Fire Point (4 page)

14

For a woman wearing heels, Tarian Griffiths could run. She sprinted down the corridor toward her son’s apartment.

‘Which one’s he in?’ Lock shouted, as he raced to catch up with her. Ty was already out in front of both of them, his SIG Sauer 226 drawn, his broad chest providing Tarian with body cover.

The reverb of the gunshot had faded. Lock counted off seven doors down this stretch of corridors.

‘Which number?’ he demanded again.

‘Seven. Three zero seven,’ Tarian said

Lock counted off the numbers: 307 was the apartment at the very end. He stepped level with Tarian and grabbed her wrist.

So far, what he knew didn’t point to anything good being behind the door. Marcus was, at best, emotionally volatile. He knew his mother was on her way up to see him, and for all Lock knew, he might have figured out that she wasn’t alone. If he was in a paranoid state and had seen his mom arriving with two heavy-built men, he might have put two and two together and come up with five. Maybe he’d decided it was some kind of tough-love intervention that would end with an injection and a strait-jacket.

More worrying was that they had heard a lone gunshot. Then silence.

If Marcus had just taken his own life, Lock didn’t want Tarian walking in on it, client or not.

‘Stay out here with Ty,’ Lock said to her, then turned to his partner. ‘Call nine-one-one. Tell them we have a suspected shot fired inside.’

Tarian began to struggle, trying to get past Ty to the door. It was no contest: doing his best to keep her calm, Ty ended up lifting her up and moving her back.

Lock stepped to the side of the door and knocked. ‘Marcus? I need to make sure you’re okay so open up. If you can’t or won’t open up, I’m going to have come in anyway.’

They could wait for security to appear with a master key, but Lock figured it would take too much time. He also knew from experience that the number of people who tried to take their life with a gun and ended up wounding but not killing themselves was surprisingly high.

Tarian began to shout her son’s name.

Ty leaned in close to her, his cell phone to his ear as he waited to reach a police dispatcher. ‘You’re not helping us here, Mrs Griffiths,’ he said to Tarian. ‘Ryan needs quiet so he can listen. Now let’s move back down here. Okay?’

He guided her along the corridor. A door opened, and an older man popped his head out. He was wearing a bathrobe. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Ty turned to him. ‘Go back inside, sir. The police are on their way.’

The neighbor looked like he was about to argue, until he took in Ty’s full frame and decided against it. He disappeared back inside his apartment and closed the door as Ty gave the dispatcher the details the responding officers would need. He turned back to Tarian. ‘Does your son have firearms or access to firearms?’

She shook her head. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

Ty fed that information back to the dispatcher.

Lock still hadn’t got a response from inside the apartment. Not good. He took a step back and got ready to take a kick at the door.

‘Marcus? It’s okay. I just want to know you’re safe.’Not a sound.

There was nothing else for it. Lock raised his left foot and kicked the door open. Allowing his momentum to carry him forward, he barreled through, his own weapon drawn.

He stood in a narrow corridor. There was no sign of blood or injury.

The air in the apartment was stale and fetid. There was the faint hint of stale cannabis.

‘Marcus?’

His question was met with silence.

He stepped through into the main living area. There was a couch, an armchair, a TV mounted on one wall and a games console. A bag of popcorn disgorged its contents across the grey carpet.

Lock bent down, checking under the couch for a weapon. As he did so, he felt a breeze on his back. He looked over at the slatted white blinds and the glass sliding doors that led out to a small balcony. A section of one blind was torn, and a hole punched in the pane. Fragments of glass lay on the carpet. Lock followed the path of the bullet to a hole in the wall.

Someone had been playing with a gun – more than playing by the look of it – but it likely hadn’t been Marcus Griffiths, or anyone inside the apartment. With five quick steps, Lock reached the glass doors and forced them open. His gun drawn, he duck-walked out onto the balcony, staying low.

He took a peek. Down below was a grassy area, and beyond that the next apartment block. It was quiet. He scanned the apartments opposite. Nothing.

Lock walked back into the corridor. Tarian broke past Ty and ran toward him. ‘Is he . . .?’

