Private L.A. (14 page)

As I left the men, I felt disoriented by the events of the evening, especially the loss. Had it been worth it? No, it hadn’t. Rankin and Del Rio were not officers sworn to uphold the law. They worked for me. They did my bidding, and they had suffered for it.

Satellite television vans surrounded the police barriers at the east end of the pier, up against Highway 1. Reporters were badgering anyone who moved their way. I thought I’d jump the railing and avoid them, but several of them recognized me and started shouting.

“Jack Morgan? What’s your role in this investigation? What’s Private got to do with the explosion?”

One of them, to my surprise, was Bobbie Newton, a particularly vicious gossip columnist and television reporter who lived up the beach from me.

“Jack!” she called. “Jack, it’s Bobbie!”

I ignored her and all of them, tried to move on. But then klieg lights blazed in my face. I looked at the cameras dead-on and said, “I’m a consultant here, nothing more.”

“Consultant to whom?” Bobbie and ten others shouted.

I didn’t answer, pushed my way by them before they could hound me further, and jogged across the highway, wishing I could talk to Justine. She has the rare ability to slice apart emotions like pain or confusion and expose the underlying fear or meaning. Ordinarily, navel gazing is not something I’m fond of. That night I felt in desperate need of a session.

But I had not heard from her or Cruz all day. I was at my car, about to call Mo-bot to see if either of them had checked in, when my cell phone rang.

“We’ve been contacted, Jack,” said Dave Sanders. “They’re letting the children go.”

IN THE DIM
light after midnight Justine crouched in the corner of the holding cell, watching a woman named Carla. Early thirties, Carla was big, muscular, and heavily tattooed. She’d looked high when she was put in the cell not fifteen minutes before, and had taken an instant dislike to Justine. At the moment, Carla was stalking Justine, carrying the handle of a broken and sharpened plastic spoon as if it were a dagger.

After she’d joined Private, Jack had insisted that Justine take a course in basic self-defense. She’d chosen aikido, a Japanese art, and had pursued it until she felt confident enough to quit and take up Crossfit to build her strength. But had it been enough?

Justine adopted a triangle pose, held up her hands, prepared to fight.

In Spanish, she asked, “Why are you doing this?”

Carla said nothing, just grinned, showing a missing upper-right incisor.

“What is your name, American?” called Rosa, the only other woman in the cell. Smaller, ratty, she watched with a worried expression.

Before Justine could answer, Carla said in English, “Her name Bitch.”

Then the big woman lunged and slashed at Justine with the knife, just missing her belly.

“Guard!” Rosa screamed.

Carla grinned again, licked her lips through the gap in her teeth.

“Now you know I mean it,” she said to Justine, and lunged again.

Justine was quicker this time. She swept her right hand in a circle, chopping at the wrist of Carla’s knife hand. The move deflected the blade down and away from her belly. It also knocked the big woman slightly off-balance. Justine encouraged that momentum, pivoted, and slammed Carla into the cement wall.

“Uhhhn,” Carla said, wobbled, but then spun and slashed at Justine.

The blade caught fabric and then skin above Justine’s left breast. She began to bleed.

Carla slashed again, cutting Justine’s forearm.

My God! Was she going to die here in this stinking cell?

All those aikido classes, all those Crossfit workouts, all those times when she’d wanted to give up or puke came back to her, made her remember to fight. When Carla moved to cut at her again, Justine’s right foot shot out, connected with the woman’s shin.

Carla grimaced in pain, tried to stab Justine. But Justine hammered down on the forearm behind Carla’s knife hand, hit muscles and nerves, causing the woman’s grip to evaporate.

The knife fell. Both women dove for it. Justine elbowed the woman in the face, snatched it up, and stepped away. “You must have had a tough childhood,” she said to the stunned woman, who was slowly getting back to her feet. “But that’s no excuse for bad—”

Carla shrieked like a lunatic and charged Justine, put her shoulder into Justine’s chest, almost knocking her off her feet. They slammed into the bars facing the hallway. Justine did the only thing she could think of and stabbed the woman in the thick muscles of her upper back.

Instead of crumpling, Carla went berserk. She head-butted Justine under the chin. Justine saw stars and felt herself weaken.

Carla grabbed Justine’s neck with both hands and started choking her.

