Deadlock rl-2

by Sean Black

  ‘Well,’ said Lock, ‘last night this town was lit up like downtown Basra, but you look happier than a pig in shit.’

  The man shook his head slowly. ‘I know. Terrible. And in Medford of all places. But life moves on,’ he added, perking up again.

  ‘Sure,’ said Lock, thinking that for quite a few people it wouldn’t. He stood up straight again. ‘Were you on duty last night?’

  ‘Sure was.’

  ‘One of your guests, a Ms Jones…’

  The man looked blank.

  ‘African-American woman. Late twenties. Tall. Good-looking.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very elegant lady. Very nice manners.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Lock. ‘I need to know when you last saw her.’

  The man stroked an imaginary beard. ‘Let me see now. She came back in around nine o’clock to pick up her key. But after that, I don’t know. I didn’t see her leave.’

  ‘She was murdered last night. The van that exploded outside the courthouse, she was in it when it went up.’

  The desk jockey went pale. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Evidently this isn’t something covered in training, Lock thought.

  ‘So you didn’t see her leave?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Do you have CCTV cameras?’

  ‘Just here in the office.’

  Lock looked up. A single camera was mounted in the corner of the far wall behind the desk to capture anyone coming in or leaving. ‘In that case, may I see the room she was staying in?’

  At this, the man looked serious. ‘Sir, are you with the FBI or something?’

  ‘I can’t tell you who I’m with,’ said Lock, taking a chance. ‘But I need to see that room.’

  ‘Do you have some identification?’

  Lock leaned over the counter. ‘What’s your name?’

  The man’s eyes flitted beyond Lock to the door. ‘Dale.’

  ‘Dale, do you love your country?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lock made a show of pushing back his jacket so that the holster holding his SIG was in plain sight. Not that he looked down, or even acknowledged that he’d done it, but Dale’s eyes were growing wide. ‘I’m very glad to hear that, because there are people out there right now who definitely don’t. And I need to find them, fast. And you can help me, Dale. You can help me by showing me that room.’

  Dale still looked unsure, so Lock pressed on, his right hand on the handle of his Sig. ‘Now, Dale, are you going to be a true American patriot and help me out here?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir,’ said Dale.

  Visibly shaking, he reached beneath the counter for a key attached to a black fob with the room number etched on it in white, which he slid towards Lock.

  Sensing that Dale was going to be on the phone to the local cops as soon as he was out of sight, Lock took the key and walked quickly towards the elevator.

  Jalicia’s room was tucked away at the back of the main motel building along with half a dozen other rooms, all of which ran at a ninety-degree angle to the rest of the hotel, which faced out on to the main avenue. The room’s position would have made Jalicia hard to spot as she came and went, Lock thought. Perhaps she’d chosen it for that very reason, thinking that the lower a profile she kept the safer she would be.

  He opened the door and stepped inside. The room itself was basic. A double bed dominated the small space. It was still made up, although Lock noticed that the sheet stretched over the red-patterned comforter was wrinkled at the bottom right-hand corner, as if someone had sat on that part of it. Opposite the bed was a desk. Next to the desk was a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. A small portable television was perched atop the wardrobe.

  Lock closed the door behind him, crossed to the desk and opened the first of three drawers. A Bible. In the second drawer were a couple of leaflets on local tourist attractions. Nothing looked like it had been moved. Lock couldn’t imagine that Jalicia would even have glanced at the leaflets. Thinking about it now, he couldn’t even imagine Jalicia outside work. She must have a family, he thought. Did they know she was dead? He opened and closed the final drawer, which was empty, thinking of the bitter blow it would be for them. From what little he knew, Jalicia had clawed her way up from a disadvantaged background. He could only imagine the sacrifices both she and they must have made.

  Lock stood there for a moment, allowing his anger at the injustice of it all to settle, cold and hard, at the base of his stomach, then he took a few steps and opened the wardrobe. Her clothes were still on the hangers. He’d never really registered her perfume when he met Jalicia, but he could smell it now. It was feminine, but understated. You wouldn’t have been aware of it unless you were up close, which he guessed not many men had been.

