by Sean Black
‘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.
A commotion on the stairs announced the arrival of the two Griffiths children. They seemed to part run, part wrestle their way into the kitchen.
‘Mom,’ said a cute blond boy, who, Lock guessed, was seven-year-old Fletcher, ‘she won’t let me in her room. She says it’s girls only.’
His sister, equally cute and blonde, nine-year-old Carrie, stuck her hands on her hips and struck a defiant pose. ‘Girls rule. Boys drool.’
Ty pursed his lips. ‘She’s kinda got a point. We do drool.’
The two children looked up at the huge former Marine, and said, in perfect sync, ‘Who are you?’
‘This is Mr Johnson and that is Mr Lock. They’re going to be around for a little while helping Mommy and Daddy out with some stuff.’
‘What kind of stuff?’ asked Carrie, hands still on hips, her laser-like blue eyes moving from Lock to Ty and back. She’d make one hell of an interrogator, Lock thought.
‘Hey, is that a real gun? Cool!’ said Fletcher, hopping onto a kitchen stool as he eyed Ty’s shoulder holster with wide-eyed excitement.
The little boy’s question prompted Lock to catch Tarian’s eye. ‘I’m going to need to run through a few things with you and Mr Griffiths.’
The Xanax kicking in, Tarian nodded while her facial expression indicated that she’d not actually processed what Lock had just said.
‘It’s better if the kids aren’t present,’ said Lock, trying to keep it light.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Tarian, turning to the housekeeper. ‘Rosa, could you?’
As the kids protested ‒‘Hey, I wanna know what’s going on!’, ‘Not fair. We always miss the real fun’ ‒ Rosa hustled them out and Tarian followed Lock and Ty into the living room. Teddy had already done some serious damage to his first highball. Another couple and Lock would have to leave asking any more questions until the morning.
He cut to the chase. ‘Firearms,’ he began. ‘Do you have any in the house? I’ll need type and location.’
Teddy shook his head. ‘Take Tarian to the range sometimes, but won’t have a gun in the house.’
He must have read Lock’s and Ty’s somewhat puzzled expressions because he immediately followed up with ‘Texan, right? You think I’d be driving round in a pick-up with a gun rack and a moose head on the hood?’
He was right: that was what Lock had assumed. But he wasn’t going to admit it. ‘A lot of high-net-worth individuals have at least one firearm in their home for protection.’
‘See?’ said Tarian.
Clearly Lock had touched upon another fault line between them.
‘Really?’ said Teddy, belligerence creeping into his voice. ‘You want a gun in the house with Marcus running around, and the kids upstairs?’
Lock opened both palms. ‘If you can both stay with me here, this won’t take long. We’ll get to Marcus in a moment.’
Lock ran through a quick set of standard questions, and the Griffithses did their best to answer with only a couple of minor detours into areas of marital discord. How long had the housekeeper worked for them and had she been background checked? Did anyone else work for them or regularly visit? A gardener? Pool boy? What about their neighbors? What was the family’s daily routine?
At one point Teddy seemed frustrated by the questioning. He looked up from mixing his second drink and said as much.
‘Patterns are important in our line of work,’ Lock explained. ‘If someone wants to hurt you, then one of our first tip-offs is something that’s out of the ordinary so we have to establish what ordinary is in your day-to-day lives.’
Teddy stirred his drink as Tarian threw herself onto a white couch next to a huge marble fireplace that was weighed down with family photos. Lock noted the absence of Marcus in the images, which were mostly from vacations in various exotic locales.
‘I understand,’ said Teddy.
Lock moved through what they knew about the security system they had in place. It was, as he had expected, fairly standard. Sufficient to push a prospective break-in artist toward a softer touch, but nothing that would offer any real resistance to someone who was determined to do the family harm. If they were to stay in the house, Lock would have to improvise some kind of a panic room.
