Deadlock

75

Lock squeezed the trigger, but rather than run, Coburn had gone to ground, and Lock’s shot went high.

The room door began to swing shut. Lock got to his feet and ran towards it. He could hear the door on the other side of the corridor being thrown open and Ty shouting at Coburn to stop. Then there was the sound of a struggle.

Lock stepped out into the corridor. It was a long stretch to where it turned at a right angle back towards the bank of two elevators. Coburn was running towards them.

Ty was on the floor just outside the door, clutching his shoulder, his face contorted in pain. For a heart-stopping second Lock thought he’d been shot again, but there was no blood.

‘Son of a bitch hit me,’ Ty spat at Coburn’s retreating figure.

Lock took to his heels in pursuit of Coburn, who now had a good thirty-yard start. At least, thought Lock, there was no longer any doubt as to what Coburn was, or which side he was on.

As Coburn closed in on the end of the corridor, Lock was gaining on him. With doors either side, Lock hadn’t wanted to risk taking a shot which might take out a curious hotel guest who had opened his door to see what all the commotion was. Coburn, however, had no such qualms. He spun round on his heel and took aim.

Lock flattened himself against a door. Coburn took the shot anyway, missing by a mile but buying himself a few more valuable seconds.

When Lock looked up, Coburn was already rounding the turn at the end of the corridor. Lock followed him, pulling up short of the turn, aware that he could fly round the corner only to find Coburn waiting for him. Reaching the end of the corridor, he took a quick look, catching sight of Coburn’s back as he ran past the elevators, heading for the stairs.

Driven on by adrenalin, Lock ran for the exit to the stairs. He burst through the door and, leaning over the railing, saw Coburn already on the way down. Lock stood there, tracking Coburn’s progress, waiting for the right moment, praying that Coburn wouldn’t duck back out into a corridor before he made it to the ground floor.

Steadying his grip on his 226, Lock took aim and squeezed the trigger. The tight confines of the stairwell amplified the sound of the gunshot, leaving an echo ringing in Lock’s ears. The single blast of gunfire was accompanied by a sharp, guttural scream of pain from below as Coburn tumbled down on to the second-floor landing.

Lock started down the stairs, taking them two at a time. He could see Coburn lying prostrate on the ground, his gun ten steps below him, safely out of reach. Blood oozed from Coburn’s right boot where Lock’s bullet had found its target.

Coburn was rocking back and forth with the pain. Finally, he twisted his head round, staring up at Lock. ‘Prison ain’t so bad,’ he said.

Lock took a moment to catch his breath. He looked around the stairwell. He was alone with Coburn. No CCTV or witnesses of any description. All anyone would have seen was two men, both armed and firing at each other, disappearing into the stairwell.

‘You think I’m going to take you in?’ Lock asked him.

Coburn half-shrugged a ‘yes’ and clutched at his bloodied foot with both hands. ‘You’re a boy scout, Lock,’ he said. ‘Why else would you have taken that suicide mission Jalicia gave you?’

Lock took one more step towards him. Then another. Coburn’s foot looked bad, but not bad enough to kill him. Not even close. He turned over the situation in his mind, then took a breath, the stairwell seeming to tunnel in round them. A cold breeze had picked up from somewhere. It took him back to the redwood clearing where Ken Prager had been butchered before being forced to watch the execution of his wife and child.

The question facing Lock now wasn’t whether Coburn deserved to die. He did. The question was, could he kill a man in cold blood? Even a man such as Coburn.

If he did, Lock would be crossing a line into a different country. And once he had crossed, there would be no return.

He stared down at Coburn’s twisted features as he writhed in pain in front of him. He thought of Ty lying helpless on the yard back at Pelican Bay, and how Reaper and Phileas had seen Ty as less than human because of the colour of his skin.

‘See,’ Coburn said, pushing down his sock to get a better look at his wound and revealing a tiny bloodied shamrock on his ankle, ‘I knew you were a boy scout.’

Lock wasn’t sure whether it was seeing the symbol of the Aryan Brotherhood hidden away on Coburn’s ankle or the smirk on his face, but he felt something in him shift at that moment. Slowly, he raised his gun so that it was aimed right between Coburn’s eyes.

‘I’m going to tell you what I told Reaper on that plane down from Pelican Bay,’ he said softly. ‘I’m not a cop, or a Marshal, or the FBI. I’m a private contractor, and right now I’m off the clock, working on my own time, so the only person I have to answer to is myself.’

Coburn blinked, and his expression morphed from a look of pained amusement to genuine fear. ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

Lock’s index finger closed round the trigger and he squeezed off a single round, the bullet catching Coburn square in the face. His left arm twitched in spasm, his neck snapped violently back, and then he was perfectly still.

The sound of the gunshot reverberated around the empty stairwell, fading slowly away until all Lock could hear was a distant hum, overlaid by the sharp keen of sirens and his heart pounding in his chest.

‘I just did,’ he said, turning his back on the twisted corpse and starting back up the stairs.