The Devil's bounty

Six

‘Lemme go, you old pervert.’

As the would-be assassin twisted around to spit in his face, Lock saw she was a teenager. He had her pinned to the floor in the corridor. The knife was already tucked away safely in his jacket. His right knee was pressed into the base of her spine, and he was holding her right hand at the wrist, ready to bend it back on itself if she didn’t stop struggling.

‘Hey,’ said Lock sharply. ‘Less of the “old”.’ He relaxed his grip a little and she drove her elbow back, catching the side of his face. He grabbed her wrist again as she tried to wriggle out from under him.

She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds but that was only making it harder for him to keep her still. He heard footsteps and looked up: a security guard was marching down the corridor, with two patrol cops in tow. Whatever information Lock was going to get, he had a very short window in which to secure it. Direct questions were hardly likely to yield much. The kid was a hood rat, and almost certainly a gang member. LA gangs often used younger members to do their dirty work because the criminal justice system treated them with relative lenience. And if it didn’t they were expendable.

‘Who do you run with?’ Lock asked her. ‘Who’s your click?’

She smirked. ‘You like being on top of me, huh? I can feel your jimmy digging into me.’

Lock rolled up the sleeve of her jacket, and shifted his weight so he could get a look at her tattoos. The first he glimpsed was a boy’s name, Ramon — it ran in blue script from wrist to elbow. A boyfriend? A pimp? A gang leader?

‘Who’s Ramon?’ he asked her.

‘The guy who’s gonna cap your ass, bitch.’

Well, thought Lock, at least she’s stopped calling me ‘old’. He checked the other arm. That was clean. ‘What do you want with Melissa?’

There was a snarl. ‘What you think? Bitch needs some killing is all.’

‘Ramon tell you that?’

She lapsed into a sullen silence. He was going to get no more from her and they both knew it.

The security guard and the two cops were almost upon him. Lock got to his feet, and hauled her upright. He pulled down the hood of her sweatshirt to reveal a tangle of black hair, which he pushed off the nape of her neck. There, scrawled in black ink, was what he had been looking for: two words and a number — Loco Diablo 13. Loco: crazy. Diablo: the devil. 13 stood for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, M, which stood in turn for ‘Mexican Mafia’, or La Eme.