by Sean Black
The Last Bodyguard
Sean Black
Contents
About the Book
Praise for Sean Black
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Also by Sean Black
About the Author
About the Book
In the latest action-packed thriller from the award-winning novelist who writes with ‘the pace of Lee Child, and the heart of Harlan Coben,’ ex-military bodyguard Ryan Lock plunges into the nightmare world of sex trafficking.
When fourteen-year-old Kristin Miller goes missing from her quiet home in the San Fernando Valley, her desperate family turn to ex-military bodyguard, Ryan Lock. Along with his partner, Marine Corps veteran Ty Johnson, Lock sets out on a journey that takes him deep into a dark, disturbing and violent world, where young women are selected, groomed and then exploited by ruthless predators.
With law enforcement’s hands tied, Lock dispenses his own brand of street justice as he tracks down Kristin, taking revenge on anyone who stands in his way. Can he get to her before it’s too late?
Praise for Sean Black
Winner of the 2018 International Thriller Writers Award in New York for Second Chance
Nominated for the 2020 International Thriller Writers award for The Deep Abiding
"This series is ace. There are deservedly strong Lee Child comparisons as the author is a Brit (Scottish), his novels US-based, his character appealing, and his publisher the same. "
Sarah Broadhurst, The Bookseller
"Black drives his hero into the tightest spots with a force and energy that jump off the page. This is a writer, and a hero, to watch."
Geoffrey Wansell, The Daily Mail
"Sean Black writes with the pace of Lee Child, and the heart of Harlan Coben. "
Joseph Finder, New York Times Bestselling Author of Buried Secrets
1
No one had called her pretty before. Not that she could remember.
She looked away, not sure how to react or what to say. Then, when he didn’t look away but kept staring, taking her in, actually seeing her, she looked down at the floor and kept her eyes there, studying the broken pattern of cracked linoleum next to the restrooms.
“You’re really pretty,” he repeated.
His voice made her feel restless. It was unsettling and thrilling and a little frightening, all at the same time.
She was hoping he’d move on, get his coffee and leave. It felt like this was some perfect moment that had arrived and if he stared long enough, she would have to look up and he would see that she wasn’t pretty at all. Then the spell would be broken.
And Kristin so wanted the spell to hold. Now she’d heard them she wanted to take those words home with her. To maybe believe they were true. That she was pretty. That she was worth a boy looking at.
“Hey,” he said.
His hand reached out, pinching her chin between the soft pads of his thumb and forefinger and gently tilting it up. It was like a move you saw on screen. A leading man move. A heart throb move.
She looked at him. Up close, he was even better looking than she’d thought when he’d first walked in. In fact, if anyone deserved to be called pretty in this place, it was him.
He had curly brown hair and huge brown eyes and delicate features, with a perfect white smile. He was good looking enough to be in a boy band.
If she’d had to pick another word to describe him, it would have been kind.
“Thank you,” she finally managed, taking a single step back, and lowering her chin again to resume staring at the cracked linoleum.
“What’s your name?”
She told him.
“Hey, Kristin, I’m Andre,” he said. “How do I get to see you again?”
This time she looked up. Being called pretty was one thing, but this question was too much. She glanced around to see which of the girls from her school were watching this unfold. They had to have put him up to this. It was the only explanation that made any sense to her. It had to be a joke.
But when she looked around, she didn’t see anyone that she recognized. Not unless you counted the mostly elderly regular customers and the two tired-looking women serving people coffee and donuts from behind the counter.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at him.
He dug a brand-new iPhone from his pocket, the very latest model, released only a few weeks ago, and handed it to her.
“Here. Add me,” he said.
It came as an instruction and somehow that made it easier for her, although she didn’t know why exactly.
Suddenly conscious of her nails, bare and bitten down, she tugged her sleeve over her hand and tapped quickly at the screen, hoping he wouldn’t notice them.
He took the phone back.
