power outage.
Up ahead, medical staff were rushing into and out of a room on the left. He counted the doors. He checked his count. Then he broke into a run.
He looked around for Ty but couldn’t see him. A nurse was rushing past. Lock grabbed her arm. ‘Melissa Warner? Has she been moved? Is that her room?’ he asked, clinging to the hope that he was mistaken.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, brushing him off with a scowl.
He kept moving. Suddenly Ty was there, although Lock hadn’t seen where he had come from. A woman screamed, the sound dissolving into a wail of denial. ‘No! No!’
Ty had his arms around her. One look at her told Lock that this was Jan, Melissa’s mother. She was trying to fight her way past Ty and into the room. He was struggling to stop her without hurting her. ‘Let the doctors do their job. Okay?’ he said.
Gradually she began to still until he took his arms away. She slid down the wall, wrenching at her hair with both hands, panic and fear overwhelming her.
‘What’s going on?’ Lock asked him.
‘I don’t know. One minute she was sitting up, looked fine, the next I’d come out so she could get some rest and all those machines went crazy. Her heart, I’m guessing. I saw them going for a defibrillator and they got a crash team in there.’
Melissa’s mother was getting to her feet. Lock and Ty helped her up. ‘I need to get some fresh air.’
‘You want me to come with you?’ Ty offered.
She shook her head, rosary beads falling over her knuckles. ‘That’s kind of you, but I’ll manage.’
Lock stood with Ty and watched her walk unsteadily towards the elevator. They glanced back at the room. The commotion seemed to be ebbing away. Voices were lowered but no one came out. Lock stared at his partner, both men thinking that wasn’t a good sign.
They waited. A nurse drifted out, eyes on the floor. A resident in green scrubs was next. He looked at Lock. ‘Are you the father?’
The question shook Lock. What was he to her? He wasn’t any kind of family. He wasn’t a friend. He had only met the girl when she had stumbled bleeding into the hotel two nights before. He was a stranger she had turned to for help. ‘Her mother just stepped outside. You want me to go get her?’
‘If you would,’ the doctor said.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Ty said, striding past them, shoulders down, long legs stalking towards the elevator.
‘She’s gone?’
The doctor bit at his lower lip. ‘I’m very sorry. Sometimes…’ He trailed off. ‘Sometimes when there’s been a trauma like she suffered, the body just overloads.’
Lock’s gaze drifted towards the room where a dead twenty-year-old girl was lying on a bed, her heart literally broken beyond repair. ‘I brought her in after the shooting,’ he said to the doctor. ‘Would you mind if I saw her?’
The doctor didn’t say anything so Lock moved past him and into the room.
She was laid out on the bed. A nurse pulled the gown over her bare breasts as Lock walked in but he could see the raw, livid scar that arced across her abdomen, the stitches still visible from where she had been pieced together after the bullet had been removed. Lock crouched next to the bed, recent history rushing at him. He wasn’t at fault for this death, not in any way, but it still weighed on him. Melissa Warner had left him a legacy as sour as any family debt.
He reached up and his hands fell over her forehead. His fingertips drifted down, and he closed her eyes.
Twenty
One Week Later
West Hollywood
Three black Cadillac Escalade SUVs came to a halt outside the restaurant in West Hollywood. Lock emerged from the front passenger seat of the middle vehicle and stepped back to open the rear door. The doors of the other two Escalades also opened kerb side. Lock ushered Triple-C’s lead rapper, Dwayne Dikes, and his date through a small knot of paparazzi towards the entrance. Ty did likewise with his principal. It was a perfectly choreographed routine, which, in this instance, was effectively there to make the principals look good. The biggest threat Dwayne was under this evening was from some undercooked scallops.
Inside the restaurant, the maitre d’ escorted the two rappers and their dates to a table in the middle of the room. Lock and Ty took a small table by the window, ordered mineral water and settled in to wait. This was close- protection work as Lock knew it: watching someone else have a good time while you waited for them to finish.
He paid for the mineral water up front, a habit he had acquired over the years. You got a drink or food and asked for the check at the same time. It meant you could leave in a hurry if you had to.
Out on the sidewalk, three lone paparazzi went back to smoking and talking and sipping their lattes. On the patio, Lock recognized a certain Hollywood actress and her buffed movie-star date, neither of them heterosexual but both with a movie on upcoming general release.
The lead Escalade pulled out into traffic. The other two followed it. Per Lock’s instructions, they would circle the block and wait around the corner, ready to pick up their charges as soon as they were finished with dinner.
Across the street there was another vehicle, a red Honda Accord with tinted windows. It was watching Lock and Ty, part of an ongoing surveillance operation. It would have been nothing for them to walk across the street, or get behind it, pull it over, haul out the driver and find out who he was working for and why he was following them. Easy, but redundant. Lock knew who it was. He knew why it was there. He welcomed its presence in the same way that he had welcomed the little black box planted in his Audi. Covert surveillance was a problem when you didn’t know it was taking place. When you did, it was a gift from the other side.
He sipped his mineral water. For a change of pace, Ty had ordered a Sprite. When the waiter brought it, Lock gave him some shit to break up the wait: ‘That stuff’ll rot your teeth.’
That was how their conversations had gone in public for a week now. Sports. Current Affairs. Trivia. No mention of Melissa Warner and what had happened to her. Definitely no mention of Charlie Mendez. Not in public. Not where there was any chance they could be overheard. Both men were thinking about the girl who had paid with her life in trying to reach Lock, but they didn’t talk about it unless they were alone and knew it was safe to do so.
In truth, Melissa was more on their minds today than any other. Lock saw her face when he closed his eyes. She had pushed Carrie to the edge of his unconscious mind and he wasn’t sure whether to be resentful or grateful.
Today, more than three thousand miles away, Melissa was being laid to rest at home in Delaware. She was to be buried next to her father. Lock had received an invitation to the funeral. He had placed it in his pocket. Then, outside a clothing store in Burbank, with the red Honda Accord across the street, he had torn it into a few pieces and tossed them into a nearby trash can. That would ensure its retrieval and send a message that, as far as he was concerned, the girl was history, a violent yet random interlude in his life, certainly not worth risking his life over, especially now that she was dead.
The charade had continued, extracting its nightly toll, but he did not waver. His anger burned so hot that when he needed strength he could warm himself by its flame.
Across the restaurant, the rap stars had ordered a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. Their dates giggled. Ty gave them a sour look.
‘Could serve those dudes this,’ he said, raising his icy glass of Sprite, ‘and they wouldn’t know the difference.’
‘Hey, they’re paying you good money to sit in this fancy restaurant sipping Sprite.’
They settled back into their seats and waited out the appetizers, entrees and dessert. As the entrees were cleared, Lock noticed movement across the street. The red Honda Accord nudged its way out into the traffic on Pico Boulevard. It had been rented to a private detective working out of Van Nuys, an ex-cop. He would have been hired by an intermediary who had in turn been instructed by another. A cover story would have been concocted to explain
