“No,” Greer said. “I couldn’t do two minutes on that damn thing, anyway.”
“Me neither,” the guy said, panting, “not with this fucking contraption on. But screw it — you go to a regular gym and everybody there wants to know what happened.”
Greer knew exactly what he was saying. “And here, nobody cares.”
The guy nodded, put the phones back on, and kept at it.
Indira wheeled Mariani over to the dispensary window, then came back to Greer with her hands pressed down in the pockets of her white lab coat. He could tell she knew all about it.
“You got time to work with me today?” Greer said, pretending all was well.
“Have you gone upstairs for the lab work?” she asked.
“Next time,” he said.
“I can’t. You know that. The supervisor has to okay all your treatments from now on.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me what started all this.” He knew, but it never hurt to get independent confirmation.
“I don’t know,” she said, with evident sincerity. “But even if I did, I would not be allowed to tell you.”
“Yeah? Then maybe I won’t tell you that the stuff about the job was true.”
“A job?” she said. “So you have a job now?”
Either she was a better liar than he knew, or she really didn’t know anything about that. Another therapist brushed past them with a one-armed vet in tow. “I’m glad,” Indira said. “It will do you good to be working again.”
He started to reach into his pocket for a cigarette, then remembered where he was. “Yeah, well, we’ll see how it goes. But the money’s good, and I think there’s actually a lot I can do there.” It was odd, but he had indeed found himself thinking, seriously, even when he wasn’t up at the estate, about al-Kalli’s security needs. Having been waltzed onto the estate by Sadowski, he knew how lax some of the present measures were. He knew where the walls could easily be breached, he was learning where the motion detectors were and what areas they failed to properly cover. It was as if his mind had been waiting for just such a challenge, for something to think about besides his next score, or his next trip to the Blue Bayou. On the one hand he knew that al-Kalli was a cold-blooded murderer — hell, he’d seen him in action — and on the other, to his own great surprise, he wanted to prove to him that he’d made a smart move in hiring Greer.
“Indira,” the other therapist called out, “I could use some help when you’re free.”
“I’ll be right there,” Indira replied.
“Okay, you gotta go,” Greer said. “But I’ll come back for those tests.”
“Do that, Captain,” she said, sincerely.
“And then maybe we can try again.”
“Yes, of course, then we can schedule another therapy appointment.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant — and he wondered if she knew that or not. But for now, he decided to just let it go. “Right.”
On the way past the security desk, the guard requested that he sign out, but Greer just kept on going.
“Captain Greer!” the guard shouted after him. “You have to sign out of the building!”
Greer, without turning around, raised the middle finger of his left hand and kept on walking.
He stopped just outside the front doors to light a badly needed cigarette. And to think about how he was going to handle the Sadowski situation. Maybe he shouldn’t have dumped him off the pier, he thought, though the memory of it even now brought a smile to his face. Just the sound of his scream, and the big splash a second later… life didn’t get much better than that.
The sun was beating down on the parking lot, and he was glad he’d parked in his secret shady spot around back. And since he hadn’t spent any time getting therapy, or getting tested, he had an hour or two to kill. In the past, he’d have simply tooled over to the Blue Bayou, or maybe down to that beach parking lot where he’d watched Zeke play volleyball — he could get high in the front seat and mellow out. But instead he found himself seriously considering a run up to Bel-Air. He was wondering about how well secured that back gate was, the one that Sadowski had arranged for him to exit from. And he was sorry he’d ever told him anything about the animals up there. Information was a weapon, and that one he’d put in Sadowski’s hands himself.
The roar of the traffic on the 405 was a steady drone, but it was otherwise kind of peaceful here. Only one other car was parked around back, one of those new Hummer 3s. Just the sight of them pissed off Greer. If he never set foot in another Hummer, it would be too soon. And now, here were all these civilians playing soldier — and that included that horse’s ass bodybuilder now known as the Governator— driving around Beverly Hills and the Palisades in cars that were probably better armored than the buckets he’d originally traveled in back in beautiful Baghdad. He’d even seen one that had fake bullet holes decaled across the back bumper. At the time, it was all he could do not to reach under the driver’s seat and pull out his Beretta, which he kept hidden there in a Weight Watchers box he’d retrieved from his mother’s trash, and blow some real holes into the back of the damn thing.
But as he approached his own heap — now that he was a working man, he wondered what it would cost to get the thing painted — he noticed that the Hummer was occupied. There was somebody in the driver’s seat, and possibly somebody beside him; the windows were too tinted and narrow to tell. But something went off in the back of Greer’s head, some little warning bell — the same sort of thing that would tell him not to open a closed door in Mosul, or step off the road to free a dog tied conspicuously to a post in the middle of nowhere. That was how Gaines, a softhearted black sergeant, had bought the farm.
He stubbed out his cigarette and, while keeping an eye on the Hummer, approached his own Mustang. There was the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, but it wasn’t his; where was it coming from? He glanced at a concrete wall — clearly some kind of security addition — that jutted out from the side of the VA hospital, about fifteen feet past the parking area. Was there somebody behind it? Even if there was, he’d already decided he could make it to his car, and the Weight Watchers box, before anybody could get to him.
He had the key in the lock when he heard the doors of the Hummer opening and the sound of swift heavy footsteps. Shit. He turned the key too quickly, and the rusty lock caught. He turned it again, glancing up, and he could see Tate and Florio, the two new Sons of Liberty boys, bearing down on him. Tate was in a tight black T-shirt, Florio was wearing a red tracksuit, and both of them were carrying what looked like brand-new aluminum baseball bats.
He wrenched the door of the car open, but it was too late — Tate took a short swing, Greer ducked, and the bat took out the front window of the Mustang with a shattering explosion. Greer ran around to the other side of the car — fortunately these two were so stupid they’d come at him together from the same side — and waited while they regrouped.
“This can’t be what the Sons of Liberty have been planning all along, can it?” Greer said, catching his breath. He knew he could never make a run for the hospital doors, or all the way out onto Wilshire Boulevard, without their catching up to him. But how was he going to get to his gun?
“Go around back,” Tate told Florio. Florio lumbered toward the back bumper of the car, keeping his eyes on Greer the whole time.
Greer had no choice. He pulled open the passenger-side door and lunged across the front seat, scrabbling under the seat for the Beretta. Tate couldn’t get in a swing from this angle; he dropped the bat with a clang on the concrete and reached for the back of Greer’s shirt to haul him out. Greer could feel his fingers on the damn box; he could even feel the cold steel of the trigger guard inside. He braced himself against the bottom of the steering wheel with one hand while he groped to get the gun out, and then he felt Florio grabbing his ankles and trying to pull him out the other way.
“I’ve got him!” Tate shouted angrily. “Let the fuck go!”
Florio grunted and let go, and Tate grabbed hold of Greer’s hair with both hands and dragged him out of the car, face-first and empty-handed. As soon as he felt his face scrape the concrete, Greer spun himself over — Tate was aiming a kick at his ribs and Greer was able to catch his foot and push it back. Tate flopped against the side of the car, but he didn’t go down, and Florio was coming around fast to join him. Greer was scuttling backward like a crab, and figuring there was no way he was going to come out of this alive, when he heard a voice say, “What’s going on here?” from somewhere behind him.
Greer kept scuttling toward the sound of the voice, and Tate and Florio were suddenly flummoxed like the dumb oxen they were. Greer smelled the cigarette smoke again.
