by Sean Black
At the bottom of the ramp, Carmen hung a left onto Grand. He held his breath, hoping she would park on the street. That would make keeping eyes on her, without being seen, a lot easier. And he didn’t want to be seen—not yet anyway.
Four blocks down, she turned into the parking structure next to her office building. Lock immediately pulled in behind a parked car, keeping enough of a gap that he could maintain visual contact with the Mustang.
The Mustang hung back for about fifteen seconds, then followed Carmen’s car down the ramp and into the parking lot. Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .
He counted slowly. At zero, he pulled out from the parking spot.
At the bottom of the ramp, he powered down his window and took a ticket. The barrier lifted and the Audi headed back up the concrete ramps to the fourth floor where Carmen usually parked.
Up on four, he glimpsed Carmen’s back as she pushed through the doors that led from the parking area to a glass-sided walkway that connected to her office building. The Mustang was already in place, parked a few rows back. A quick look told him no one had exited.
He eased the Audi into a space where it was partially obscured from the Mustang’s view by a concrete support. His hand slipped to the butt of his SIG Sauer P229. The handgun of choice for many professionally trained close-protection operators, it was loaded with a fresh magazine and good to go.
While Carmen collected the papers from her office, he planned on asking the occupants of the Mustang a few questions. The answers they provided had better be adequate or their night was about to take a very unexpected, not to mention unwelcome and potentially fatal, turn.
8
Lock’s attention stayed on the Mustang. It would have been dangerous to assume that whoever was inside it was acting alone. Another car carrying accomplices could swing up the ramp behind him at any moment.
He doubted it. But it was possible. And possible was enough to trigger caution.
A fragment of paranoia popped into his mind. Could one of the Mustang’s occupants have gotten out already and gone after Carmen? Highly unlikely. But, again, possible.
He decided it was best to be on the safe side. He dug out his cell phone, pulled up Carmen’s name and tapped to make the call. He wanted to make sure she was okay. If she didn’t pick up, he’d change his approach, pull the guys from the Mustang and do a quick head count, at gun point if need be.
To his relief, she answered almost immediately.
“Hey, where are you?” she asked.
The question he’d hoped she wouldn’t ask. Whatever he said now would be a lie—either a direct deceit or one of omission. Lying to the woman you loved wasn’t good, regardless of the purity of your intentions and how good your reason.
To hell with it. He’d take it head on.
“In the parking structure next to your office.”
He took a breath and waited for the inevitable explosion. Carmen might be a polished professional all-round classy lady and demon defense lawyer, but she also had a feisty Latin temper. It was one of the things that had attracted him to her. But, as with any attractive quality, it came with a downside.
“Excuse me?”
“Can I explain?”
“I think you’d better,” she said, her voice full of the implied threat that it had better be good, and he’d better get to it fast. He could see now why she was widely regarded as the scourge of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, their prosecutors, the LAPD, any number of expert witnesses, and even one or two judges.
“When we were at the restaurant there was a Mustang parked outside. The same car followed you downtown. I’m looking at it now.”
She didn’t respond straight away. A good sign in this instance. “How did you know they were going to follow me?”
“A hunch, which in this case comes down to years of watching out for this kind of stuff.”
There was another pause at her end.
“Where are you now? Precisely,” he asked her.
“Just walking into my office.”
That was good. Her office had a security guard stationed in the lobby twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. He was low-paid, likely poorly trained and incapable of stopping any real threat if it arose. But he had eyes on a bank of cameras, and he was, presumably, in good enough shape to raise the alarm if anything did go down.
“Were you aware of anyone following you inside?”
“No. Should I have been?” Carmen sounded spooked. Again, not a bad reaction. Better spooked and alert to her surroundings than the alternative.
“No. I’m ninety-nine percent certain they’re both still in their vehicle. I just wanted to make sure.”
“Listen, Ryan, I’m going to call LAPD, get them to send a unit down here to take a look.”
It was his turn not to respond immediately. He was weighing that judgment. If they saw the cops, they might split before anyone could talk to them. It would also mean that they, and whoever had sent them (assuming there was another party), would know they’d been made. They could resume surveillance and Lock would have much less chance of spotting them. They’d be more careful not to be made by him a second time.
All of that would also mean that he might never get to know who they were or what they wanted with Carmen.
On the other hand, the LAPD might catch them, and even if they weren’t arrested, he’d have some information to work with. He could do some digging, as could Carmen, and they’d know who they were dealing with.
“Ryan?”
He decided. “Call them. Tell them I’m here as well. I don’t want them thinking I’m some kind of extra surprise and getting spooked when they roll up.”
He gave Carmen a run-down on the Mustang’s details, and exactly where it was parked. He also asked her to make sure that the dispatcher informed the responding patrol about the details of his vehicle, who he was, where he was and the fact that he was legally carrying a handgun.
Finally, he told her to stay put until he called her back and it was done. Assuming they hadn’t left of their own accord before the cops arrived.
