Private L.A. (Private 6)

Maines looked at Justine as if she’d been speaking Urdu. “What?”

Justine described in detail what she’d found, including the empty camera brackets, the missing hard drives.

Maines shook her head.

“We’re assuming some of the drives had all the footage from the location shoot,” Justine said. “Is that a prob

lem?”

“No. Everything having to do with Saigon Falls was backed up every day to a server here, and there’s another backup somewhere in Minneapolis. From the ranch, from Vietnam, from here. It didn’t matter. Constant backups.”

Justine thought about that, set Saigon Falls aside for the moment, dug in her purse for her phone, and showed Maines the picture Sci had sent her.

“Who is she?”

Maines appeared momentarily transfixed, looking at the photograph as if wrapped up in another time and place altogether. In a dazed tone, she said, “I forgot her. In all this craziness I completely forgot Adelita.”

Chapter 78

THE TWO POLICE officers having lunch at Mel’s Drive-In never knew what hit them, just kind of sagged when the suppressed bullets blew through their skulls and ricocheted off the counter. Officer Kate Rangel slumped forward into her French fries. Her partner, Officer Lance Barfield, drifted off his green stool onto the floor.

Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was blasting from the jukebox, covering some of the noise, so Johnson was already ten feet beyond their corpses, looking for his next target—two down, five to go—when one of the Cub Scouts realized what had happened and began to scream.

Like an infection spreading, more screams echoed as others joined him.

“The tranny’s got guns!” someone shouted.

“You bet he does, sugar!” Johnson yelled in that high squeaky voice before pulling the trigger of his right pistol twice, blowing side-by-side holes in the chest of a busboy unfortunate enough to have been clearing a booth in his path.

Pandemonium swept the diner, patrons and staff all wailing, diving to the floor, ducking beneath tables. Johnson skated calmly through the place toward the exit facing the Strip. A steroidal punk came out low from behind a table, tried to knock Johnson off his blades.

Johnson shot him left-handed, double-tap to the crown of the skull. The man died and the chaos began anew. Johnson heard pleas for mercy, cries of “No, Please, No!” and the sort of foolish shout-outs to God that their kind always make when people around them get to dying.

Johnson pushed open the glass door, stepped out onto the landing of the four-step stair that led down to the outdoor eating area. The people below him were on their feet, some running, others frozen, several crying now that they saw the pistols in his hands. He had to move now. Sirens would not be long in coming.

He jumped the stairs, landed in a rolling crouch, shot two of the duffers, hitting both men in the back as they tried to flee. Angling hard right now between tables, oblivious to the screaming, he was thinking, Six down, one to go.

Johnson got over the low railing and onto the sidewalk, aware of cars rushing in both directions up and down the Strip, oblivious to the bloody mayhem he was causing as they passed. His instinct was to kill whoever remained at the west end of the eating terrace, closest to Drybar. That would put him near the parking lot where Nickerson would be waiting with one of the vans.

As Johnson swung the guns west, he spotted the old lady who’d gaped at him when he entered the diner, the one wearing the sweatshirt promoting a trout paradise. She was squared off in a horse stance twelve feet away, both hands wrapped around a small-caliber pistol.

“You get down now!” she yelled at him in a hoarse voice. “I have passed an NRA handgun self-defense course. I will shoot you!”

An NRA course? What was that? A weekend? Two? Johnson almost laughed. The truth was that unless you were deranged or enraged, it took a lot of training to be able to actually shoot someone in cold blood. Most first-timers just yanked the trigger and threw the shot wide.

Knowing that, Johnson took his chance. He grinned at her, said, “Sure, Grandma,” dropped his right pistol, and whipped the left one up at her.

He was aware of the old woman blinking as the shot went off.

Her bullet hit Johnson’s rib cage, passed below the heart, through the lung, where it expelled its energy before blowing out his back. The second pistol dropped. Johnson crumpled to the sidewalk after it, coughing up the blood already drowning him, dying in surging disbelief, utterly baffled by the fact that he had lived through so many days of full-on combat in his life with hardly a scratch to show for it, like he’d had some invisible shield around him; and yet here he was shot down in drag by some pistol-packing grandma she-bitch from Thief River Falls.

Chapter 79

I GOT THE call from Chief Fescoe about the latest No Prisoners attack twelve minutes after it went down, almost as soon as he understood the scope of the massacre and the nature of the victims.

“I’ve got two of my own dead down there,” Fescoe said, sounding rattled. “I’m on my way there with a forensics team, so is Townsend, but both our departments are spread thin. It won’t be enough. We’d like a team of your techs if we can get them.”

“Right away,” I promised, and within nine minutes Sci, Mo-bot, the Kid, and three other techs were with me, driving as fast as we dared from our offices to the Sunset Strip.