‘Ken Prager was my friend,’ Lock said. ‘I had to do what I could to help bring these guys to justice.’
‘Loyalty’s a fine quality,’ Carrie said, avoiding eye contact.
Lock’s heart sank.
‘I don’t know, Ryan. I mean, if I had a great story to chase, I wouldn’t want to have to ask your permission. That’s one of the things I like about you. You’re not threatened by my career. You respect my independence.’
That much was true. In his downtime between jobs, Lock was quite content to walk Angel in Central Park, hit the gym, then shop for groceries and cook dinner. Carrie often teased him that barring his adrenalin junkie tendencies, he’d make someone a great wife one of these days, and he laughed along with her. Maybe it was a generational thing but he’d never bought into any macho bullshit about a woman’s place being in the kitchen. He was happy to be with a woman who didn’t take any crap, and who’d built a life for herself.
‘I’m sensing a “but” here somewhere,’ he said.
‘I just don’t know if this is working out between us,’ Carrie said.
Lock sighed. He wasn’t about to plead for another chance. Not because he was too proud, but because, in his experience, once a woman had made a decision about a relationship there was rarely any going back. They were harder than men in that respect. Yet he wasn’t quite ready to give up on what they had.
‘Does it change anything if I say that I don’t think I’ve ever missed anyone before like I missed you these past five days?’ he asked.
Carrie looked away again. He could sense her softening.
‘How do I make it up to you?’
‘There is one thing,’ said Carrie, watching as Reaper was finally bundled from view by a phalanx of law enforcement.
‘Name it,’ said Lock.
‘Help me get an interview with Reaper.’
32
The guard opened the holding cage and Reaper stepped out. Jalicia nodded for him to free his shackles. Layers of body armor, some of it still slicked with the blood of dead US Marshals, jutted out from his bulky frame. He looked, thought Jalicia, like a cross between the Terminator and a Kevlar-encased Egyptian mummy.
‘Get him out of that stuff,’ she said, holding up a black plastic Nordstrom’s suit carrier. She unzipped it and held it up for his inspection. ‘A lot of people died to get you here, so you might want to make the effort to look presentable.’
Knowing that an inmate in prison blues was already a couple of credibility points behind a witness who was dressed in civilian clothes, Jalicia had brought Reaper the change of clothes: a single-breasted dark grey suit, a crisp white shirt still bearing the crease marks from its packaging, and a suitably conservative blue tie.
‘Thank you,’ Reaper said, showing no after-effects of the events surrounding his transfer.
‘I hope it fits you.’
Reaper checked the label on the collar. ‘Should be fine.’
Jalicia cleared her throat. ‘Lock thinks those people back at the airfield were trying to free you from custody. He says this whole thing with you agreeing to testify is a sham.’
Reaper ran his fingertips over the silk of the dark blue tie, then tilted his head down so that he was looking straight at Jalicia. ‘Lock thinks a lot of things,’ he said, sounding world-weary.
‘Is it true? Once I get you on that stand out there, are you going to punk me, Frank?’
Judging by how his mouth folded in on itself, the use of his first name seemed to pinch Reaper. Maybe it was a long time since he’d heard it. His pupils shrank to pinpricks of black. ‘I could tell you “no”. Or I could tell you “yes”. But we all know that convicts lie, right? So the only way you’re really going to know is when you start asking me questions in front of that jury.’
Jalicia stepped back, determined not to let him see that he was getting to her. ‘That’s not much of an answer,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t much of a question,’ he fired back.
‘I’ll see you on the stand. Remember to speak nice and clearly.’
Jalicia turned and walked out of the holding area. In the corridor, she leaned against the wall, closed her eyes and counted to ten, slowly. She was going to get through this, she told herself. This case was going to make her career.
The voice of the Aryan Brotherhood’s lead defense attorney snapped her back into the present.
‘Are you praying, counsel?’
Judging from his broad grin, he seemed to have recovered his composure after the bombing at the courthouse in San Francisco.
‘What do you want, Gross?’
‘I was going to offer you a final opportunity to save your blushes.’ He moved in closer. ‘My clients are prepared to name the individuals who killed Agent Prager and his family.’
It was Jalicia’s turn to smile. ‘They could have done that right at the start and saved us a lot of grief. Not to mention dead bodies.’
Gross shrugged. ‘It’s how the game gets played. You wait for the clock to run right down.’
‘What are they looking for in return?’
‘You drop the death penalty,’ Gross stated.
‘Let me get this straight. First, your clients order the murder of a federal agent and his family. Then they bomb a Federal Courthouse to stop their trial. And, finally, when they’re out of chances to take out the main defense witness, all of a sudden they want me to show mercy. So they get to go back to what they were doing anyway, and all of this was for nothing?’ She took a step forward herself so that she was inches from Gross’s smug features. ‘No deal.’
‘You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgement,’ said Gross.
He had a point, but Jalicia wasn’t willing to concede that to his face. Deals like this were the currency that kept the conveyor-belt of what passed for justice in America oiled and operational. Of course, Gross had a reputation for using last-minute carrots like this to put prosecutors off balance, but she was minutes away from testimony that had the potential to bring the Aryan Brotherhood to its knees. No, this was too big a win for her. There would be time later to hunt down the people who pulled the trigger on Prager and his family.
If Gross sensed her initial doubts, he was careful enough not to press too hard. ‘Think about it, counsel,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want to pass up an opportunity you might regret later.’
Inside the courtroom, Lock, a protective hand on the small of Carrie’s back, found a couple of seats near the front. After the massive adrenalin rush from combat at the airfield, he was on the inevitable comedown. His concern about Reaper’s true motive and a grilling by the FBI hadn’t helped his mood much either. The only ray of light was that he seemed to have gone some way towards patching things up with Carrie.
As they took their seats, she touched his hand with hers. The tenderness of the gesture gave him reassurance that he hadn’t blown it entirely.
‘You think he’ll testify?’ she whispered to him.
‘Oh, he’ll take the stand. The guy’s got an ego to make Simon Cowell blush. It’s what he’ll say that worries me.’
‘You know, since the bombing in San Francisco I’ve been doing some checking into these white supremacist prison gangs. Nazi Low Riders. Aryan Brotherhood. Texas Circle.’
Lock had a sudden flashback to the prison yard at Pelican Bay and Ty lying in the middle of it, face down, in the dirt.
‘And?’ he asked her.
‘It’s not quite as cut-and-dried as everyone would like to believe. Even within each gang there always seem to be two opposing forces pulling against each other.’
‘Which are?’
‘Well, on the one hand you have the criminal enterprise part. Stick together for protection, then extend that to other inmates, and start bringing trade into the equation — drugs, for instance. I’d call those guys the pragmatists.’
‘Pragmatists? Now there’s a five-dollar word.’
‘You know what I mean, Ryan. These are the guys who tattoo on a swastika when it might as well be a dollar bill.’