Private L.A. Read online

  Johnson pushed open the glass door, stepped out onto the landing of the four-step stair that led down to the outdoor eating area. The people below him were on their feet, some running, others frozen, several crying now that they saw the pistols in his hands. He had to move now. Sirens would not be long in coming.

  He jumped the stairs, landed in a rolling crouch, shot two of the duffers, hitting both men in the back as they tried to flee. Angling hard right now between tables, oblivious to the screaming, he was thinking, Six down, one to go.

  Johnson got over the low railing and onto the sidewalk, aware of cars rushing in both directions up and down the Strip, oblivious to the bloody mayhem he was causing as they passed. His instinct was to kill whoever remained at the west end of the eating terrace, closest to Drybar. That would put him near the parking lot where Nickerson would be waiting with one of the vans.

  As Johnson swung the guns west, he spotted the old lady who’d gaped at him when he entered the diner, the one wearing the sweatshirt promoting a trout paradise. She was squared off in a horse stance twelve feet away, both hands wrapped around a small-caliber pistol.

  “You get down now!” she yelled at him in a hoarse voice. “I have passed an NRA handgun self-defense course. I will shoot you!”

  An NRA course? What was that? A weekend? Two? Johnson almost laughed. The truth was that unless you were deranged or enraged, it took a lot of training to be able to actually shoot someone in cold blood. Most first-timers just yanked the trigger and threw the shot wide.

  Knowing that, Johnson took his chance. He grinned at her, said, “Sure, Grandma,” dropped his right pistol, and whipped the left one up at her.

  He was aware of the old woman blinking as the shot went off.

  Her bullet hit Johnson’s rib cage, passed below the heart, through the lung, where it expelled its energy before blowing out his back. The second pistol dropped. Johnson crumpled to the sidewalk after it, coughing up the blood already drowning him, dying in surging disbelief, utterly baffled by the fact that he had lived through so many days of full-on combat in his life with hardly a scratch to show for it, like he’d had some invisible shield around him; and yet here he was shot down in drag by some pistol-packing grandma she-bitch from Thief River Falls.

  Chapter 79

  I GOT THE call from Chief Fescoe about the latest No Prisoners attack twelve minutes after it went down, almost as soon as he understood the scope of the massacre and the nature of the victims.

  “I’ve got two of my own dead down there,” Fescoe said, sounding rattled. “I’m on my way there with a forensics team, so is Townsend, but both our departments are spread thin. It won’t be enough. We’d like a team of your techs if we can get them.”

  “Right away,” I promised, and within nine minutes Sci, Mo-bot, the Kid, and three other techs were with me, driving as fast as we dared from our offices to the Sunset Strip.

  The block between Londonderry Place and Sunset Plaza Drive was taped off. The full-on media carnival was yet to arrive, but the sideshow was already set up and running. As we moved gear inside the police lines from the east, Bobbie Newton was on air, having a best-friends-forever moment with June Wanta, the sixty-seven-year-old grandmother of ten who’d shot and killed the gunman who’d rampaged through Mel’s.

  “Where’s your gun, June?” Bobbie Newton asked breathlessly.

  “I gave it to the police, of course,” Wanta said, nervously lighting a Marlboro, puffing.

  The smoke went in Bobbie Newton’s face, made her unhappy, but she moved upwind and gushed, “You’re a hero, June! How does it feel?”

  “I’m no hero,” the old woman said, taking another puff. Her hands were trembling. “I just defended myself from a crazy fool the way anyone who’d taken an NRA handgun course would.”

  The crowd that had gathered broke into laughter and cheers. Bobbie Newton, however, looked at the grandmother as if she’d suddenly sprouted a set of horns. Then she peered into the camera, said, “Yes. See there, friends, the value of education. It never ceases to amaze me.”

  Turning back to the grandmother, Bobbie said, “Now, I understand you came face to face with the shooter before he started, uh, shooting.”

  “That’s right,” Wanta said, took a drag off her cigarette.

  “How are you sure it was him?”

