by Sean Black
Brice rummaged around in the bag, found the pepper spray, and handed one to Mike. Mike struck a line through pepper spray. His finger moved down the list.
“Handcuffs. Two pairs.”
“Here. Let’s just hope this one ain’t a fighter.”
Acknowledgments
Special mention and sincere thanks to Naomi Gargano, Mike Davies, Anthony Downes, Joe Dugan, Frances Mojica and all the readers who have bought, borrowed, stolen, read and reviewed the Ryan Lock series over the years. I appreciate each and every one of you.
Thanks also to friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic who have kept me going during the writing of what was, at times, an emotionally draining story.
Most of all, love and thanks to M and C.
Second Chance
A Ryan Lock Novel
Second Chance
An SBD Book
Copyright © Sean Black 2017
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Sean Black has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, I988, to be identified as author of this work
For my friend, David Seidler, and in memory of the late David Shaber, two brilliant Hollywood screenwriters, who, in their own way, and at different times, kept me going when the going was tough.
About the Book
Over the years, former military bodyguard Ryan Lock has made more than his fair share of enemies. It was only a matter of time before one of them came looking for payback . . .
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A serial rapist brutally murdered inside California's highest-security prison for women. A frantic gun battle in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. A beautiful, young defense attorney violently abducted from her office.
A series of apparently random events that are anything but.
Someone is hell bent on revenge, and their target's name is Ryan Lock.
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Praise for the Ryan Lock series:
“Readers, meet Ryan Lock – a tough-guy hero for the new age.” Gregg Hurwitz
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"This series is ace!" The Bookseller
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"This is a writer, and a hero, to watch." - Geoffrey Wansell, The Daily Mail
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"Black's style is supremely slick." - Jeremy Jehu, The Daily Telegraph
1
Manhattan Beach, California
* * *
Alicia Hallis didn’t like the way this guy was looking at her son. She didn’t like it one little bit. She nudged her husband, who was busy replying to a work-related email on his iPhone. “That guy over there’s been staring at Jackson for, like, the past five minutes.”
Jim Hallis looked up from the screen with a nonchalance that made Alicia want to scream. “What guy?”
“Over there. Standing next to the bench. With the black ball cap and the red and black shorts.”
Jim lowered his sunglasses from where they were perched atop his head, and looked over toward the bench. He picked out the man his wife had just described. She’d missed out on a few details. Like the dude being well over six feet tall, two hundred pounds, with a thick black beard and covered with tattoos. And not your usual hipster Manhattan Beach-type ink either. He was sporting a huge eagle across his chest, lightning bolts that ran all the way up his neck, and a couple of teardrops. Jim was sure he’d heard somewhere that tear-drops signified you’d killed someone.
The guy saw Jim looking at him. He didn’t blink. He didn’t break eye contact. He stared straight back.
Jim Hallis quickly turned back to his wife. “Where is Jackson anyway?”
Wrong question. Alicia immediately went into panic mode.
“Oh, my God! I can’t see him. Where is he?” she said, grabbing her bag.
Jim quickly scanned the kids weaving their skateboards through the crowds. He picked out Jackson, who was talking to a group of slightly older girls. “Chill out. I see him. He’s right over there,” he said, with a nod.
Alicia shifted back down from completely panicked to mildly uptight. Jim wondered if her obsession with keeping tabs on Jackson’s every waking move would ever pass. He got that some moms could be over-protective, but Alicia took it way too far. She’d even gone so far as installing a hidden tracking app on Jackson’s phone so she’d know where he was when he was out of the house.
Alicia was heading over to their son. Jim hurried to keep up with her. The work email would have to wait. “Hey, don’t go cramping his style,” he said, trying to lighten her mood.
“What style? He’s eight.”
“Yeah, and those girls are at least eleven. Wish I’d had that kind of confidence when I was his age. I couldn’t even look at a girl without blushing.”
Alicia slowed up. He walked next to her.
“Anyway, the dude’s gone.”
“Can you not say ‘dude’? It makes you sound like a moron.”
Alicia looked back over at the bench. Jim was right. He wasn’t there. She scanned the crowds but the man with the tattoos was nowhere to be seen. “He really was staring at Jackson. You believe me, right?”
“Of course,” Jim lied. The truth was that ever since they’d welcomed Jackson into their home Alicia had never fully accepted that he wouldn’t be taken back again. That his being there was permanent. That they were Jackson’s parents. She’d wanted a child so badly, and they’d been so lucky to get a baby that she seemed to believe their good fortune could evaporate at any moment.
Jim was worried that as their son grew older he’d begin to resent Alicia’s overbearing behavior. Kids had to be allowed some space to grow up. To make their own mistakes.
Jackson broke away from the group and wandered back to them.
