Fire Point

by Sean Black

  They skirted around the edge of the building. Steps down to a door that opened into the garage. Lock pulled the door open. Ty spun through first, and gun-faced the empty space. Lock followed. He kicked out his heel to slow the closing door. It closed with a gentle click. They stood in the semi-gloom and listened. There were four rows of cars, each row two-thirds occupied by vehicles. Facing them was an elevator for residents who didn’t want to take the stairs.

  Slowly, Lock and Ty moved through the vehicles. There was no sign of anyone. On the other side of the parking lot, there was another set of stairs, and another door that led out to the other side of the block. The shooter would have had plenty of time to make it there before they arrived.

  They walked toward it. Took the steps, opened the door and stepped out into bright sunshine. Azure blue water lapped gently against the boats tied up in the marina. Nothing and no one stirred. Besides the wail of sirens in the near-distance, everything was perfectly quiet.

  16

  Although two shots had been fired, including one that looked like it had been aimed at Tarian Griffiths’s head, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department didn’t seem all that interested. The two officers who had responded went through the motions, but that was about it. Extra units arrived to search the complex for the gunman; they interviewed everyone present and took pictures. When that was done, they hooked their thumbs into their belts and began to study the carpet.

  Lock wasn’t entirely surprised. The empty apartment was a crime scene without a victim. There was no blood, no sign that anyone had been so much as injured, never mind killed. The only damage had been to the glass doors, the wall, and Tarian’s ankle, which appeared to be sprained rather than fractured.

  The possible involvement or whereabouts of Marcus Griffiths didn’t seem to trouble them much either. Given that his mother had spoken to him not so long ago, he couldn’t be considered a missing person. When it came to someone who had reached the age of majority, a certain amount of time had to elapse before the police would even register them as missing. As far as law enforcement was concerned, it added up to a bunch of not very much. If they’d found Marcus dead, or Lock hadn’t taken Tarian to the floor and she’d been shot, it would have been a very different story. But he wasn’t dead, and she hadn’t been shot, and cops didn’t get overly excited with things that might have happened. Hypothetical mayhem wasn’t popular with prosecutors and thus tended to be unworthy of court time.

  Lock, on the other hand, had a whole world of concerns that he hadn’t had when he’d first responded to Tarian’s request for help. They went nicely with his growing sense of unease. Not just about Marcus, his state of mind, where he might be and what he might be thinking, but about the whole deal. Tarian had contacted him to keep an eye on her son, he’d been reluctant to help and then this had happened. The son missing, a couple of gunshots, and someone trying to take her out.

  It was all way too coincidental. And Lock didn’t believe in coincidences. Not the convenient kind anyway. Not the kind that worked in your favor. The kind that messed you up, those he believed, but the type that got you what you wanted? Not so much.

  With what had just gone down, it was pretty certain that he and Ty were going to be unable to do a one-eighty and walk away. Now Tarian and her husband needed his and Ty’s close-protection services. And they still had a missing son out there. If Tarian Griffiths’s mission had been to get him onboard, it had been accomplished. Not that he believed she was connected to the shooter who had tried to blow her Botoxed head clean off her shoulders. But he couldn’t help wondering.

  His mind flashed back to the vehicle that had followed them earlier. Minutes later, someone had been taking pot shots at them from below. Could it have been the same two? The timing suggested it couldn’t. They had been behind Lock, Ty and Tarian on the way from the restaurant to the apartment complex. To get ahead of them, and in place to fire the first shot through the apartment window, would have taken speed and planning.

  Then again, Lock thought, the two men who had fled the scene of the shooting clearly knew a fast way of leaving the complex. If they had slipped in the same way while Tarian and then Lock were dealing with complex security at the guard booth it was conceivable that they could have been in place by the time Lock was walking toward the apartment.

  But why a shot into an empty apartment? The second shot had been professional, and a professional didn’t fire without a target in their sights. The only thing that Lock could think was that it had been some kind of a come-on. A single shot that was intended to draw someone in. If the shooter knew Tarian was looking for her son, was worried about him, then a shot into the apartment would likely draw her in to see if he’d been hurt. Maybe they just hadn’t factored in that Lock and Ty would be making first entry.

