Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel Read Free Page B

she’d learned that you had to keep something back, some small piece of yourself. If you didn’t, you got your heart broken, and Raven had experienced enough heartbreak to last a lifetime. She had shut herself off and focused instead on making a life for herself and Kevin, and no one was going to take that away from her now.
    Rolling her shoulders to ease the crick in her neck, she walked through the door that led from the garage into the hallway at the rear of the house, then into the kitchen. She put her purse on the counter, took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and drank half of it.
    She pulled her work outfits from the holdall and jammed them into the washing machine, then went back outside to collect the mail, leaving the door open so she could get back in quickly if anything happened. Nothing did, and the mail held no nasty surprises either. There were no handwritten envelopes, no death threats, nothing weird, just the usual junk mail and bills.
    She walked back into the house and suddenly remembered something. She’d lost her sunglasses earlier in the week – she’d looked all over the house but hadn’t found them. Now she went back into the garage to check the car. Leaving the mail on the hood, she peered into the glove box, then under the seats. Nothing.
    She stopped, trying to think where she might have put them down. It came to her. She had been unloading groceries from the trunk the day before and, unable to see in the gloom of the garage, she had taken them off. Maybe she’d forgotten to pick them up again.
    She clicked the button to open the trunk, and walked to the rear of the car. The interior trunk light was faulty so she crossed to the light switches on the far side of the garage. The fluorescent tubes flickered into life, throwing fragments of harsh, savage light into the trunk. A horrific still image flashed in front of her. Then the lights steadied and she could see it clearly.
    She stared into the maw of the trunk at a semi-clothed body, the stump of the neck covered with clean plastic sheeting, the ends wrapped tightly with string. Then she started to scream.

3
     
    The minutes dragged as Raven waited in the kitchen for the cops to show up. She smoked a cigarette, then lit a second from the fading embers. She thought about going next door or across the street to one of the neighbors but decided against it. Since moving in she had kept her distance from them, scared that they would work out who she was and what she did for a living. Anyway, no one had come when she had screamed. Not one person. The thought brought her close to tears.
    She could have waited outside on the patch of front lawn, she guessed, but she was sure that no one was inside the house. There were no signs of anyone having broken in – no forced locks or smashed windows. Nothing out of the ordinary – apart from the decapitated body in the trunk of her car.
    She reached over and turned on the tap, extinguishing the burning red tip of the second cigarette with the jet of water, then rinsing the flecks of wet black ash down the drain, jamming the stub into the waste-disposal unit and turning it on. Then she walked to the front door to wait for the cops.
    Another minute passed. A long minute. She rubbed under her eyes, staining her fingers with mascara.
    A flashlight swept across the glass pane in the front door, and she started. Then the bell rang. Raven took a couple of deep breaths and opened the door. A lone female patrol officer stood on the threshold. A cruiser was parked at the kerb, its lights dappling the neighbors’ lawns and splashing red over the gaudy Halloween decorations that sat in people’s front windows.
    ‘Ma’am, you called to report finding a body?’ the patrol officer asked, as her partner came into view from the side of the house.
    Raven pulled the door wide so they could come in, noticing as she did so that her hands were still shaking. Suddenly everything tunneled in on her. The red and blue