Fight, little sister!

Justine rammed her bloody forearm against the big woman’s throat. Nothing. She reached over, grabbed the handle of the makeshift knife sticking out of Carla’s back, and worked it like a gearshift. Carla’s face turned demonic then, her strength grew exponentially, and Justine knew she would not be able to hold the woman off.

JUST WHEN THE
stars became dots and began to gather before Justine’s eyes and she felt herself losing consciousness, she heard boots running. Jail guards with batons appeared behind Justine, clubbed her, and then clubbed Carla.

“She attacked me,” Justine coughed. “She tried to kill me.”

Her blouse was stained with blood. It dripped from her forearm.

“No way,” Carla spat back. “Bitch tried to kill me. Put a shiv in my back, so I came after her.” She looked over at Rosa, the smaller woman. “Ain’t that right?”

Rosa seemed not to know what to say. One guard said, “Don’t matter. She’s coming with us now.”

One set of guards grabbed Carla. The other two snapped handcuffs on Justine and roughly led her down the hallway past a row of other holding cells where women hung on the bars and looked at her like she was part of a sideshow, making kissy-kissing noises, or telling her what a bitch she was, or asking her to carry messages for them. Her legs were shaky from adrenaline, and she thought she might heave for the second time in less than twelve hours. And what was happening to Carla? Where were they taking the woman who’d tried to kill her?

After an elevator ride, Justine was led down another hallway that had an antiseptic smell. Commandant Gomez stood outside the jail clinic. If he felt surprise at her condition, he wasn’t showing it. Instead, he stared at her with an annoyed expression. “You and Private Investigations have powerful friends in Mexico City, Ms. Smith. You and Señor Cruz are to be freed and taken directly to your jet, where you will leave the country and not return.”

“A woman just tried to kill me in the cell,” Justine said in a shaky voice. “What the hell’s going on here, Commandant? Where are the Harlows? Do you know? Are you part of a conspiracy? Covering up Leona Casa Madre’s murder too? Trying to have me killed?”

Gomez turned nasty. “I am part of no conspiracy,
señora
, and I most certainly did not try to have you killed. The cells are the cells. We cannot control what happens in them. Leona Casa Madre, for your information, let notorious members of a drug cartel use her apartment from time to time. It’s the only reason she could afford the place, pigsty that it was, drunk that she was.

“And I have personally checked out these lies about the Harlows. Both supposed ‘witnesses’ told me they made their stories up, trying to get some US publication to pay them to describe things that did not happen. Now, you have a phone call waiting inside. And I will personally investigate this attack on you. I assure you.”

“I’ll bet you will,” Justine said. “Where is Carla? The woman who attacked me?”

“You have a phone call waiting inside,
señora
,” Gomez said again, stoic, gesturing toward the clinic, where Justine saw Arturo Fox coming in another door. A nurse was holding a cell phone toward her.

Justine felt disgusted, degraded. “What cartel?” she asked the commandant. “What drug cartel was Leona in with?”

Gomez hesitated, said, “De la Vega. Beyond that I have no answers.”

Justine glared at him, then held out her cuffs. The commandant thrust his chin at one of her guards, who unlocked them. She walked into the clinic, ignored the blood all over her, and snatched the cell phone from the nurse without another glance at Gomez.

“Justine,” she said.

Jack said, “You don’t know how happy I am to hear your voice.”

Given the weight of all that had happened to her in the last twenty minutes, Justine burst into tears. “Some crazy woman tried to kill me in here.”

Stunned silence. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

Justine could hear pain and guilt in Jack’s voice as plain as day, did not understand it, said, “I’m okay. Cut a few places and my jaw doesn’t feel right. But I’m okay. How did you find us?”

“Long story,” Jack said. “Took a few calls to our office in Mexico City. Calderón pulled some levers and we popped you.”

“We’re not backing off this, I hope you know,” she said.

“I’m not,” Jack said. “But I need you here ASAP.”

“No, Jack, this has gotten personal—”

Jack cut her off. “Last night Dave Sanders was contacted by the kidnappers. They say they’re letting the Harlow children go. I need you here to examine and evaluate them. We’ll be getting instructions in six hours.”

“I’ll be there in four, maybe five,” she promised. “Where are you?”