The checklist complete, he circled back toward Marcus. He had already heard Tarian’s take. Now he wanted to hear what Teddy thought but he didn’t want it to escalate into a blazing row, which he had a feeling was almost inevitable.
‘Mrs Griffiths,’ he said, ‘would you mind showing Tyrone the alarm system? And also, Ty, if you could recce upstairs, see if we have a space that would fill the gap as a temporary safe area.’ Lock had learned a while back that the term ‘panic room’ tended, unsurprisingly, to instill panic in clients.
‘Certainly,’ said Tarian. Ty followed her out.
Lock waited until they were out of earshot.
‘Sure I can’t get you one, Mr Lock?’ asked Teddy.
‘How old was Marcus when you two met?’ Lock asked.
Teddy closed his eyes, his head lolling a little from the booze, his face flushed. ‘Let me see, he would have been about twelve.’ His eyes opened. He shot Lock a defensive look. ‘He was already seeing a therapist when I got together with Tarian. I tried my best, y’know, but . . . Our two are great, just normal kids so it’s not like it’s . . .’
Teddy trailed off. The more he talked, the more Lock was beginning to feel some sympathy for Marcus, a young man he hadn’t even met. To go through a marriage split was hard enough on most kids, then to see your mother have kids with another man, that wasn’t easy either. But for those kids to be regarded as ‘normal’ while you were the freak . . . And Lock had the feeling that Teddy made his feelings plenty clear, even if he hadn’t necessarily said it out loud.
‘It’s not like it was your fault?’ Lock said.
‘I don’t mean it like that. But, yeah, I guess. I mean, his dad is kind of high strung. Geeky type. And you’ve seen Tarain gobble down those pills like they were M&Ms.’ He rattled the ice in his glass. ‘I’m rambling on here. Tell me to shut up or something.’
‘Talk to me about Marcus over the past year or so. Something’s changed, from what your wife said. He’s become more aggressive. Threatening? Walk me through it.’
The bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue clanked hard against the rim of the highball glass. Teddy flinched, a drunk who didn’t like to make it too obvious. ‘It started off with Marcus spending all his time on that computer of his. That was what he always did. But it really got obsessive. We tried talking to him about it, but he wouldn’t open up, not even to Dr Levi.’
‘That’s his therapist?’ Lock asked.
‘The one before his current one, yeah. His current shrink is a guy named Stentz,’ said Teddy. ‘Anyway, about eighteen months ago, Marcus suddenly started going out. Y’ know down to the Sunset Strip. Hollywood. Downtown. He asked his mom for new clothes. It was like some kind of a miracle. It was like this was a new Marcus. He was clean. He was even coming to the club with me to play a little golf. Working out. Being a regular kid his age.’
‘What happened?’ Lock asked. ‘People usually don’t change that suddenly.’
Teddy shook his head and splashed some soda onto the marble counter of the bar before adjusting his aim back toward his glass. ‘I gotta be honest with you, Lock, Tarian and I were so freaking relieved that we didn’t want to ask too many questions.’
‘So everything’s going great?’ prompted Lock.
‘I think we maybe got our hopes up too soon. Tarian was pushing for him to e
nroll at USC. He always had the grades for it. It wasn’t like I had to write any checks. Academically he was always an A student. That’s when the problems started. It was like it was too much for him. He started bothering that girl and it all went to shit from there. Anytime either of us tried to talk to him, he’d just get crazy. Cuss in front of the kids. Cuss out his mom. Storm out of the house. That was when I suggested I get him his own place. I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I was worried he might go too far when he got angry. Or that I would. That someone would get hurt. And now this . . .’
Lock wanted to ask about moving therapists but stuck a pin in that subject and circled back to the period when Marcus the moth became Marcus the butterfly. ‘When he started going out, who was he hanging with?’
Teddy’s eyes narrowed as he struggled to access that part of his memory, the booze twisting the passage of time. ‘There was a bunch of ’em. They all kind of blended together. Real nice kids, though. Really fun. They even joked about taking me with them to chase tail on the Strip.’