  Lock took another look around the apartment. Too many questions. Too many imponderables. In the kitchen that lay just off the hallway, Ty had Tarian sat down at the two-person table and was taking her through some breathing exercises, trying to get her to calm down without resorting to the pills she’d immediately dug out of her Chanel bag when she’d finished talking to the Sheriff’s Department. Lock and Ty needed her present and correct, rather than whacked out on Xanax, if they were going to figure out what the hell was going on. But even without drugs, Lock had to concede that she wasn’t making much sense. Coming within an inch of getting your head blown off could do that to you.

  Stepping into the kitchen, Lock was struck by how clean and tidy it was. It was not the type of scene he would readily have associated with a kid of that age who was living alone. The sink was devoid of dishes, dirty or otherwise. The counters were spotless. Even the floor was free of the usual detritus. Lock started to open cabinets. Clean, everything neatly stacked. He crossed to the refrigerator. As the light blinked on, he was confronted with something that was almost more surprising than the two gunshots. Not only did the interior sparkle, it was filled with fresh produce. Kale, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, kiwis, strawberries, and all manner of other fruit and vegetables, along with coconut water and soya milk. Lock had seen some messed-up stuff in his time, but a twenty-year-old college kid who ate like Gwyneth Paltrow?

  Holding the refrigerator door open, he glanced over his shoulder at Tarian. ‘You did something right anyway. At this age, I was living on a diet of ramen noodles and Twinkies.’

  Tarian stared at the contents and shook her head. ‘That’s new. I’ve never seen Marcus so much as eat a banana without me having to nag him.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lock, ‘at least you know he’s been looking after himself.’

  Her face fell. Lock immediately felt bad about saying it. It had come out glib and uncaring when he’d intended to sound positive. If one of the worries was that Tarian’s son was a suicide risk, Lock had wanted to highlight the fact that people contemplating ending their lives tended not to take care of their diet and nutrition.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She shook her head again, a little too quickly, like she had bees buzzing about inside that she was trying to dislodge. ‘It’s okay. I know what you mean.’ She raised her head a little, and the sun from the small kitchen window caught the side of her face. ‘He started working out a few months ago. Running. Cycling. I think he may even have started going to a gym somewhere down near Sunset.’

  Across the table from her, Lock noticed Ty perk up. ‘You know what it was called?’ Ty asked.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Tarian. ‘He mentioned it in passing.’

  ‘Maybe if we got a list you’d be able to pick it out,’ Lock pressed.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Tarian, as they heard a knock at the apartment door. Ty rose from his seat. Lock closed the refrigerator and raised his hand to indicate to Ty that he would get it. Perhaps the prodigal son had finally returned. Or maybe it was the gunman, come back to finish the job now that the LA County Sheriff’s Department were no longer on the scene.

  Drawing his SIG Sauer 226, Loc
k stepped out of the kitchen into the corridor. His back flat to the wall on the hinge side of the door, he said quietly, ‘It’s open. Come on in.’

  He raised his SIG as the handle turned slowly, the door opened, and a man walked in. His face drained of blood as he stared at Lock.

  ‘Who the fuck are you, and where’s my wife?’ said Teddy Griffiths.

  17

  As far as Lock was concerned, Teddy Griffiths had arrived with a question mark hanging over his head. After the attempted shooting and attendant mayhem, Tarian had finally thought to contact him. The delay itself was telling in terms of family dynamics, but that wasn’t what had troubled Lock.

  What niggled at him was the trouble they’d had contacting Teddy, who had told his wife he was playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. The manager in the pro shop had informed Tarian that Mr Griffiths was out on the course and that they would try to get a message to him, but that it might take some time. So far, so ho-hum. A lot of married men played golf. Not always for the love of trying to propel a small white ball around a park with tiny holes, but precisely because it allowed them time away from their domestic duties. Being uncontactable was the point. So Tarian being unable to get in touch with him meant nothing.

