Private L.A. Read online

  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.

  Chapter 110

  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.

  Chapter 111

  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.”

  Chapter 112

  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?”

&nb
sp; 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.”

  Chapter 113

  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.”

  “Was Saigon Falls backed up?”

  Maines’s eyes were glistening with tears. “That’s what makes this all so awful. It was there, backed up around six the day Thom and Jen disappeared. It was a rough edit, but you can already see the genius of it. The story line. The acting. The cinematography. I’d love to show it to you, but it seems so …”

  “Seems so what?” Justine said, wondering where this was going.

  Maines looked lost again before saying, “There was another backup made from the ranch the night they disappeared, some sort of emergency thing. Maybe triggered by the power going off and the generator taking over? I don’t know. But about a hundred files were sent to the data bank that had never been there before.”

  “What were they?”

  Maines replied, “How is it possible that the artists who created Saigon Falls also created this?”

  She hit RETURN on the smart tablet. The huge LED screen lit, showing the Harlows’ master bedroom at the ranch in Ojai.

  Chapter 114

  A NAKED WOMAN knelt on the bed, feet and butt facing the hidden cameras. She was whimpering in pain as Thom Harlow crouched over her, naked too, sodomizing her while Jennifer shoved a dildo into her vagina and smacked her ass with her open palm.

  “You came back early because you love this,” Jen Harlow said in a taunting tone. “Admit it, you little bitch whore.”

  The woman just kept making soft, painful noises, like a rabbit Justine had once seen with a broken leg.

  “Admit it!” Thom roared.

  “Turn it off,” Justine said, feeling sickened.

  “Wait,” Maines said bitterly. “It’s important.”

  Justine tuned out the increasingly lewd and degrading things Jennifer and Thom Harlow were saying to the woman, watched from her peripheral vision until Maines said, “There.”

  Thom Harlow had come off his knees, rolled onto his right side, and pulled the woman down after him, so that the cameras caught the front of her body.

  Adelita Gomez winced with every one of Thom’s thrusts, but she was not broken. She was looking defiantly at Jennifer, as if she would not allow herself to display any sign of humiliation or submission.

  Justine looked away toward Maines, who said in a numb, flat tone, “I found other films like this with Adelita starring. When they were in Vietnam, they got her drunk. She cried like a baby the first time they took her.”

  “Turn it off,” Justine said again, repulsed and filled with sympathy for the nanny. What was she, eighteen?

  “Not yet,” Maines said in a dull voice. “It gets worse.”

  “I don’t think I—”

  “There he is,” said the Harlows’ personal assistant before her hand flew to her mouth. She whined, “Oh, God, the poor little guy.”

  In the lowest part of the screen Miguel Harlow had wandered into the room. For a moment he was frozen, watching his adopted parents defile his nanny. Then he turned and ran out of the picture. His parents seemed not to notice him at all.

  “This had to have been shot the night the Harlows disappeared,” Justine said, watching Maines. “Miguel didn’t just hear strange noises, he saw this, he got scared, he ran, he tripped and fell, bruised his shins, and—”

  “Get off her or I fucking kill you!”

  Up on the screen, four men dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas had burst into the Harlows’ bedroom, shotguns and pistols trained on the trio.

  Thom Harlow stopped his frantic thrusting and squirmed away from Adelita, trying to cover himself, while Jennifer screamed, jumped off the bed, and reached for a robe. One man grabbed the actress’s hair and hurled her against the wall. “You going nowhere you’re gonna need that, bitch.”

  He picked up the robe, looked away from Adelita, tossed it to her.

  “What do you want?” Thom Harlow demanded, now over his initial shock and trying to sound like one of the action heroes he’d played over the years.

  The men said nothing.

  But Adelita Gomez, in Jennifer’s robe now, glared at Thom and spat bitterly at him: “I want justice.”

  Chapter 115

  “THAT’S REALLY WHAT she said?” Mo-bot asked, appreciation starting to show on her face. “ ‘I want justice’?”

  Justine nodded, then shook her head when Sci offered her the bottle of Midleton Very Rare Irish Whiskey. Almost everyone from the L.A. office was in Del Rio’s hospital room, called there by me to celebrate the fact that that afternoon, while I was battling No Prisoners, Rick had shown movement in both knees, and feeling as high as his hips.

  Sci offered me the bottle. I wanted it, but the nurse who’d exa
mined me earlier in the evening said I’d probably suffered a mild concussion and should lay off the booze for a week or two.

  Meanwhile, Emilio Cruz was saying, “So someone, maybe that son of a bitch Captain Gomez, sent those men to snatch the Harlows?”

  “Or maybe Adelita recruited the gunmen,” I offered. “I mean, she had to be the one who got them past the security. She had to have been the one who cast that shadow we saw behind Jennifer when she was returning from her jog the night they disappeared.”

  “How would she know how to disable security at the ranch?” Del Rio asked. “She’d never been there, right?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Justine agreed. “But maybe she snooped around in their computers and found a diagram of it. Who knows? But I watched those guys in the black hoods shoot up the Harlows with hypodermic needles and carry them out of the bedroom. The cameras seemed to be feeding directly to the data bank in Minneapolis until someone tore out the cameras and presumably took all the computers in the house.”

  “So you think they made a hundred of these films?” Sci said, pouring himself a little whiskey. “That’s seriously twisted. Going back how long?”

  Justine looked even more disgusted, said, “Cynthia made me watch one more of them. It was worse, openly sadistic.” She paused. “I recognized the victim almost immediately.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Justine shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it. “I suspected something the other night at Sanders’s, but I couldn’t have known the deeper, terrible secret.”

  “What are you talking about, Justine?” Mo-bot pressed.

  “Who are we talking about?” Del Rio asked.

  “Anita Fontana,” Justine said. “The Harlows’ housekeeper.”

  “No way,” I said, flabbergasted. “She’s been with them, what? Twelve years? Why would she stay? She could have left them, refused to come back when she went home on vacations.”