“Who were those girls?” Alicia asked.
Jackson blushed. “I don’t know. They wanted to know where I got my board. Where I went to school. That sort of junk,” he said, glancing down at the brightly colored skateboard tucked under his arm.
Jim slapped Jackson on the back. “That’s my boy.”
Jackson shot him a sheepish smile from under a tangled blond fringe.
“Jim!” Alicia scolded.
“Hey, when you got it, you got it.” He put a hand on his son’s shoulders. “Tell you what, why don’t we all head down to Tomboy’s? Grab ourselves a chili burger. Mom can have a salad if she’s still on that dumb diet.”
Alicia glared at him. “I’m not on a diet. I just like to look after myself.”
He smiled at her. “I’m teasing. You look great, honey. Jackson, why don’t you go on ahead?”
Jackson dropped his board, and took the opportunity to skate away from his parents’ bickering.
“It’s a beautiful day. Whoever that weird guy was, he’s gone. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
Something about the way Jim said it seemed to break the tension. Alicia smiled back at him. “Okay.”
He took her hand and together they threaded their way through the crowds toward the restaurant, Jackson skillfully carving out a path on his skateboard.
* * *
The three girls turned the corner and ran straight into the man with the tattoos and the thick black beard. They took a step back, exchanging nervous glances.
“So?” the man said.
“He’s really cool,” the oldest of the three said. She was twelve.
“For a little kid,” one of the others added. She had found the whole thing too creepy for words. Some guy paying them to go talk to a boy like that.
“I didn’t ask you to find out if he was cool. What school does he go to?”
The older of the girls shrugged. “Pacific.”
“Grade?”
“Third.”
“His teacher?”
&
nbsp; The girl’s hand shot out, palm facing up. “Where’s that twenty?”
The guy dug into his pocket and pulled out a roll of notes. He peeled off a twenty and slapped it into her hand. Her fingers closed around it.
“Miss Parsons. I think that was what he said.”
“You think?”
“That was it. I’m sure.”
It didn’t matter. That would be easy enough to verify. And this had saved him a lot of time and hanging about. Manhattan Beach wasn’t exactly the kind of place where a man like Padre blended in. The last thing he needed was to be bounced back to the joint on some bullshit PV (parole violation) because a neighbor called the cops.
2
Central California Women’s Facility
Chowchilla, California
TV satellite trucks lined either side of the road leading to the Central California Women’s Facility. It was home to the state’s female death-row prisoners, and others who offered a particular security challenge.
Up near the gatehouse, a perfectly made-up blond television reporter was delivering a breathless piece to camera. Behind her, a small group of protestors holding an assortment of handmade placards were pushed back into a small fenced-off area by a half-dozen members of local law enforcement. The reporter took in the protestors with a sweep of her hand, then looked back down the barrel of the camera lens to finish her piece to camera.
“As you can see, Brad, the transfer of serial rapist Gerard, now Ginny, Browell to this women’s facility has drawn a small crowd of protestors. Some of them have family members inside here, and are concerned about their safety. As for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they say that the latest court ruling has left them with no alternative but to move Browell to a women’s facility, regardless of their own concerns. And the nature of this individual’s crime has meant that advocates for the rights of transgender people have been remarkably silent on the issue. But in less than one hour, it’s our understanding that one of America’s most notorious and prolific serial rapists will be placed inside this women’s correctional facility.”
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Chance, whose real name was Freya Vaden, sat in her usual spot as the other inmates in the unit clucked around her, like hens who’d just spotted a fox digging its way under the coop fence. Except this fox hadn’t needed to dig: the California Supreme Court had done the spade work.
Clarissa Thoms, a thin meth-addict, with frizzy red hair, who was serving life without possibility for parole for drowning her twin sons, shoved in next to her. “What we gonna do, Chance? That’s what I want to know.”
Chance leaned in and brushed away a stray strand of hair from over Clarissa’s eye. “Calm yourself, honey. I have it all under control.”
That served to set off a fresh round of clucking from the others in the group.
“Under control? This is a monster coming into our house.”
“It ain’t a woman, that’s for sure. I don’t care what no doctor says.”
“I heard he only claimed he was trans so he could get a transfer and keep raping.”
“How’s he gonna rape without a dick, huh?”
“Shows what you know. I heard he uses a shank. Shoves it up inside you so you’ll be hoping it was his pecker.”
Chance had heard enough. She slammed down two open palms on the plastic table top. “Hush now. All of you. If they put him in this here unit with us then I said I’m going to deal with it.”
That brought more questions.
“How?”
“What you gonna do, Chance?”
“He’s strong, Chance. You won’t be able to take him on your own.”
Chance smiled at them. “Whoever said anything about doing it on my own?” She turned so that she was facing Clarissa. “Ol’ Ginny Browell’s gonna kick and scream more than your two little ’uns. You think you can handle that, Clarissa?”
