Red Tiger

by Sean Black

  “He wasn’t very happy about you making him call the cops.”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that, Ty. Where he comes from, you call the cops and tell them someone stole your Lamborghini and they want to know where you got the money to buy a Lamborghini.”

  “Point taken.”

  They lapsed back into silence. They could hear sirens, first in the distance, then closer.

  “You think those kids are okay?” Lock asked his partner.

  “I think it all depends on just how smart or dumb those gang members are.”

  “What do you mean?” said Lock.

  “If they’re dumb they could try to get an extra pay day. Run a K and R.”

  K and R meant “kidnap for ransom”. It was common in some countries. Big business, even. But not in the United States where law enforcement was way too sophisticated and uncorrupted, and the price was life, without the possibility of parole, if you were caught.

  The kidnap part was easy enough, as the gang had just proved. They had stumbled straight into one. The ransom part, the actual collecting, without being detected or the money traced, was far harder. America wasn’t fertile ground for that part of the crime.

  “This looks way beyond their pay grade,” said Lock.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Ty.

  “So if they’re smart?”

  “If they’re truly smart,” said Ty, “those two kids are already face down in the Pacific.”

  15

  Li could feel his boss’s rage radiating all the way from Beijing. His hands were shaking so hard that he had to cradle the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

  His boss let rip with a fresh tirade.

  All Li could do was wait for the tide of anger to recede.

  “How? How could you allow this to happen?” his boss screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” said Li, for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  “Why didn’t you check? Why didn’t you check the cameras?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think anything like this would happen here,” he pleaded.

  The only consolation he had was that he was in America. If this had been China, there was every chance he would no longer be breathing. Then again, very few criminals in China would have been stupid enough to do this. Not against someone like his boss.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” his boss asked finally.

  “I contacted Mr. Lock and his associate. They’re the best there is. And the police will be here soon.”

  Mention of the police set his boss off on a fresh rant. “The police? Are you some kind of an imbecile? We can’t involve the police in our business.”

  “I was given no choice. Lock insisted.”

  “He insisted? He works for us, and you work for me.”

  “It’s not like that here,” said Li. “The police will find them.”

  “And if they don’t?” said his boss.

  “Then we have our people,” said Li.

  “I’m coming over. I’ll handle this myself.”

  Li heard him shrieking at one of the assistants to arrange a flight. His boss usually had a jet on standby at all times. China was a big country, bigger even than America, and for a man like him, time was money. “I promise you. This will be resolved quickly.”

  His boss said nothing. Li had something he needed to ask. But it was delicate. Even more so now. It was a topic his boss had expressly told him not to raise unless they were face to face.

  “Have you heard?” said Li.

  “Heard about what?”

  “What’s happened with him? Is he here?”

  He waited for a fresh tide of bile. None came. His boss had hung up.

  Li put his cell phone back into his pocket and went outside to meet with the police officers.

  16

  Lock walked back to where Ty was standing by the front door, his re-entry blocked by two patrol officers. They were both giving Ty the death-stare, one with his hand resting on his baton, the other with a palm cradling her Taser.

  “I don’t think they like you for some reason, Ty,” said Lock.

  “They’re just playing hard to get,” said Ty, with a smile. “They know what’s up.”

  “Or, in your case, down,” said Lock.

  “Whatever.” Ty smiled.

  He was enjoying his new-found notoriety, Lock could tell. Ty fell into the any-attention-is-better-than-no-attention group of people.

  “You get it?” Lock asked him.

  Ty held up a tiny key-sized USB drive. “Sure did.”

  It contained a download of the relevant sections of footage from the security camera. They could review it at their leisure. Lock had already set up a meet with Carl Galante, who worked with Carmen’s law firm as an investigator. He was a former San Diego cop who nowadays mostly worked cases in Los Angeles and might have a read on which gang the kidnappers were from.

  Not that this gang was necessarily from Los Angeles. The major gangs were all over California. They had their strongholds and territories, but they were a lot more spread out over the state, and indeed the country, than they had been.

  “We going to bounce?” said Ty.

  “I want to speak with Li before we leave. See if he wants us to stay on the payroll.”

  Lock had spoken at length with the local cops, but he hadn’t had any further private conversation with Li. There was every chance that, now they had made him involve law enforcement, Li wouldn’t want to work with them.

  “And if he doesn’t?” Ty asked. “You really going to go sit by the pool until the next call comes in?”

  Ty knew Lock well. There was no way on earth that he would completely wash his hands of something like this. Rich or not, spoiled or not, Lock would not walk away from two kids who were so far out of their depth and facing a grisly end, if they hadn’t already met with one.

  Neither of them was capable of watching footage like they had seen, cashing the check, and forgetting the whole affair. It wasn’t who they were.

  “We can kick around the weeds a little. Maybe make a few moves that the cops can’t,” said Lock.

