Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (27 page)

The move to Los Angeles, like everything else that had happened in the last six months, had been for Raven. Everything he did was for Raven. The way he worked hard to keep in shape. The notes he spent hours crafting, even though he hadn’t sent most of them. The people who were out to hurt Raven, and whom he had taught a lesson: Cindy, who wanted to usurp Raven’s star status; that asshole in the bar, Larry Johns; and that scumbag director who had hurt her and was an affront to all men.

The first one, Cindy, had been the most difficult. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but with it being a woman, he had felt a sexual charge. But the swelling he had felt between his legs when he had abducted Cindy and had her under his control seemed a betrayal of how he felt about Raven, so he had packed those thoughts away.

People might have imagined that it was an easy thing to do but it wasn’t. Approaching Cindy in the underground parking lot, he had been close to backing out. His stomach had filled with tension, and his mouth was so dry that he had barely been able to utter her name loud enough to get her to turn round. He’d hit her with the stun gun, and once that had been done, once he had crossed that initial line, it had been much easier. There was the rush of adrenalin for a start, the fear of knowing that if someone saw you now it would be bad, that you would be arrested and people would know what you had done.

The thought of people knowing had been the scariest of all in some ways. He had floated through life with no one noticing him. That was what life was like when you looked like him. The only thing worse than being ignored was the barely concealed looks of disgust you got, especially from beautiful girls when they saw you. From an early age he had done everything in his power to fade into the background. Then he’d made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and he had been drawn into the light, albeit momentarily.

He got out of the Saab, walked to the rear and opened the door. The blonde stared back at him wide-eyed, gagged, and with her hands bound behind her back. He climbed in and pulled her up into a sitting position. Then he helped her out of the car and on to her feet. Pushing her ahead of him, he walked inside the one-bedroom wooden guesthouse that he rented from the old lady who lived in the main house and whom he never saw except when he paid his rent every month.

‘You can relax. You’re not my type,’ he said to the blonde. ‘I’m saving myself for someone else.’

He needed to speak with Raven alone. Just five minutes would do it. Five minutes when he could explain why he had done what he had. That was all he needed. If that bodyguard hadn’t got involved he would have had those minutes by now and one less person would have had to be hurt. But he wouldn’t listen.

Well, he was listening now.

59

Riding with no helmet, the acrid sting of burning wood along with the dust thrown up from the highway stinging his eyes, Lock smelt the fire long before he saw it. He tried not to think of Carrie trapped inside the house as flames licked the walls but couldn’t help himself. With the image came a deep rage that welled up inside him.

His mind drifted back to the letters but he couldn’t put any order to them now. He had to stay focused, direct his energy first at getting to the house, and then to finding Carrie. Nothing else mattered.

He took the curve wide before the house, then cut in front of the line of cars that had been stopped by a California Highway Patrol radio car on the ocean side of the road. He climbed from the bike, not stopping to bother with the kick stand. It fell with a crash on to its side, the front tyre spinning round and round.

He could see flames licking out from the garage and two separate City of Malibu fire tenders parked close by, fire fighters in breathing apparatus dousing the roof and those of the houses either side with two monumental jets of water, trying to dampen the blaze before it took a proper hold of the main structure.

He ran towards the house, pushing past a couple of neighbors who had gathered to watch. As he shouted Carrie’s name, a Malibu sheriff’s deputy crossed towards him. Lock could feel the intensity of the fire now, a wall of heat that buffeted towards him as the wind changed direction.

The deputy put out an arm in front of him, barring his progress.

‘My fianc8Ee was in there,’ Lock said, pushing away his arm.

‘Sir, the crews have already checked inside. There’s no one inside.’

Lock stepped back away from the deputy and began to look around. There was an EMS ambulance parked across the street on the other side of the highway, and he sprinted over to it. Two crew members were in the front cab, and he tapped on the window. He asked if they’d seen Carrie but they replied in the negative. No one had needed medical assistance so far.