Lock’s face must have betrayed something because Teddy straightened up. ‘Not that I would. I mean, I’m married ‒ we were joking around.’
‘Remember any names?’ Lock pressed.
‘Not really. Kids that age, it’s all “bro” and “dude”. They kind of had their own little language going on. Man, I must be really out of touch because most of it went way over my head. “Negging”. “AFCs”. “LMR”. Like all this inside baseball jargon.’
‘Anyone from the group that stood out from the pack?’
Something clicked finally. Lock could see it in Teddy’s shift of expression and the smile that crept across his face. ‘I think the leader, if you will, was this Asian kid. I always assumed they were kind of geeky but this young man . . . Party animal. Real charming too. Think he had his eye on Tarian.’
Lock noted the ‘they’. ‘How’d that go down with Marcus?’
Teddy kept smiling. ‘Usually it wouldn’t have. Hell, the kid never liked me even holding his mom’s hand. But it was like Marcus was in thrall. Is that the expression?’
Lock nodded.
‘Yeah,’ Teddy went on. ‘It was like Marcus hero-worshipped that kid.’
‘And you never caught a name?’
‘Not unless “bro” counts as a name, no.’
20
They worked their way down the channel in the darkness. Krank led the way. Discovering the route into the complex where Marcus lived had been part of a game. One day, instead of driving in, like he usually did, Krank had decided to try something different. A big part of the lifestyle he’d discovered through pick-up had been about approaching things differently. There was a playfulness to it. So, rather than knocking on the front door, when Krank visited someone, he would find a different way of arriving.
One afternoon he’d been sarging ‒ a term in the community for trying to pick up ‒ cute tourist girls on the Venice boardwalk when Marcus had called. His car was in the shop so he’d walked all the way down along the beach and canals to the Marina. That was when he’d found the route into the complex from the ocean side. It wasn’t even hard. It was just that people in LA didn’t walk so no one thought to use this way. When he’d shimmied up onto Marcus’s balcony he’d thought the kid was going to have a heart attack.
There was another side to his prowling, though. One that, at first, he hadn’t been proud of but which he had come to accept as part of who he was – as part of his inner hunter-gatherer man. He had begun to prowl at night, without the rest of the group.
It had begun semi-randomly with a girl who had blown him off after one date. He realized later that she had only agreed to go out with him as a joke with her friends. She had known from the jump that he was a pick-up artist. She was curious, but immune to all the game he threw at her. After the date, when she had spent fifteen minutes making fun of him and he’d finally lost his cool and stormed off, he found that he couldn’t help thinking about her. It was stupid. It went against the code. But there it was.
He had tracked down the house where she still lived with her parents out in La Canada on Google Maps. One night he had parked his car a few streets away and gone on the prowl, through backyards and past shimmering dark blue swimming-pools lit from underneath in the darkness.
How could he describe the thrill of that night? It was like the first time he had gone out sarging and it had worked. Prowling through the early-morning streets of La Canada had been a rush beyond even that. He had felt special, like the only man who was truly alive at that hour.
From time to time a motion-activated outside light would snap on. Or a yappy dog would bark. He would start, feeling a surge of fear at the possibility of discovery. He would step out of the pool of light, or the dog would quiet, and he would be at peace again.
After a time he started carrying treats for any dogs, and was adept at spotting lights, sensors and other security features. But standing outside the girl’s bedroom that first night had been like a junkie’s first hit, magical and sick-making at the same time. He hadn’t done anything to her. That had never been the intention. It had been enough, back then, to know that he could.
Tonight was a little different. He had MG and Loser with him and they were heading to Marcus’s apartment to get some stuff.
Krank held up his right hand so that the moonlight from the ocean caught his fingertips. Nearby, a boat strained against its ropes as a swell tugged it back from the dock. Krank and the other two faded back into the shadows as a lone security man walked by.
