Sean Black - Deadlock

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.

Hand in hand, Lock and Carrie climbed the steps of Grace Cathedral and walked through the Gothic facade into the cool of the nave. The visit had been Carrie’s idea, a way of both of them finding some closure before they headed home, although Lock had been grateful that she hadn’t used those words.

The last few days had involved endless variations on the same set of questions. Lock’s answers had not changed. Gradually, and with no appetite to wash the ATF’s dirty laundry in public, the questions had fallen away to a distant echo until Lock was alone with only his own thoughts for company.

In the body of the cathedral was a limestone labyrinth. Unlike a maze, Carrie had explained, a labyrinth had no dead ends. You followed the path to the centre, stayed there for as long as you wanted, then followed the same route back out.

She dropped Lock’s hand from hers and stepped back.

‘You don’t want to walk it with me?’ he asked her.

Carrie shook her head. ‘I’ll be over there if you need me,’ she said, nodding towards a candle-lit area off to one side.

He watched her walk away. Calm. Composed. More precious to him than any woman he had ever known. In the days since those final moments alone with Coburn in the stairwell, she had allowed him his silences, letting him know with a look, or a hand at the small of his back, that if he needed to talk she was happy to listen, but not pressing him on it.

She seemed to understand that for him there was no release to be found in taking another man’s life, no surge of excitement from the metallic tang of blood that filled your nostrils, no joy in pulling a trigger.

Feeling more than a little self-conscious, Lock stepped onto the labyrinth and slowly began to follow it round. The past week had given him the time to think about the path he had chosen in life, the places it had taken him, and the things it had taught him about the best and the worst of human nature.

Even with all that baggage, nothing had prepared him for seeing Ken Prager and his family being slaughtered. Nothing would ever erase in his mind the first sight he had had of Ty lying on the yard at Pelican Bay. Nor would he ever forget the shiver in Coburn’s eyes as he’d watched him squeeze the trigger. All of these things Lock would carry with him — perhaps for the rest of his life.

Reaching the centre of the labyrinth, he stopped and closed his eyes, letting it all settle inside him. Then he followed the path all the way back to where he had started.

He found Carrie by a small shrine commemorating a visit to the cathedral, or church as it then was, by Martin Luther King. King had spoken of many things. Of hatred. Of fear. Of the power of love. A little over three years later, his own life had been snatched away by an assassin’s bullet.

The labyrinth had held no answers for Lock. But maybe, he thought as he watched the yellow candlelight flicker over the resigned expression on King’s face, this tiny shrine did.

There was the world as most people wanted it to exist, and then there was the world as it was, and standing in the middle, trying to make sure that people like King or the President could do their job were men like Lock.

Lock gave Carrie’s hand a squeeze.

‘Let’s go home.’