Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (4 page)

He got up as quietly as he could, leaving Carrie lying asleep on her side, her hands folded like a pillow under her head, and their yellow Labrador, Angel, sprawled across the bottom of the bed, her jowls twitching as she chased imaginary sea monsters.

Measuring every step with care, he walked downstairs. In the kitchen, he filled a glass with water from the faucet and took a sip.

He opened the dishwasher, and a rush of warm, wet air filtered out. He pulled out the top rack a few inches, jamming the door open. Then he walked to the large sliding door that fronted one half of the house, pulled it open and stepped out on to the smaller of the beach house’s two decks.

Looking over the guard rail he could see the white foam of the surf. The air out here was cold. Off to his right Big Rock, a cluster of huge rock formations, lay about thirty feet from the edge of the houses that crowded the coastline. Might as well enjoy all this while it lasts, he thought.

He had come out to Los Angeles a few weeks ago to provide close protection security to an overly paranoid movie actress, who was having problems with an ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t accept that their relationship was over. Unusually for one of his protection gigs, Carrie had tagged along for the ride. The work had paid ridiculously well. The beach house, a second home that the star in question rarely used, had been thrown in as part of Lock’s remuneration, saving them the cost of a hotel or small apartment.

The troublesome former boyfriend had turned out to be an Australian actor. He played tough-guy action heroes and took the method approach a little too seriously. In the end Lock had got him alone in a parking structure in Westwood and explained the difference between fiction and reality, illustrating his point by dangling the action hero over the edge of the roof while rush-hour traffic sped past five hundred feet below. The guy had taken the hint, and the movie actress had been so grateful to get him out of her life that she had offered Lock the use of the beach house for as long as he wanted. Lock had thanked her, but regular life called, at least for Carrie, and in two days’ time they were due to fly back to New York, Carrie to her job as a news reporter and Lock to whatever corporate security gig came up next.

He went back inside the house, pulling the glass door closed behind him. On the kitchen counter his BlackBerry was vibrating. He crossed to it, picked it up, and studied the glow of the screen.

The number was showing as unknown and, above that, the time as 04:56 hours. Out of habit, Lock answered it.

Before he even had the phone to his ear, he could hear a woman on the other end of the line, her voice ragged and husky, as if she had only recently stopped crying.

Lock listened for a moment as, under his feet, another boulder slammed into one of the timber supports holding up the house.

‘Ma’am? Can you hear me?’ he said softly. ‘Are you in immediate danger?’

There was a short silence. Then the woman spoke again. ‘Not right this second but, yes, I’m in a lot of danger. You help people in my situation, right?’

Oh, Jeez, thought Lock, here we go. Between them, he and his business partner, Tyrone Johnson, attracted around a dozen crank calls a week. Tough guys who lived in their parents’ basements, reading comic books, and wanted the opportunity to go toe to toe with them; tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who wanted to let Lock in on how the government was attempting to control the population’s thoughts. And, a third category, which Ty, much to Lock’s annoyance, seemed bent on encouraging: a group of women they referred to as Damsels in Distress, who often invented all kinds of threats (abusive boyfriends, prowlers, deranged stalkers) in order to try to arrange a rendezvous.

He had a feeling this was a category-three phone call. ‘Ma’am, if your life is under threat you need to call nine-one-one and speak to the police department in your area. I’m sure they’ll be able to help you.’

This time the woman sounded almost irritated. ‘Who do you think gave me your number in the first place?’

Lock was taken aback. ‘Excuse me?’

‘My name is Raven Lane. I’m being stalked. I have the LAPD’s Threat Management Unit helping me out but something just happened. I need some additional security. They told me to call you.’

Through his work so far in Los Angeles, Lock knew all about the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit, or TMU. It dated back to 1989 when California had passed the first anti-stalker legislation. Being slap-bang in the centre of the entertainment industry, the police officers who worked for it were kept busy. When it came to non-celebrities they were only usually involved when stalking or harassment became aggravated. Lock knew that for the most part the victims were fairly anonymous. Sometimes all it took was a sad individual chancing upon a Facebook page for a whole world of misery to open up for the unsuspecting victim. He also knew that stalking cases were messy and difficult. ‘But why, if the TMU are helping you, do you need me?’