  He quickly rifled through her clothes, then ran his fingertips along the bottom of the wardrobe, although he wasn’t sure exactly what he was hoping to find. Closing the wardrobe door, he moved to the chest of drawers. The top drawer contained Jalicia’s underwear, which was mostly black and lace-edged. For the first time since he’d walked into the room he felt like he was being intrusive. He closed the drawer and went quickly through the others. Everything was folded neatly.

  Finally, he moved into the small bathroom. A make-up bag lay open on the counter, and the shower curtain was pulled back. A vaguely damp towel was folded neatly over a rail. He walked back out of the bathroom and stood next to the bed. Nothing disturbed. Nothing out of place. The room told at least part of the story: Jalicia had left of her own accord.

  Lock exited the room and stood outside the motel, his back to the wall. Jalicia’s car was a pale blue Volkswagen Jetta. He was sure he’d seen her get into it after Reaper’s testimony had come to an abrupt end.

  He walked to the front of the motel but couldn’t see it. He retraced his steps back to Jalicia’s room and beyond, to an area at the back of the motel. There it was, parked in a row of five lined spaces that were marked out next to two huge commercial trash containers. But her keys hadn’t been in her room, and neither was her handbag. She must have left with them, Lock thought, but not used her car.

  So, she would have walked out of the room some time after nine but never made it as far as her car — a distance of maybe twenty yards. Yet there were rooms all around, and people in them. If there had been a struggle, surely someone would have heard something?

  Of course, maybe they had. Lock walked towards the middle of the parking lot and turned to face the building. It was a low-rent motel late at night. If Jalicia had made a noise, the other guests might have put it down to any number of things.

  Even with all that, he couldn’t imagine Jalicia being abducted without putting up a hell of a struggle. She was a fighter; that was her nature. He walked slowly towards her car, hunkering down, looking for something, anything; a speck of blood, something dropped from her bag. But there was nothing.

  He stood back, his hands still on his knees, his head down. From close by came the trill of a cell phone. Not from a room, but outside. Just feet away. Lock looked around to see if there was anyone to whom it might belong. Maybe Dale the desk jockey had come to check on him? But no, Lock was still alone.

  It kept ringing. It was coming from one of the big trash containers. Lock grabbed at the top of the first container, hauled himself up and looked down into it, spotting the flashing display almost immediately. He let go, stepped back, and this time took a running jump, almost falling into the container head first. His elbows over the lip, he swung over a leg, reached down and managed to pluck out the cell phone just as it stopped ringing.

  Extricating his leg, he dropped back down to the ground and jammed the phone into the back pocket of his denims as two Medford Police Department cops rounded the corner.

  ‘Sir, place your hands where we can see them, and do not make any sudden movements.’

  43

  For a full five minutes Lock argued with the cops that they didn’t have probable cause to search him. But they did, they both k
new it, and they took the cell phone before he had the chance to confirm that it was Jalicia’s, never mind run through it properly. They also took back the borrowed key. That done, they let him go with a warning not to interfere any further in what was now a federal investigation.

  Lock assured them that he wouldn’t. And he might have actually meant it too, if it wasn’t for the fact that the more Coburn and the cops told him to back off, that it wasn’t his problem, the more determined he became to find out what the hell was really going on. Plus, Lock had a problem with authority. It was a personality trait that made for a bad soldier but a great military cop. It was also, Lock had grown to realise, a piece of his character inherited directly from his father, which inevitably had brought them into so much conflict over the years that they rarely spoke. Lock’s father had, like so many parents, held to the dictum ‘do as I say, not as I do’. But Lock was incapable of that. Once he got hold of something, he worried at it like a dog with a bone.

  The cops stood in the parking lot and watched him get into the car he had rented that morning from the Avis representative at the Rogue Valley airport. He waved them a friendly goodbye and headed back in the direction of Carrie’s hotel.

