Private L.A. (Private 6)

If I shot Cobb just as he was going out the door and I was lucky, he’d pitch forward and drop the grenades. What was outside? An alley? A parking lot? I had no idea.

In any case, it had to be better than the bombs going off in here. If I was really lucky, the door would shut behind Cobb before they blew. If I was unlucky,

he’d crumple backward at the shot and drop the grenades, and I’d be shredded.

If they went off.

Cobb made the decision for me. He swiveled his head back at me and then made a quick jerking motion with his right hand, suggesting that he was going to throw the grenade at me. He sold the pump fake as well any NFL quarterback. I couldn’t help it. I cringed, shrank, just for a moment. But it was enough for the laser sight to slide off his head and for him to shoulder open the door and dart outside.

I fired at the last of him. The round struck the steel door right behind his back. The door started to swing shut. Without thinking, I took four big leaps, heard a clanking noise, and kicked open the door.

The second I saw the Dumpster directly across the alley from me I knew what Cobb had done and I threw myself sideways and down. The grenade defied time and blew with extraordinary force. I felt it like a giant hand slapping me, boxing my ears, deafening me, and dazing me.

But I wasn’t cut. The grenade had landed in the near-empty Dumpster. The heavy-gauge steel walls had contained the explosion, forced the shrapnel upward like a deadly geyser. Knowing that what goes up must eventually come down, I threw my arms over my head and struggled to my feet.

By the time I got oriented and turned, Cobb had exited the alley and was running diagonally across East Sixth Street. He disappeared from view. I felt slightly off-balance as I tried to sprint after him.

Where was Cobb going? Anywhere but here? Or to a car?

I got my answer when I reached the end of the alley and saw him running into a used-car lot on the north side of Sixth. I tried to aim but had no clear shot.

I ran out into traffic. I still couldn’t hear much, but then caught over the din in my ears the honking of horns and the screeching of tires as cars tried to avoid hitting me. Were those sirens?

My eyes were scanning back and forth from Cobb to the area around him. I reached the sidewalk just as he vaulted a fence and landed in a second used-car dealership. I crouched and scurried over to Atlantic, hearing shouts as I turned north, really hurrying now.

Ahead of me half a block a cement mixer was parked, turning, while three laborers who’d been laying new sidewalk were looking toward the car lot. I popped up, saw Cobb pulling a guy from a silver Chrysler convertible with a yellow balloon attached to its antenna. He jumped in and the car started moving.

At first I was sure Cobb was heading for the rear exit back into the alley. But he suddenly turned hard right, heading toward Atlantic.

I ran, screaming at the guys working the cement, “Get down! He’s got a grenade!”

Either they saw my gun or they understood and dove into the wet cement. The others were slower to understand and were still standing there puzzled when I ran past, gun up, just as Cobb nosed the car across the existing sidewalk, looking to pull out onto Atlantic.

I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from him when I yelled, “Cobb!”

He glanced at me, showed little surprise, and side-armed the second grenade at me.

Chapter 110

TIME SEEMED TO slow as the grenade bounced and rattled down the sidewalk toward me. Cobb stomped on the gas, shot out onto Atlantic, and sideswiped a commercial van.

But I was focused on that bouncing grenade. An F1 has roughly a four-second fuse. I caught it right-handed at two seconds, twisted, saw my target, and threw it at three seconds.

Once upon a time all I wanted to do was to play football. For years, I’d throw footballs through a tire my father hung from a tree in our backyard, keeping at it for hours on end. Practice more than talent got me onto my college team.

That day practice saved my life.

The grenade dropped into the cement hopper on top of the mixer, dropped into the huge barrel of the mixer itself, and blew with a muffled thud. Wet cement erupted from the hopper and discharge chute and rained down on me as I leaped out into the street.

The van Cobb had sideswiped had crashed into a parked car on the other side of Atlantic. Cobb’s convertible was picking up speed, heading back toward Sixth. I went singular again, raised the pistol, and took one shot at his head. I missed and hit the back of the driver’s seat.

The convertible went out of control and crashed into a fire hydrant. When I got to the car, LAPD cruisers were coming at me from three directions.

Cobb sat slumped against the driver’s-side door. His breathing was labored, he was coughing out a fine pink mist. I couldn’t hear anything but the sirens now but knew Cobb was probably making a gurgling sound, sign of a sucking chest wound, a sound that would have ordinarily sent me spinning back to Afghanistan, in country, where anything deadly was possible.

But not that day. I was cold and utterly rooted in reality when I stepped up, gun trained on Cobb’s scarred face. As more frothy blood began to appear at his nostrils and lips, he gazed at me with utter bewilderment.

“Chopper pilot?” he whispered. “How did I …? How did you …?”