“UCLA Medical Center,” he said, the pain palpable now.

“What’s happened?” she demanded.

“It’s Rick, Justine,” Jack said. “He’s hurt real bad. Can’t feel his legs. He’s in surgery right now.”

I SAT UP
all night on a couch outside the surgical facility. Mo-bot joined me around one, Sci an hour later.

Del Rio had gone under the knife at eleven p.m., two hours before I got to the hospital after a short visit to Sanders’s Beverly Hills offices, where a simple e-mail message from a blind source declared, “The children will be released tomorrow. Time to be determined. We contact. Justice has been served. They are innocents.”

As hour upon hour ticked by on the clock with no word from the doctors trying to treat Del Rio’s burns and back, I felt unable to think or talk about the Harlows, or No Prisoners, or Tommy, or Carmine Noccia, for that matter. For the first time in a long time, probably since my mother’s death, I prayed, confessing my belief that I had caused Bud Rankin’s death as surely as No Prisoners had. I was also the reason my best friend was five hours into surgery, and now six. I begged God for mercy, for Rankin’s soul, for Del Rio’s spine.

I didn’t know whom to contact about Rankin. The man had no family and was a real loner. I vowed, however, to honor his passing in some way.

Overriding those thoughts was the fact that I’d always considered Del Rio virtually indestructible—a force fused to me in battle, a fellow marine, a blood brother who would never desert me, a man whom I would never desert. As dawn broke over Los Angeles, the idea of that man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life nearly broke my heart.

I sipped a coffee Sci had gotten me and gazed up, numb, at the television blaring coverage of the bombing and the deaths on the Huntington Beach Pier. The media had much of the story now and was blaring every aspect except, it seemed, Private’s involvement. The mayor was even shown admitting that the explosion had taken place during a phony drop of—

“Jack?” Justine said, shaking me from the screen.

Cruz was there too, but I could only look at her. She looked exhausted. Her right forearm was wrapped in bandages. Her lower face was slightly swollen. And yet she was beautiful as always. But I could see that something had been taken from her in Mexico, or cracked in her in Mexico, and that only served to bewilder me more.

A tiny woman in surgical scrubs exited the operating room. She introduced herself as Dr. Phyllis Oates, chief neurosurgeon at the medical center.

“Who is Mr. Del Rio’s next of kin?” she asked.

I swallowed hard, instantly feared the worst, and said, “I’m closest.”

For a moment, Dr. Oates just looked at me, and I felt like I was being pushed over a cliff. Then the surgeon managed a tired smile and put her hand on my arm. “I wanted you to know what a lucky, lucky man Mr. Del Rio is. By all rights, he should have been paralyzed from the waist down, but the lineman’s belt and the wet suit held the broken vertebrae in place, prevented them from severing his spinal cord. There’s considerable swelling, and it might take several months, but I believe he’ll walk again. And run.”

I looked at Justine, and Sci, and Mo-Bot and Cruz, and we all began to cry and hug. I don’t remember being happier or more grateful in my entire life.

“WE’VE GOT THEIR
attention now, Mr. Cobb,” Watson said, looking away from several computer screens streaming early-morning coverage of the Huntington Beach Pier explosion, as well as clips from the killings at Malibu and at the CVS.

“We do indeed, Mr. Watson,” Cobb said. “Two more cycles and we’ll have a clear shot at the prize.”

They were inside the garage in the City of Commerce. Cobb was stuffing the Lakers hoodie, the blond wig, the sunglasses, and the cap into a trash bag. There would be no further need for the disguise. It had served its purpose and more. For the time being, law enforcement would be focused on a man answering No Prisoners’ description, which was how Cobb wanted it.

“Today?” Kelleher asked.

“Today we rest and regroup, Mr. Kelleher,” Cobb said. “In the meantime we let the media do its job, get the drumbeat of threat going, build the panic exponentially, get the government worms all squirming like they’ve been plugged into a socket. We let them assure the people that they are safe, and then we wait until we start hearing them speculate that we might be finished, that we’ve left Los Angeles alone. That could be twelve hours after the assurance of safety. Could be thirty-six, or forty-eight.”

“And then we go again?” Johnson said. The wiry black man was sitting on the foot of his cot, cleaning a pistol.