Private L.A. (Private 6)

“You okay?” Justine asked around eight that evening.

I’d been staring obsessively at the screen while everyone ate burritos Cordova had brought in.

“I wish you and the others would take my offer.”

“We’re not going to leave you here to deal with de la Vega alone, Jack,” she said. “Just not happening.”

“This was my idea,” I reminded her. “And I’m beginning to think it was a bad one, that de la Vega might go Scarface somehow, and that I may have put us all in his crosshairs unnecessarily.”

Justine laid her hand on my shoulder. “We’re all in this together, Jack. We’re seeing this through together.”

But with every passing minute I was becoming more and more on edge. Time gives an opponent a chance to come up with a countermove. Had I given them too much time?

“Shit,” Mo-bot said.

“Double shit,” Sci said.

I glanced away from the screen. Sci and Mo-bot looked like they were each about to birth a cow. Mo-bot was gesturing wildly at her computer, where bright-orange numbers were blinking—2, 3, and 4—alerting us to the tripping of motion detectors we’d placed inside the wall that surrounded the house and yard.

Someone had found us.

Make that three, maybe four people had found us.

And they had no interest in knocking.

Chapter 122

THE DRAPES WERE drawn, but Cordova flipped off the lights.

“Get low, spread out,” Jack whispered.

In the dim light shining from the computers Justine saw Cruz, Cordova, and Sci fan in different directions. It seemed surreal to see Kloppenberg carrying one of the sawed-off shotguns. It felt even stranger to be holding the combat shotgun, her finger on the safety.

Justine flashed on the image of Carla and had a moment of uncertainty until Jack eased up beside her, whispered, “Some people will tell you that the best thing you can do when you’re outgunned is to give up and negotiate for your safety. Nothing is further from the truth. If someone attacks you, fight and keep fighting with whatever you’ve got, especially when you’re dealing with people who have probably killed before.”

“Like assassins sent by a drug lord?”

“Exactly,” Jack said, looked at Mo-bot. “First shot, you upload that video.”

Mo-bot nodded, but Justine could tell she was shaking.

For several minutes there was just the sound of their breathing. Then Justine heard a soft ding from Mo-bot’s computer. Two new numbers were flashing—8 and 9, the rear bedroom and the bathroom windows.

They’d already been breached and no one had heard a sound.

Chapter 123

I GESTURED TO Cruz to cover the front door and to Justine to cover the windows in the main room. Then Cordova and I slipped off our shoes, turned on the red flashlights, held them beneath the barrels of our weapons, went back to back, moved sideways over rough wood floors into the hallway, guns and lights aimed in the direction of the doors to the bathroom and the rear bedroom.

As we listened for any sound, any movement, any reason to open fire, I wondered whether this was it, after everything I’d been through, my family’s disintegration and disgrace, the helicopter crash, my tortured relationship with my brother. Was I going to die in a squalid house in Guadalajara? Were Justine and the others going to follow me to the grave?

We reached the end of the hallway and split. Cordova stood to the doorknob side of the bedroom door. I did the same with the bathroom door. It took everything in me to stay calm, control my breath and my heart so I could hear.

A shuffle. Right there on the other side of the door.

Sometimes the best defense is surprise. Without thinking I twisted the knob, hurled the door inward, felt it hit something soft and crunchy. I heard a grunt and jumped around into the doorway, trying to get square to shoot.

But I came up short at a trembling sleek black pistol aimed by a street urchin who could not have been more than fourteen. He kept moving his right leg and cringing.