“Are you always this bossy?” she asked, once he’d finished giving her the instructions.
“Only when I’m working.”
“I’m work now, am I?”
He smiled. “I thought all women were. The good ones anyway.”
“Nice save.”
The call ended. Lock dug in, his focus staying tight on the Mustang. Easing his SIG from its holster, he laid it gently on his lap, and took a closer look at his surroundings.
The parking structure was laid out so that the entry ramp, which took drivers up the levels, was on the eastern side. The exit, which took drivers back down in a series of similar loops, was to the south. Both the Mustang and Lock’s Audi were facing west.
If they did see the LAPD cruiser as it crested the ramp and decided to get out of there, it would be easy enough for him to scoot ahead and block their exit to the south.
To avoid confusion, and no doubt for cost reasons, both the eastern and southern ramps were single lane. If he blocked the ramp there was no way the Mustang would be able to maneuver around him. If they tried, and scratched the Audi’s paint, he’d give them something more to worry about than a field interrogation.
A few minutes later his cell chimed with an incoming call from Carmen.
“Okay, there’s a unit on the way. Should I stay where I am?”
“Absolutely. I’ll call you when they’re done.”
“This sucks. You know that, right? You’re stuck in your car and I’m stuck in my office.”
“It’ll be over in no time,” he said as, right on cue, the roll bar of the responding unit crested the top of the fourth-floor ramp. “In fact, here’s the cavalry now.”
He watched as the LAPD patrol car eased slowly toward the Mustang. He could see that it was a two-officer unit. The driver was a Latino sergeant with a barrel chest and the kind of close crop that guys went
for when their hairline began inching back from their forehead.
Next to the sergeant sat a much younger female officer. She was African-American and still had the game face rookies wore when they were new to the job, eager to prove to the world, and maybe their training officer, just how in control of every situation they were. She shot him a less than friendly look as the patrol eased past the passenger side of the Audi.
So far neither the Mustang nor its occupant or occupants had made any kind of a move. They had obviously decided to sit tight and talk their way out of this.
“What do you mean we followed someone all the way here from Santa Monica, Officer? Must be a coincidence. Yeah, one in a million, right? Hey, what can we tell you? We often like to take a romantic drive downtown in the evening and just park where it’s nice and quiet.”
Somehow Lock doubted that answer, or any variation on it, would satisfy the two cops who had now pulled up directly behind the trunk of the Mustang, blocking any possibility of a last-minute escape.
He stayed put in the Audi. He assumed one or both of the two cops would head over to speak to him once they’d dealt with the Mustang. There was no point in his inserting himself into the middle of things. Cops tended to respond badly to citizens (that is, anyone who wasn’t a cop) who did that, and he didn’t blame them. It was best if he let them do their job.
A flash of movement inside the Mustang caught his eye. It took him a fraction of a second to realize what he was looking at. From his position he had a partial view of the Mustang’s front passenger-side mirror.
He saw a hand come up fast, fingers closed around the stock of a gun. With the darkness and slight tint of the window he couldn’t be a hundred percent certain, but it looked to him like a machine pistol.
9
The sergeant was already out of the cruiser and heading to the driver’s side window. He had his service weapon drawn, but it was held down by his side. The rookie had the patrol car’s passenger side door open, her weapon drawn and punched out toward the Mustang.
From where they were, neither cop had the view Lock did. They wouldn’t see the pistol until it was too late.
Lock knew that anyone who draws a fully automatic weapon like that wasn’t going to settle for a friendly chat and a ride to the local precinct. In California, with its relatively strict gun laws, weapons like machine pistols came with the kind of jail time no attorney could talk their client out of—mandatory time.
Grabbing his SIG from his lap, Lock pushed open the driver’s door of the Audi and rolled out as fast as he could. The older cop, alerted by the noise, spun round.
“Threat!” Lock yelled. with a nod toward the Mustang, careful not to raise his own gun just yet. Threat was standard close-protection language that covered everything, apart from an explosive device, the idea being that an IED or bomb required a different response from a gun, knife or other weapon. Not knowing if a regular cop would recognize the terminology, he followed up quickly: “Front passenger just drew his gun.”
His weapon punched out, the older cop took a hesitant step back, almost losing his footing in the process.
The female rookie tensed, grabbing inside for the patrol’s microphone. “Driver, passenger, keep your hands where I can see them.”
Her words echoed around the concrete parking lot. They were met with silence.
Lock noticed that in the time it had taken for him to shift his attention to the two police officers and look back to the side mirror, the passenger had disappeared from the front seat.
What the hell?
A Mustang wasn’t a limo or a town car. Hell, it wasn’t even a large sedan or an SUV. The internal capacity would have made moving into the back of the vehicle a struggle. He was sure that the door had remained closed. And his eye would have been drawn to someone wriggling their way into the back. Unless . . .