  But then, about a half-hour later, he had called Tarian’s cell phone. Lock could hear him bellowing at her and caught almost every word of the conversation. Teddy had told his wife he had just finished up and was walking off the eighteenth hole. He was coming straight there.

  Again, all very normal. The part that was hard to explain came about fifteen minutes later when Teddy had knocked at the apartment door.

  Even with light traffic, which was almost unheard of in Los Angeles, where the freeways ran close to capacity during daylight, the drive from Riviera to this part of the Marina would take a minimum of a half-hour.

  The man either had a time machine, a very fast helicopter or hadn’t actually been on the golf course at Riviera when his wife had called. And even if he had been able to get there that fast, Lock was fairly sure that a country-club-type course like Riviera didn’t allow members to tee off in Bermuda shorts, sneakers and a T-shirt. Teddy Griffiths might have been spending the afternoon enjoying himself, but Lock was fairly certain it hadn’t involved golf.

  Whether guilt was a factor in his pushing Lock aside, rushing to his wife and throwing his arms around her, Lock couldn’t be sure, but he wouldn’t have ruled it out. As Teddy made noises of comfort and Tarian burst into tears, Lock waved Ty back out into the corridor.

  ‘You think he was playing golf?’ Lock asked his partner.

  Ty gave a languid shrug. ‘Might have involved balls and holes, but taking ten minutes to get from the Palisades to the Marina?’

  Lock shot his partner a ‘You have to go there?’ look.

  It was met with yet another languid shrug. ‘All I’m saying is, Teddy boy may have a hobby, but it ain’t golf.’

  The wind had picked up outside. Fractured window blinds fluttered through the hole left in the glass door by the gunshot. Yeah, thought Lock, a guy facing a costly divorce? It was an old, old story.

  Teddy Griffiths appeared from the kitchen. His cheeks were still flushed, and sweat trickled down from a mop of dishwater blond hair. At five ten, he was carrying an extra hundred pounds. What Lock guessed was his usual bluff good-old-boy demeanor seemed to have been stripped away.

  When he spoke, his voice was remarkably soft.

  ‘Mr Lock, can I speak with you a moment?’

  18

  Teddy placed a hand on Lock’s shoulder as they walked down the corridor. Lock stopped walking and looked at the hand. It dropped back to Teddy’s side. He could still smell the waft of stale sweat oozing from the man’s skin. Wherever Teddy’s hands had been, Lock didn’t want them near him.

  ‘So, what do you want to say to me?’ he asked the man.

  Teddy sucked in some air and puffed out his cheeks. He did a slow exhale. ‘I’m worried about my wife.’

  Lock kept a straight face. It took no little effort. ‘I’m sure. That was a close call. Do you have any idea who might want to harm her or your stepson?’

  Teddy shook his head. ‘This is way beyond anything.’ He drew another deep breath. He was trying for the air of a man who had reached the boundary of what he understood about life. To someone less cynical than Lock, it might have worked. But all Lock could think was, Cut the bull crap and save us all some time, would you? Instead he said, ‘Mr Griffiths?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know that kid of hers. I mean, I’ve tried. The Lord only knows I’ve tried. Tried talking to him, not talking to him, taking him out with me, leaving him alone.’ Teddy leaned in, giving Lock another burst of body odor, and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘He’s just effing weird. He gets this look in his eyes sometimes. Maybe he took a shot at his mom.’

  Lock didn’t respond. Teddy stared down at the faded hall carpet. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. He loves his mom. It’s just that look he has. I got a hundred fifty pounds on him, but that kid, I think he could just snap.’

  From the open apartment door, Lock could hear Ty and Tarian Griffiths talking. She appeared to have recovered from her shock and was now bombarding him with questions. Now was not the time for Lock to be having this particular talk with Teddy Griffiths.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I can do. I was already talking to your wife about helping you with this situation,’ said Lock, though he didn’t have much of a clue what the situation was, apart from being a hot mess with extra hot mess thrown on top and a whole load of trouble garnish on the side. ‘If someone is threatening your family, it doesn’t matter yet that I don’t know the who and whys of it. Ty and I can provide close-security protection. Make sure you’re safe. And while we’re setting that up for you, we can go look for Marcus. Maybe if we find him, we’ll figure out what all this is about.’

