Free The Devil's Bounty by Sean Black

like, for ever and it was one of his little phrases. I guess everyone thinks that bail bondsmen and skip tracers deal with bad asses all the time, but from what I know about it, it’s mostly people who’re just plain dumb or unlucky or a combination of the two. Anyway, from time to time they’d get someone who really was bad news. Joe would cut them some slack, but Danny had been around long enough that he’d send them to someone else because he knew they’d skip or they’d be too much trouble if he had to go after them. So, if he didn’t want to deal with someone because he wasa real bad guy who had a habit of skipping out, that was the phrase he’d use. He’d say that he didn’t want to go after the Devil’s Bounty. He was right too. If he’d still been around, there’s no way he would have let Joe go after Mendez.’
    The Devil’s Bounty . Lock chewed it over. It made sense. He often turned down clients because he knew that they were going to be way more trouble than they were worth. And when he gave them the benefit of the doubt, it almost always ended in tears – and in his last major job, protecting Raven Lane, there had been an ocean of them.
    ‘Is Danny still around?’ he asked.
    ‘He died ten years ago. Joe kept the name until he was established, then went with Brady Bail Bonds.’
    ‘So, it was just an old-timer’s phrase?’
    ‘Pretty much. Good advice, though.’
    As Lock thanked Joe’s widow for her help and wound up the call, he glanced across at the tracking device. He had moved it from the trunk to the front passenger seat as a reminder that someone, somewhere, perhaps at the Mendez estate, perhaps in Santa Maria, was tracking his every move in front of a computer screen, watching the little dot that represented his car crawling across a map. He was glad of that. They thought they had the upper hand. Right now, that suited him just fine.

Nineteen
    IT WAS DARK when Lock reached the UCLA Medical Center. This time he parked in the structure that was officially designated for visitors. He took the elevator up to the ICU and got out, hearing the shouts of a medical team, a doctor barking orders, nurses yelling back. He shrugged it off. It was Intensive Care: medical emergencies were hardly a rarity.
    He walked down the long corridor. Unless she had been moved, Melissa’s room was the sixth door on the left. He had counted before, not just the room but the steps to it from the elevator – an old habit acquired over years of close-protection work. Any time he found himself in a location that was unfamiliar to him, he would work out exit and entry points so that he would know exactly how long it would take him to reach them if there was a fire or a power outage.
    Up ahead, medical staff were rushing into and out of a room on the left. He counted the doors. He checked his count. Then he broke into a run.
    He looked around for Ty but couldn’t see him. A nurse was rushing past. Lock grabbed her arm. ‘Melissa Warner? Has she been moved? Is that her room?’ he asked, clinging to the hope that he was mistaken.
    ‘Excuse me,’ she said, brushing him off with a scowl.
    He kept moving. Suddenly Ty was there, although Lock hadn’t seen where he had come from. A woman screamed, the sound dissolving into a wail of denial. ‘No! No!’
    Ty had his arms around her. One look at her told Lock that this was Jan, Melissa’s mother. She was trying to fight her way past Ty and into the room. He was struggling to stop her without hurting her. ‘Let the doctors do their job. Okay?’ he said.
    Gradually she began to still until he took his arms away. She slid down the wall, wrenching at her hair with both hands, panic and fear overwhelming her.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Lock asked him.
    ‘I don’t know. One minute she was sitting up, looked fine, the next I’d come out so she could get some rest and all those machines went crazy. Her heart, I’m guessing. I saw them going for a defibrillator and they