The Innocent: The New Ryan Lock Novel (13 page)

‘With?’ asked Ty. She had obviously taken him for a reporter. He looked around the crowded bar. ‘I’m not with anyone.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

He took another sip of bourbon. He was going to have to make it last. He planned on driving back out to the Shaw house later to try again to find Malik, and he didn’t want to give the local cops an easy DUI collar.

He looked at the woman standing with him. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Kelly,’ she said, putting out her hand for him to shake.

‘I’m Ty. Short for Tyrone. Listen, do you want to take a ride with me?’

She raised her eyebrows, then her glass. ‘Hey, I don’t know what one beer gets you where you’re from …’

Ty smiled despite himself. ‘Not like that.’

Ty started the engine as Kelly scooted into the passenger seat, and shut the door. He buried the gas, and Kelly was thrown back in her seat. She grabbed the dash to steady herself. ‘If you kill me and dump me in a ditch, my mom is going to be so pissed at me. I just want you to know that.’

‘Noted,’ said Ty.

They headed down the main street. Ty hung a left, heading for the Shaw house. He wanted a reporter to see what he had. He figured it was insurance in case the cops got really hinky with him.

‘So, private security, huh? What does that involve?’

He glanced over to see the red light of Kelly’s digital recorder. ‘Turn that thing off or I’m gonna toss it out the window,’ he told her.

She made a big show of clicking the off button, and jamming it into the pocket of her jacket. She had turned it back on. He was sure of it.

‘Off-off,’ he said. ‘In fact, take out the batteries and give them to me.’

She sighed, pulled the recorder back out, and dumped the two AAA batteries into his open palm. He hit the button to lower the window and tossed them out.

‘Hey!’ she protested.

‘I’ll buy you some more. What were you asking me?’

‘What do you do?’

Day to day, Ty didn’t give it a lot of thought. He doubted most people did. It was hardly a regular job in the commonly understood sense. But it did have its routines and patterns, especially when he and Lock were involved in a straight-up close-protection gig, like the one they’d been doing in New York. You ran walking drills, you moved people in vehicles using well-grooved embus/debus procedures, and you had a plan for actions on attack. ‘Lemme see. We protect people. Only we’re not the cops.’

‘Like bodyguards?’

Empty streets swept by outside. Everyone tucked up inside watching TV, having a late dinner or putting their kids to bed. Lock hated the word ‘bodyguard’, but Ty understood it was just a shorthand for most people.

‘Kind of like that,’ he said.

‘Who are you guarding here?’ Kelly asked.

‘Right now?’ said Ty. ‘No one. I’m looking for someone.’

‘The same person the cops are looking for?’

‘That’s right,’ said Ty, pulling in across the street from the Shaw house. ‘You want to get yourself an exclusive?’

She looked nervous. Ty killed the engine and got out. Kelly followed him across the street and down the side of the property.

Ty opened the back door that led into the kitchen. He turned. Kelly was standing outside. ‘Okay, for a “private security consultant” I met in a bar, you are seriously starting to freak me out.’

‘I can drive you back there, if you like. Up to you.’

She hesitated.

‘You want this story or not?’ he said, stepping into the kitchen.

She walked across to the door. ‘I already have the story.’

He went over to the dishwasher and pulled it open. It was empty. Ty felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He looked at Kelly as she came into the room. ‘No, you don’t.’

Ty closed the dishwasher and walked through into the hallway. ‘Malik? Malik, it’s me, Ty.’

He was met by silence. ‘Malik?’

He could see Kelly standing in the doorway. ‘He’s here?’ she whispered, natural curiosity obviously trumping her fear. Ty raised a hand to quiet her.

He started up the stairs and began to check the bedrooms. They were empty. A closet door was open. Ty was sure it had been closed when he had been here earlier. Moonlight filtered in through the windows. Clothes were strewn on the carpet.

He heard footsteps behind him. Kelly stood in the hallway, her eyes fixed on the bloody wall. ‘This where it happened?’

Ty straightened up. ‘Yeah, except it didn’t go down like the cops are saying. Come here.’

She moved deeper into the room.

‘See the blood?’ said Ty.

She nodded.