  One advantage they possessed over regular law enforcement was that they could push the envelope a little more when it came to what Lock euphemistically termed “investigative methods.” In other words, as long as they didn’t get caught, or were dealing with someone who wouldn’t go to the cops, they could do what they deemed necessary to find the two kids.

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” said Ty, shooting another grin at the two female patrol cops. “Ladies.” He retreated in the direction of Lock’s Audi. He had some calls of his own to make. specifically to people he knew who might be able to tell him who in the Southern California area would be the go-to guy to get rid of a car like a Lamborghini Aventador.

  It wasn’t as if those bozos planned on taking it for a joyride before dumping it. It had to be moved on, and only a certain number of people in the criminal fraternity would be interested.

  “How’d your boss take the news?” Lock asked Li, as the two men paced the top of the driveway.

  Behind them a fresh tranche of CSI had just arrived. Lock had told them they wouldn’t find anything inside the house. They had elected not to take his word for it. As far as he was concerned, that was on them.

  “How d’you think?”

  “So?” said Lock. “You want us to stay on this?”

  “I thought you wanted these guys to handle it,” said Li, pissy.

  “No, I said they had to be informed. Which they are. If you hadn’t told them, you could be in a world of pain.”

  Li laughed. “Like I’m not already.”

  “Come to America, play by our rules.”

  “Is that what you plan on doing? Playing by the rules?” Li asked.

  A bigger question underlay it. Lock knew that. So did Li.

  “I have slightly different rules,” he said.

  “How different?” said Li. />
  “Why did you call me?”

  “You already asked me that,” said Li.

  “I forget what you said.”

  “I needed someone who would do what it takes to find Emily and Charlie.”

  “Well, my answer hasn’t changed,” Lock told him.

  “Then I see no reason not to continue using your services.”

  “Good,” said Lock. “These guys won’t speak to me, so if you hear anything from them . . .”

  “I’ll let you know,” said Li.

  Lock climbed into the front passenger seat of the Audi. Ty could drive them back to Los Angeles.

  “What’s the good word?” said Ty.

  “He wants us to keep working for him.”

  “Except we’re not, are we? Working for him, I mean.”

  Lock shook his head. He knew what Ty was driving at. This was beyond a standard contract. It had crossed that line as soon as they had watched two young people being driven away by a bunch of gangbangers. Some jobs were business. Some, by their very nature, became something more. This was something more.

  “Nope.”

  Ty buried the gas pedal as they pulled out onto Rancho Road. The Audi took off. “Comes down to the same thing, though,” he said.

  “So far it does,” said Lock.

  17

  Motel 6

  San Bernardino, California

  * * *

  Even tigers with an empty belly had to sleep sometime. Or, at least, rest in the shade, away from the glare of the sun.

  He pulled off I-10 at the San Bernardino exit, found a motel and took a room in back. One night, paid for upfront in cash in case he had to leave in a hurry.

  The desk clerk said something to him about no girls. By “girls”, the Red Tiger assumed he meant prostitutes. He stared at him. The clerk found a sudden interest in his paperwork and mumbled an apology.

  It was good to know that, even here, he could look at another man and scare him. He had always believed it was nothing to do with his appearance. It was something much simpler than that. When he looked into someone’s eyes, they sensed that he was capable of killing them.

  They sensed it because it was true. He had done it before. He would, no doubt, do it again.

  It wasn’t something he attached any pride to. Some of the killings he regretted. One or two haunted him. But mostly he viewed them like a slaughterhouse worker would when dispatching cows or pigs.

  He moved what he had with him into the room, including the guns. He kept the Mossberg next to the bed. He put down his bag and pulled out the old photograph album.

  His shoes were by the door. He lay down and leafed through the album. There were pictures of his grandparents and his parents. He studied those of his grandparents, taken when they were younger. They had been Party members. That was how they had survived. By conforming. By going along with the majority. By not stepping out of line. By being good Communists.

  Not to be a good Communist? Not to conform? That was to choose death.

  Flipping through, he came to his own baby pictures. He had been a chubby baby. His parents told him he had been happy. Always smiling and content. It was hard to reconcile that with who he was now.

  What had happened to him? He guessed it was life. Loss.

  A few years after they were married she had fallen pregnant. It was a little girl. The Red Tiger was overjoyed. He refused to be a father who was disappointed by having a girl. Some people killed the child if it was a girl. They denied the pregnancy entirely. Or if they lived in a small town or village where it couldn’t be denied, they claimed it was a stillbirth.

  Tens of thousands of babies had died like that. All of them girls.

  The Red Tiger had vowed that would never be him. He would cherish his daughter. He would give her all that he had.

  Once, shortly after she was born, a colleague had teased him about having a daughter rather than a son. This colleague, a fellow officer, had made a crass joke about leaving her out in the countryside to die. He hadn’t used those words, but it had been implied.

  The Red Tiger had beaten the man to a pulp, thrashed him so badly that the man’s head had swollen to almost double its normal size.

  No one ever made such jokes around him anymore. He did not get into trouble or lose his job. Instead he was promoted. It was the first time he had realized the power of his own ability to unleash violence. After that, violence became his narcotic.