  When he got there, Carrie was perched on the bed in her room, wrapped in a white cotton robe, wet hair up in a towel, answering her cell phone. She looked exhausted, having been on air pretty much all night, reporting live from the scene almost hourly, the entire nation rising from east coast to west and tuning in to see a reporter who was still several steps ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, her newsroom back in New York had been working their law enforcement contacts hard, filling in the gaps for both her and, by extension, Lock.

  She waved at Lock as he walked in, held the phone away from her ear and mouthed, ‘Ty.’

  ‘Ty?’ Lock asked, taking it from her. ‘How are you?’

  Ty’s voice came through loud and clear. ‘I’m watching the news is how I am. What the hell happened?’

  ‘Ask him how he is,’ Carrie said, fighting back a yawn.

  ‘I already did.’ Lock tapped her bare knee. ‘Get some sleep.’

  Carrie swatted at him. ‘Then ask him again.’

  Lock cradled his cell between his ear and shoulder. ‘Carrie wants to know how you are.’

  ‘Stronger by the day, and just as good-looking as before.’

  Lock looked at Carrie and sighed. ‘Seems that being shot has left Ty suffering from delusions of adequacy.’

  ‘I heard that,’ Ty protested. ‘Any news on Reaper?’

  ‘Thin air.’

  ‘What about the guys who sprung him?’

  ‘Nada.’

  ‘That helicopter they were using was military,’ Ty said.

  ‘That’s what I thought too.’

  ‘Hard to pick one of those up on eBay.’

  Carrie was scribbling something on a piece of paper which she shoved under Lock’s nose. He read it, then relayed the information to Ty.

  ‘One of Carrie’s sources has had word that a Little Bird assault helicopter went missing from a base in San Diego three days ago.’

  ‘They know who took it?’

  ‘If they do, they’re not saying. You know what the Army’s like.’

  ‘You gonna try and talk to them?’ Ty asked.

  ‘Be wasting my time, but Carrie’s going to keep digging.’

  ‘So what are you gonna do? And don’t tell me nothing, Lock, because I know you must have a hard-on for Reaper a foot long by now.’

  ‘I wish,’ muttered Carrie, lying back, her eyes closed, head propped up on the pillows.

  On the other end of the phone, Ty laughed.

  Lock shot her a fake injured look, then lowered his voice. ‘I’m heading back to the Bay. One of the AB leaders survived the attack. If he doesn’t have a clue what Reaper’s up to then nobody does. Listen, once I’ve spoken to him, I’m coming down to San Francisco to see you.’

  ‘Look forward to it,’ said Ty, before hanging up.

  ‘You sure you really want to go back in there, Ryan?’ Carrie asked, sitting up.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I know the territory.’

  Carrie gave him an even look. ‘You mean like Ty did?’

  44

  Lock headed out of Medford on Interstate 5. He’d have to drive north first, towards a place called Grants Pass, before the highway would drop him back south and west to Pelican Bay. To his right, trees had been planted at regular intervals along the highway. The storm clouds were being sucked back out towards the Pacific, revealing a powder-blue sky.

  The smell of rental-car air freshener combined with his lack of sleep was soon making him woozy. He lowered all four windows a notch.

  As he drove, the traffic fell away to a trickle of pick-up trucks and lumbering semis and the giant redwood trees closed in around his tiny car. Looking at a map he’d picked up at a gas station before he left, he’d wondered at some of the names. Rattlesnake Rapids. Wolf Creek. Starvation Heights. It was a landscape that could eat a man up whole, that was for sure.

  Lock wondered if Reaper was near one of those places now. Maybe shooting the rapids with his band of fellow psychopaths, the water swallowing their trail. Or camped out on top of Starvation Heights, surveying the land below, planning a desperate last stand against the minions of what Reaper saw as an occupying government. What was the phrase he’d used? Oh yeah, the Zionist Occupation Government.