  The grandmother looked at Bobbie Newton like she was a ninny, said, “Back home in Thief River you don’t see too many black guys dressed up like Marilyn Monroe Does the Roller Derby.”

  The crowd roared. Mrs. Wanta looked over, puffed, smiled, waved, and then said, “Gotta go now, Bobbie. Police want to talk to me.”

  She turned, walked away, smoke trailing her. The crowd cheered more loudly.

  “There you go,” Bobbie Newton said, grinning inanely at the camera. “A reluctant hero blows away the bad guy and saves who knows how many lives in the process. I have the feeling we’re going to be hearing much more from Mrs. June Wanta. A star is born. Can we say movie deal?”

  “Why does everything have to end up with a movie deal in L.A.?” Mo-bot snorted as we moved away into the crime scene.

  “Company town,” I replied before spotting Fescoe and FBI Special Agent in Charge Christine Townsend emerging from Mel’s Drive-In.

  “It’s carnage in there, Jack,” Fescoe said, clearly shocked. “Son of a bitch supposedly skated through the place shooting anyone he pleased.”

  “Until he got to Grandma,” I said.

  “Wish there were more like her,” Townsend said, looking over at Mrs. Wanta, who was lighting another cigarette and listening to a detective’s questions.

  “We wanted Sci to process the shooter’s body,” Fescoe said, gesturing toward the sidewalk and the corpse of the wiry cross-dresser. “That’s his specialty, right?”

  “Among many others,” I replied, motioning Kloppenberg, Mo-bot, and the rest of their team toward the dead killer. “You think he’s No Prisoners?”

  Fescoe shrugged. “Haven’t seen the calling card yet. But he did try to kill seven people.”

  “Doesn’t look anything like the guy at the CVS.”

  Special Agent Townsend shrugged. “Maybe he wore makeup in the CVS job and this is over.”

  “No,” Fescoe said. “Jack’s right. This guy’s got a different facial structure.”

  “Then this isn’t over,” I said. “The dead guy, whoever he is, is just one of any number of people, at least two, who could be behind this entire—”

  Fescoe’s phone rang. The chief turned away, answered.

  “Anything new on the Harlows?” I asked Townsend.

  “Nothing hard,” she replied. “You?”

  “I’ve got a guy flying to Panama.”

  “You have unlimited resources or something?”

  “What can I say? They pissed me off.”

  “That was the mayor,” Fescoe said, interrupting, sweating now. “No Prisoners has made contact, demanding three million or eight more will die.”

  Chapter 80

  INSIDE THE GARAGE in the City of Commerce, Cobb and the other three remaining members of No Prisoners were glued to the coverage of the shootings at Mel’s Drive-In. CNN’s Anderson Cooper had been in L.A. already to report on the Harlow case and had rushed to the scene. So had affiliates from every major news network, all of them leading with footage of June Wanta smoking, listening to their questions skeptically, cracking jokes, and consistently downplaying any idea that she was a hero.

  “You have no idea what kinda broad I am,” she said, rasping in laughter at Anderson Cooper, who didn’t seem to know what to make of her.

  Neither did Cobb, who felt like he wanted to pick something up and smash it. Johnson had been his best man, the one who’d been with him longest, the most loyal friend he’d ever had. It was Johnson who’d carried Cobb, seen to his medical care after the explosion that turned his face into a spider’s web.

  “I don’t get it,” Hernandez said. “How does a chain-smoking grandma
from Minnesota kill Johnson?”

  Anderson Cooper asked virtually the same question on-screen.

  The old lady didn’t miss a beat. “She pulls the trigger,” Mrs. Wanta said.

  Cobb wanted to reach through the screen and throttle the bitch, who went on to reveal to Cooper that she was in Los Angeles “seeing the sights alone because my damn fool of a husband, Barney, wouldn’t get out of his—”

  Cobb couldn’t take her anymore and muted the screen.

  Watson was gazing at him. “We still good, Mr. Cobb?”

  Cobb felt the others watching him, looking to him for leadership. “You think we’re jeopardized because they’ve got Johnson’s body?”

  The other three men shrugged or nodded.