Lock put a hand on her shoulder. ‘He’s not there. He’s gone. There’s no blood, no sign of a struggle.’

‘Sheriff’s Department are on their way,’ said Ty. ‘You want me to cancel that ambulance?’

‘No, leave it for now. We may still have a shooter.’

As Lock turned back to the open apartment door, Ty fell in behind him. Lock prodded the door open with his foot, and both men, guns drawn, pressed forward through the living room toward the balcony.

A breeze picked its way through the hole in the glass door, sweeping up the pages of a paperback book that lay on the coffee-table, next to a laptop computer. Lock motioned for Ty to follow him out onto the balcony.
Together they scanned the apartments opposite for any sign of a sniper. Nothing. The only person they could see was a middle-aged man on an exercise bike. He appeared not to have registered that a shot had been fired. Then Lock picked out the white earbuds of his iPod.

To the left was the road that led down to the other blocks in the complex. Beyond the road, gangways led down to the boats. There was no sign of movement on the road or the boats, not that Lock had much of a view of either. Ty was on his cell to the security office. They hadn’t seen anyone. Nor had anyone left.

It could be that the shooter was on one of the boats. Either that or they were holed up somewhere else in the complex. In one of the underground parking structures or an apartment.

Finding them would be next to impossible without a lot of boots on the ground. A single shot fired with no one injured and the only damage being a broken door was hardly going to get a huge response from law enforcement. Even in somewhere as usually quiet as th
e Marina.

More importantly, there was no sign of Marcus Griffiths. There was no blood, no indication that anyone had been injured. Given that his mother had spoken to him not long before, when he had seemed fine, Marcus Griffiths couldn’t even be considered a missing person.

The two men looked at the drop from the balcony to the ground. ‘What you think?’ Lock asked his partner. ‘He hears the shot and jumps?’

‘It’s grass, so it’s doable. He hears the shot, followed by someone yelling outside in the corridor and decides to split by the fastest route available,’ said Ty.

Lock’s eyes narrowed. ‘But if he does that he’s running toward the shooter.’ Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Tarian walk into the apartment.

‘Where is he?’

She kept walking toward them.‘He’s not here, but that’s not a bad thing. Look, you’d be better waiting in the corridor. We still have someone out there with a gun, and they’ve already taken one shot at this place.’

Tarian took in the broken glass. ‘I need to find my son.’

She started to move again, heading for Lock and Ty. Side on to her, out of the corner of his eye, Lock caught the speck of movement down below. He turned to see someone move behind a metal ventilation grate at the very bottom of the apartment block opposite.

15

‘Threat!’

As Lock shouted, he made a dive for Tarian, throwing himself toward her, pushing her back through the open door. He tackled her at the knees, like a rugby player. His shoulder caught the back of her legs – the fastest way he knew to collapse someone and get them on the ground. She yelped with surprise, and shrieked with pain as her knee banged against the floor. Lock was on top of her, his body covering hers. If a shot came through the doors, he would take it first.

His reaction and the speed with which he moved were the result of years of training, and endless repetition. It took hour upon boring hour of walking drills and debus/embus procedures, as well as more static security drills, to shave tenths of a second from your reaction time – to go from being the quiet man to a raging bull.

Less than five seconds after he had spotted the threat, Lock glanced back across to the balcony. Crouched low, Ty had drawn his SIG Sauer 226 from his holster and was taking aim.

There was the crack of a shot from down below. Another round whistled through the open glass door, and embedded itself in the wall.

‘Ty!’ Lock said. ‘You see the shooter?’

‘I see them.’ Ty’s answer came by way of a squeeze of the trigger as he fired at the metal grate. There was a clang as his shot hit metal followed by a moment of silence. Then he growled, ‘Missed the motherfucker. He’s on the move.’

Lock could feel Tarian’s breathing, smell her perfume, feel the heat coming off her body. He eased off her. ‘You okay?’

‘I think I might have broken my ankle.’

Lock crouched next to her as she rolled onto her side. She didn’t seem like a woman accustomed to physical pain, which meant he was fairly sure her ankle was likely sprained. If you broke a bone, you knew about it. Unless you were on drugs or drunk there was very little ‘might have’ involved.

