Lockdown rl-1

by Sean Black

Stafford glanced over his shoulder. Startled by how close he was to the edge, he took a step forward, but Lock waggled the gun. ‘Wrong direction.’

  ‘I won’t do it. I’m not going to jump.’

  ‘Then I’ll throw you. It won’t be the first time I’ve done it.’

  Lock holstered the Sig and punched Stafford hard in the solar plexus. As he went down, winded, Lock kicked him in the groin, then in the face. ‘No one’s going to notice a little extra trauma on the body of a jumper,’ he remarked, grabbing the back of Stafford’s jacket and shirt and hauling him to the edge.

  ‘Help me! Someone!’ Stafford screamed.

  ‘We’re on our own, Stafford. Not even Daddy can rescue you now.’

  There was a concrete lip at the very edge of the roof. Lock pulled Stafford up on to it.

  ‘Please. Please, don’t do this!’ Stafford begged.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? Give me one good reason.’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘You don’t want to die, do you?’

  Stafford shook his head, tears streaming down his face. ‘No, I don’t.’

  Lock stood back, the gun still on him. ‘OK, so here’s what you’re gonna do.’

  Lock briefly outlined Stafford’s obligations and what would happen to him if they weren’t fulfilled. Then he retreated back inside the stairwell, leaving Stafford alone on the roof for the night to think about what he’d done.

  A few days later the intern had contacted Lock to thank him. A day after the attack a certified cheque in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had arrived in the mail at her apartment. Along with a legal agreement that she would take no further action.

  Lock knew that it was a cheap way out for Stafford and he felt bad about that. But he also knew what the conviction rate was in sexual assault cases.

  Once again, justice hadn’t come into it.

  Twenty-two

  ‘I want Ty to work the recovery with me.’ Lock phrased it as a statement rather than a question. It was quicker that way, and they’d already wasted thirty minutes on bullshit that had zero to do with the safe recovery of Josh Hulme and everything to do with Meditech’s share price and Stafford’s ego.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Nicholas. ‘What else do you need?’

  ‘We’ll need someone to liaise with the JTTF.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be the best person to do that?’ Nicholas asked.

  ‘I’m gonna have my hands full. Plus, my being involved hasn’t been a popular move with them.’

  ‘OK, what else?’

  ‘We’ll need a team of people to sort through all our previous threat assessments. Particularly those relating to Richard Hulme.’

  ‘Already done,’ Stafford piped up. ‘And I’ve had a briefing go out to all employees warning them to be vigilant and report anything suspicious to local authorities and our security personnel.’

  Maybe Stafford’s midnight sojourn on the roof with him had finally knocked some sense into him, Lock thought.

  ‘So who’s to hold the fort here while you’re out playing detective?’ asked Brand.

  ‘By the looks of it, I thought you’d already stepped into the breach,’ Lock fired back.

  ‘Well, someone had to.’

  Nicholas Van Straten rifled his papers, signalling the end of the meeting. ‘That’s everything settled, then.’

  Ty and Lock rode back down together in the elevator.

  ‘You sure about leaving this place to Brand?’ Ty asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Me either. You know, I don’t have the kind of investigation experience you do.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe I’m not the best man to be helping you out.’

  ‘You fit all three of my main criteria,’ Lock said.

  ‘Oh yeah, and what are those?’

  ‘I need someone I can trust. And investigating comes down to one thing those chumps back up there don’t possess. Common sense.’

  ‘That’s only two. What’s the third?’

  ‘If there are any more closed doors, I need someone in front of me.’

  ‘Now, that I can buy. I’m still getting a feeling there’s something else.’

  Lock sighed. ‘OK, the political activists we’re going to be dealing with aren’t your right-wing Bill O’Reilly crowd, right?’

  ‘Meaning it’ll be a hell of a lot more difficult for them to tell a black man to go take a jump.’

  ‘Got it in one. We need to locate the enemy’s weak spots. If that so happens to be a liberal conscience, that’s what we use.’

  ‘So you’d use the colour of my skin to game someone?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Ty thought about that for a second. ‘OK, I can be down with that.’