  “Fear not, gentlemen,” Cobb said. “I believe we’re still good to go for quite a while yet. I mean, we don’t officially exist, do we? Isn’t that what they did to us? Stripped us of everything, threw us to the hyenas?”

  “They did, Mr. Cobb,” Kelleher said, anger flaring across his face. “And thorough bastards they were about it.”

  “So what exactly makes any of you think they can identify us, let alone locate and catch us before we’re finished here, and long gone?”

  Chapter 81

  AFTER NINE THAT night, I returned to the office for a conference call with Mattie Engel in Private’s Berlin office regarding an embezzlement case she’d been working on for nearly a month on behalf of Sherman Wilkerson, our client who lived above the beach where the first No Prisoners bodies were found.

  I hung up believing that Engel had the situation well in hand and would be ready to file a full report to Sherman sometime the following—

  A knock. I looked up, saw Justine, felt that little pang I always get in my chest when I haven’t seen her in a while.

  “Got a minute?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I was going to have a drink. Want one?”

  “Oh, God, I’d love one,” she said, coming in and sitting down hard in an overstuffed chair by the couch.

  As I reached into my lower desk drawer to get out a bottle of Midleton Very Rare Irish Whiskey, I was thinking again that something had changed about her recently, aged her in a way I’d never seen before.

  I handed her a glass with two fingers of Midleton in it neat. She took a sip, closed her eyes, and said, “That helps.”

  “You saw that No Prisoners struck again?” I asked.

  “Heard it on the radio. Some grandmother killed him?”

  “We believe No Prisoners is several people acting in concert. The dead guy’s just one of them.”

  “ID yet?”

  “Sci and Mo-bot are working with the FBI on that.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “So we’re back on that case again?”

  “Just the lab for now,” I said. “But there’s a twist in the demand No Prisoners made to the mayor that might bring us in deeper.”

  “A twist you can’t discuss?”

  “For now,” I said.

  She nodded absently.

  “You wanted to tell me something?” I said. “If not, I was going to head over to see Rick.”

  Justine startled, confused, but then nodded. “That picture Sci sent me? I know who the mystery girl is. Her name is Adelita. I’ll tell you her last name later.”

  Intrigued now, I sat in a chair across the coffee table from her, sipped the whiskey, and listened as she told me all she’d learned about Adelita from Cynthia Maines.

  Six weeks before the Harlows were to fly to Saigon for filming, Maines was sent over to organize the family’s living arrangements and to hire a staff in Vietnam. She was not there when Adelita came into the Harlows’ life. Jennifer was always hiring and firing nannies, usually one a year, sometimes two. She’d fired her last nanny twelve days before the family was to fly to Vietnam, and no one she’d interviewed in the meantime suited her.

  Enter Adelita. She’d only been in Los Angeles three days, here on a student visa from Mexico to study acting for six months. She had defied her parents on her eighteenth birthday and used a small inheritance from her grandmother to fund a plane ticket, a few months’ rent, and the acting lessons.

  Eight days before their flight to Vietnam, the Harlows were at their Westwood apartment, staging up before the big move overseas. Adelita ran into Jennifer Harlow, one of her acting idols, on the sidewalk outside a deli. Jennifer was harried, trying to deal with Miguel, who was throwing a fit, while she juggled a phone call regarding Saigon Falls.

  Star-struck as she was, Adelita charmed Miguel into calming down. Impulsive, perceptive, Jennifer talked to Adelita, took her to lunch with the children, got her to admit she wanted to be an actress.

  “Jennifer offered her the job as nanny,” Justine said, reaching to pour herself more whiskey. “The idea was that she’d get to see the world and get to really understand the life of an actor.”

  I said, “Sounds like the offer of a lifetime, one of those fated meetings you used to hear took place at soda fountains where stars found their fortunes.”

  “Right?” Justine said. “Anyway, Maines said Adelita accepted, flew to Saigon with them a week later. She said Adelita was great with the kids, and the entire family seemed to love her. The nanny was evidently a pretty good actress as well. They gave her a minor role in the film. She plays the daughter of an American diplomat fleeing Saigon as the Vietcong advance.”

