Private L.A. (Private 6)

Chapter 40

COBB WORE A convincing fake beard, dark this time, to hide his scars. With the hood of his green rain jacket up, he left a pizza joint a mile north of the Huntington Beach Pier. For a moment he was back in those desert mountains hearing the children and women cry, hearing their husbands begging for mercy when pity was long dead and gone. What had they wanted from him? What had they expected?

They expected us to die, Cobb thought coldly. They all expected us to die and crumble to dust.

That thought turned to blazing anger. They abandoned us. They tried to bury us. Well, guess what, we’re not dead, and we’re taking what we’re due.

In a blind rage now, he punched in a number on a throwaway cell phone, said, “You ready, Mr. Stern?”

“We’re going to rip this,” Stern promised.

“We’re counting on it,” Cobb said. “And tell Mr. Allen, go big or go home. We’ll find someone else.”

Stern’s voice cooled. “You just make sure you hit the record button.”

“Oh, we will,” Cobb assured him. “Twenty-five seconds.”

“Synced, ready to launch.”

Cobb hung up, checked the time. It was eight fifty-eight.

He punched in a second number, poised his thumb above SEND.

We go big here, he thought. Or we all go home the hardest way possible.

Chapter 41

“CHIEF’S BY ME, moving along the rail north side of Ruby’s,” said Bud Rankin in the earbud tucked beneath the hood of my wet suit. “It is eight fifty-nine and forty seconds. He’s preparing to drop.”

I said nothing, just swept my attention out and along the perimeter of that electric halo of light, looking for an intruder.

“Bags are gone,” Rankin said.

I saw the bags fall. I saw them hit the churning water forty yards in front of me. The dry bags slapped and spun on the writhing ocean surface. My attention darted away, back along that perimeter of light.

“Anything, Chief?” I asked. Fescoe was supposed to remain on the rail, advise us of any effort to retrieve the dry bags from below the surface.

That was going to be difficult in the extreme in any case. Inside the bags, Sci had placed two small pressurized CO2 tanks hitched to a switch activated by a pressure gauge. Deeper than six feet and the tanks would expel their charges, inflate the bags, and drag anyone holding them to the surface. If the pressure-gauge trigger failed, Sci could activate the tanks by radio.

Fescoe cleared his throat, said, “Not a goddamned—”

The explosion came without warning, a brilliant flash, crack, and roar that threw a ballooning plume of flame that witnesses later described as flat blue with a central core that burned as bright as mercury.

Del Rio was on the pylon almost directly below the explosion.

For a split instant I saw my friend backlit, jerked, and bent backward against the waistband of his lineman’s belt before the force of the blast struck and body-slammed me. The hit tore my feet from the pylon, caused my rope to lose purchase. I was aware of falling.

Chapter 42

IN RETROSPECT, I was lucky to have dropped off the pylon and plunged into the Pacific. The cold water stung my face while currents and eddies swung me at the length of the lineman’s rope. I fought to free myself, unclipped the carabiner that held the rope to the belt, kicked toward the surface.

The pier lights were still on. Dark smoke boiled thick in the air to the south, billowing out toward the darkness. Police sirens were gathering from multiple directions. There was enough light for me to see Del Rio hanging from his belt twelve feet up the scorched pylon.

“Rick!” I shouted.

Del Rio rolled his head toward me. “Burned, Jack,” he grunted through the earbud. “Back’s broken, I think. Can’t move my—”

“Don’t move anything!” I screamed. “Don’t move at all!”