Private L.A. (31 page)

“I think you’re full of shit,” Cobb said. “There’s no one out there. If there was, it wouldn’t have been you they sent inside.”

He pressed his butt against the lever. The door clicked, opened two inches. Light poured in. Cobb shifted his head to look outside, opened the door farther. His face was silhouetted now. The laser sight trembled on his temple.

MY FINGER TIGHTENED
on the trigger as my mind whirled with thoughts, options, and dire consequences.

If I shot Cobb just as he was going out the door and I was lucky, he’d pitch forward and drop the grenades. What was outside? An alley? A parking lot? I had no idea.

In any case, it had to be better than the bombs going off in here. If I was really lucky, the door would shut behind Cobb before they blew. If I was unlucky, he’d crumple backward at the shot and drop the grenades, and I’d be shredded.

If they went off.

Cobb made the decision for me. He swiveled his head back at me and then made a quick jerking motion with his right hand, suggesting that he was going to throw the grenade at me. He sold the pump fake as well any NFL quarterback. I couldn’t help it. I cringed, shrank, just for a moment. But it was enough for the laser sight to slide off his head and for him to shoulder open the door and dart outside.

I fired at the last of him. The round struck the steel door right behind his back. The door started to swing shut. Without thinking, I took four big leaps, heard a clanking noise, and kicked open the door.

The second I saw the Dumpster directly across the alley from me I knew what Cobb had done and I threw myself sideways and down. The grenade defied time and blew with extraordinary force. I felt it like a giant hand slapping me, boxing my ears, deafening me, and dazing me.

But I wasn’t cut. The grenade had landed in the near-empty Dumpster. The heavy-gauge steel walls had contained the explosion, forced the shrapnel upward like a deadly geyser. Knowing that what goes up must eventually come down, I threw my arms over my head and struggled to my feet.

By the time I got oriented and turned, Cobb had exited the alley and was running diagonally across East Sixth Street. He disappeared from view. I felt slightly off-balance as I tried to sprint after him.

Where was Cobb going? Anywhere but here? Or to a car?

I got my answer when I reached the end of the alley and saw him running into a used-car lot on the north side of Sixth. I tried to aim but had no clear shot.

I ran out into traffic. I still couldn’t hear much, but then caught over the din in my ears the honking of horns and the screeching of tires as cars tried to avoid hitting me. Were those sirens?

My eyes were scanning back and forth from Cobb to the area around him. I reached the sidewalk just as he vaulted a fence and landed in a second used-car dealership. I crouched and scurried over to Atlantic, hearing shouts as I turned north, really hurrying now.

Ahead of me half a block a cement mixer was parked, turning, while three laborers who’d been laying new sidewalk were looking toward the car lot. I popped up, saw Cobb pulling a guy from a silver Chrysler convertible with a yellow balloon attached to its antenna. He jumped in and the car started moving.

At first I was sure Cobb was heading for the rear exit back into the alley. But he suddenly turned hard right, heading toward Atlantic.

I ran, screaming at the guys working the cement, “Get down! He’s got a grenade!”

Either they saw my gun or they understood and dove into the wet cement. The others were slower to understand and were still standing there puzzled when I ran past, gun up, just as Cobb nosed the car across the existing sidewalk, looking to pull out onto Atlantic.

I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from him when I yelled, “Cobb!”

He glanced at me, showed little surprise, and side-armed the second grenade at me.

TIME SEEMED TO
slow as the grenade bounced and rattled down the sidewalk toward me. Cobb stomped on the gas, shot out onto Atlantic, and sideswiped a commercial van.

But I was focused on that bouncing grenade. An F1 has roughly a four-second fuse. I caught it right-handed at two seconds, twisted, saw my target, and threw it at three seconds.

Once upon a time all I wanted to do was to play football. For years, I’d throw footballs through a tire my father hung from a tree in our backyard, keeping at it for hours on end. Practice more than talent got me onto my college team.

That day practice saved my life.

The grenade dropped into the cement hopper on top of the mixer, dropped into the huge barrel of the mixer itself, and blew with a muffled thud. Wet cement erupted from the hopper and discharge chute and rained down on me as I leaped out into the street.