‘Cops said it was a shotgun Malik had just bought. Which explains the blood, except there would have been a lot more and it would have been spread out further. Plus they were lined up, and killed here, like ducks in a row.’ He glanced over to make sure she was listening. Her eyes were wide. She seemed fixated on the wall. He kept going: ‘Cops are telling a different story entirely. Saying how they were killed in their rooms. Not room, rooms. Like Malik went to where they were sleeping and killed them one by one. And that’s not even getting into how he wouldn’t have hurt his family. Hell, he never even spanked those kids. Not even once. Didn’t agree with it.’

Now she was looking at him. ‘How do you know? People do weird things all the time.’

‘I know because I grew up with him. He was my friend.’

‘That’s why you’re here?’ said Kelly.

‘That’s why I’m here. And it’s how I know this story about Malik murdering his own family is bullshit.’

‘So if he didn’t, then who did?’ said Kelly.

‘There’s a lot more going on. A lot that people don’t know.’

‘Hang on. I have a call.’ She pulled out a cell phone from her bag, and listened. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right there.’

‘What’s up?’ Ty asked her.

Kelly looked around the room. ‘Can you give me a ride?’

Three blue police sawhorses blocked the road that led to the Becker home. Ty lowered the window of the Audi as a young patrol cop ducked his head, rain splashing off his hat. ‘Road’s closed, sir. You’ll have to turn around.’

Kelly leaned over from the passenger seat. ‘You can let us through.’

The patrol cop nodded. ‘Sorry, didn’t see you there. Parking’s next to the front entrance. Official statement is in a half-hour.’

‘You got some pull, huh?’ said Ty, hitting the button to close the window. Two cops dragged the middle sawhorse back and the Audi nudged its way through the gap.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they weren’t going to let us in till they saw you.’

‘Everybody falls for a pretty face,’ said Kelly.

Ty parked next to a couple of other vehicles. ‘Thanks for the ride,’ she said. She put her hand on the door, ready to get out. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘You going to look into what I showed you?’ Ty asked her.

‘Sure,’ she told him. ‘I’ll talk to some people. See what I can find.’

Ty sat and watched the rain bounce off the road. He wasn’t going to wait for the official statement. He already had an idea what the story was going to be. He reversed, turned and drove toward the roadblock.

The cops moved the sawhorse and he drove through. He rang Lock.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘You found him?’ Lock asked.

‘Not yet. You see the news?’

‘About Becker. Yeah. You think it was Malik?’

Ty hesitated. If Becker had been behind the killing of Malik’s family, it was possible that Malik had taken revenge. More than possible.

‘I don’t know.’

Silence settled between them.

‘Okay. Well, I’m almost there. Just about another thirty miles to go. Tyrone?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Regardless of whether he did or not, we need to find him. And fast.’

‘I know.’

There was a hairbrush next to the washbasin. Malik picked it up and turned it over in his hand. The bristles were tangled with Kim’s long dark hairs. There was some of Katy’s too. At bedtime Kim would brush Katy’s hair. When she was done Katy would insist on brushing her mom’s. Sometimes Malik had watched them as they did it. The closeness they’d had was beautiful. Now it was gone.

Still holding the brush, he put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat on it. If only he’d minded his own business, they would still be here. The kids would be asleep in their rooms, and he would be lying next to his wife.

All he wanted now was to be with them in death as he had been in life. But even that would be denied him. A man who was presumed to have murdered his family sure as hell wasn’t going to be laid to rest next to them. Kim’s sister would see to that. She and Malik had never gotten on at the best of times. Kim’s father had been an attorney, and her mother a doctor. They had died in a car accident three years ago. Kim had graduated
magna cum laude
from Stanford. Marrying a ball player, even one who had made it to the NBA, had not been what her parents had had in mind for their elder daughter. They had made that clear to both Malik and Kim. Things had thawed a little between him and Kim’s family once Landon was born, but only a little.

As a child going to church, he had learned about Purgatory, a state short of hell but filled with torment. And now he was trapped alive in it. Death offered no release, and living, going on, was hellish. His grief was still too raw, too overwhelming, to offer the comfort of revenge. Revenge required some kind of life force, and Malik didn’t have that within him.