  A year after that incident, his wife died suddenly. An aneurysm, the doctors said. There in the morning when he left for work, dead by the time he got home.

  Family tried to persuade him to let his daughter go. There were still people who would take a little girl. Who were so desperate for a child that it didn’t matter their gender. He refused. He found an older lady to look after her. He refused to work beyond his official hours. His boss complained, but not to his face. His boss feared him too.

  He did everything he could to transmit the love he had in his heart to his little girl. Then the day had come when it all ended. The day she passed into another life. The day that he still mourned.

  Exhaustion finally overtaking him, the Red Tiger fell asleep, the photo album open on his lap, the shotgun next to his head.

  18

  Ryan Lock’s Apartment

  Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles

  * * *

  Lock opened his fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer and handed it to Ty, who opened it using his Gerber and took a sip.

  “That’s good.”

  “German. They have a bunch of laws about purity.”

  “Yeah, I’d heard,” said Ty.

  “About what they can put in their beer,” said Lock. “Not the other kind of purity.”

  The apartment buzzer sounded. “That’ll be Carmen and Galante,” said Lock, going to let them in. He had already spoken about the new case to Carmen as they’d driven to Los Angeles from the airport. He had asked her which of her law firm’s investigators was strong on organized car theft and street gangs.

  Carmen had suggested Carl Galante. He was former San Diego PD but he mostly worked private investigations in Los Angeles. His help had proved invaluable to Lock when Carmen had been kidnapped. Lock trusted him.

  Ty took another swig of pure German lager. “Man, first time she gets to see you since you’re back from New York, and she’s hanging out with us chumps. Shouldn’t you two be cozying up together all romantic?”

  “There’s going to be plenty more time for that. Trust me.”

  “What you say?” said Ty.

  “We’re moving in together.”

  The bottle stopped halfway to Ty’s lips. “For real?”

  “Yeah, we just have to decide where that’s going to be. This is too far out, and her place is too small.”

  “Damn,” said Ty. “Big step.”

  “Not really. When you know, you know,” said Lock.

  Ty raised his bottle in a salute as someone knocked at the door. “True dat.”

  Lock opened the door to his lawyer girlfriend and Carl. He kissed Carmen and shook Carl’s hand. “Good to see you, Carl. Go grab yourself a beer.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Galante, loping past him in the same shorts and Dogtown T-shirt that Lock remembered him wearing the first time they had met.

  Lock and Carmen kissed again. Carmen handed him two brown paper bags full of takeout. Lock held them up to his nose. “Smells good. Thanks. You want a glass of wine?”

  “Sure. What you got?”

  Lock laughed. “I have what you always drink. It’s chilling.”

  “You’re the best,” she said, planting a fresh kiss on him. He never tired of her kisses. Couldn’t imagine that he ever would. He was a lucky man to have found a woman like her.

  “I really am.” He smiled.

  She walked past him, pinching his butt as she went. Lock put the food on the counter and brought out some plates and cutlery. Ty was on the balcony with Galante.

  “You guys
hungry?” he called.

  “Sure,” said Galante.

  Ty shot him a what-a-dumb-question look.

  It was. Ty was pretty much always hungry. And, much to the annoyance of any woman he dated, Ty could eat a lot and maintain his six-pack. He had a freak metabolism. Plus, and it had taken Lock a while to figure this out, Ty didn’t eat very often. It was just that when he did, he ate everything in front of him.

  As Lock and Carmen began to unpack the food containers and lay it all out on the island in the center of the kitchen, Ty and Galante wandered in from the balcony.

  “Nice place you have here, Ryan,” said the investigator.

  It was nice. It cost close to four thousand a month in rent, but it was large and airy with a nice open-plan layout, and it looked out over the Marina.

  Ty stuck a nose into one of the containers. “Chinese, huh?”

  “What? Did I mess up?” said Carmen. “I thought you ate everything.”

  “Ty’s trying to be funny,” said Lock. “The kids who’ve been taken are from mainland China.”

  “Parachute kids, huh?” said Galante. “I figured that’s who it would be when Carmen mentioned Arcadia.”

  “Different kind of immigrants,” said Carmen. “My grandparents came here with nothing.”

  “Hey,” said Ty. “Least it was their idea to come.”

  Lock decided to call a halt to the game of My Family Had It Worse Than Yours. “Don’t go there, Carmen. Ty wins this one every time. Hey, but look at us all now, eating Chinese food, drinking expensive booze and looking out over the Pacific. Not too bad.”

  They ate, with their plates on their laps, in front of Lock’s television screen, and watched the stream of security-camera footage from the USB drive. From time to time one of them would ask to slow something down, or freeze the frame, or full screen the angle from a particular camera.

  “Kind of a weird choice for a movie night,” Carmen joked.

  “Sure. I have a DVD with a Hugh Grant flick around here somewhere,” said Lock, and Carmen tossed a cushion at him.