Clarissa’s smile fell away, and tears blossomed in her eyes. “That ain’t a nice thing to say, Chance. I didn’t mean to do what I did to those boys.”
Chance got up from the table with a shrug. “I’ll do it myself if I have to. Makes no difference to me.”
As a couple of the hens huddled around Clarissa, Chance walked over to the stairs that led to the upper level of cells and climbed them. At the top she passed a guard. She didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at her.
As she passed him, he palmed a small phone to her. Without breaking stride, she took it and headed for her cell. She stepped inside, closed the door, powered up the phone and began to scroll through the messages that rolled in.
She stopped at the third, tapped on an image that had been attached. The picture filled the screen. It showed a couple standing on the curb outside a coffee shop. Freya was already familiar with the woman but seeing the man with her made her heart leap into her throat. Every feature of his face had been etched into her memory.
“No way,” she muttered to herself. “No freaking way.”
What were the odds? After all these years?
Oh, this was going to be even better than she’d imagined in her wildest dreams. Way better.
3
Santa Monica, California
Ryan Lock didn’t believe in second chances. Or, perhaps more accurately, he had chosen not to believe in them. When things went bad—really bad—you had one opportunity to avert disaster. And, if you wanted to live to see another sunrise, you’d better take it.
If you didn’t, or if your aim was off, you wouldn’t get another. The other side would make their move, and you’d be so much road kill, lying squashed on the verge.
In Lock’s line of work, close-protection security—what the general public thought of as bodyguarding—there were rarely do-overs. There was no reset button. There was no way to turn back time.
The stakes were brutal and binary. You and the people you were charged with protecting either lived or died.
Over time, Lock had allowed the same belief to dictate his personal life. He had been lucky enough to meet the woman of his dreams. Carrie Delaney had opened up a whole new world for him. They had met in New York and fallen in love. Then she had died in front of his eyes while fleeing two kidnappers.
He had always figured that had been his one shot at true love. But now, much to his surprise, it looked like he’d been wrong. From nowhere a woman had entered his life who stirred some of the same feelings he had experienced before.
"Ryan?"
Carmen Lazaro’s voice drifted across the perfectly set table, snatching him away from a storm-swept Topanga Canyon road where Carrie had died and his life had changed for the worse. He looked across the table at her. She was a tall caramel-colored beauty, with lush chestnut hair and mesmerizing brown eyes. Raised by a Mexican mother and Guatemalan-Irish father, she had grown up in East Los Angeles and studied law at UCLA, graduating in the top one percent of her class ‒ three part-time jobs to pay her way through college had prevented her from coming out on top. She had turned down a fistful of big-money offers from white-shoe law firms to carve out a far less lucrative, but more rewarding, career as a criminal defense attorney in downtown Los Angeles.
“Ryan?” This time Carmen’s voice was a little more insistent.
“Sorry?”
“Can you stop working? Just for one evening?”
He was puzzled. “Working?”
“You’re miles away and when you’re not miles away you’re scanning the room like someone’s about to pop up from under a tablecloth with a machine gun.”
She was right. He had been checking out their fellow diners. It was a habit carried over from work. He was constantly scanning his surroundings, performing a second-by-second risk assessment. Looking for something in the environment that didn’t quite chime.
Over the years, the presence of the abnormal, the absence of the normal, had come as close as he’d gotten to having a mantra. It had made him a first-class bodyguard, and a second-rate date. This wasn’t the first time Car
men had pointed it out.
He threw her a placatory smile—not that he was known for smiling or placating people but Carmen was different. Big-league different. “I apologize. You have my full, undivided attention,” he said, taking a sip of water.
“Yeah, right. Tell you what, I’d settle for half to three-quarters.”
“Deal.”
“What are you so on edge about anyway. You know what the cops call this part of town, right?”
He didn’t, but he guessed it wasn’t going to be complimentary. Cops were rarely complimentary about the world. They’d seen too much of it. “Go on.”
“They call it West Latte Division.”
A cursory glance around the main dining room of Mélisse confirmed Carmen’s point. The area from Marina Del Rey to Malibu and all the way inland to the B-neighborhoods of Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel Air, was about as upscale and genteel as you got in the sprawling Greater Los Angeles area. Here, what most people would consider crime was rare, and serious violent crimes were rarer. When they did happen, they captured the front pages, and were dealt with swiftly. Drive ten miles and homicides were commonplace. But the closer to the Pacific you got, the richer the residents, and hence the safer the streets.
A movie-star-handsome waiter materialized at their table to take their order. He flashed an overly familiar smile at Carmen as his eyes fell a little lower than was professional. “Madam, are you ready to order?”