  The elevator’s floor counter ticked down to single digits.

  ‘So, what do you think our chances are?’ Ty asked.

  Lock thought about it. The doors opened into the lobby.

  ‘Well, we got no ransom demand, no sightings since the kidnap, and the one person who does know what happened was just confirmed dead. Apart from that, I’d say we’re in excellent shape.’

  Twenty-three

  ‘We’ll take my car.’

  Ty gave Lock a look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You got something to say about my car, you’d better say it.’

  ‘OK, but if we take your car,’ Ty said, pulling out a black i-Pod, ‘we gotta dock my tracks.’

  It was Lock’s turn to eye-roll Ty. ‘Maybe I should have picked Brand as my ride-along after all.’

  Ty faked outrage. ‘That cracker listens to country. I got stuck in the CAT vehicle with him once. Made me listen to a tune called “How Can I Tell You I Love You With a Shotgun in My Mouth?” And they say rap lyrics are messed up? Damn.’

  ‘Point taken. My ride, your music.’

  ‘Calling your vehicle a “ride” is stretching it.’

  ‘So’s calling the shit you listen to music.’

  Forty minutes later they pulled up at the gates of the cemetery, still debating the pros and cons of Lock’s car and Ty’s taste in music.

  Ty scanned the other arrivals. ‘Don’t these folks look in the mirror before they leave home?’

  At the top of the hill a Who’s Who of the animal rights crowd were gathering to watch Gray and Mary Stokes being laid to rest, alongside their long-deceased pets, dogs, cats, rabbits, and even a donkey.

  ‘Not an animal lover?’

  ‘Had a pit bull once. Loved that dog, man.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Tried to eat my little cousin Chantelle. Had to shoot the asshole. I mean, she was pulling its ears and shit, so it wasn’t entirely unwarranted biting her, but family’s family.’

  ‘Ty, I get a lump in my throat listening to stories about your upbringing. It’s like the Waltons on crack.’

  Ty smiled. ‘Screw you, white boy.’

  ‘Listen, you stay here with the car.’

  ‘Aw, man. Do I have to?’

  ‘What’s the problem now?’

  Ty regarded the interior of Lock’s Toyota with a look of repulsion. ‘Someone might think this piece of shit’s mine.’

  A familiar face greeted Lock as he started up the hill. The sergeant voted ‘most likely to be high on cholesterol but low on patience’ lifted a fillet o’ fish with extra cheese in greeting. Who the hell puts cheese on a fillet o’ fish? Lock wondered.

  ‘If it ain’t Jack Bauer,’ said Caffrey, swiping at a smear of mayonnaise, which slicked under one of his chins.

  Lock was as pleased to see some variation in Caffrey’s diet as he was to hear that the cardiac time bomb’s sarcastic repartee extended to both sides.

  ‘How’s that sandwich?’

  ‘Food from the gods,’ Caffrey mumbled, mid mouthful.

  ‘You really get around, don’t you?’

  ‘JTTF seconded me,’ spat Caffrey.

 
‘That a new tactic? Al-Qaeda attack, we Spurlock them till their livers burst.’

  ‘Spurlock?’ Caffrey asked, missing the reference.

  ‘Guy who made the movie about eating nothing but burgers for a month.’

  ‘A month?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Lucky bastard.’

  ‘Well, it’s been nice chatting.’

  Lock started past, but Caffrey blocked him. ‘Don’t go upsetting any of these folks, Lock. I’ll be lucky to finish the last set of paperwork you generated by the time I retire.’

  ‘I’m just here to pay my respects.’

  Caffrey stepped out of his way, and took a sloppy bite of mystery fish. To a man who’d missed breakfast, it looked pretty damn good.

  Lock carried on up the slope towards a spot where he could see a couple of blacked-out SUVs. As subtle as a brick, the decals on the numberplate might as well have read ‘FBI Surveillance’. Then again, maybe that was the point: the FBI letting the stragglers of the animal rights campaign know they were being watched.

  As he passed the FBI vehicle, Lock narrowly resisted a juvenile temptation to tap on the windows. He stopped fifty yards back from the funeral party as it gathered around the plot. Two graves. Side by side.

