Private L.A. (Private 6)

Four: members of the Harlow-Quinn team? Had one of them threatened to blow the story on the orphans’ fund? Or had the actors been ignorant of the way the money was being funneled to the Saigon Falls project, then discovered it, and had they been preparing to go to the authorities?

Five: whoever took the Harlows, excluding the Harlow-Quinn team.

I supposed that was possible. Maybe we were close and someone had decided to take me out?

Then again, for the most part, Justine had taken the lead in that investigation. Had she been the assassin’s real target, with me a lucky opportunity?

It was suddenly all too much to think about. My head ached and I closed my eyes. I honestly don’t remember falling asleep.

Chapter 96

MY CELL PHONE rang and I jerked alert on my couch, head groggy. What time was it? Three thirty a.m.? I’d been sleeping five hours?

Yawning, I picked up the cell, saw a number I didn’t recognize, answered, “This better be good.”

“Didn’t want to come tell me in person that someone tried to kill you, huh?”

I hung my head, feeling guilty for having forgotten to visit Del Rio, or at least call him. “It was a crazy day, Rick,” I began.

“I’m sure it was,” he said. “Make up for it. Get over here ASAP.”

“It’s three thirty in the morning.”

“There’s someone here wants to see you, misses you deeply.”

I flashed on Angela, the Filipina nurse. “It’s three thirty in the morning.”

“Which is why you better get your ass over here, Jack,” Del Rio said firmly. “Ghosts like the one standing in front of me need to be gone and well hidden in spooky spook land long before sunrise.”

Chapter 97

I HADN’T SEEN him in more than a decade, but he had not aged a bit and still looked like an overgrown choirboy, with pale pinkish skin, a pleasant pie-shaped face, and a riot of curly orange hair. But the eyes gave the lie to everything else, hard and dark as sapphires even if his lips were smiling.

“Guy Carpenter,” I said when I saw him in the chair usually reserved for me in Del Rio’s hospital room.

Carpenter was dressed in boat shoes, khakis, a white polo shirt, and a blue Windbreaker sporting the logo of a country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With the Titleist ball cap on his head, he looked ready for thirty-six holes. I knew better. He’d never been in a country club in his life, unless it was one constructed especially for bad-asses, which he most definitely was.

“Jack Morgan,” Carpenter said, getting to his feet, shooting me a winning smile, and shaking my hand while those hard sapphire eyes danced over me, making me feel oddly expendable. “Been following your career since the ’Stan.”

“Can’t say the same about you.”

“Yeah, well, I was always better suited to the shadows than you were. How long did you last at the company?”

“Two years,” I said. “Difference of philosophy.”

“I figured that,” he replied, then laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t it strange the way life unfolds? The unexpected turns and twists?”

Del Rio spoke up from the bed. “You come here to tell us something, Guy, or get all touchy-feely about life unfolding in its grand arc?”

“He hasn’t changed,” Carpenter said to me, throwing a thumb Del Rio’s way. “Even with a broken back he hasn’t changed.”

“Not a bit,” I replied.

Carpenter’s smiling face fell then, and I saw the darkness I’d glimpsed several times in Afghanistan when Del Rio and I were charged with moving him about the country on missions we never fully understood.

He went to the door and shut it, then jammed a chair under the doorknob. “That nurse is a real pain,” he said. “I figured she might try to interrupt our business just to get her jollies.”

“You were always a quick study,” I said.