by Sean Black
About the Book
THE CITY OF ANGELS HAS A STALKER.
Adult movie actress RAVEN LANE is one of the most lusted-after women in America, with millions of fans to prove it. But when a headless corpse turns up in the trunk of her car, she realizes that fame carries a terrible price.
Fearing for her life, and with the LAPD seemingly unable to protect her, Raven turns to elite bodyguard RYAN LOCK for help.
Lock stops bad things happening to good people, but can he stop the tidal wave of violence now threatening the city of Los Angeles as Raven’s predator targets – and kills – those closest to her?
As events spiral out of control, Lock is drawn into a dangerous world where money rules, where sex is a commodity to be bought and sold, and where no one can be trusted, least of all his beautiful new client …
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Sean Black
Copyright
Gridlock
A Ryan Lock Thriller
SEAN BLACK
For Peter and Jemima
Prologue
Near the end of every month, Bert Ely got up an hour earlier than usual, fumbled into his clothes in the dark so that he didn’t wake his wife, clambered into his beat-to-hell Chevy Impala and drove the eighteen miles from his house in Van Nuys into downtown Los Angeles. Getting on to the 101 freeway at six rather than his usual seven o’clock shaved about twenty-five minutes from his commute, although saving time wasn’t the real issue. The time he spent in the car on these particular days was something he looked forward to all month.
He loved the ritual of his routine as much as he enjoyed what lay at the end of it. As with any indulgence, half the fun – at least, as far as Bert was concerned – lay in the anticipation.
The 101 took him out of the San Fernando Valley, through Hollywood, the city’s degenerate heart, finally depositing him via the Broadway off-ramp into downtown Los Angeles where he worked as a real-estate appraiser for Citicorp. It was a mind-numbing job, based in a soul-crushing grey office building full of good little corporate automatons. Along with the fact that his wife no longer had sex with him, and his kids probably couldn’t have cared less whether he lived or died, Bert used the utterly mundane nature of his job to justify his end-of-the-month routine.
This morning, as he turned from North Broadway on to West 1st Street, a Los Angeles Police Department cruiser pulled out behind him. He found his heart rate quickening a little, although he had no real reason to feel guilty – certainly not yet, anyway. He supposed that technically what he would do today was against the law, but that was more to do with the thick streak of Puritanism that still ran through American society than anything else.
The rack of stop lights next to the Japanese American National Museum was at red. The LAPD cruiser pulled up alongside him. Bert glanced at the two cops riding up front. One was half twisted round in his seat, talking to a young Hispanic woman who was perched on the rear bench seat. Judging from her clothes, and her cratered complexion, over which she had smoothed a rough veneer of foundation, she was a street walker.
She saw Bert looking at her and stared back at him, like she knew what his secret was. Bert’s heart rate elevated again. The middle finger of her left hand popped up as she flipped him off, then the lights changed and the cop car continued down 1st Street as Bert made the right turn on to South Central Avenue, his heart still pounding.
He shook the image of the Hispanic woman from his head as he pulled into the parking lot, a sleepy-eyed attendant handing him his ticket as soon as he exited the car with his briefcase.
The sidewalk was still dewy with the water from early-morning street cleaning as he took a left heading down towards Starbucks on the corner of South Central Avenue and 2nd, passing the Cuba Central Café, and Yogurtland. Outside Starbucks a few chairs and tables were already stacked on the patio, ready to be deployed. Bert walked quickly past the three banks of newspaper vending machines next to the curb, crossed the little patio and pushed the door open. He went straight to the counter and placed his order without glancing up at the board.
‘Skinny latte, no foam,’ he said, to the barista. ‘Oh, and gimme a blueberry muffin.’ The muffin was an everyday treat for Bert.
As he waited, he studiously avoided looking outside towards the final bank of newspaper vending machines, their metal posts planted in the sidewalk. A black one, a brown one and two red ones, the last of which held the key to his treat. Inside that machine were copies of this week’s LA Xclusive newspaper, although the term ‘newspaper’ was a bit of a misnomer. There was no news inside, only page after page of adverts for escorts, predominantly female but with a scattering of men and transgender prostitutes, all selling limitless variations of the same thing: sex.
It was the endless variation on a theme that captivated Bert. Not just in terms of all the different physical types, ages and races, but in the array of services they offered, some so outlandish that even the thought of them made Bert queasy. Sometimes the ads had pictures too, although he had learned from a couple of disappointing liaisons that they couldn’t always be relied upon to be accurate.
