by Black, Sean
As the traffic on the highway thinned out, Lock finally spoke.
‘You bring the shovel?’
Ty glanced in the rear-view for the briefest of seconds.
‘In the trunk with the quicklime.’
Five minutes later, Ty pulled the Lincoln off the road and they hauled an unwilling Roach out. They walked him for ten minutes, hitting a rise and putting them all out of sight of the highway. Every time Roach tried to look over his shoulder, Lock prodded him with the gun.
‘This looks as good a spot as any,’ Ty said.
‘Get down on your knees,’ Lock ordered.
Roach was crying now. Big mucus-filled sobs. Just like Aaron Prager. Lock contemplated starting out by cutting off one of Roach’s many Nazi-themed tattoos. He jammed his gun into the back of Roach’s neck.
‘This is bullshit, man. You’re going to kill me because I called someone a name?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve done a lot worse. Sure there’s been more than a few blacks, or Hispanics, or gay folk, or people who just looked different, who’ve run into you and your little jerk-off crew. Haven’t there?’ The SIG was ready to fire. He withdrew it from Roach’s neck. ‘I’m going to use this, but I don’t want any contact burns. It makes the gun easier to trace if they find you.’
Taking a step back, Lock aimed the SIG six feet to Roach’s right, then pulled the trigger. Roach let out a choked scream and, judging by the smell, emptied his bladder and bowels simultaneously.
‘Damn, that’s rank. You want to get a bit more variety into your diet there, son,’ Ty said.
Roach turned to them, tears streaming down his face. ‘Hey, if you’re going to do this, just do it, OK?’
‘Why shouldn’t we torture you a little bit first, like your friends did with Aaron?’ Ty said. ‘Eyes front, cockroach.’
Roach complied.
Lock raised the SIG again. ‘Now, you have one chance and one chance only to tell us who you ratted Aaron out to.’
Roach sucked some snot back up his nose. He shuddered a sob. ‘He never told us his real name.’
‘He must have called himself something.’
‘Cowboy.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Like six two. Bigger than average. Real fit. He was in the military.’
Another look between Lock and Ty.
‘Ex-military?’
‘No, still serving. He was trying to get us to sign up too. He said that was the best shot the movement had. For as many of us as possible to join up, get the training and then use it when the time came.’
‘What unit was he in?’
‘He never said.’
‘Infantry? Air Force? Navy? What?’ Lock pressed the SIG into Roach’s back.
‘He just said something about Special Forces.’
Lock noticed Ty’s wry grin. Every wannabe Walter Mitty character – and the white supremacists had plenty of those – claimed some kind of connection to Special Forces.
‘Did he say where he was based?’
‘He said they came from all over, but he was down in Coronado.’
‘You got the Seals down there, far as I remember anyway,’ said Ty.
Lock jabbed the gun into Roach’s flesh. ‘That ring a bell?’
‘No. I swear.’
‘So this Cowboy guy came down and hung out round here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘After you told him about Aaron and who his father was?’
‘No, I met him before that.’
So much for Aaron dicking about on the wrong internet forums. The Feds had called that one wrong. Lock could see Ty thinking the same thing.
‘He come on his own?’
‘Apart from one time. There was a woman with him.’
‘Catch her name?’ Lock asked, his attention sharpening.
‘Chance,’ said Roach.
Lock sighed. Another street name.
‘What was she like?’
‘Like maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Blonde. Super-hot. Nice rack.’
‘She military as well?’
‘No, but her father had been. She talked about him some. He was a martyr to the cause. You know, like David Lane and those guys in the Order.’
‘He was in the Order?’
‘No, he came after those guys. She said he was up in Pelican Bay.’
Lock breathed in sharply. ‘She have a name for him?’
‘No.’
‘Think hard, Roach,’ Lock said, pushing so hard into Roach’s neck with his gun that he could see a welt starting to form.
‘Cowboy called him something. It was kinda cool.’
‘Reaper?’
‘Yeah,’ said Roach. ‘That was it.’
52
Cowboy woke with a start. The engine was idling, and he was in the passenger seat. He started to sit up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Before he could get an answer, Trooper floored it and Cowboy was flung backwards.
‘He’s up ahead.’
‘Jogging?’
‘Taking a walk. You know that little rise we came over when we got here?’
‘Yeah,’ said Cowboy, hauling himself up so he could see through the front of the windshield.
‘Well, right now, he should be just about over that.’
The speedometer of their SUV crept past fifty, then sixty. Either side of the road was grass and trees. They had to make sure they stayed on the road. And so did the man up ahead of them.
‘Keep the speed up but the revs down,’ Cowboy said. ‘He hears the engine, he’ll jump out of the way.’
‘OK, but he’s probably going to think it’s kids, not someone who’s aiming for him.’
Junius Holmes heard the car behind him as he crested the hill. There was the road and then three feet of asphalt beyond the white line where it was safe to walk. Anyone passing him, and recognizing him, might have guessed he was thinking about weighty matters. A case the Supreme Court had before it, or what he was going to say at a seminar he was to give shortly at Harvard about law and philosophy. In fact, he was thinking about what he was going to have for dinner. Even a justice of the highest court in the land had to eat, he told himself. He was thinking chicken, with mashed potato and broccoli.