‘The TMU’ve been great but a panic alarm and a drive-by from a patrol car twice a night isn’t going to cut it any more. I need someone who’s going to stop this stalker before he hurts me.’

Lock sighed. In the normal run of things, and with the exception of big-mouthed Aussie thespians, he wasn’t in the vigilante business. Sure, push him hard enough and he’d push back harder, but he didn’t go hunting down stalkers and dishing out street justice. In the real world, behaviour like that tended to land you in prison and, from recent experience when he had been under cover in one, he knew he didn’t like prisons very much.

At the other end of the line, the woman must have read his silence. ‘Listen, I’m not asking you to kill the guy. Hell, I’m not even sure who he is.’

Lock still said nothing, counting on her to fill the silence.

‘I can pay you, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Lock said, looking up to see Carrie walking bleary-eyed down the stairs, Angel skittering in a figure-of-eight pattern around her heels.

‘Then let me help you out here,’ the woman said. ‘This morning I found a body in the trunk of my car. I’m pretty sure it was a woman’s.’

‘You think?’ Lock asked, suddenly interested.

‘It was difficult to tell,’ the woman said. ‘She didn’t have a head.’

6

As Lock swung his rented Range Rover from the Pacific Coast Highway through the short stub of the McClure tunnel and out on to the 10 freeway, Carrie glanced up from the browser feature on her BlackBerry. ‘She’s a porn star,’ she announced.

‘That so?’ he said, noncommittal.

The phrase ‘headless corpse’ meant that Carrie was riding shotgun. A reporter is never officially off-duty, she’d explained to Lock, as they’d both thrown on their clothes. Angel had also insisted on tagging along and had taken up a position in the back, occasionally poking her head through the space between the two seats, hyped up at the prospect of an unscheduled road trip.

‘You want me to read you some of her credits?’ Carrie asked him.

‘Any of them win any awards?’

Carrie scrolled down. ‘No Oscar nominations, but
Yank My Doodle, It’s A Dandy
is kind of a snappy title.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Are you really going to look after this woman, Ryan?’

Lock glanced over. ‘You don’t think I should? Y’know, even porn stars have a right to be safe.’ He nodded towards Carrie’s BlackBerry. ‘What else you got?’

Carrie studied the screen for a moment. ‘Wow.’

‘What is it?’ Lock asked.

‘Well, she’s not how I’d imagined.’

‘How’d you imagine her?’

‘Blonde, lots of silicon, huge boobs. Kind of plastic looking.’

‘She’s not?’

Carrie’s brow wrinkled a little. Lock found it reassuring. After all these weeks in LA, he’d grown used to the complete absence of facial movement. Everyone out here seemingly had the Botox look, which left their faces a flat plane devoid of expression. Their happy face was the same as their sad face, which was almost the same as their angry face. Coupled with the habit of framing every sentence like it was a question, even when it wasn’t, it rendered the most mundane of daily interactions a veritable minefield.

‘No,’ Carrie continued. ‘She’s beautiful, not fake at all, and she looks… I dunno, kind of fragile.’

On the dash, the fuel warning light pinged on. Lock checked the GPS for the nearest gas station and switched lanes, ready to pull off at the next exit.

At the gas station on Fairfax, he slipped his credit card through the window to the cashier and went to fill up. Carrie leaned against the side of the Range Rover and watched him. ‘You know how you sometimes say that what people call a sixth sense is them adding up all the data but not being able to articulate the conclusion?’

Lock glanced over at her. ‘Yeah.’

‘Well, if there’s a better than fair chance that something bad is going to happen to her, you have one question left to answer.’

‘Is she a good person or not?’ he said, smiling at her, liking the way she looked, and feeling lucky all over again that she’d decided to be with him.

‘And her job doesn’t make her a bad person,’ Carrie said.

Lock stifled a yawn. Sharp autumn sunshine reflected back off the windshields of the cars traveling in the other direction. Carrie was right. But then she was always right. So why did he still feel uneasy about taking this job?

