Fire Point

by Sean Black

  Ty’s ice water was delivered with the flourish befitting an eight-hundred-dollars-a-night beachfront hotel. He took a sip, put it to one side and went back to reading the court document. After a time, he looked up. ‘Who’s the girl?’‘Don’t know for sure, apart from what it says there. Freshman at USC. Grew up in Orange County. Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Had some of the same classes as our boy. Guess that’s where he ran into her.’

  Ty rubbed at his face. ‘If they were in the same classes and he has a restraining order that prohibits him being within two hundred yards of her, that might explain him dropping out. You think the mom knows?’

  Lock glanced past Ty to the white-painted french doors that led out onto the terrace. ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask her.’

  11

  More than a few male guests, including those seated with wives and girlfriends, checked Tarian out as she crossed the terrace toward them. Lock guessed that, behind his Oakleys, Ty was one of them. If she was fazed by the male attention, she didn’t show it. Lock guessed she was used to that kind of reaction to the point where it barely registered.

  He and Ty stood as she reached them. Lock did the introductions. Tarian sat down. The waiter was dismissed with the back of her hand and a curt ‘In a moment.

  ‘So?’ she began. ‘Do we have an agreement that you’ll help my son?’

  Lock picked up the folder and tossed it across the table at her. ‘We did. But I can’t work for someone who lies to me.’

  ‘It was stupid of me not to tell you,’ said Tarian, her eyes fixed on Lock. ‘I thought that if you knew you might not be prepared to help. I didn’t think you’d be amenable to helping someone who’d been accused of stalking.’

  ‘A little more than accused,’ said Lock, tapping a finger down on the folder. ‘Judges don’t hand those out for nothing.’

  ‘And I’m taking it seriously, Mr Lock. Though I do have to say that . . . Well, Marcus gets obsessional about things. And sometimes he doesn’t realize the effect that can have on other people. He never actually threatened this young woman. He was just overly persistent.’

  Ty was looking at Lock. ‘That so?’

  Lock nodded. ‘I went out and spoke to her last night. He never threatened her, but she still felt threatened. Not sure how useful a distinction that is, Mrs Griffiths.’

  ‘What else did she say?’ Tarian said. ‘Only we’re trying to sort something out with the administration at USC to see if Marcus might be able to return in the spring.’

  ‘And I hope you do,’ said Lock. ‘But I’m afraid we can’t help you.’

  ‘Can’t?’ asked Tarian. ‘Or won’t?’

  ‘We protect people from others, not from themselves,’ said Lock. ‘You need a mental-health professional, not private security. And I don’t say that to be unkind.’

  Tarian leaned forward, lowering her voice. ‘Teddy’s spoken about that. About having Marcus . . .’ She hesitated. Lock had noticed that, unlike cancer or heart disease, when people spoke about mental illness they tended to be more careful about their choice of words. It was as if, even after all this time, the stigma wouldn’t go away. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘my husband thinks Marcus might be better off if he was placed in some kind of secure facility. For his own good. But until he does something . . .’

  Right now, Lock couldn’t shake off his unease. The girl he’d spoken to at USC, the one who had been stalked by Marcus Griffiths, had told him way more than he was going to share with Tarian.

  ‘By which time it will be too late,’ said Lock.

  ‘I don’t want that to happen,’ said Tarian. ‘Please, if you would just meet with my son. Perhaps if someone such as yourselves were to recommend that Marcus needs residential care it might be taken more seriously.’

  12

  Ty got into the passenger seat of Lock’s R6 and closed the door. They were waiting for Tarian. They would follow her car the short distance to her son’s apartment in Marina Del Rey.

  It was hot. High eighties. That was well above average for Santa Monica, where the ocean breeze tended to keep things nice and pleasant. A heatwave was predicted. It would get up to the nineties here on the coast and the hundreds out in the Valley.

  A grey Mercedes with tinted windows appeared. Tarian had the driver’s window lowered so they could see it was her. She cruised past them. Lock pulled out behind her and into the traffic on Ocean Avenue.

  ‘So we assess him like we would any other external threat to a principal?’ said Ty, one arm dangling out of the window as they drove past a couple of young women in denim shorts and crop tops rollerblading down the sidewalk.

  Lock buried the gas pedal to make a light and stay with Tarian’s Mercedes. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  ‘What’s going on here, Ryan? Is there something you’re not telling me about this?’ What did that co-ed at USC tell you?’

  Lock’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and the black BMW sedan that had been following them since they’d left the hotel. He glanced at his partner. ‘It’s more what she didn’t say than what she did.’

  13

  Lock pulled in behind Tarian’s Mercedes as she talked to the lone security guard manning the entrance to the apartment complex. Every non-resident visitor had to be signed in. They had to give details of who they were, and whom they were there to see. Their vehicle details were recorded too.

  Thirty seconds later it was Lock’s turn. The security guard was Hispanic, in his late forties, with an easy smile and a professional manner. It was a feature of Marina Del Rey that if you saw someone who wasn’t white they were likely working rather than living there. Lock nudged the Audi past him and followed the Mercedes past a series of boat docks and jetties. The BMW had fallen away.

  The Mercedes turned right, and disappeared down a ramp into an underground parking lot. Lock followed, pulling into a visitor’s spot as Tarian got out.

  He and Ty walked her to the elevator. ‘Does your son know we’re coming?’ he asked.

  ‘I called ahead to tell him,’ she answered.

  ‘And what did you say about who we are and why we’re here?’

  She snapped off her sunglasses as the elevator doors opened. ‘He knows who you are, but I said the family’d had some kidnapping threats and that you were here to talk about that.’

  Lock didn’t like it. He wasn’t opposed to telling a white lie once in a while, but in general he believed in being honest with people. For a start, the truth was a whole lot easier to remember. And if Marcus had issues, trust would be key. Lying to a volatile person meant you were taking a risk.

  He put a hand across the elevator door, preventing it from closing. Tarian had already stepped inside and was waiting for him and Ty.

  ‘That’s not gonna do it. You tell your son the truth or we’re out of here,’ he said to her.

  She looked like she was about to argue, but decided against it. Her eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll tell him I’m worried about him, and you’re here to make sure he stays safe. How about that?’

  Lock let the door go and stepped into the elevator with Ty. Tarian hit the button for the third floor. The doors closed.

  ‘And the kidnapping threats?’ Ty asked. ‘You already mentioned those, correct?’

  ‘A family like ours always has some level of threat.’

  ‘Okay, that works. But from now on in, the truth?’ said Lock.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Tarian, as the elevator stopped, the doors opened ‒ and somewhere down the corridor a gunshot rang out from behind an apartment door.

  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 the 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.