Ahead of him there was a low roar – a big rig struggling to get up the sharp gradient. It wasn’t a road ideally suited to such a wide vehicle, but there was rarely much traffic here and it would be on the opposite side to where he was walking, so he didn’t deviate from his path.
The SUV was up to seventy now. They couldn’t see Holmes, so unless he had ducked into the woods to take a leak, he was just ahead of them over the hill.
‘OK,’ Cowboy said to Trooper, ‘keep that speed.’
‘Dude, you’re worse than my ex-wife. Shut the hell up and let me do this.’
Junius glanced round and saw an SUV behind him. Life didn’t go into slow motion. Instead, he froze like a rabbit for a second as the big rig which had climbed the hill shifted up a gear.
Cowboy could see Junius Holmes, but he could also see the driver of the big rig, who was shifting the path of his vehicle to avoid the pedestrian.
‘Do it then, man!’ he shouted at Trooper. ‘Do it now!’
53
They left Roach in the desert, naked and bleeding. A less than fitting punishment for him, thought Lock, but it would have to suffice. Ty had argued the merits of throwing him into a cactus bush, but Lock had countered by pointing out that most of the cacti out here were endangered species which didn’t deserve having a low-life such as Roach thrown at them.
They had thought about taking Roach up to San Francisco themselves (where Lock wanted to talk to Coburn) and handing him over to the Feds there, but they wanted away from this part of the state as fast as they could. No, Lock decided, once they had some distance they would put a call in to the authorities. If they got lucky with the timing, by the time Roach found his way back home he would have someone from federal law enfor
cement there to take him in for questioning about his role in the death of the Pragers. But at least Roach had been useful, Lock thought: he’d established the identity and parentage of the woman who was almost certainly Ken’s killer.
They pulled in to an off-site lot next to LAX, parked the Lincoln at the back and caught a shuttle bus to the terminal, where Lock used his credit card to get them two seats on the next flight up to San Francisco. Because they would have to check their firearms at the check-in desk, Lock made sure to wipe off any residue of the SIG’s contact with Roach’s head before he stowed it in its lockable carry case.
Inside the terminal, they headed to the Virgin America counter, filled in the appropriate paperwork and checked their bags. Then, boarding passes in hand, they made for security, both, thankfully, passing through the detector without incident. A swipe might well have showed positive for cordite, and that wasn’t a conversation they wanted to have with a member of the Transport Security Administration, whom Lock regarded with an informed contempt.
Instead, they watched as a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair was led into the Perspex search box and asked repeatedly to stand so that they could wand her. Lock, who was gathering his wallet and belt from the end of the conveyor, quickly lost his patience. The door leading out of the Perspex box was ajar, so he turned in the direction of the female TSA officer as she said for a third time, ‘Ma’am, do you think you could stand up, just for a few seconds?’ and said, ‘Miss?’, taking a leaf from the TSA officer’s book and being an asshole, politely, with a smile on his face.
Ty nudged Lock. ‘What about the grey man?’ he said, referring to Lock’s belief that a good close protection operative had a duty not to call attention to himself.
Lock ignored him.
The TSA officer looked over. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Does she look like she can stand?’ Lock asked, still polite.
‘Are you traveling with her?’
The elderly woman opened her mouth.
‘She’s my aunt,’ he said firmly. ‘Now, we have several hours until our plane actually departs, so I’d like to see your supervisor and register a formal complaint regarding your behaviour towards an elderly, not to mention disabled, passenger.’
The TSA officer flushed under the two inches of make-up she’d plastered over her face. ‘There’s really no need—’
‘I’d say asking someone in a wheelchair to stand three times means there’s every need. Now, will you call your supervisor, or shall I?’
Lock kept his tone even and low, like a parent explaining to a toddler why they shouldn’t run with scissors.
‘I’ll just run the wand and then you can both be on your way,’ the officer said, hurriedly.
Lock sighed. The TSA had caught a lot of flak since their formation. They had some good people – ex-law enforcement and military – but they also had more than their fair share of people who couldn’t read a leaflet without moving their lips and who confused brusqueness with thoroughness.
The officer waved her wand vaguely in the elderly woman’s direction. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’
Lock stepped forward, took the woman’s wheelchair by its handles and pushed it out of the box as the female officer went to look for someone else to give a hard time to. Maybe a nun, he thought, or a boy scout. Someone who fitted the profile of crazed terrorist bent on bringing the western world to its knees.
Once they were well clear of the security area, the elderly woman craned her neck back to get a view of her rescuer. ‘Thank you, young man,’ she said, sweetly. ‘Those people are such assholes.’
At their gate, a knot of passengers and ground crew were standing in front of a plasma screen tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station. Lock and Ty shuffled to a halt, hoping that they weren’t the main feature, but no one gave them a second glance. Instead everyone stared intently at the screen as a news update rolled along the bottom: ‘Supreme Court Justice Junius Holmes Killed In Multiple Vehicle Auto Smash’.
Lock edged closer to a middle-aged cleaning woman holding a mop.