The van Cobb had sideswiped had crashed into a parked car on the other side of Atlantic. Cobb’s convertible was picking up speed, heading back toward Sixth. I went singular again, raised the pistol, and took one shot at his head. I missed and hit the back of the driver’s seat.

The convertible went out of control and crashed into a fire hydrant. When I got to the car, LAPD cruisers were coming at me from three directions.

Cobb sat slumped against the driver’s-side door. His breathing was labored, he was coughing out a fine pink mist. I couldn’t hear anything but the sirens now but knew Cobb was probably making a gurgling sound, sign of a sucking chest wound, a sound that would have ordinarily sent me spinning back to Afghanistan, in country, where anything deadly was possible.

But not that day. I was cold and utterly rooted in reality when I stepped up, gun trained on Cobb’s scarred face. As more frothy blood began to appear at his nostrils and lips, he gazed at me with utter bewilderment.

“Chopper pilot?” he whispered. “How did I …? How did you …?”

He couldn’t finish, but I understood. He knew who I was. He knew some of my background. He considered me a stark inferior.

“Everyone gets lucky once in a while,” I said as the patrol cars skidded to a stop. “Why did you do it, Cobb?”

His expression mutated into derision, as if I were an idiot not to understand why he and his men had killed twenty-one people, blown up the Huntington Beach Pier, extorted the City of Los Angeles, and looted a state revenue account for a hundred and fifty million.

“We needed the money,” he rasped, laughed, hiccupped, and then shuddered when blood poured from his mouth in a torrent, washing away the makeup and exposing that spider’s web of scars.

I heard someone shout, “Drop your weapon!”

I did, still watching Cobb.

He looked at me as he bled out.

I can honestly say there was not a lick of self-pity in his eyes as they lost their light and went dead, dull, and gone.

ELLEN HAYES RAN
her therapy practice out of an office on a side street near Century City. Justine parked, looked at the building and then the sky, thanking God that Jack had survived his encounter with the No Prisoners conspirators. The news was all over the radio stations. Somehow he’d walked away relatively unscathed. That was what the news reader had said, but a big part of her wondered if that was true, if it could be true.

Mo-bot had called to fill her in on what they weren’t reporting yet on the radio. The final two members of the No Prisoners conspiracy had been taken without shots fired, surrounded on all sides by snipers when they tried to flee after learning about the firefight at Robby Eden’s Café. Albert Watson and Denton Nickerson were in federal custody. So was Jack, while law enforcement sought to establish exactly what had happened inside the restaurant.

Justine checked her watch. Five minutes to four. For a moment she tried to convince herself to call Ellen Hayes, to tell her about the shoot-out, and that she needed to be with Jack for the moment. They could reschedule.

But the old Justine pushed her out of the car. She couldn’t be a friend to Jack or to anybody while she was walking around like this, feeling like this.

Hayes was waiting for her. “I’ve been worried since you called yesterday,” the therapist said, leading Justine into her office. “What’s going on?”

Justine sat in a chair, sighed, and said, “I have this friend, Jack.”

Hayes rolled her eyes as she took another chair. “We’re not doing the friend thing, are we? You said on the phone this was about you.”

“This
is
about me,” Justine said. “But I wanted to tell you about this friend of mine, Jack, my boss, actually. I told him recently I couldn’t understand him because he seems to grow calmer in chaotic situations, unfazed by violence unfolding right in front of him.”

Hayes frowned. “Okay?”

Justine paused a beat, swallowing against the emotion rising in her throat. “I found out something about myself recently, Ellen. In many ways I am Jack’s opposite. I am unnerved in chaotic situations. I am … terrified of … violence … haunted by it in a way that …”

Hayes sat forward sympathetically. “Tell me what’s haunting you.”

It spilled out of Justine over the next forty minutes: Mexico, her anxiety, her casual liaison with a married man.

“You’ve described the attack,” Hayes said when she’d finished. “But not how it made you feel.”