Still, contained within the pages was a wonderland of possibilities, like a huge candy store
for grown-ups. Inside those little boxes was an array of women, all of whom would have sex with Bert in return for money. From corn-fed Midwestern runaways, who no doubt told themselves that what they were doing was no different from what they’d done at home in the back seat of a car on a Saturday night, through the twenty-something MAWs (Model/Actress/Whatevers), with their gravity-defying silicone boobs and jaded air of disappointment that they weren’t even going to make the Z-list, all the way to the hardened professionals, women who had long ago reconciled their hopes and dreams with the reality of making a living by lying on their backs. Over the years, Bert had sampled them all.
Recently, though, he’d begun to find a sameness to the experience, and to feel a dark, lonely emptiness once the encounter was over. Where once he’d felt satiated, now his monthly liaisons left Bert hungry for something other than sex. For intimacy, maybe?
Last month, in the awkward post-coital moments and with ten minutes still officially on the clock, he had lain in bed with a young redhead in a condo in Playa Del Rey. He’d asked her if they could spoon, cuddle in together, his arms around her. She’d looked at him like he was nuts and asked him to leave, reaching into a bedside table and producing a hand gun to emphasize that she wasn’t kidding.
Strangely, he had never felt much guilt about paying women to have sex with him, rationalizing that a real affair, one with emotions and feelings, would be far more upsetting to his wife. That was part of the reason he never visited the same woman twice. Well, that and the fact that he liked the variety. Living in LA you could sample all that the world had to offer in the way of women without leaving the city boundaries. As long as you didn’t want a hug at the end.
‘Sir? Is this to go?’
The barista’s question snapped Bert back to the tiny coffee shop, which was starting to fill with office workers.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ Bert mumbled, handing over ten dollars and waiting for change. He put the two single dollar bills into the tip jar and kept the coins, which he’d need to pay for his copy of the newspaper. Then he picked up his coffee and the brown paper bag holding his muffin and wandered back outside into the early-morning California sunshine.
He stood for a second, sorting through his change and trying to get back a little of the good feeling he’d left the house with that day; the good feeling that came from his little secret.
At lunchtime he’d sneak to the men’s room, peruse the women on offer that week, then make a phone call. With his department offering flexible working hours, he’d reclaim the time he’d banked by getting into the office early, and drive over to the woman’s apartment. He was thinking that maybe he’d try someone a little older today, someone who might not find it strange that a man of his age would trade sexual gymnastics for a hug. Or, maybe, he thought, smiling to himself, he’d find a hot little spinner and screw her until her eyes popped out of her head.
It was only then, standing on the sidewalk, lost in his own thoughts, that he noticed the stack of newspapers sitting at the far end of the vending machines, the pages of the top copy fluttering in the breeze as the beginnings of a hot Santa Ana wind funnelled its way from the natural canyons of the LA basin to the concrete canyons of downtown.
‘Huh,’ he said to himself, bending down slightly. Someone, a kind of perverted Good Samaritan, must have opened the machine and dumped all the copies out on the ground. With his knees still bent and his head down, Bert grabbed one from the middle of the small pile. Then, as he raised his head, he saw something that sent a jolt of adrenaline surging through him, stealing his breath and leaving a tingle of pins and needles in his fingertips.
Normally, if all the newspapers had been taken, he would have looked through the smeared glass display window to see ‘SOLD OUT’ printed on a screen at the back of the compartment that held the papers. But that wasn’t what he was looking at right now.
Instead he was seeing blood – a lot of blood. And in the middle of the sheet of blood, a pair of eyes were staring back at him.
A head. Someone had taken out the newspapers and replaced them with a human head.
Still gasping for air, Bert straightened up and looked around. A clutch of middle-aged white women dressed in pant suits walked past. One glanced at the paper still clasped in Bert’s hand, and gave him a look of disgust. None seemed to look at the vending machine and what was in it.
Maybe it was a prank. Yeah, thought Bert, that had to be it. A mannequin’s head and a tube of fake blood. Must be some goddamn feminists trying to make a point about the exploitation of women or some shit.
He looked back to the head. Sweet Jesus. If it was a prank, they’d made it look really convincing.
The initial shock had passed to the point at which he was starting to think about what to do next. He should just get the hell out, he knew that. Then another thought struck him, keeping him there.
If there were cameras on this intersection and the prank was found later, the police might think he had something to do with it and want to speak to him. They might even come to his home.
