take it from them. They just don’t know it.”
“You take that bike?”
“Why do you like the bike so much?”
“I work on ’em. Ducati makes a nice bike. I’m just makin’ conversation is all. You don’t like talkin’?”
“My experience, strangers who start talkin’ aren’t what they seem to be,” Jack said. Perfect. The trick to any good setup was to make the mark think he was steering the conversation. As far as Dog was concerned, he had initiated this conversation and he was pursuing it. Jack was the reluctant follower.
“What, you got somethin’ to hide?” Dog laughed. “You don’t strike me as the kind to make trouble.”
Jack nodded. “That’s my point. Trouble is what I’m trying to avoid.” Jack downed his beer and ordered another. “So if you’re another one of them trying to set me up, forget it. I’m clean.”
Dog blinked at this, the conversation having moved a little too fast for him. “One of them? Them who?”
Jack eyed him now, as though appraising the big, hairy man for the first time. “You’re a cop.”
Gabs the bartender shrieked with laughter as she dropped off his beer.
“Bullshit,” Dog laughed. “Bullshit.” He laughed awhile longer, loud just like he talked. When he settled down a bit, he said, “So why are cops looking for you? What’d you do?”
Jack smirked. When he spoke, his voice was conspiratorial. “Nothing. I was just interested in something and I made too much noise about it.”
Dog grinned mischievously. “What was it?”
Jack hesitated, then shrugged. “You know that bombing thing in Oklahoma City a few years back. I was just curious how they blow things up. How to make bombs and shit like that.”
Dog’s eyes lit up when Jack said
Jack laughed. “What the hell, you never wanted to blow something up?”
“The thought has crossed my mind,” Dog said, raising his glass in a toast. He took a sip. “Listen, you really want to know how to make a bomb, I can show you the real shit.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked, lowering his voice.
“Come on outside. My truck.”
Jack followed the hairy giant out of the Killabrew. There was a dirty white Dodge Ram 1500 parked off to the side of the parking lot, a tarp thrown over the bed. “I got cool shit back here,” Dog said, his voice growing more animated. “I think you’re gonna like it. Help me with that cover.”
Jack put his hands on the heavy tarp to lift it, but his fingers lost all strength as something cold and heavy struck him on the back of the head.
5. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 P.M. AND 11 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Diana tried to blink the sleep from her eyes. She’d been up since last night, trying to find the clue that would help everyone else see what she, bleary-eyed though she was, saw so clearly. Alaska Airlines Flight 442 had been deliberately bombed.
Diana Christie was not prone to hysterics. One did not become an investigator for the NTSB without a large supply of objectivity, not to mention patience and meticulousness. NTSB investigators had access to the finest investigative forces in the world, but they often worked alone, working their way through tiny scraps of evidence, minuscule warps in the fabric of shattered aircraft, minute scars on the wheels of locomotives, and usually under the watchful eye of the media. The pressure was enormous, and only the coolest and calmest were chosen for the job.
Diana was one of them. She’d worked on the go team that investigated TWA 800. She’d headed the investigation of the American flight that went down over Chicago, and the Amtrak derailment in Denver. She was an expert.
Which made her current investigation all the more frustrating. She had no vested interest in this particular disaster, no emotional attachments. She certainly had no agenda beyond the truth, and no reason to bang her head against the brick wall of other people’s incompetence… except that her job was to find the cause of a particular effect. That was her raison d’etre, and she took it seriously.
Diana was investigative by nature, but the mystery she currently attempted to pierce led her into unknown territory. She examined equipment and shards of blasted metal, not people. Her work led her to the conclusion that the blast had originated in seat 29D. The airline manifest told her that the seat had been occupied by one Ali Abdul. Now, Diana wasn’t a police detective, but she could pick up the phone as easily as the next person, so she’d made telephone calls. The address Ali Abdul had listed was out of date. To make things more frustrating, it appeared that every Ali Abdul residing in the city of Los Angeles was alive, which was very inconvenient considering that her theory was Ali Abdul had blown himself up.
There was, undoubtedly, an answer to this mystery. However, to resolve it she needed someone with the right sort of investigative skills. She decided to try the jerks at CTU one more time.
Shoemacher was one of those streets you rarely see on television programs about Los Angeles: a beautiful, well-landscaped street lined with elegant mid-sized houses and set in the heart of the city. The television usually showed the nice houses only on the west side or in the suburbs, but the truth was a vibrant community existed south of Hollywood and east of downtown. There were vibrant communities in south central and east L.A., too, but the television rarely hinted of that.
Don Biehn knew all this. A cop of twenty-two years, of course he did. But he didn’t know why he was thinking of it at that moment. Self-distraction, maybe. Compartmentalization of emotions. Sheer madness, for all he knew.
Whatever it was, it allowed him to get from St. Monica’s to Shoemacher Avenue without eating his own gun. He parked his car at a metered spot near the corner of San Vicente and Olympic, then crossed Olympic and went up Shoemacher, a diagonal street cutting a swath through a mid-Wilshire neighborhood. It was a short walk from there down the darkened sidewalk to the pretty brick house occupied by a monster.
Aaron hadn’t known his name. In his journal, he’d simply called him “the other father.” Father Frank had brought him in for “special visits.” Don now planned to pay a special visit of his own.
The first time down the street, he walked right by the house, taking in as much information as he could without pausing. Lights were on, and the flicker of colors against the thin rice-paper panel blocking the large front window told Don that the priest was watching television. He went halfway up the block, paused and looked around as though lost, then turned back. This time, he favored the shadows, and when he reached the brick house, he glanced around to see if anyone was looking, then turned in a quick and businesslike way up the side lawn to the gate. It was unlocked. He opened it slowly, keeping the creaking to a minimum, then closed it himself so the self- closing spring didn’t slam it shut. He had to negotiate some trash and recycling bins, but in a moment he was around the side of the house and into the backyard. There was a set of French doors between the backyard and the kitchen. It was locked.
Undiscouraged, Don hurried back around to the front of the house. There were several cars parked on the street right in front of the priest’s house. Don wasn’t sure which of them was owned by Collins. It didn’t really matter. Once again glancing around to see if any neighbors were out, and finding no one, the detective slapped first one and then the other car hard.
Car alarms wailed. One of them was the annoying kind that changed its pitch and tempo every few seconds, and both were loud. Don hurried back around the house to the French doors. Even from here, the alarms sounded shrill and loud on the quiet street. Inhaling deeply, Don wrapped his fist in his jacket and wound up to punch out one of the glass squares.
But before he could, something covered his mouth and nose. He inhaled sharp, eye-watering fumes, and everything went black.