Raw emotion welled up inside Justine. “I don’t know,” she choked. “I guess I saw how random and violent life becomes in an instant. It almost makes you afraid of the next moment. You know?”

“If you let it,” Hayes said. “We are the sum of our thoughts. What
you
choose to dwell on will dictate
your
emotions.”

“I know all this.”

“Even experts need to hear it every once in a while,” the therapist replied. “Let’s start by dwelling on the fact that you’re alive. A good thing.”

“Yes, but even that carries scars …” Justine stopped, stared into her lap, her shoulders quivering.

“Justine?”

“This has changed me into someone I despise,” Justine sobbed. “I have to own what I’ve done. There’s no excuse for what I did with Paul.”

THE THERAPIST SAT
quietly for a moment, then nodded, said, “You do have to own what you’ve done, Justine. You also have to own the fact that you went through an extremely traumatic experience and because of that experience acted on a romantic impulse when you didn’t have all the facts. Isn’t that right?”

“He’s married,” Justine said.

“Yes,” Ellen said. “And
he
has to own that. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He asked you out for coffee. He didn’t try to stop you in the gym.”

“I was the aggressor.”

“You’re saying you were more powerful than Paul was, able to bend his free will so easily?”

Justine blew her nose, tried to smile. “I am stronger than he is. I can do more pull-ups than he can, anyway.”

“But can you control his will?”

Justine thought about that, then shook her head.

“Good,” the therapist said. “Now, I don’t want you to minimize what happened with Paul. But at the same time, I don’t want you to minimize his free will in failing to tell you he was married, and a father.”

Justine said nothing for a moment, but then sniffed and nodded.

“Okay,” Hayes said. “I think we’ve made more than a little progress. But our time’s up. I have another client coming. Shall we schedule another appointment?”

“But what am I going to do about—”

“What you’re going to do about Paul is a subject for our next session. It’s enough for today for you to have gotten it off your chest.”

Justine wanted to argue, but sighed, “You’re the therapist.”

Outside, she could hear the din of rush-hour traffic—it was five o’clock. She got to her car, feeling a little less confused, a little lighter, more … Her cell phone rang. She answered.

“Justine?”

“Cynthia?” Justine said, recognizing the voice of the Harlows’ personal assistant.

“Can you come to the Warner lot?” Maines asked, agitated. “Right now?”

“What’s wrong?” Justine demanded.

“It’s worse,” Maines choked. “Much worse than you could ever imagine.”

CYNTHIA MAINES WAS
waiting in a golf cart at the main gate of the Warner lot in the last light of Halloween. Justine hadn’t remembered the date until she’d seen the kids dressed in costumes running from house to house.

The Harlows’ personal assistant looked shell-shocked. She’d obviously been crying.

“What’s happened?” Justine asked, climbing into the passenger seat.

Maines drove on, her shoulders hunched forward as she said, “I’ve learned that my life is not what I thought it was. I’ve learned that my beliefs are suspect. And that my instincts are worthless.” She glanced over at Justine, looking lost. “How is that possible? How is it possible to spend years of your life with people and not see them?”

“Tell me,” Justine said.

Maines shook her head in disgust. “It’s something that has to be seen.”

They drove past the turn to the Harlow-Quinn bungalow, past the soundstages, and parked not far from the cafeteria. They walked into a nondescript building with a central hallway.

“I got a friend of mine to let me use the screening room,” Maines said, putting a key into a lock and opening a door for Justine.

There were six theater seats inside and a good-sized screen. Justine had no idea what was going on when Maines scooped up an iPad and gave it orders.

Maines’s hands were shaking. She seemed to be having trouble picking out the commands.

“I got worried after you left the other day,” Maines said hoarsely. “About the computers missing at the ranch, and whether the files for
Saigon Falls
had actually been backed up.”

“Okay?” Justine said.

“I couldn’t get into Harlow-Quinn to take a look,” Maines said. “So I contacted the repository in Minneapolis where all the digital files were supposed to be sent. I had to talk to them a couple of times when we were setting this all up before the move to Vietnam, so they knew me. They had no idea I’d been fired and gave me a temporary password that allowed me to review the logs.”