‘Stay down,’ barked Lock, rolling off Tarian, who was clutching at her ankle. ‘Cops will be here soon.’

‘They’re moving,’ Ty shouted, one long leg over the balcony, ready to make the drop.

‘I’m coming,’ said Lock, springing to the balcony, and following Ty over the edge. The grass below made the drop of sixteen feet manageable.

Ty was already off and moving, gun drawn, toward the opposite apartment block. Lock dropped into a modified Weaver stance, his SIG punched out ahead of him, and scanned the territory, ready to provide covering fire.

Ty made it to the edge of the apartment block, and Lock sprinted to join him. He ran in a slightly irregular zigzag pattern to make the shooter’s job harder, but they were nowhere to be seen.

They reached the metal grille where the shots had come from. Beyond it was the parking structure. A couple of car alarms wailed in protest, no doubt triggered by the fleeing gunman.

They skirted around the edge of the building. Steps down to a door that opened into the garage. Lock pulled the door open. Ty spun through first, and gun-faced the empty space. Lock followed. He kicked out his heel to slow the closing door. It closed with a gentle click. They stood in the semi-gloom and listened. There were four rows of cars, each row two-thirds occupied by vehicles. Facing them was an elevator for residents who didn’t want to take the stairs.

Slowly, Lock and Ty moved through the vehicles. There was no sign of anyone. On the other side of the parking lot, there was another set of stairs, and another door that led out to the other side of the block. The shooter would have had plenty of time to make it there before they arrived.

They walked toward it. Took the steps, opened the door and stepped out into bright sunshine. Azure blue water lapped gently against the boats tied up in the marina. Nothing and no one stirred. Besides the wail of sirens in the near-distance, everything was perfectly quiet.

16

Although two shots had been fired, including one that looked like it had been aimed at Tarian Griffiths’s head, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department didn’t seem all that interested. The two officers who had responded went through the motions, but that was about it. Extra units arrived to search the complex for the gunman; they interviewed everyone present and took pictures. When that was done, they hooked their thumbs into their belts and began to study the carpet.

Lock wasn’t entirely surprised. The empty apartment was a crime scene without a victim. There was no blood, no sign that anyone had been so much as injured, never mind killed. The only damage had been to the glass doors, the wall, and Tarian’s ankle, which appeared to be sprained rather than fractured.

The possible involvement or whereabouts of Marcus Griffiths didn’t seem to trouble them much either. Given that his mother had spoken to him not so long ago, he couldn’t be considered a missing person. When it came to someone who had reached the age of majority, a certain amount of time had to elapse before the police would even register them as missing. As far as law enforcement was concerned, it added up to a bunch of not very much. If they’d found Marcus dead, or Lock hadn’t taken Tarian to the floor and she’d been shot, it would have been a very different story. But he wasn’t dead, and she hadn’t been shot, and cops didn’t get overly excited with things that might have happened. Hypothetical mayhem wasn’t popular with prosecutors and thus tended to be unworthy of court time.

Lock, on the other hand, had a whole world of concerns that he hadn’t had when he’d first responded to Tarian’s request for help. They went nicely with his growing sense of unease. Not just about Marcus, his state of mind, where he might be and what he might be thinking, but about the whole deal. Tarian had contacted him to keep an eye on her son, he’d been reluctant to help and then this had happened. The son missing, a couple of gunshots, and someone trying to take her out.

It was all way too coincidental. And Lock didn’t believe in coincidences. Not the convenient kind anyway. Not the kind that worked in your favor. The kind that messed you up, those he believed, but the type that got you what you wanted? Not so much.

With what had just gone down, it was pretty certain that he and Ty were going to be unable to do a one-eighty and walk away. Now Tarian and her husband needed his and Ty’s close-protection services. And they still had a missing son out there. If Tarian Griffiths’s mission had been to get him onboard, it had been accomplished. Not that he believed she was connected to the shooter who had tried to blow her Botoxed head clean off her shoulders. But he couldn’t help wondering.