  As Lock got closer he realized that he shouldn’t have worried about his attire. He was about the best-dressed person there. The mourners were a rag-tag mixture of decaying hippies and twenty-something New Agers. One kid in his early twenties had turned up in blue jeans and a brown faux-leather jacket, presumably hand-crafted from tofu. Lock would have forgiven him black, but brown?

  A few of the mourners turned their heads at Lock’s approach but no one said anything. At the centre of the group he glimpsed Janice sitting in her wheelchair, staring into the void as the two coffins were simultaneously lowered into the earth.

  A man in his sixties with an ashen pallor and long greasy hair stood, hands clasped and head bowed, and said a few words. As Lock stepped closer, he caught the last of it.

  ‘Gray Stokes goes to his grave a hero. A martyr for the cause of animal rights. He was a man who saw genocide where others chose to look away. A man who chose to confront those who ran the death camps. A man who chose to speak up for those who have no voice. But his death will not be in vain. The movement to liberate animals from suffering and torture will go on. And his spirit will travel with us on our journey.’

  Martyrdom, sacrifice, struggle. Lock wondered where he’d heard all those words before. Maybe John Lewis, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, had it right when he’d warned a Senate committee a few years back that animal rights extremists were becoming a real threat. But then al-Qaeda had leapt straight to the top of the terror charts with a boxcutter rather than a bullet, and most everyone had forgotten that terrorism wasn’t restricted to guys with a penchant for virgins in the hereafter.

  People on the fringes of the group began to drift away back down the slope once the man had finished his eulogy. Lock approached Janice, a couple of the remaining mourners shooting him a dirty look as they passed him. The younger man in the brown jacket was speaking now, head tilted in defiance. ‘They’re gonna pay for this. You’ll see. They’ll be filling whole graveyards by the time we’re through.’ His dire predictions were aimed at everyone and no one. Janice shushed him as Lock came closer.

  Lock reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ The words seemed inadequate. He braced himself for another outburst from the uber-casual hothead, maybe even a punch, but the young man drifted off as well.

  Janice kept her eyes on the two coffins. ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘To pay my respects.’ Lock flicked his head in the direction of the hothead. ‘Who’s he?’

  Janice’s eyes flicked from Lock to the two hulking JTTF SUVs. ‘Why don’t you ask your friends?’

  ‘Don’t you think things have gotten too serious for us to be playing any more games?’

  ‘Why are you really here?’

  ‘Answer my question and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘That’s Don,’ Janice said. ‘He wasn’t really part of our group. He didn’t agree with our way of protesting.’

  ‘More of a direct action kind of a guy?’

  ‘He’s been involved in some liberations.’

  ‘Liberations’ was the term used by the activists to describe their forcible entry into labs that used animals, in order to free those animals. Occasionally they’d hit farms as well, usually ones with vast sheds of battery chickens.

  ‘So what’s he doing here?’

  ‘Same as you.’

  ‘This guy bothering you?’ said someone, tapping Lock’s shoulder for emphasis.

  Lock half turned to see the guy in the brown tofu jacket. He was tall, but he struggled to be imposing. Lock ignored him.

  He tapped again. Harder this time. ‘Why don’t you leave her alone?’

  ‘Don, it’s OK. This is Ryan Lock — you know, the guy who saved me.’

  Don looked awkward and studied the ground. ‘Guess I owe you a thank you.’

  As apologies went it settled somewhere on the wrong side of grudging.

  ‘Sure you would have done the same,’ Lock said.

  ‘Yeah, I would have.’

  ‘So, what do you know about Josh Hulme?’

  Don blinked at Lock’s sudden shift of direction. ‘I know what his father does. You live by the sword, you-’

  Lock moved in quickly on Don, making sure he had eye contact and didn’t break it. ‘We’re talking about a young boy here. I’d appreciate it if you gave my question some proper consideration.’

  Janice edged her chair up between the two men. ‘There’s no need for this. Especially not here. And not today.’