However, if he alerted the police right now, he could tell them he was walking past and just happened to notice it. He’d be a vigilant citizen rather than someone with something to hide.
He took a step towards the machine, and had a better look at the head. Although it was obscured by the blood spattering the panel he could make out enough of the features – soft, full lips, blue eyes, a small button nose and dyed blonde hair running down the cheeks in limp, tangled strands – to see that it was a woman’s.
Get it over with, he said to himself, jamming two quarters into the vending machine as quickly as he could and yanking at the handle to open it.
The stench hit him like a truck. Even holding his breath the sickly sweet cloying odor clawed its way to the back of his throat, making his stomach spasm and sending the little that was left of last night’s dinner spilling over his shoes and splashing on to the sidewalk. Behind him a woman screamed so loudly that he thought his ear drums might burst.
Still gasping, he looked down at the copy of LA Xclusive he was holding in his left hand. On the cover there was a young blonde woman, perfectly made up and airbrushed: collagen-full lips, a button nose, deep blue eyes with silky platinum curls. It was the same person.
Slowly, reluctantly, Bert Ely looked again at the front cover of the paper and the headline above the girl’s face: ‘MEET CINDY CANYON’.
One
Her body slick with baby oil and sweat, Raven Lane whiplashed her neck, sending a thick mane of jet-black hair flying into the air, arched her back and smiled at the three hundred men crowded around the tiny platform, as Mötley Crüe’s heavy-metal anthem ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ pounded out from two huge speakers mounted at either side of the stage.
Dollar bills cascaded across the metal barrier, which, along with two steroid-pumped bouncers, separated Raven from her public. Ignoring the money, she wrapped herself around the stripper’s pole, suggestively pistoning her left hand up and down the cold metal, her mouth open, her head thrown back again, her eyes closed in an expression of erotic abandon.
After years on the road, she had her routine down cold. Every gesture, every pout, every spin around the pole and every hair-flick was choreographed to the second, specifically engineered so that every single man in the club went away feeling that somehow Raven Lane had danced solely for his gratification.
She opened her eyes again, ready to move into the next part of the routine. At the edge of her vision she caught sight of a scrawny weasel of a man with a ratty beard, wearing a John Deere baseball cap, squeezing under the barrier and heading straight for her. Somehow he’d found his way past the two lunkhead bouncers and was now careening towards her at top speed.
Raven tensed as she adjusted her feet, one hand wrapping around the pole for support. Judging the speed of his approach, she took one final twirl and brought up a razor-sharp heel straight into his solar plexus. The man stumbled backwards clutching his chest as th
e crowd signalled its approval with a primal roar. One of the bouncers jumped on top of him and he was pulled back over the barrier by his hair before being propelled through the crowd by another member of the club’s security staff. Despite his obvious physical discomfort, he had an inane grin on his face, as if a kick in the chest from Raven was some kind of come-on.
Raven swept the incident from her mind, working through her routine, her hands running across her bare breasts, her backside thrust out towards the crowd, seemingly lost in a state of rapture. All the while the downpour of dollars cascaded towards her until she almost lost sight of the faces of the men who’d already paid twenty bucks at the door just to see her naked body.
Eight minutes later, and almost as many thousands of dollars richer, she was escorted back to her dressing room, a dingy cupboard at the back of the single-storey roadside saloon. She towelled herself off, reapplied her makeup, put on a short, red silk robe from Frederick’s of Hollywood and headed back out to have her picture taken with fans and to sign T-shirts.
The T-shirts cost fifteen dollars; her signature was another ten. Having their picture taken with her cost the men an additional fifteen. Alongside her cut of the door money and the bar, plus all those dollar bills tossed on to the stage, an appearance like this netted her around fifteen thousand dollars. Not bad for a few hours’ work by a twenty-eight-year-old who hadn’t even graduated from high school, she thought, as another loser stepped forward to have his picture taken with her.
After almost a decade of shedding her clothes on-stage and in movies, Raven still couldn’t quite understand why men would turn up to see her. With her long black hair and near flawless body, she knew what the obvious attraction was, but she still didn’t quite get it. She always thought it must be like visiting the most amazing restaurant in the world but contenting yourself with standing outside, your nose pressed against the window, as other people ate the food.
Maybe, she guessed, what attracted these men was exactly that: her unattainability. That she was a fantasy made flesh. Someone they could think about when they got home and had to bang the overweight domestic drudges of wives that they themselves had created. Yeah, fantasy was what she sold, she thought, rolling the tension from her shoulders and flicking back her hair; that had to be it.