They gave him time to pass and started moving again. In under two minutes they reached the green space under MG’s balcony. It was enough of a climb to focus the mind. They stared up at the balcony. Krank knew that both he and MG had to be thinking the same thing. He looked over at MG. ‘How could you have missed her?’ he asked.
MG shook his head. ‘I didn’t. It was that guy pushing her out of the way.’
Krank choked back a laugh. ‘Fucking with you, dude. You did good. Now, are we gonna do this thing or not?’
With Loser acting as a look-out, Krank gave MG a boost and he began the climb, hand over hand, toward the edge of the balcony. Loser gave Krank a boost and soon he and MG were pulling back the board that had been placed across the shot-out glass door.
They ducked through into the apartment. There was enough light from outside that they didn’t need the Maglite Krank was carrying. He stood in the living room while MG went to find it.
A few moments later, MG was back from his bedroom. ‘It’s gone,’ he said.
‘You’re sure?’ said Krank, panic rising in his chest.
‘I know where I left it, and it’s not there,’ said MG, running a hand through his curly mop of hair.
‘Maybe someone moved it,’ said Krank.
MG shook his head. ‘I bet my mom took it. You know, so it wouldn’t be stolen or something.’
‘Then,’ said Krank, ‘you’ll have to go get it.’
‘How?’ asked MG. ‘It’s not like coming here. They have cameras, alarms.’
MG was so dumb sometimes, thought Krank. He always overreacted. Made things bigger than they were. ‘Who said anything about breaking in? It’s your home, too, right?’
‘Now?’
This time Krank did laugh. He held up his wrist so that MG could see the luminous dial of his watch. ‘No, not now. It’s too late. In the morning.’
‘We heading back to the house?’
Krank glanced down at his wrist. It was a little after eleven thirty. The Strip would just have started to get moving. It had been a day filled with tension. It was time to party.
21
In the half light of the Griffiths family residence, Lock walked into the living room to find Ty standing by the window, peering out into the garden. Ty glanced round, though he barely needed to: both men could pick out the sound of the other’s footfall from some distance.
‘We good?’ Ty asked.
‘Kids ar
e asleep. Tarian will probably sleep till midday and hubby’s got a serious whisky snore going on,’ said Lock, joining Tyrone by the window. ‘You?’
‘Did a full circuit outside. Quiet neighborhood. Not even midnight and I think everyone within two blocks is in bed asleep.’
‘Early to bed, early to rise so they can stay focused on making money,’ said Lock.
Ty stepped away from the window, and took a seat next to the fireplace. The last embers of a fire Lock had started earlier were glowing among the ashes. ‘Guess that money’s all well and good until something like this comes along. What’d Teddy say?’
Lock stayed by the window. He traced the shadows in the garden, trying to map them in his mind. ‘Seems like Marcus fell in with a party crowd a little while back. Teddy thought it was the beginning of the end of their problems but not so much.’
‘Kid doesn’t seem like a party guy. Not from what everyone’s saying anyway,’ said Ty. ‘But if he fell in with kids who were partying real hard that could explain some of this.’
‘Explain what?’ Lock asked.
‘Well, partying in LA usually means drugs. Say Marcus is bi-polar or some shit. He starts dropping whatever these kids are taking. Wrong drug for a kid with mental-health issues? That’s like throwing a hand grenade into the middle of a fire. Shit’s gonna get messy real quick.’
Lock hadn’t thought of the drug angle, yet it made perfect sense. Marcus is withdrawn. He falls in with what they used to call a ‘fast’ crowd. He starts using and pretty soon he has some serious psychological problems. With all the designer drugs floating around, who knew how it would affect someone like him? Ty was right. There was stuff out there now that was lab-engineered and able to part your hair straight down the middle with the first sniff, snort or pill. It would easily explain the mood swings and aggression that both Tarian and Teddy had talked about.