Private L.A. (Private 6)

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