“You maybe want to hang out some time?”
“Sure,” she said, resuming her laser-like study of the linoleum.
“Cool.”
Then he was gone. As fast as he had appeared. A mirage.
Never, expected Kristin, to be heard from again.
2
“Trust me. It’s always the ones who look away or start staring at the floor like they’re looking for change. The ones who look like they’ve never been given a compliment in their sad, sorry lives. Those are the little fishes you want to scoop out of the pond.
The others. The ones that are fine looking. The ones that look straight back at you and smile and walk off, or tell you to get lost, or look like they hear that shit all day, every day. Those ones are no good.
Always rem
ember, Andre, a ho is born, not made. Although they sometimes need a little shaping.”
He had Hanger’s speech down pat. He’d heard it enough times.
Like a lot of things that Hanger said, it never varied. Not even by a word. Hanger had speeches for young bucks like him, he had speeches for bottom girls like Soothe, and he had more than a few speeches for his hoes.
He had speeches for the police. Speeches for Johns who damaged the goods. Speeches, if it came to it, for a judge, although that had only happened once as far as Andre was aware.
Hanger had introduced him to the game. Or rather, for Hanger and men like him, to the world of pimping, which was the game within the game. Sometimes it got called the life, although that was more what the women called it.
The life had its own rules, and it had its own language. Ducks. Swans. The track. Track hos. Carpet hos. An entire world within a world, what a bullshit sociology college professor would call a subculture.
Andre didn’t go out looking to recruit girls for Hanger. He’d found that hunting rarely, if ever, worked. Instead, he just lived his life and kept his eyes open.
He’d even come up with a name for what he did. He called it Pokémon Ho. Not Pokémon Go. An h instead of a g. Ho for, well, he assumed it was short for a whore, not that he ever used that word around the girls.
Pokémon Go was this game you played on your phone, only you played it outside. You’d point the screen at things outside and these little Pokémon characters appeared, and you could capture them. Just like a treasure hunt.
And, thought Andre, so was this. Only the little Pokémon hoes he captured were real, and he could exchange them for actual money.
A lot of guys tried to find them over the internet, but Hanger had turned him on to the real-life hunt early on. Hanger was the last of the old school, and he’d told Andre he wanted to pass on his knowledge to one last generation.
For a start, Hanger had explained, real life recruitment saved time. You might talk to a girl online for weeks and get nowhere. But out here you could tell pretty much immediately who a suitable target was and who wasn’t.
Andre thought of it as part science and part art. And for every girl he handed off, he got five hundred bucks. Two hundred came up front and the other three came after Hanger put her to work. If she was white, a swan, it got bumped up by another five hundred.
Hanger also showed Andre how the pimping game worked. Andre had already seen the money that could be made from pimping. It was crazy, off the charts, loot.
A single girl might be worth a couple of hundred grand a year to Hanger. It was almost all profit too. The girls didn’t keep any of it. Not a single cent. Everything got handed over. Hanger clothed and fed them, bought them drugs and booze, but that was it. The rest was pure profit.
At home, in his mom’s basement, Andre fired up a blunt. He spent the next few hours poring over the girl’s social media accounts. With each scroll down a page, more and more dollar signs appeared in his eyes.
Kristin was young and white, two qualities that made her worth a lot more out on the track. For a moment he actually considered keeping her for himself, putting her out there to earn for him. But he knew he didn’t have the game required, not yet anyway.
From what he could tell, his instincts had been right. She was ripe for someone like Hanger. She only had her mom and a grandpa. No father that he could see.
Hanger had told him that girls without a father were easier to turn out. Plus, they were less risky, easier to deal with if their family came looking for them.
As he kept swiping and scrolling, moving back into Kristin’s past, he felt a twinge of guilt pull at him as she got younger. He quickly brushed it off, reminding himself that this was business. There was no room for sentiment in the game.