As he was talking to them a call came in about an injured biker south of their position on the Pacific Coast Highway. Overhearing the radio message snapped Lock back to some semblance of reality. Regardless of the circumstances, he would be arrested for taking the guy’s bike. The present chaos might delay matters but the Range Rover was still there, and it would be traced back to him eventually.

He needed to get away – and fast. But he also wanted to make sure that what the deputy had said was correct, that there was definitely no one inside the house.

With this thought in mind, he jogged northwards towards a beach-access gate, which lay about fourteen houses further down.

He took the steps two at a time and started back along the beach in the direction he’d just come. Two houses short of the beach house, he stopped, blowing hard from the running and the wisps of smoke that had caught in his lungs. Bent forward, palms pressed to his knees, he tried to catch his breath.

The front of the house was almost perfectly intact, which lent a surreal air to what he’d just witnessed from the highway. Looking up he could pick out a couple of details. He couldn’t get far enough back without going into the ocean to see the top deck, but the glass door leading to the lower deck seemed open. He knew Carrie wouldn’t have left without locking it, which told him she’d gone in a hurry.

The beach would have been the obvious escape route, not just because of the water but because the belly of the fire lay near the road side of the house. He clung to the thought. He’d start walking back north first, trying Carrie’s cell phone as he did so, even though it was still switched off.

He walked close to the shoreline so that he could get a view into some of the houses in case Carrie had sought refuge with one of the neighbors As he walked, the tide rushed in behind him, erasing his footprints.

Two hundred yards down the beach, the smell of the cloying smoke began to abate and the sirens drifted away to a whisper, snatched away by a hot south-easterly Santa Ana. Looking north, the chaos that lay behind him seemed almost impossible. Up ahead he could see a dog, head down, wandering back and forth in the surf.

Angel.

The realization hit him like a slap. He’d forgotten about her. He broke into a run, wet sand making it hard, his thighs and calves stinging as he reached her. She trotted up to him, tail wagging but with her head down. He knelt down to stroke her head and she defaulted to her usual position, lying on her back, legs akimbo, waiting for him to rub her belly.

It was the first ray of light he’d had so far. There was no way Carrie would have left Angel in a burning building or vice versa. For one of them to be safe meant both had to be.

Lock’s cell phone chirped and relief swept over him as he saw Carrie’s name flash on the display. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘You had me worried sick. Are you okay? Where are you?’

There was a moment of silence, then a man’s voice: ‘She’s fine. Now, here’s my offer. I’ll trade you. Your bitch for mine.’

60

Fear descended slowly over Carrie, settling on her like a shroud. She’d struggled on the journey out until she’d felt a horrific jolt of pain in her lower back, which had almost lifted her off the floor. At first she thought he had stabbed her with the knife. It was only a few moments later that she realized he had Tasered her. The knife had been there to scare her, the fifty thousand volts of the Taser to gain her compliance.

He had set the fire using a can of petrol he’d found in the garage. Then they had left. He had given her a clown mask to wear as they crossed the street, thus shielding her face from any passing commuters. It would be like they were a couple goofing around on Hallowe’en.

It had worked. They had attracted a few strange looks, but this was LA, after all, a city where strange behaviour was the default setting.

Now she was bound and gagged, trussed up on a couch in a living room that smelt of dried semen and stale, ten-day-old laundry. Her hands had been tied in front of her and her legs bound quite tightly together. A third rope linked the two and meant that if she attempted to stand up she would fall forward on to her face. She knew this because she had already tried it – twice. The second time the man had walked in on her. He was still wearing the clown mask, which she took to be a good sign.

Lock must have mentioned in passing that kidnappers who hid their identity usually didn’t want a surviving victim identifying them. If you were kidnapped by someone who had no such reservations then the chances were far higher that you were going to die.

Hauling her back on to the couch, the man had run his hands over her body. He’d unbuttoned her blouse and slid a hand inside her bra.

