She smirked. ‘You like being on top of me, huh? I can feel your jimmy digging into me.’
Lock rolled up the sleeve of her jacket, and shifted his weight so he could get a look at her tattoos. The first he glimpsed was a boy’s name, Ramon — it ran in blue script from wrist to elbow. A boyfriend? A pimp? A gang leader?
‘Who’s Ramon?’ he asked her.
‘The guy who’s gonna cap your ass, bitch.’
Well, thought Lock, at least she’s stopped calling me ‘old’. He checked the other arm. That was clean. ‘What do you want with Melissa?’
There was a snarl. ‘What you think? Bitch needs some killing is all.’
‘Ramon tell you that?’
She lapsed into a sullen silence. He was going to get no more from her and they both knew it.
The security guard and the two cops were almost upon him. Lock got to his feet, and hauled her upright. He pulled down the hood of her sweatshirt to reveal a tangle of black hair, which he pushed off the nape of her neck. There, scrawled in black ink, was what he had been looking for: two words and a number — Loco Diablo 13. Loco: crazy. Diablo: the devil. 13 stood for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, M, which stood in turn for ‘Mexican Mafia’, or La Eme.
Seven
Melissa’s eyes were still closed when Ty arrived a little after eight o’clock with orange juice and bagels — the west coast equivalent of coffee and doughnuts. He handed Lock a small carton of juice and put the brown-paper bag on the slide-in table at the foot of the bed, along with some low-fat cream cheese and paper napkins. ‘You want to head back to the hotel and get some shut-eye?’ he asked.
Lock shook his head, then nodded to the manila folder Ty was holding. ‘What you got?’
Ty sighed. ‘It’s pretty messed up. In fact, it’s about as messed up as it gets.’ He put the folder on the table beside the bagels, then looked at Melissa. ‘You sure she can’t hear us?’
Lock crossed to the bed. Her face was tight and troubled, three parallel lines furrowing her brow. He lifted her right hand and ran his fingers over the back. ‘She’s still pretty far gone from the anaesthetic.’
Ty shrugged. ‘Melissa’s a student up at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Regular kid, middle-class family, Mom and an older sister, Dad either dead or gone, not sure which. She’s working as a hostess in a restaurant but keeping her grades up. So, it’s the last day of her first year. She goes out with a couple of friends. There’s a fight at a club between one of her male friends and some football player. This guy Charlie Mendez intervenes, saves the friend from getting his ass kicked.’
‘Who is Mendez?’ Lock asked.
Ty raised an open palm. ‘Kind of a good question, but I’ll get to that. Anyway, he invites Melissa and her friends back to his place on the beach. Serious piece of real estate worth a couple of million. More drinks. They all end up in the hot tub. He tells them they can stay over. She starts feeling groggy, heads to bed. Next morning she wakes up next to him and they’re both naked.’
‘He drugged her?’
‘No way of knowing for sure. Could’ve been a date-rape drug or all that booze. Lot of times girls think a drink’s been drugged when it’s just that someone’s dumped a bunch of extra alcohol in there. Anyway, it don’t matter because whatever it was she wasn’t in any fit state to consent and she’d definitely had sex.’ Ty lowered his voice. ‘A lot of sex, if you know what I mean.’
‘Let’s finish this outside.’ Lock felt uncomfortable — out cold or not, the girl was still within earshot. They picked up their breakfast and the papers, then walked into the corridor. Lock stood with his back to the half-open door, still vigilant. ‘What then?’
‘Okay,’ Ty continued. ‘She gets out of there as fast as she can, and goes to the cops. They do a medical exam. Bingo. There’s DNA from this Mendez cat up inside her.’
‘He was already on the database?’
‘Drug possession. Minor shit. But they get a hit. So they set up a pretext call. You know, she calls him, asks what he did, and the asshole is dumb enough to laugh about it.’
‘He copped to it?’
Ty gave a rueful smile. ‘Guy isn’t the brightest star in the sky, plus he’s got an ego the size of a planet. Young rich asshole, know what I’m saying? Cops pick him up, he makes out like he was joking when she called, and he has money, right? Or, rather, his family does. They hire themselves a whole bunch of expensive lawyers. And this is where it gets really fucked up. Those lawyers, they persuade the judge to bail him.’
Lock felt his blood run cold. ‘Bail?’
‘Two million dollars and he has to surrender his passport,’ said Ty. ‘But he’s out.’
‘Where’d he get two million bucks?’
‘Don’t let the name fool you. The family got serious coin — deep roots in Santa Barbara too.’
The next part of the story Lock could guess. ‘So he’s bailed and runs?’
‘Not right away, no. He turns up every morning, like a good boy, just long enough to realize that he’s shit out of luck. His fancy lawyers rip her story to shreds in the courtroom but she stands firm. Plus they messed up with the jury selection. Got rid of as many women as they could, but a lot of fathers are sitting there, listening to this.’ Ty paused for a moment. ‘Fathers with young daughters. He’s going to prison and you and me both know how much they love rapists in somewhere like the Bay. The next day, he’s a no-show. The US Marshals go looking but he’s long gone. Defence lawyers try to get a delay but the trial goes on with an empty chair. Unanimous guilty verdict and a judge who’s been made to look like a complete asshole.’
Based on what he knew about the vagaries of the American justice system, in which property was more valued than people, Lock guessed at the sentence: ‘Six to ten?’
‘Might have been, if the lead investigator hadn’t turned up a whole bunch of video tapes of other girls he’d raped. All of ’em drugged. The judge was so pissed that when the jury came back with a guilty verdict he gave Mendez life without.’
That meant he’d die in prison. No chance of parole, even if he found Jesus. It was a rare sentence for a man like Mendez but the crimes had been particularly venal and, as Ty had just said, he’d ruined the judge’s career.
Ty gave a wry smile. ‘Pretty awesome incentive to stay wherever he is, right?’
‘And to make sure that Melissa doesn’t complain too loudly,’ said Lock, pulling the door closed, but leaving enough of a gap that he could still see her.
Ty had a sip of orange juice, then opened the folder, took from it a bunch of printouts and handed them to Lock. ‘This dude Joe Brady was a bondsman working out of an office north of LA. Melissa talked him into going after our boy. Not that he needed much persuading. Two million bond means a bondsman gets two hundred grand for his safe return. He found our boy Charlie down in Chihuahua, Mexico.’
Lock started to flick through the printouts. They were mostly new stories from the wires. Any number of bail bondsmen and bounty hunters had ventured south of the border to find Mendez, bring him back and claim their share of the bond. Most had expended considerable resources, only to fetch up at a series of dead ends. Just one had come close to finding him. That was Joe Brady — the Joe, he guessed, that Melissa had mentioned.
Joe tried.
According to what was in front of him, Brady had gone to Mexico with a posse of men and a camera crew to capture the moment for posterity. But whoever was looking after Mendez had not taken well to Brady’s avowed desire to repatriate him. In the middle of the night, while Brady, his team and the camera crew had slept in a small hotel, a group of paramilitaries had arrived. They had taken the Americans and an Aussie soundman hostage. The following morning their bodies, including Joe Brady’s, were found hanging from a bridge in Santa Maria, the border town notorious for more homicides per head of population than anywhere else in the world, Afghanistan and Somalia included.
Lock handed the printouts back to Ty. ‘And now she wants me to go and get him,’ he said.
A silence settled between them. Ty broke it: ‘And what do you think?’
Lock looked again at Melissa. ‘I don’t know. I need some more information. And we have the small matter of