When he followed her on Instagram, she messaged him almost immediately. He didn’t reply. He would, but not right away. He needed her to do her own scrolling, to look at his pictures, to start to develop those feelings that girls who’d been ignored their entire life always had.
He pulled up the latest picture she’d posted. It showed her standing in front of a Christmas tree, smiling shyly at the camera. He copied the picture and sent it on to Hanger.
“I want two for this one,” was the message he sent with the picture.
Hanger messaged him back. “Two? You must be tripping.”
Andre didn’t respond.
A half hour later, Hanger came back.
“She is fine, though. I’ll go to two, but only if she works out for me.”
Andre smiled and tapped out his reply.
“Deal.”
3
Ryan Lock perched on the edge of the couch and took the framed photograph from Joyce Miller. He studied the face of the girl in the picture for a moment. She had brown hair, cut into bangs that almost reached her eyes, and soft brown eyes.
She stared out from the frame at Lock, her expression suggesting that having her picture taken was something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
Lock didn’t take too long over the photograph. He studied it more as a courtesy than anything else. He doubted it was the image he’d need to track down Kristin.
Rather than risk offense by immediately giving it back, he handed it off to the woman sitting next to him, Angie Garcia.
“Mrs. Miller,” he said. “Would you have something taken more recently?
Kristin’s mother looked confused. She glanced over to Kristin’s grandfather, who was sitting, watchman-like, by a chair near the window. His head turned towards them, his face angled side on to the street.
“That was taken last month,” said the grandfather.
“I might have something more recent,” said Joyce Miller, getting up and bustling over to a credenza.
“No, that’s fine,” said Lock, trying to keep the shock out of his voice. “How old did you say your daughter is?”
“She’s fourteen,” she said. “Just turned. Her birthday was last month.”
Lock’s expression didn’t change. Inside, all he could think was fourteen.
How the hell did a quiet, studious fourteen-year-old girl from a lower middle-class family in the San Fernando Valley, a girl who had seemingly never dated and studied hard, a girl with dreams of becoming a nurse, end up in the hands of sex traffickers? And why had it fallen to the likes of Angie Garcia to find her?
He kept those questions to himself, at least for the time being, and tried to focus on the task at hand. First and foremost, taking the emotion out of it, this was a missing person's case.
The first task was to locate the missing girl. To do that, he needed as much information about her as possible.
Joyce Miller seemed to anticipate his need. She opened the top drawer of the bureau and pulled out a slightly worn looking tablet computer.
“She took her phone with her, but she left this,” she said, handing the tablet off to Lock. “I don’t know any of her passwords, but I thought you might be able to hack into it or something.”
“That’s great,” said Lock, taking the tablet. He doubted he’d be able to crack the password himself, but he knew plenty of cyber security people who would do it for a fee with no questions being asked.
If they were going to find Kristin, her computer was almost certainly their best shot. If it had her social media accounts, then it was likely a treasure trove of information. Teenagers lived their lives online. That had its downsides, but it also made tasks like this substantially easier.
There was a chance that if the social media accounts on the computer were linked to the apps on her phone, which they almost certainly were, that they’d be able to get a precise location that would take them straight to her.
He decided not to mention that as a possibility. Not until he knew more. The last thing he wanted to do was raise the family’s hopes. But, if everything went smoothly, he might have Kristin back with her family in less than twenty-four hours.
“When we spoke on the phone,
you mentioned something about Kristin perhaps having met a boy just before she took off,” prompted Angie.
“She was in love,” said the grandfather, making no attempt to conceal the mix of scorn and sarcasm in his voice. “Like anyone was going to fall for Kristin.”
Lock traded a look with Angie, both of them momentarily taken aback.
“A boy’s never even so much as asked her out,” her mom added, trying to smooth things over and move on. “She doesn’t get invited to parties or out on dates. She goes to school, she comes home, that’s about it.”
“Did she mention this boy’s name or give you any details, like how old he was or where he was from?” said Lock.