His mind flashed back to the vehicle that had followed them earlier. Minutes later,
someone
had been taking pot shots at them from below. Could it have been the same two? The timing suggested it couldn’t. They had been behind Lock, Ty and Tarian on the way from the restaurant to the apartment complex. To get ahead of them, and in place to fire the first shot through the apartment window, would have taken speed and planning.

Then again, Lock thought, the
two men
who had fled the scene of the shooting clearly knew a fast way of leaving the complex. If they had slipped in the same way while Tarian and then Lock were dealing with complex security at the guard booth it was conceivable that they could have been in place by the time Lock was walking toward the apartment.

But why a shot into an empty apartment? The second shot had been professional, and a professional didn’t fire without a target in their sights. The only thing that Lock could think was that it had been some kind of a come-on. A single shot that was intended to draw someone in. If the shooter knew Tarian was looking for her son, was worried about him, then a shot into the apartment would likely draw her in to see if he’d been hurt. Maybe they just hadn’t factored in that Lock and Ty would be making first entry.

Lock took another look around the apartment. Too many questions. Too many imponderables. In the kitchen that lay just off the hallway, Ty had Tarian sat down at the two-person table and was taking her through some breathing exercises, trying to get her to calm down without resorting to the pills she’d immediately dug out of her Chanel bag when she’d finished talking to the Sheriff’s Department. Lock and Ty needed her present and correct, rather than whacked out on Xanax, if they were going to figure out what the hell was going on. But even without drugs, Lock had to concede that she wasn’t making much sense. Coming within an inch of getting your head blown off could do that to you.

Stepping into the kitchen, Lock was struck by how clean and tidy it was. It was not the type of scene he would readily have associated with a kid of that age who was living alone. The sink was devoid of dishes, dirty or otherwise. The counters were spotless. Even the floor was free of the usual detritus. Lock started to open cabinets. Clean, everything neatly stacked. He crossed to the refrigerator. As the light blinked on, he was confronted with something that was almost more surprising than the two gunshots. Not only did the interior sparkle, it was filled with fresh produce. Kale, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, kiwis, strawberries, and all manner of other fruit and vegetables, along with coconut water and soya milk. Lock had seen some messed-up stuff in his time, but a twenty-year-old college kid who ate like Gwyneth Paltrow?

Holding the refrigerator door open, he glanced over his shoulder at Tarian. ‘You did something right anyway. At this age, I was living on a diet of ramen noodles and Twinkies.’

Tarian stared at the contents and shook her head. ‘That’s new. I’ve never seen Marcus so much as eat a banana without me having to nag him.’

‘Well,’ said Lock, ‘at least you know he’s been looking after himself.’

Her face fell. Lock immediately felt bad about saying it. It had come out glib and uncaring when he’d intended to sound positive. If one of the worries was that Tarian’s son was a suicide risk, Lock had wanted to highlight the fact that people contemplating ending their lives tended not to take care of their diet and nutrition.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She shook her head again, a little too quickly, like she had bees buzzing about inside that she was trying to dislodge. ‘It’s okay. I know what you mean.’ She raised her head a little, and the sun from the small kitchen window caught the side of her face. ‘He started working out a few months ago. Running. Cycling. I think he may even have started going to a gym somewhere down near Sunset.’

Across the table from her, Lock noticed Ty perk up. ‘You know what it was called?’ Ty asked.

‘I don’t,’ said Tarian. ‘He mentioned it in passing.’

‘Maybe if we got a list you’d be able to pick it out,’ Lock pressed.

‘Maybe,’ said Tarian, as they heard a knock at the apartment door. Ty rose from his seat. Lock closed the refrigerator and raised his hand to indicate to Ty that he would get it. Perhaps the prodigal son had finally returned. Or maybe it was the gunman, come back to finish the job now that the LA County Sheriff’s Department were no longer on the scene.

Drawing his SIG Sauer 226, Lock stepped out of the kitchen into the corridor. His back flat to the wall on the hinge side of the door, he said quietly, ‘It’s open. Come on in.’

He raised his SIG as the handle turned slowly, the door opened, and a man walked in. His face drained of blood as he stared at Lock.

‘Who the fuck are you, and where’s my wife?’ said Teddy Griffiths.