Private L.A. (22 page)

Without waiting for an answer, Johnson darted by her toward the restrooms. “Sir!” the hostess called after him. “Ma’am?”

But Johnson paid her no mind as he pushed into the men’s room and let the door shut behind him. Finding an empty stall, he entered, got the guns from the pack, and put it back on. He held the suppressed pistols reversed, butts facing the front, palm to the action, fingers cradling the trigger guards, barrels flush to his lower forearms, a carry that often fooled the best trained of men and women, even if only for an extra moment or two.

Stepping from the stall less than twenty-five seconds after he’d entered, Johnson said, “Minute thirty, maybe less.”

“He’s waiting,” Cobb said.

From that point forward, Johnson did not pause. He pulled open the door, skated past a family of five chatting with the hostess. Dodging around them, he passed between a waitress filling a coffeepot next to the stainless kitchen door and a mom with three Cub Scouts, never heard them giggling at him.

Rolling now across the gray-green floor, seeing the cops in tunnel vision, Johnson crossed his hands, popped the left gun into the air and let go of the right weapon. He grabbed the guns with opposite hands. Unfolding his arms, swinging the suppressed barrels inward, past each other, and forward, he found the triggers and aimed at point-blank range.

JUSTINE FOUND CYNTHIA
Maines just where she’d said she would be: in Burbank, in the cafeteria on the Warner Brothers lot. It was late afternoon and the place was quiet, just a few people having coffee. Justine had not seen the Harlows’ personal assistant since the children were released. She remembered how Maines had been angry, defiant. Now she appeared overwhelmed, sick, almost defeated.

“What’s happening?” Maines asked as if she couldn’t take any more.

Justine had called Maines and requested the meeting. But she’d found over the years that understanding up front the state of mind of the person she was interviewing helped immensely during investigations. She said, “Tell me what’s going on with you first.”

Maines made a disgusted noise and gestured toward the cafeteria window. “Evidently I don’t have an office at Harlow-Quinn anymore. I was told to leave this morning.”

“By Terry Graves?”

Maines nodded bitterly. “Camilla and Dave were there too. My God, I’ve known them all for more than ten years. They just cut me off.”

“You tell this to the FBI?”

“Of course,” Maines said.

“And?”

“They said that’s their prerogative, and then asked me all this stuff that was all BS.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know,” Maines said, throwing her napkin on the table. “About the studio, and whether Warner and the other investors were freaking out, wondering if all the money invested in
Saigon Falls
is gone. They said the studio execs hardly mentioned Thom or Jennifer, said it was just the money they were interested in, which is fucking depressing, you know?”

“That all?”

“No, they asked me the same kind of stuff you did. And about Terry and Camilla, and Sanders, and everyone who works at H-Q.”

Tears began again. “It’s like I’ve been shipwrecked or something, cut off.” She choked. “I miss Jen and Thom. This is the only job I’ve ever had, and I …”

Maines wept. Justine sighed, and, wondering about all the hurt that seemed to be going around lately, she moved to the other side of the table to hold the woman.

Maines said, “I feel helpless. I feel like people are blaming me.”

“Helpless is a horrible place to be,” Justine said, rubbing her back. “Being blamed for things beyond your control is worse. Dealing with this sort of situation usually involves letting go and focusing on what you can control.”

Maines stilled, looked embarrassed, grabbed the napkin and wiped at her tears. “I don’t know what to do.”

“How about helping me find the Harlows?”

That seemed to offer Maines some hope to grasp because she said, “Anything you want. Any time you want. Same as I told the FBI.”

“Okay,” Justine said, returning to her seat. “Did you know about the secret passage off Jennifer’s closet, the one that led down to Thom’s editing room and also up to a panic room with a two-way mirror that overlooks their bedroom?”

Maines looked at Justine as if she’d been speaking Urdu. “What?”

Justine described in detail what she’d found, including the empty camera brackets, the missing hard drives.

Maines shook her head.

“We’re assuming some of the drives had all the footage from the location shoot,” Justine said. “Is that a problem?”

“No. Everything having to do with
Saigon Falls
was backed up every day to a server here, and there’s another backup somewhere in Minneapolis. From the ranch, from Vietnam, from here. It didn’t matter. Constant backups.”

Justine thought about that, set
Saigon Falls
aside for the moment, dug in her purse for her phone, and showed Maines the picture Sci had sent her.

“Who is she?”

Maines appeared momentarily transfixed, looking at the photograph as if wrapped up in another time and place altogether. In a dazed tone, she said, “I forgot her. In all this craziness I completely forgot Adelita.”

THE TWO POLICE
officers having lunch at Mel’s Drive-In never knew what hit them, just kind of sagged when the suppressed bullets blew through their skulls and ricocheted off the counter. Officer Kate Rangel slumped forward into her French fries. Her partner, Officer Lance Barfield, drifted off his green stool onto the floor.

Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was blasting from the jukebox, covering some of the noise, so Johnson was already ten feet beyond their corpses, looking for his next target—two down, five to go—when one of the Cub Scouts realized what had happened and began to scream.

Like an infection spreading, more screams echoed as others joined him.

“The tranny’s got guns!” someone shouted.

“You bet he does, sugar!” Johnson yelled in that high squeaky voice before pulling the trigger of his right pistol twice, blowing side-by-side holes in the chest of a busboy unfortunate enough to have been clearing a booth in his path.

Pandemonium swept the diner, patrons and staff all wailing, diving to the floor, ducking beneath tables. Johnson skated calmly through the place toward the exit facing the Strip. A steroidal punk came out low from behind a table, tried to knock Johnson off his blades.

Johnson shot him left-handed, double-tap to the crown of the skull. The man died and the chaos began anew. Johnson heard pleas for mercy, cries of “No, Please, No!” and the sort of foolish shout-outs to God that their kind always make when people around them get to dying.

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.

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.”

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.