyone else thinks about us? As long as we all have each other, and we can all get along then that’s all that matters, right?

I count the days my darling. You should too. Because when we’re together then nobody and no one is ever going to hurt you like they did in the past.

I also think about us together.

Lock skimmed the remaining few paragraphs as they descended into a series of luridly graphic accounts that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. For a guy who wanted to protect her from all the other perverts, he sure as hell had some strange ideas about the fullest expression of romantic love between two adults.

Lock checked the postmark again, jotting it down on a piece of paper, alongside the name of the inmate and his prison number.

De Shawn Wilder. Corcoran Prison, California. Prisoner Number 9786324.

Lock put the letter to one side and started on the next. This one was from Pelican Bay, an institution Lock was familiar with. The tone and content weren’t that different from the other. It talked about the person writing it getting out and what he would do with – or, more accurately, to – Raven. It was dated four months back.

He scanned the rest of the letter, seeing if anything would jump out. He was going so fast he almost missed it.

One word, a name, tucked away in the penultimate paragraph.

Fairfax
.

The name chimed. He’d heard it somewhere in connection with Raven. He looked outside at the gathering dusk, then back at the letter, reading the sentence.

Let me know if there are any more creeps like Fairfax hassling you.

And then it came to him. Fairfax had been the first porn director whom Raven had threatened, the one before Vice, the one who’d ended up dead.

His heart pounding, Lock took another look at the sender.

Reardon Galt. Pelican Bay Prison. Prisoner Number 675310.

55

Carrie was sitting out on the lower deck, and didn’t hear the whir of the garage door. It was covered by the sound of the ocean rolling in under the house.

It was only when Angel stirred from beside her feet, head cocked to one side, then started to bark in the direction of the kitchen door that she swiveled round. Ryan must have got home early, she assumed. Or maybe Maria, the woman who came to clean the place twice a week and had left only an hour ago, had forgotten something and come back to retrieve it.

As the door into the kitchen swung open, this was who she thought it was. At least, for the first second or so. Her mouth dried and she felt a raw squall of fear creeping over her skin and burrowing its way into her stomach.

She squinted, her eyes struggling to adjust to the relative gloom of the kitchen after facing the dazzling sunlight sparking off the water. The shadowed outline of a man stood there.