A fresh jolt of adrenalin surged through him as his eyes flicked to the Mustang’s trunk. The stumpy barrel of a gun pushed through a hole that been drilled just next to the trunk release. The black of the barrel against the black paintwork made it all but seamless.
The car had been modified. Most likely the rear seats had been removed, along with the panels that separated the interior from the trunk.
“Get down!” Lock screamed at the two cops, as he threw himself to the floor.
10
Lock’s elbow banged painfully into the concrete, sending a jolt of pain up his arm. He shook it off, and kept moving, rolling underneath his own vehicle. An engine block, even a modern one with all its plastic and computers, made for a fairly decent bullet absorber.
He knew that the angle of the hole in the Mustang’s trunk would make firing low to take him out tricky—if the gunman even thought to aim. A machine pistol was the ultimate small spray-and-pray weapon. What it lacked in precision it made up for in sheer rounds fired per second.
He righted himself so that he was lying on his belly, facing the rear of the blocked-in Mustang. The first burst of gunfire pulsed from the Mustang’s trunk about a half-second later. The noise was loud and intense. The muzzle flared red and yellow.
His view obscured, he inched forward, the SIG still in his hand, not that it was of any use. The guy firing the pistol might not have had an angle to him, but the same went from Lock’s end. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to start trying to shoot out tires and draw fire toward himself just yet.
What he was looking at, though he hadn’t realized it until now, was the difference between a civilian stop-and-search and one conducted by the military in a higher-risk environment. LA was a tough place to police, with no shortage of knuckleheads, gang members and all-round bad guys, plenty of them packing heat, but it didn’t compare to Baghdad or Kabul.
The first rule of the hard stop in a high-risk environment was to establish distance. For someone to blow you up, they had to get close enough. You could take a bullet from a distance, but the more distance, the harder it was to hit a target. So the trade-off was between contact close enough to give you the information you required, and staying alive.
What these cops had done was to focus on preventing escape or evasion. Jam their cruiser behind the Mustang and block it in. Make sure the Mustang wasn’t able to go anywhere. That had only raised the stakes for the occupants. They’d been transformed into the proverbial cornered rat—a situation that rarely ended well if you didn’t have greater firepower.
He needed to get a better idea of what was going on. There was only one way for him to do that.
Crawling forward another few inches, he could make out the back of the female rookie’s feet, planted in a shooting stance. Judging by where they were placed in relation to the patrol car’s wheels, he guessed she was still tucked in behind the passenger door.
He heard a couple of single cracks as one or both of the officers returned fire. There was a brief, almost surreal, moment of silence. Then a fresh burst from the gun poking out of the Mustang’s trunk. Shifting forward and looking up, Lock could see the barrel of the gun pan fractionally to the shooter’s left, in the direction, he guessed, of the male cop.
Yup.
Another staccato burst of gunfire coincided with another single round.
A woman’s scream cut through the ringing in Lock’s ears. The rookie. It had to be. She wasn’t hit, though. It wasn’t that kind of a scream. It was a sound that signaled a horrified reaction. Her partner had been hit, at least once, maybe more. He was down, and in a bad way. Lock would have put every last cent he had on it.
Patrol cops in the LAPD wore body armor as standard. It might have saved the sergeant. Unless he’d taken a round to his head, his groin or one of his legs. A head shot was what people feared, but a round through your groin or into your leg could be as bad. Lose too much blood, too fast, and you’d be in a world of trouble before you even realized it.
The ringing in Lock’s ears was intense—it grew in pitch, an incessant mosquito buzz. He shook his head, more to clear his mind than his e
ars. He needed to improvise an AOA (actions on attack) plan—and fast. He couldn’t just sit tight and watch two cops get slaughtered in front of him while he lay under his car.
First, he told himself, he needed a better visual. Pushing off with his elbows, he scrambled forward another few inches.
Now he had some kind of a low-level view of the patrol car. It wasn’t pretty. The vehicle had been peppered with rounds. Narrowing his eyes, he could make out the older male cop lying on the ground next to the still-open driver’s door. He was on his side, one arm in spasm. Blood had already pooled around him.
He made out the feet, lower legs and butt of the female rookie. She was holding her position, but had hunkered down, making sure she presented less surface area to the shooter. That was good.
Suddenly, she took a step back. Somewhere, in a register beneath the high-pitched ringing in his ears, he was sure he heard a solid thunk, like a car door being slammed shut.
He pushed off with his feet, his elbows and knees scraping painfully over the hard concrete, trying to inch himself forward again to get a better view. A pair of perfectly polished boots stepped slowly along the edge of the driver’s side of the Mustang. The driver was headed toward the older patrol cop as his buddy poured in a fresh series of staccato bursts of fire toward the helpless female, who had started to duck-walk backwards, away from the patrol car and her partner.
It was safe to say that his time assessing the situation had just been abruptly curtailed. He scrambled to his feet, and stood directly in front of his car. His right foot fell back, and he narrowed into something akin to an inline boxer’s stance as he raised the SIG.
11