  Teddy’s sweaty paw took another swipe at Lock’s shoulder. For a terrible second, Lock thought he was going to try to hug him. He took a precautionary step away. Teddy settled for a vigorous handshake. ‘I can’t thank you enough. Not enough.’

  ‘Shall we go collect your wife and get you folks home?’ said Lock, ushering Teddy Griffiths ahead of him. He dug in his pocket for some hand sanitizer, squirted some onto his palms and rubbed them together.

  Back inside the apartment, Ty was standing with Tarian. He had picked up the laptop computer that had been lying on the table. ‘Mrs Griffiths wanted us to take a look at this,’ he said to Lock. ‘I’d already suggested it wasn’t a good idea to leave a computer in an unsecured apartment.’

  Lock looked at Tarian. They were riding a line by taking the computer ‒ even with Tarian’s permission. Marcus Griffiths was her son, but he was also an adult. He had a right to privacy. Technically the laptop was his property. ‘You sure?’ Lock asked her.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said.

  19

  Tarian and Teddy Griffiths lived on a quiet street in up-scale Brentwood, along with the two kids they’d had together. The Griffiths home, which had just about the required land to be considered an estate, was a few doors down from where O. J. Simpson had lived at the time of his wife’s murder on North Rockingham Avenue.

  Lock pulled into the long, meandering driveway, a tinge of apprehension clinging to him, along with the odor of Teddy’s funk. He was hoping the ghost of one of LA’s most infamous former residents wasn’t some kind of omen for what lay ahead of him and Ty. He was still thinking about the Oedipal nightmare Teddy had hinted at. Was it misdirection or something more sinister? If you’d ended up as a person who struggled with the world as an adult, many people chose to lay the blame at a parent’s door.

  Lock had always regarded such thinking as an easy out. When you grew up, or even if you didn’t but your age ticked over to eighteen, then you took responsibility for what you did, if not wholly for who you were. Nobody could fully control who they were, but they could at least at
tempt to behave like a decent person.

  He reversed his Audi into a space between Tarian’s car, which Ty had driven back with Tarian as passenger, and Teddy Griffiths’s mid-life-crisis automobile, a canary yellow Ferrari California. Ty was already escorting the couple through the front door where they had been met by an attentive Hispanic housekeeper. The kids were nowhere to be seen.

  Stepping out of the Audi, Lock snapped a few pictures of the house’s exterior with his iPhone. He also noted the security features, which he picked out with ease, something that was significant in itself. Easily noted cameras and alarms operated as a general deterrent. When there existed a real, credible threat, they tended to be more discreet. If you wanted to be aware someone was coming, you didn’t always want them to know you knew.

  The house was mock-Tudor in style, a fairly common theme in LA’s privileged enclaves where, by the standards of old Europe, the money was new. Walking along a single street in Brentwood, you could go from ultra-modern contemporary to Tuscan villa and on to olde-English cottage in a single block. LA was the be-who-you-want-to-be town. The only problem, as Lock could see it, was the number of people who had chosen to reinvent themselves as assholes.

  Leaving his exterior recce for the time being, Lock walked through the front door and into a large open hallway with a sweeping staircase. Off to one side there was a vast living room that faced out over the front gardens. At a wet bar near the back of the room, Teddy Griffiths was fixing himself a Scotch and soda that was nine parts Scotch to one part soda. He looked up. ‘Where are my manners? You guys want a belt of the good stuff?’ he asked Lock.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Lock, curtly.

  Heading back out of the room, Lock found Ty in the kitchen with Tarian. She had clearly found a stash of Xanax and was palming two pills while filling a glass from a stand-alone water dispenser. She threw them back with some water and sighed with relief. Lock had the feeling that Teddy’s drink and his wife’s pill-popping weren’t self-medication strategies they reserved for extreme situations.