‘Cowboy called him something. It was kinda cool.’
‘Reaper?’
‘Yeah,’ said Roach. ‘That was it.’
52
Cowboy woke with a start. The engine was idling, and he was in the passenger seat. He started to sit up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Before he could get an answer, Trooper floored it and Cowboy was flung backwards.
‘He’s up ahead.’
‘Jogging?’
‘Taking a walk. You know that little rise we came over when we got here?’
‘Yeah,’ said Cowboy, hauling himself up so he could see through the front of the windshield.
‘Well, right now, he should be just about over that.’
The speedometer of their SUV crept past fifty, then sixty. Either side of the road was grass and trees. They had to make sure they stayed on the road. And so did the man up ahead of them.
‘Keep the speed up but the revs down,’ Cowboy said. ‘He hears the engine, he’ll jump out of the way.’
‘OK, but he’s probably going to think it’s kids, not someone who’s aiming for him.’
Junius Holmes heard the car behind him as he crested the hill. There was the road and then three feet of asphalt beyond the white line where it was safe to walk. Anyone passing him, and recognizing him, might have guessed he was thinking about weighty matters. A case the Supreme Court had before it, or what he was going to say at a seminar he was to give shortly at Harvard about law and philosophy. In fact, he was thinking about what he was going to have for dinner. Even a justice of the highest court in the land had to eat, he told himself. He was thinking chicken, with mashed potato and broccoli.
Ahead of him there was a low roar — a big rig struggling to get up the sharp gradient. It wasn’t a road ideally suited to such a wide vehicle, but there was rarely much traffic here and it would be on the opposite side to where he was walking, so he didn’t deviate from his path.
The SUV was up to seventy now. They couldn’t see Holmes, so unless he had ducked into the woods to take a leak, he was just ahead of them over the hill.
‘OK,’ Cowboy said to Trooper, ‘keep that speed.’
‘Dude, you’re worse than my ex-wife. Shut the hell up and let me do this.’
Junius glanced round and saw an SUV behind him. Life didn’t go into slow motion. Instead, he froze like a rabbit for a second as the big rig which had climbed the hill shifted up a gear.
Cowboy could see Junius Holmes, but he could also see the driver of the big rig, who was shifting the path of his vehicle to avoid the pedestrian.
‘Do it then, man!’ he shouted at Trooper. ‘Do it now!’
53
They left Roach in the desert, naked and bleeding. A less than fitting punishment for him, thought Lock, but it would have to suffice. Ty had argued the merits of throwing him into a cactus bush, but Lock had countered by pointing out that most of the cacti out here were endangered species which didn’t deserve having a low-life such as Roach thrown at them.
They had thought about taking Roach up to San Francisco themselves (where Lock wanted to talk to Coburn) and handing him over to the Feds there, but they wanted away from this part of the state as fast as they could. No, Lock decided, once they had some distance they would put a call in to the authorities. If they got lucky with the timing, by the time Roach found his way back home he would have someone from federal law enforcement there to take him in for questioning about his role in the death of the Pragers. But at least Roach had been useful, Lock thought: he’d established the identity and parentage of the woman who was almost certainly Ken’s killer.
They pulled in to an off-site lot next to LAX, parked the Lincoln at the back and caught a shuttle bus to the terminal, where Lock used his credit card to get them two seats on the next flight up to San Francisco. Because they would have to check their firearms at the check-in desk, Lock made sure to wipe off any residue of the SIG’s contact with Roach’s head before he stowed it in its lockable carry case.
Inside the terminal, they headed to the Virgin America counter, filled in the appropriate paperwork and checked their bags. Then, boarding passes in hand, they made for security, both, thankfully, passing through the detector without incident. A swipe might well have showed positive for cordite, and that wasn’t a conversation they wanted to have with a member of the Transport Security Administration, whom Lock regarded with an informed contempt.
Instead, they watched as a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair was led into the Perspex search box and asked repeatedly to stand so that they could wand her. Lock, who was gathering his wallet and belt from the end of the conveyor, quickly lost his patience. The door leading out of the Perspex box was ajar, so he turned in the direction of the female TSA officer as she said for a third time, ‘Ma’am, do you think you could stand up, just for a few seconds?’ and said, ‘Miss?’, taking a leaf from the TSA officer’s book and being an asshole, politely, with a smile on his face.
Ty nudged Lock. ‘What about the grey man?’ he said, referring to Lock’s belief that a good close protection operative had a duty not to call attention to himself.
Lock ignored him.
The TSA officer looked over. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Does she look like she can stand?’ Lock asked, still polite.
‘Are you traveling with her?’
The elderly woman opened her mouth.
‘She’s my aunt,’ he said firmly. ‘Now, we have several hours until our plane actually departs, so I’d like to see your supervisor and register a formal complaint regarding your behaviour towards an elderly, not to mention disabled, passenger.’
The TSA officer flushed under the two inches of make-up she’d plastered over her face. ‘There’s really no need-’
‘I’d say asking someone in a wheelchair to stand three times means there’s every need. Now, will you call your supervisor, or shall I?’
Lock kept his tone even and low, like a parent explaining to a toddler why they shouldn’t run with scissors.
‘I’ll just run the wand and then you can both be on your way,’ the officer said, hurriedly.
Lock sighed. The TSA had caught a lot of flak since their formation. They had some good people — ex-law enforcement and military — but they also had more than their fair share of people who couldn’t read a leaflet without moving their lips and who confused brusqueness with thoroughness.
The officer waved her wand vaguely in the elderly woman’s direction. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’
Lock stepped forward, took the woman’s wheelchair by its handles and pushed it out of the box as the female officer went to look for someone else to give a hard time to. Maybe a nun, he thought, or a boy scout. Someone who fitted the profile of crazed terrorist bent on bringing the western world to its knees.
Once they were well clear of the security area, the elderly woman craned her neck back to get a view of her rescuer. ‘Thank you, young man,’ she said, sweetly. ‘Those people are such assholes.’
At their gate, a knot of passengers and ground crew were standing in front of a plasma screen tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station. Lock and Ty shuffled to a halt, hoping that they weren’t the main feature, but no one gave them a second glance. Instead everyone stared intently at the screen as a news update rolled along the bottom: ‘Supreme Court Justice Junius Holmes Killed In Multiple Vehicle Auto Smash’.
Lock edged closer to a middle-aged cleaning woman holding a mop.
‘When’d this happen?’ he asked her.
She shrugged, grabbed her mop and bucket and shuffled away.
Lock was reaching for his cell as it rang. Carrie.
‘You see the news?’ she asked him.
‘Just now.’
‘Well, we’re getting early word that it wasn’t an accident.’
This didn’t make sense to Lock. These kind of incidents usually took days of piecing together. For law enforcement to be hinting at foul play so early in an auto smash was almost unheard of. Even if it did involve someone like Junius Holmes, who despite his WASPy name had made his reputation getting down and dirty in the trenches as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice before being appointed by the new President to serve on the Supreme Court.