  Blaming the government, Lock reflected, was an easy out for the white inmates inside America’s prisons. They had been incarcerated not because they’d peddled amphetamine to school kids, or shot some unfortunate first-generation immigrant minding the till of a convenience store, or because they’d drowned someone in their own hot tub after staging a home invasion robbery. No, it was always other people’s fault, part of a wider plan to do them down, all engineered by dark forces skulking in the shadows and plotting a new world order.

  With Reaper’s messianic tendencies, Lock had a strong hunch that his former cellie wasn’t about to go quietly. He wasn’t about to do a disappearing act. No, Reaper had something else in mind. Lock was sure of it.

  Aware that his eyelids were getting heavier by the minute, Lock reached down and jammed on the radio. There wasn’t much choice: a couple of country music stations and something that billed itself as Rogue Valley’s top-rated twenty-four-hour evangelical station. Lock would have welcomed some divine inspiration, but doubted it was going to come via this particular source. He clicked the radio back off.

  Ten miles further on, Lock hit a line of traffic. It came up on him fast, and he had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a black pick-up sporting a National Rifle Association decal and a Palin for President 2012 sticker. The jolt as the car lurched to a halt convinced him that he’d have to take a nap before he got to Pelican Bay.

  The local cops had set up a roadblock and were checking vehicles, and he was aware that his rental car and dragged-through-a-bush-backwards appearance would single him out for special attention.

  He stayed in his car as he was approached, immediately declaring his firearm. Thankfully, one of the cops recognized him.

  ‘Any sign of them?’ Lock asked him, with a show of forced politeness.

  ‘Not a one,’ said the cop, disconsolate.

  No shit, Sherlock, they left in a helicopter, Lock thought. ‘Well, good luck.’

  The cop waved him through, and Lock continued on his way.

  Fifty miles down the road, he pulled in at a rest stop. Seconds after he’d switched off the engine, pulled on his parking brake and set the alarm on his cell phone, he was dead asleep, the doors locked and his SIG close by.

  Lock rarely dreamt, and when he did he shrugged his dreams off pretty much as soon as he’d taken a leak and had his first sip of coffee. But the nightmare images that came to him now would be less easily shed, based as they were on the realities of the previous days.

  At first he was tumbling down a black slide that deposited him i
n a heap in the middle of the yard at Pelican Bay. As he looked up and got his bearings, he saw Ty, surrounded by bare-chested white inmates, their bodies a continuous mosaic of swastikas and lightning bolts. As they closed in on Ty, knives glistening in the early-morning sun, Lock glanced up towards the gun tower. The guard’s face melted into Reaper’s as one of the inmates slashed at Ty and he went down.

  There was a screech of tires behind Lock as a black van careered across the yard, throwing up clouds of dust. Lock felt a burst of relief which faded almost immediately when he spotted the driver, her hands taped to the wheel. It was Carrie, a swastika carved, Manson-like, into her forehead. The living corpse of Ken Prager rode shotgun alongside her, helping to guide the wheel.

  Lock sank to his knees, letting rip with a primal scream. Then a black tunnel was all around him, sucking him back into the sky and away from being able to help either Carrie or Ty.

  Lock woke to the sound of his cell phone’s alarm, the gun still by his side, the steering wheel in front of him. Disoriented by the images from his nightmare, he peered out of the windshield and both side windows, a thin sheen of sweat coating his face. He wiped the worst of it away with his sleeve, opened the door of the car and stepped out into the fresh air, shaking out the cramp from his legs. He took a walk round the rest stop area, then got back in the car, took a sip of water, wishing it were coffee, started the engine and continued his journey.

  It was dusk by the time Lock drove past the unmanned security booth and into the parking lot that fronted the administration building of the prison. Coming in this way, a visitor would have little idea of the security that lay beyond. He pushed open the main door, stepped on to the sparkling linoleum that covered the lobby floor, then took a left towards the warden’s office. The two middle-aged women who served as administrators were packing up, ready to go home.

  Lieutenant Williams stepped from his office next to the warden’s. He didn’t look particularly pleased to see Lock.

  ‘Warden Marquez still here?’ Lock asked him. ‘It won’t take long.’