Sean.’
‘If you feel that’s best,’ Parker said. Was I being over-touchy to read such scepticism into such a short response?
I took my eyes off the road for just long enough to throw my boss a cynical glance. ‘How long do you think he’d keep his mind on the job, Parker,’ I said tightly, ‘if I dropped something like that on him now?’
‘Sean’s a professional,’ Parker said, confident, reaching for his sunglasses, sliding them back on. ‘He wouldn’t let it affect him.’
Yeah . But there was a hollow ache somewhere high under my ribcage that I recognised as anxiety. Maybe that’s just what I’m afraid of most .
CHAPTER EIGHT
Our destination was a part-completed parking structure on the outskirts of Santa Clarita. On that much, at least, Parker had briefed us before we left Calabasas. There, we would hand Witney over into the care of our mysterious client, saddle up and head back to New York.
I wasn’t sorry to be going home.
It still struck me as odd to think of Manhattan that way. The time I’d spent teaching self-defence classes to women in a run-down seaside town on the north-west coast of England seemed a lifetime ago. Several lifetimes, if you wanted to look at it that way. And not many of them happy ones.
But there was something about New York that sang to me. The colour and the noise, the friendly profanity, the chance to slip unnoticed as a sharp blade through the crowd.
On the surface, Los Angeles seemed too shiny by comparison, too evenly tanned, its teeth too straight and too white. It was a city altogether too prone to admiring its own reflection in designer store windows as it cruised the main drag, and wouldn’t admit to anything rotten at its core.
‘Boss?’ came Erik Landers’s voice over the radio from the lead vehicle. ‘This is it?’ There was enough doubt in his voice to make it a question.
‘Affirmative,’ Parker said, terse, into the mic. ‘Top floor. Stay alert, people.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I murmured, looking at the sagging security fencing, the weeds forcing up through the cracked concrete. ‘I hope you took payment upfront on this one, Parker.’
‘Trust me, the last thing this particular client is going to do is try to double-cross us, Charlie,’ Parker said. ‘He just likes to keep things kinda covert, that’s all.’ But when I glanced across I found him craning forwards to check out the high angles and knew, despite his reassuring words, he didn’t like the set-up any more than I did.
So, why agree to it?
The three Chevys clambered slowly over the uneven ground, soft suspension wallowing through the iron-hard ruts. According to Parker’s intel, the parking structure was part of an overambitious retail development project that had stalled into a morass of legal wrangling. Meanwhile, the concrete blanched and crumbled as nature did its concentrated best to reclaim what had been taken.
The mesh gate blocking the entrance to the structure now stood drunkenly open, the chain that had once secured it cut through with neat precision, dangling from the pulled-back hasp with the redundant padlock still attached.
We climbed steadily up the darkened series of ramps towards the roof, the Chevys thumping over badly fitted expansion strips, their tyres protesting each tight upward corner until at last we broke through into sunlight again.
The roof was a wide, flat area of rippled concrete, mapped by tar lines and scattered with the abandoned debris of slipshod management.
You could certainly see plenty from up here, from the distant rush of building traffic on I-5, to the distinctive beige and orange livery of a Southwest Airlines 737 lifting off out of the grandly overtitled Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to admire the view.
Three vehicles were already in position on the otherwise deserted rooftop. Two more blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had probably come from the same custom workshop
‘If you feel that’s best,’ Parker said. Was I being over-touchy to read such scepticism into such a short response?
I took my eyes off the road for just long enough to throw my boss a cynical glance. ‘How long do you think he’d keep his mind on the job, Parker,’ I said tightly, ‘if I dropped something like that on him now?’
‘Sean’s a professional,’ Parker said, confident, reaching for his sunglasses, sliding them back on. ‘He wouldn’t let it affect him.’
Yeah . But there was a hollow ache somewhere high under my ribcage that I recognised as anxiety. Maybe that’s just what I’m afraid of most .
CHAPTER EIGHT
Our destination was a part-completed parking structure on the outskirts of Santa Clarita. On that much, at least, Parker had briefed us before we left Calabasas. There, we would hand Witney over into the care of our mysterious client, saddle up and head back to New York.
I wasn’t sorry to be going home.
It still struck me as odd to think of Manhattan that way. The time I’d spent teaching self-defence classes to women in a run-down seaside town on the north-west coast of England seemed a lifetime ago. Several lifetimes, if you wanted to look at it that way. And not many of them happy ones.
But there was something about New York that sang to me. The colour and the noise, the friendly profanity, the chance to slip unnoticed as a sharp blade through the crowd.
On the surface, Los Angeles seemed too shiny by comparison, too evenly tanned, its teeth too straight and too white. It was a city altogether too prone to admiring its own reflection in designer store windows as it cruised the main drag, and wouldn’t admit to anything rotten at its core.
‘Boss?’ came Erik Landers’s voice over the radio from the lead vehicle. ‘This is it?’ There was enough doubt in his voice to make it a question.
‘Affirmative,’ Parker said, terse, into the mic. ‘Top floor. Stay alert, people.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I murmured, looking at the sagging security fencing, the weeds forcing up through the cracked concrete. ‘I hope you took payment upfront on this one, Parker.’
‘Trust me, the last thing this particular client is going to do is try to double-cross us, Charlie,’ Parker said. ‘He just likes to keep things kinda covert, that’s all.’ But when I glanced across I found him craning forwards to check out the high angles and knew, despite his reassuring words, he didn’t like the set-up any more than I did.
So, why agree to it?
The three Chevys clambered slowly over the uneven ground, soft suspension wallowing through the iron-hard ruts. According to Parker’s intel, the parking structure was part of an overambitious retail development project that had stalled into a morass of legal wrangling. Meanwhile, the concrete blanched and crumbled as nature did its concentrated best to reclaim what had been taken.
The mesh gate blocking the entrance to the structure now stood drunkenly open, the chain that had once secured it cut through with neat precision, dangling from the pulled-back hasp with the redundant padlock still attached.
We climbed steadily up the darkened series of ramps towards the roof, the Chevys thumping over badly fitted expansion strips, their tyres protesting each tight upward corner until at last we broke through into sunlight again.
The roof was a wide, flat area of rippled concrete, mapped by tar lines and scattered with the abandoned debris of slipshod management.
You could certainly see plenty from up here, from the distant rush of building traffic on I-5, to the distinctive beige and orange livery of a Southwest Airlines 737 lifting off out of the grandly overtitled Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to admire the view.
Three vehicles were already in position on the otherwise deserted rooftop. Two more blacked-out Chevy Suburbans that had probably come from the same custom workshop
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