Private

“I heard on the street. It was a hit man. For the Mob.”

“His name?”

“I don’t know that. How would I know that? Yowww,” he yelled as Del Rio gripped a hank of white hair and forced Perez’s face down onto the stove again.

“Monkey. His name is Monty! Something like that.”

Del Rio had briefed me on known enforcers, and Bo Montgomery, aka Monty, was local, which put him right at the top of the list.

“Montgomery,” I said to Del Rio.

Perez shouted, “That’s him. Now, turn off the gas, maaan.”

Del Rio pulled Perez away from the stove. He said, “Be right, yo. Or I’ll be back to visit. I keep my promises, maaan.”

Chapter 80

NOW WE HAD something, and Rick and I were both feeling it to the max. It was a twenty-five-minute drive from Perez’s two-kilo manse to a hit man’s horse farm in the Agoura Hills, north of Malibu.

The approach was a dusty, unpaved driveway through tall brown grass and trees marked with “No Trespassing” signs. The drive curled around a bluff, then ran straight to a shingled farmhouse, weathered to a silvery shade of gray.

There was a new barn behind the house and a paddock where a mule and three bay mustangs stood head to tail, swishing at flies under a tree. Beyond the paddock was a riding trail that climbed a gentle hill a quarter mile away.

Del Rio braked the car, and light glinting off glass made me look up.

I saw the dome shape of an Avigilon sixteen-megapixel camera mounted under the eaves of the house. I had been thinking of getting the same surveillance system for myself. It shot wide-angle high-res video in color and infrared.

A door hinge squealed, and a man stepped out of the house with an AK-47 in his arms and a gnarly dog at his side. The man was wiry, nothing remarkable to look at, which probably helped him in his work. The dog had a head the size of a large melon. It tensed and growled as we got out of the car.

I kept one eye on the dog as I introduced Del Rio and myself to Monty, faking a casualness I didn’t feel. The man was a killer many times over. He was holding a weapon that could turn a person into a colander in seconds.

At the same time, I was hyperaware of my hair-trigger buddy standing beside me. Del Rio had a loaded gun stuck in the back of his waistband. He couldn’t outdraw Monty, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. Sweat formed on my upper lip.

Monty said, “What do you want?” His voice was high, almost boyish.

“I’m Jack Morgan, with Private. Shelby Cushman’s husband is my client,” I said. “We have no issues with you. I just need to know who wanted Shelby dead.”

“I’ve heard of you, Mr. Morgan. I don’t know any Cushmans.”

I kept talking. “If the hit on Shelby was personal, if killing Shelby was a message for our client, we want to work that out.”

Monty’s thin lips hardly moved when he said, “I repeat, I don’t know any Cushmans. And if I did know that Shelby always took a nap at four in the afternoon, it still wasn’t personal, and I don’t send messages. Now, back up slow so you don’t scare the horses.”

“Thanks, Monty, you’re a real professional,” I said. Then Del Rio and I walked away and got into the car.

I took the wheel. I backed out slowly, then drove along the driveway, dust billowing up behind us.

Chapter 81

I HAD BEEN working the Schoolgirl case hard-for the girls, for Justine, a little of both, and had finally gotten to sleep. The buzzing of the phone jerked me out of a dream. My heart was pumping so hard, I thought I’d bust a valve. I opened the phone, didn’t even bother to let the caller speak.

I shouted, “Not yet,” then slammed the phone down on the table.

That bastard. I was so close to getting it. So close to figuring it out. I almost had it. What was I missing about Afghanistan and that exploding helicopter?

I dropped my head back onto the pillow. The dream was still vivid in my mind, and it played out like a movie on the blank screen of the ceiling.

The dream matched up with what I remembered of that day. I’d been standing at the ramp of the CH-46. I heard artillery popping from the fifty-cals as the helicopter burned. Men screamed.

Danny Young was on his back in the dark. His flight suit was soaked with his blood, so much of it, I couldn’t see where he’d been hit.

I called his name. Then everything stopped. There was a sound in my ears, like static, and my vision blurred.

I tried, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t get a clue what had just happened. I’d just lost a few seconds, though.

The action began again.

In life as in the dream, I had pulled Danny out of the aircraft, slung him over my shoulder, started to run with him across that burning battlefield.

I’d put him down safely and then-what?

I was flat on my back, and Danny was lying lifeless a few feet away. I had died and come back. With Del Rio’s help.

I put a pillow over my face, and more images of Danny came to me as I lay in my soft bed.