Private L.A. (Private 6)

AT THE SAME time, one hundred miles to the south, in her Civic hybrid parked down the block from a CVS pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard, Sheila Vicente was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

An assistant district attorney juggling a monstrous caseload, including the upcoming prosecution of a capital murder case, she was also a divorcing mother of two, and on the line with her soon-to-be ex-husband.

“Do you think I’m a doormat you can just walk on?” Vicente demanded.

Silence. Then her husband, cold, said, “No, just the same old inflexible—”

“Bitch?” she said, struggling for control. “I’m a bitch because you have the gall to call me at the eleventh hour and ask for a different weekend with the boys so you and your plastic-boob girlfriend can jet down to Cabo for a quick forty-eight in the sack?”

“Pat’s got two days off from rotation,” her husband shot back. “It’s rare.”

“Not as rare as a day off is for me!” Sheila shrieked. “I haven’t had one in three weeks.” She threw down her cell.

Sheila shook from head to toe, trembled against every bit of will she had left, staring into the distance at what had once been a dream life, barely aware of the blond man with the scruffy beard, the mirror sunglasses, the baggy pants, and the Lakers hoodie pimp-strolling confidently by her car, up the sidewalk, and into the pharmacy.

“Mommy?” a thin little voice came from the backseat. “Mommy sad?”

She looked in the mirror, saw her two-year-old son so worried, and knew now she had no choice. She had to go through with it.

As much as she hated the idea, she was going to fill a prescription for antidepressants. Serious antidepressants.

Chapter 16

HERNANDEZ CHECKED HIS disguise in a mirror in the cosmetics section. Not even his own not-so-dear and dead mother would recognize him like this. Gringo to the max, man. I could be one chubby boy under all these clothes, right?

“How many?” Cobb’s voice muttered through the earpiece hidden beneath the locks of the blond wig, breaking Hernandez from his thoughts.

“Nine total,” Hernandez replied.

Silence, then a comment from Watson: “Video and audio feeds are crisp and strong.”

Cobb said, “Take five, Mr. Hernandez, drop the card, and leave.”

“Going mundane,” Hernandez said, feeling a familiar thrilling sense of descent, of regressing to the primitive, of tasting bloodlust.

He angled through the store, sniffed the perfumed air, plucked a king-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and tore it open. He dropped the candy into his mouth, savoring the melt as he walked to the prescription window, noticing that the pharmacist was on break. An old black woman stood to one side, hands on her wooden cane, waiting for her medicine, looking at him suspiciously.

A pimply redheaded woman, the only one behind the counter, said brightly, “Here to pick up, sir?”

“More like a drop-off,” Hernandez said, drawing the suppressed weapons.

He shot her at point-blank range with the right-hand gun and then whirled, looking for the old woman. The crazy bitch was already swinging at him with her cane. It broke across his arm, right across the new tat

too, setting it afire, shocking him, but only for a moment before he realized she was moving to stab him with the splintered end of her cane.

Hernandez’s left hand swung instinctively, aimed at the old woman’s chin, and shot her there. She crumpled to the tile floor.

“Weak, Mr. Hernandez,” Cobb said. “You should have taken her first.”

Hernandez ignored the criticism, stalked through the aisles, his arm screaming in pain, but believing that no one else in the store, what with the Muzak braying, had heard the suppressed shots or the bodies falling.

Guns back in his hoodie’s pocket, he walked past a teenage girl shopping for nail polish in aisle three. He skirted a plump guy looking at razors in aisle five but killed an older man checking out incontinence pads in aisle seven.

He considered the middle-aged woman perusing the paperback racks, a mystery novel in one hand, but then shifted his focus to the two clerks manning the front desk, man, woman, both in their late twenties.

The male clerk died stocking cigarettes, shot in the back. “You got company coming,” Cobb said. “Move.”

The female clerk died screaming, the first to be aware of her impending death, trying to crouch and hide beneath the cash register.