Although it was daylight by the time they arrived, Raven Lane’s street was still awash with emergency vehicles – a couple of Scientific Investigation Division wagons, a van from the Medical Examiner’s Office and the requisite marked and unmarked cop cars. Lock parked up twenty yards shy of an LAPD police cruiser and got out. He flagged down a uniform. ‘You still have a watch commander here?’ he asked him.

Lock knew from experience that with a crime scene like this there was usually a captain designated to co-ordinate the security of the scene so that everyone else could do their job without risking the contamination of any potential evidence. Ever since the O. J. Simpson trial, where footage was played of detectives wading through the front of the crime scene without the appropriate gear aimed at preventing cross contamination, the LAPD had been shit-hot about stuff like this. A clear chain of command at a crime scene was key to making sure there were no screw-ups a defense lawyer could pounce on later.

The uniform looked at him. ‘And you would be?’

Lock gave his name and why he was there.

The uniform stared at him. ‘This is a crime scene, sir. You’ll have to wait for this young woman until we’re finished talking with her. You understand me?’

Lock was neither surprised nor upset by the officer’s reaction. If he’d been doing the same job he would have reacted in the same way. Cops viewed private security contractors as wannabe cops. In Lock’s experience many of them were.

He walked back to the car to be greeted by a barking Angel. Carrie was down the street, away from the crime scene, chatting up one of the neighbors

‘Any information?’ Lock asked her, as she stepped away from the couple she’d been talking to.

‘
Nada
. Raven Lane keeps herself to herself. Most of the neighbors had no idea what she did for a living until tonight. Or, at least, that’s what they’re saying. I’m not sure any man is going to admit he recognizes a porn star when his wife’s standing next to him.’

They waited a couple more hours, then Lock called the cell-phone number Raven had given him. She picked up straight away.

‘I’m at the end of the street,’ he said.

Maybe now that she’d had a chance to collect her thoughts, she’d change her mind about needing his help. He was hoping she would.

‘Let me see if they’ll let me leave,’ she said. ‘The guy from the Threat Management Unit is here too. Would you like to speak to him?’

‘That would be great,’ said Lock. He got out of the car and took a look down the street. The uniformed cop he’d spoken to earlier and who was now helping to secure the perimeter glared at him. Lock waved the fingers of his right hand at him. The uniform said something to the officer standing next to him. Whatever it was, it wasn’t complimentary.

Lock ignored him, focusing on the house in the street with the greatest concentration of vehicles parked outside. It was about six down on the left-hand side.

The San Fernando Valley, which was where they were now, was cheaper than the prime real estate on the west side of the city. It divided up into nice neighbourhoods, and not-so-nice neighbourhoods. It was also further from the coast and, as the name suggested, its topography made for a hotter climate. In high summer the temperature could reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks on end. However, even with sweltering conditions and a shitty real-estate market, Lock guessed you wouldn’t be left with much change from a million dollars for the house he was looking at.

With its neatly trimmed front lawn dotted with flower-shaped sprinkler heads, its newly painted white exterior and freshly varnished white oak front door, it certainly wasn’t the kind of place you’d associate with a stripper. Of course, the open garage door at the front lowered the tone of the whole neighbourhood: it was being swarmed over by a whole host of forensics techs. Inside, he could just about glimpse what he assumed was Raven Lane’s car, a dark blue BMW sedan.

Lock had been so busy studying the house and all the activity that he had barely noticed the woman walking through the police line towards him. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail revealing delicate features, and the most striking violet eyes he’d ever seen were set above high cheekbones and a turned-up nose. She walked with a sense of purpose, looking straight ahead, but there was a vulnerability to her as well. All of a sudden the million-dollar house made sense to him.

This was a woman whom men would go to war over. And it looked like one, in his own sick fashion, already had.

7

Next to Raven, a hefty guy with a bushy head of tight black curly hair, wearing grey slacks and a white shirt with a shoulder holster, struggled to keep up. Lock guessed that this was one of the officers from the LAPD’s Threat Management Unit. He hoped he was good at catching stalkers because, judging by the roll of fat spilling over his belt, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be much use stopping one if they came after Raven.