He stood up and carefully placed the hairbrush back beside the basin. He walked out into the bedroom. He heard a car prowling in the street outside. He froze as headlights swept the room, then ducked down, and crawled on his hands and knees to the window. Looking out, he saw a campus-police patrol car roll past. It stopped at the end of the road. One of the cops got out. Even from this distance, Malik knew from the waddle that it was Tromso. The cop hefted a shotgun as he made his way back toward the house. In his other hand he was carrying a plastic container. It was too dark for Malik to make out what it was.

Seeing him shifted something inside Malik. He crawled to the bedroom door, out into the hallway and got to his feet. He headed down the stairs.

Malik froze in the downstairs hallway as a shadow fell over him. Tromso was at the front door. He jiggled it. Malik backed into the kitchen as Tromso threw himself against the front door.

It held, and he heard Tromso groan as he bounced off it. He could hear the cop moaning about his shoulder. It was the first thing that had cheered Malik in a long time. He crossed to the knife block, and pulled a hefty Sabatier blade from the wood. Tromso might have a gun, but if he could get close enough to him, he was sure that he had more than enough body strength to overpower an out-of-shape donut-gorger.

Malik turned back to the door. From nowhere a hand clamped over his mouth. Another hand reached down and bent back his wrist. The pain shot up his arm and the knife dropped from his grasp.

‘You’re in enough trouble already without stabbing up some cop,’ said Ty.

Tromso must have given up on the door. There was the sound of a window being broken.

Malik felt Ty drop his hand. He turned to see his friend. They looked at each other for a second.

‘Ty, I didn’t …’

Ty put up a hand to silence him. ‘I know. Let’s get out of here.’

Malik stood where he was. He could hear more glass dropping to the floor.

‘What’s he doing here?’ he whispered.

Ty’s hand clamped on his shoulder and he started to drag Malik backwards. A cone of light splashed across the hallway, presumably from Tromso’s torch. ‘Anyone there?’ shouted the cop.

Malik was torn between fear and his desire to confront Tromso. Ty didn’t seem to be suffering from any such confusion. He grabbed Malik by the collar and hustled him hard toward the open door.

They made it out before the light from Tromso’s torch flitted across the kitchen. Ty pulled the door to. Malik watched as Tromso walked into the kitchen, put down the container and unscrewed the top.

Even with the door closed, Malik could smell gasoline. He started back toward the door but Ty pulled him away. There was the scuff of shoes on concrete from the side of the house.

Ty hissed, ‘We have to go, brother.’

Malik could see Ty’s hand on the butt of a handgun. He didn’t doubt that his friend was more than capable of killing both cops if it came to it. And that was what they would have to do if they waited around for a few more seconds. If it had been Malik’s decision to make, he would have taken them out. But Ty was only there because of him. Malik’s life was already in tatters. He couldn’t ask Ty to kill two cops to satisfy his curiosity or to stop whatever was about to happen.

Together, Malik and Ty stepped back into the darkness of the yard as the younger cop appeared around the corner. Malik watched as he walked to the back door. He opened it and shouted to Tromso, ‘Hey, boss, it was open the whole time.’

He didn’t hear Tromso’s reply, but he did catch the sloshing sound of gasoline hitting the kitchen floor that Kim always kept spotless. He turned to Ty. ‘Go. Leave me here.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘But they’re destroying the evidence,’ Malik protested.

Tromso had retreated deeper into the house. Malik imagined him spraying the living room with gas. In a few minutes he would drop a match, or turn the stove on, and everything Malik had to remind him of his family, all the family photographs, Katy’s stuffed toys, the first basketball he'd bought Landon, Kim’s wedding dress would be gone. His throat tightened and he started to choke.

‘You don’t want to be here to see this,’ said Ty.

Slowly, Malik turned away, and together they disappeared into the woods at the back of the house. They were almost at Ty’s car when Malik heard the roar, and looked back to see the orange glow in the distance as his home was engulfed by flames.

Ty pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. ‘I got him,’ he said.

Ty popped the trunk, took out a gym bag and threw it to Malik. ‘Here. New clothes. Put them on.’ He had a lot to say to him, and a lot to tell, but now wasn’t the time. A couple of blocks over, they could see the flash of lights from a fire truck as it wailed its way toward the blazing house.