  “Where is she—Adelita?” I asked.

  “I’m coming to that,” Justine said, taking another large draw on the whiskey, which surprised me because I’d never seen her drink like this before.

  Maines said something happened to Adelita about halfway through the nine months in Vietnam. The girl who had been so enthralled by the Harlows’ world, so excited to be given a part in their film, became infinitely more subdued. She worked just as hard, cared for the children just as well, but something was definitely off about her.

  “Maines tried to get her to open up once, but Adelita forcefully shut her down,” Justine continued. “In any case, before they returned from Vietnam, Adelita was offered the same vacation Cynthia was, three weeks off with a bonus of an additional three weeks’ pay. She took them up on the deal and left Saigon two days before Maines and the Harlows.”

  “Where’d Adelita go?” I asked.

  “Home,” Justine said, closing her eyes. “Mexico. Guadalajara, in fact.”

  “Really,” I said, piecing some of it together. “So what’s her last name?”

  “Gomez,” Justine said, eyes still closed, but wincing. “Same last name as the Jalisco State Police captain who put Cruz and me in jail down there.”

  Chapter 82

  BEFORE I COULD put that information into context, Sci knocked at my doorjamb, entered. He saw the Midleton bottle. “That looks good.”

  “You look like you could use a snort,” Justine said, turning in her seat.

  “A snort?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, reaching for the bottle again. “What else do you call it?”

  “Snort will do,” Kloppenberg said, taking the bottle from her after she’d poured a fifth and sixth finger of the whiskey.

  “Any luck on identifying the shooter?” I asked as Sci got a glass.

  “No,” he said. “Which is why I’m here.”

  Yet another knock came at my door. Mo-bot entered, yawning, but looked at Sci pouring, said, “Gimme one of those.”

  “Another strikeout?” Sci asked, pouring her a glass.

  “Total wall,” she said. “Even dental records.”

  “One of you want to tell me what you’re talking about?” I asked.

  Sci handed Mo-bot her drink and plopped down beside her on the couch, said, “So we had beautiful fingerprints, all the DNA material anyone could need, dental pics, you name it, and nothing.”

  “Well, something,” Mo-bot said. “But what it is isn’t exactly clear.”

  “You sound like you’ve been drinking already,�
� Justine observed with a slight slur.

  Mo-bot sipped her whiskey, sighed with pleasure, and then explained that when they’d run the fingerprints and dental records of the dead homicidal drag queen through various law enforcement databases around the world, they’d gotten a positive match.

  “And?” I said.

  “And nothing,” Sci said.

  “Whaddya mean, nothing?” Justine asked.

  “It’s like the database freezes and doesn’t let us go forward,” Mo-bot said.

  “You’re being blocked?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t say blocked,” Sci said. “More like frozen.”

  Mo-bot nodded. “It’s like there’s still an echo or a ghost of that guy’s fingerprints in the system that’s being recognized, but everything else about him has been scrubbed clean.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Well, totally corrupted, at least,” Sci said.

  “What database did you freeze in?” I asked.

  Kloppenberg pursed his lips, said, “US Department of Defense personnel records. Past ten years.”

  I slapped my leg. “I said this felt like military guys from the get-go.”

  “But which military guys?” Justine asked loudly, the slur stronger. “Bud Rankin was an ex-marine. He would have known how to figure it out. And, you know, why aren’t we raising a toast to poor Bud Rankin?”

  She’d had too much already. But I nodded, said, “To Bud. An old soul who will be missed.”

  “Hear, hear,” they all muttered, and downed their drinks.

  “When this is over we’ll have a proper memorial for Bud,” I said.

  Justine reached again for the bottle. I slid it away from her, said, “Why don’t I get you home for some much-needed rest?”

  She raised her finger at me, trying to focus, trying to argue, but then licked her lips and nodded. I put the empty glass on my desk and turned back to her, seeing the amusement on Sci’s and Mo-bot’s faces.

  Justine was out cold, already snoring.