In the end, a phone had rung in the small kitchen off the living room and he’d withdrawn his hand to go and answer it, leaving Carrie on the couch, her heart thumping with fear.

She could hear him talking a few feet away but had to strain to pick out any words. She thought she heard her own name, then Raven’s, but the rest was muffled.

Then he was back, sitting next to her on the couch, a lecherous hand sliding to her knee. The horrible clown mask tilted towards her at an angle that made the face, which hadn’t changed, of course, seem inquisitive, as if Carrie was a specimen pinned to a high-school science-lab table, ready to be dissected.

‘Now, where were we?’ he said.

61

Ty had stashed his purple Continental at Burbank airport and hired them a fresh ride, a new model Ford F-150 truck. It had been selected via phone by Lock because there was a near identical one (same model, same colour) parked three doors away from where he and Ty were now.

Outside Raven’s house two Cadillac SRX SUVs were parked up, the only visible outward evidence of her new security team, who were already inside. Four men, all of them ex-law enforcement, though thankfully not LAPD.

Lock looked across to Ty. ‘You do realize that if we mess this up we’re going to prison, right?’

Ty clenched his right fist and held it out for Lock to bump. ‘Then let’s make sure we don’t mess it up.’

It had taken Lock less than five minutes after the phone call to decide what had to be done. He could have called the cops and laid the whole thing out for them, but he would have lost any control over what happened to Carrie. And after the stunt they’d pulled with Clayton Mills earlier that day, and the betrayal with the bodyguard, he couldn’t trust them to do this right.

From his private security work, Lock knew that kidnappings were far more common than you would realize from watching the news. There was a simple reason for that. People were kidnapped. Demands were made. Demands were met. People were freed. It was a black market of criminality that operated under the cops’ and the federal authority’s radar. Kidnap and ransom insurance, usually abbreviated to K&R, and the attendant specialized security companies to which they subcontracted extractions, were big business.

This meant there was a straight line here. There might be kinks in it, and Lock would have to deal with those, but essentially it was straightforward. Lock kidnapped Raven and handed her over in return for Carrie. There was a part beyond that too, but for now that was the equation.

He could only hope for one thing: that Raven hadn’t yet heard that Carrie had been taken.

He looked from the front of Raven’s house back to Ty. ‘Let’s do this.’

He got out of the car while Ty stayed in the driver’s seat. He could feel the weight of Ty’s SIG Sauer 226 pressing against the small of his back as he tucked it inside his waistband. A properly held concealed-carry permit seemed suddenly redundant and almost comical in light of what he and Ty were about to do. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances, kidnapping was hard time for a long period. Let Carrie die and he’d be good with the law. Try to save her and he’d be on the wrong side. There was only one way to go.

Lock walked down the path to the front door of Raven’s house and rang the bell.

There was no surprise when the door opened. A shaven-headed guy, big but with a paunch, glared at him. ‘Can I help you?’

He was typical of most private security contractors. To an outsider he might have looked the part but Lock knew that, when it came down to it, he’d be about as much use as a glass trampoline. Lock smiled at him, burying any residual anxiety he was experiencing. ‘I’d like to speak to Ms Lane. I’m—’

‘I know who you are,’ the guy said.

‘Can you tell her I’m here? If she says she’s busy or doesn’t want to see me, give her this.’ He handed the guy a blank white envelope, which held the key to the mailbox that he’d taken from Raven’s purse.

The guy took it and the door closed.

A minute later it opened again and Raven stood on the threshold. The envelope had been opened and she was pale but doing her usually good job of holding things together. She stared at Lock.

‘The key must have fallen when I pushed you out of the car,’ he told her.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m sorry. You were right – back there in the car, I mean. Things were a little confused. I was a little confused as well.’

If Carrie wasn’t being held God knew where, Lock would have laughed. ‘You were wasted in adult movies, Raven,’ he said, pulling a single sheet of paper from his pocket, the top sheet of one of her many prison letters.