  ‘Under normal circumstances, I’d agree. But as long as Josh Hulme’s missing, I’d argue that normal rules no longer apply. Especially as I think you, and your buddies, might know where he is.’ Lock grabbed Don’s wrist and twisted, just enough to make it interesting. ‘Now, Don, maybe we could start with your full name.’

  No one moved from either of the two blacked-out SUVs, although Lock would have bet the farm that they had shotgun mikes catching every word of the exchange. Their decision not to intervene didn’t surprise him, even though he’d just committed assault. Government agencies were big on outsourcing these days and Lock would do as well as any Syrian jailer with a cattle prod and some time on his hands. Plus he wasn’t quite as restricted by the niceties.

  ‘Why the hell should I tell you anything? You’re not a cop.’

  ‘That’s right, Don, I’m not. Which means I’m not bound by proper procedure.’

  Don glared at Lock, his eyes full of hatred.

  ‘Stop it!’ shouted Janice. ‘We’ve just buried our parents!’

  Lock dropped Don’s wrist. ‘What do you mean “we”?’

  ‘Don’s my kid brother.’

  Twenty-four

  Lock wondered how much of an extremist you had to be to fill the role of the Stokes family black sheep. It did kind of explain some of the young man’s over-righteous anger, though. He almost regretted adding injury to insult by hurting Don’s wrist. Then he thought of Josh Hulme, and his momentary feeling of sympathy ebbed away, as quickly as it had appeared.

  Don worried at his wrist. ‘Man, I could use a drink.’

  The way he said it, Lock assumed he wasn’t talking about a lactose-free protein shake. Lock had always assumed the animal rights crowd weren’t much for liquor. Lentil casseroles, for definite. Cheap whisky, not so much.

  ‘There’s a place about five blocks from here. I can give you a ride,’ he offered.

  Don seemed unsure.

  ‘He’s OK,’ said Janice.

  Don still said nothing. Lock didn’t want to push it, but this was a great opportunity. Get a few drinks in him and who knew what Don Stokes would cough up?

  ‘Listen, I shouldn’t have laid my hands on you back there, man. I’m sorry.
’

  Don almost managed a smile. ‘Forget it, you saved my sister’s life.’

  ‘We good?’ asked Lock, offering a hand.

  Don shook with his left. ‘I’m usually right-handed, but some asshole almost broke it.’

  In the language of men, that was a yes. The tension between them lifted.

  Lock helped Janice back down the slope. It had never occurred to him before, but if getting a wheelchair up a slope was an effort, getting it back down was an adventure. At the bottom, he could see Ty fully engaged in the seemingly impossible task of trying to make it look like he had nothing to do with Lock’s Toyota while standing right next to it.

  Lock made the introductions. Once those were out of the way, Lock, Ty and Don helped Janice into the car and then spent the next ten minutes collapsing the wheelchair and trying to load it into the trunk.

  ‘Shoulda brought one of the Yukons,’ Ty observed helpfully as they set off, the FBI surveillance vehicle slotting in behind them.

  Lock drove, Janice next to him in the passenger seat, giving Ty and Don a chance to buddy up in the back.

  ‘You must really like animals, huh?’ said Ty.

  ‘Guess I do.’

  ‘I had a dog once,’ Ty continued, earning a please don’t go there glance from Lock in the rear-view. ‘Man, I loved that dog.’

  ‘That the one who died at a ripe old age?’ Lock asked, pressing down on the gas, eager to get to the bar.

  ‘Nah, I’m thinking of a different one. Y’know, the pit bull. I’m sure I told you this story, right?’

  ‘Which is why I don’t need to hear it again.’

  Lock glanced in the mirror. The JTTF SUV was still behind them, keeping the regulation half-block distance.

  Ty smiled at Don. ‘Lock gets real emotional when I tell it. It was kind of an Old Shep type of situation.’

  ‘Well, here we are,’ interrupted Lock, turning so hard into the bar’s parking lot that Ty and Don were thrown around on the back seat.

  Having helped Don wrestle the wheelchair from the truck, Lock left him to reassemble it. Then he pulled Ty out of earshot. ‘What are you doing, Tyrone? These people love animals more than they do people and you’re gonna tell him about shooting your dog?’