Private L.A. (Private 6)
“What can I say? They pissed me off.”
“That was the mayor,” Fescoe said, interrupting, sweating now. “No Prisoners has made contact, demanding three million or eight more will die.”
Chapter 80
INSIDE THE GARAGE in the City of Commerce, Cobb and the other three remaining members of No Prisoners were glued to the coverage of the shootings at Mel’s Drive-In. CNN’s Anderson Cooper had been in L.A. already to report on the Harlow case and had rushed to the scene. So had affiliates from every major news network, all of them leading with footage of June Wanta smoking, listening to their questions skeptically, cracking jokes, and consistently downplaying any idea that she was a hero.
“You have no idea what kinda broad I am,” she said, rasping in laughter at Anderson Cooper, who didn’t seem to know what to make of her.
Neither did Cobb, who felt like he wanted to pick something up and smash it. Johnson had been his best man, the one who’d been with him longest, the most loyal friend he’d ever had. It was Johnson who’d carried Cobb, seen to his medical care after the explosion that turned his face into a spider’s web.
“I don’t get it,” Hernandez said. “How does a chain-smoking grandma
from Minnesota kill Johnson?”
Anderson Cooper asked virtually the same question on-screen.
The old lady didn’t miss a beat. “She pulls the trigger,” Mrs. Wanta said.
Cobb wanted to reach through the screen and throttle the bitch, who went on to reveal to Cooper that she was in Los Angeles “seeing the sights alone because my damn fool of a husband, Barney, wouldn’t get out of his—”
Cobb couldn’t take her anymore and muted the screen.
Watson was gazing at him. “We still good, Mr. Cobb?”
Cobb felt the others watching him, looking to him for leadership. “You think we’re jeopardized because they’ve got Johnson’s body?”
The other three men shrugged or nodded.
“Fear not, gentlemen,” Cobb said. “I believe we’re still good to go for quite a while yet. I mean, we don’t officially exist, do we? Isn’t that what they did to us? Stripped us of everything, threw us to the hyenas?”
“They did, Mr. Cobb,” Kelleher said, anger flaring across his face. “And thorough bastards they were about it.”
“So what exactly makes any of you think they can identify us, let alone locate and catch us before we’re finished here, and long gone?”
Chapter 81
AFTER NINE THAT night, I returned to the office for a conference call with Mattie Engel in Private’s Berlin office regarding an embezzlement case she’d been working on for nearly a month on behalf of Sherman Wilkerson, our client who lived above the beach where the first No Prisoners bodies were found.
I hung up believing that Engel had the situation well in hand and would be ready to file a full report to Sherman sometime the following—
A knock. I looked up, saw Justine, felt that little pang I always get in my chest when I haven’t seen her in a while.
“Got a minute?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I was going to have a drink. Want one?”
“Oh, God, I’d love one,” she said, coming in and sitting down hard in an overstuffed chair by the couch.
As I reached into my lower desk drawer to get out a bottle of Midleton Very Rare Irish Whiskey, I was thinking again that something had changed about her recently, aged her in a way I’d never seen before.
I handed her a glass with two fingers of Midleton in it neat. She took a sip, closed her eyes, and said, “That helps.”
“You saw that No Prisoners struck again?” I asked.
“Heard it on the radio. Some grandmother killed him?”
“We believe No Prisoners is several people acting in concert. The dead guy’s just one of them.”