‘When’d this happen?’ he asked her.
She shrugged, grabbed her mop and bucket and shuffled away.
Lock was reaching for his cell as it rang. Carrie.
‘You see the news?’ she asked him.
‘Just now.’
‘Well, we’re getting early word that it wasn’t an accident.’
This didn’t make sense to Lock. These kind of incidents usually took days of piecing together. For law enforcement to be hinting at foul play so early in an auto smash was almost unheard of. Even if it did involve someone like Junius Holmes, who despite his WASPy name had made his reputation getting down and dirty in the trenches as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice before being appointed by the new President to serve on the Supreme Court.
‘Why do they think that?’ he asked.
‘Because of reports from the scene. A truck driver who got tangled up in it said there was an SUV containing two white males who’d aimed straight for Holmes.’
‘Maybe the driver lost control of the car?’
‘Oh, he lost control OK.’
‘So why do the authorities think it was deliberate?’ Lock asked, taking a few more steps away from the throng staring up at the screen.
Ty edged away with him. ‘Carrie says they don’t think it was an accident,’ Lock said to him.
‘Ryan, you still there?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
‘The two white guys in the SUV. One died at the scene. The other fled. The one who died was sporting a swastika tattoo.’
‘Neither of them female?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Well, it turns out that the woman who pulled the trigger on Prager was almost certainly Reaper’s daughter.’
Carrie made a low whistling noise down the phone. ‘That would explain a few things. But how did she persuade everyone else to get involved in taking that kind of risk to spring him?’
‘I’d guess, judging from something else I’ve found out about Ken, that she had her methods.’
‘What?’
‘Well, there’s no way of knowing for sure, but we think she was sleeping with Ken even though we think she knew who he was right from the get go.’
Carrie was quiet for a moment as she digested this. ‘Poor Janet,’ she said at last.
‘Yeah,’ Lock agreed. ‘Can you see what you can get on Reaper’s daughter for us?’
‘I’m on it. Anything else?’
‘Do we know if Junius Holmes ever went after any of the white supremacist groups?’
‘Better than that. He helped put away Reaper in the first place.’
Lock could hear someone speaking to Carrie.
‘Ryan, hang on.’
Lock’s eyes tracked back to the TV screen and the carnage at the scene of the accident, then Carrie came back on the line.
‘Got one more thing for you. When Jalicia was coming up through the ranks at the DOJ, guess who her mentor was.’
Onscreen, a body was being loaded into the back of an ambulance.
‘Junius Holmes,’ said Lock.
54
Glenn Love waved the truck into the rear of the Bureau of Street and Sewer Repair depot on Cesar Chavez Street. The driver climbed down along with two other members of the crew and Glenn slapped them each on the back.
He went into the tiny office and started filling out the paperwork. People called up to report a pothole or some other piece of sidewalk or road that needed to be fixed, it went into the system, someone was sent out to take a look, and within forty-eight hours it had to be repaired. Like the mail, cracks in the asphalt and holes in the road kept appearing. It was an unending task, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
Same shit, different day.
All that said, there were parts of the job Glenn enjoyed. Getting to work outside rather than in an office, at least when the weather was halfway decent. The camaraderie he had with the rest
of the guys. The feeling that, even though no one really ever came up and thanked him for holding up the traffic while they did their work, he did actually do something that improved life for people in the city. Not like some of the assholes in BMWs or Mercedes or Lexi who gave his crew the finger as they drove past, annoyed that they’d lost a full sixty seconds waiting in traffic. No, Glenn felt like he made a difference.
Paperwork done, he left the depot and clambered into his five-year-old car for the thirty-minute commute back home. He drove past the Presidio, then took the Golden Gate Bridge. The bay was clear of fog and the air felt warm. Having grown up in this area, Glenn still got a jolt of excitement from the city, especially on a day like today.
As he cleared the bridge, a couple of Hell’s Angels cut round his car, both riding fat-boy Harleys with ape hanger handlebars. A regular enough sight, they sped off, diving in and out of traffic, then they were gone from sight.
Glenn didn’t notice the vehicle that had followed him all the way from the depot. Nor did he see the occupants. After all, who would possibly want to follow Glenn Love?
But the car kept trailing him, all the way home. As he turned into his driveway, it kept on going. He didn’t notice it then either. He was too busy gathering up his stuff from the front passenger seat.
He took off his boots and put them in the trunk. Then he walked up the driveway and through into his house by the back door. His wife, Amy, had her back to him, washing her hands in the sink. He crept up on her and slid his hands around her waist.
She jumped. ‘Glenn! You frightened the life out of me.’
‘Got your heart racing a little faster, did I?’
‘You are such an ass,’ she said, but with a smile on her face.
His hands slipped down her waist a little. ‘I was thinking maybe we could get away this weekend. Leave the kids with your mother.’
She turned, kissed him on the lips. ‘We have that thing at the Spicers’. Then Patrick has soccer on Saturday. And Rebecca has a play date over at the Myers’ on Sunday. Maybe another weekend?’
‘Sure.’
‘Oh, come here,’ she said, pulling him towards her for another kiss.
