Chapter 110
TIME SEEMED TO slow as the grenade bounced and rattled down the sidewalk toward me. Cobb stomped on the gas, shot out onto Atlantic, and sideswiped a commercial van.
But I was focused on that bouncing grenade. An F1 has roughly a four-second fuse. I caught it right-handed at two seconds, twisted, saw my target, and threw it at three seconds.
Once upon a time all I wanted to do was to play football. For years, I’d throw footballs through a tire my father hung from a tree in our backyard, keeping at it for hours on end. Practice more than talent got me onto my college team.
That day practice saved my life.
The grenade dropped into the cement hopper on top of the mixer, dropped into the huge barrel of the mixer itself, and blew with a muffled thud. Wet cement erupted from the hopper and discharge chute and rained down on me as I leaped out into the street.
The van Cobb had sideswiped had crashed into a parked car on the other side of Atlantic. Cobb’s convertible was picking up speed, heading back toward Sixth. I went singular again, raised the pistol, and took one shot at his head. I missed and hit the back of the driver’s seat.
The convertible went out of control and crashed into a fire hydrant. When I got to the car, LAPD cruisers were coming at me from three directions.
Cobb sat slumped against the driver’s-side door. His breathing was labored, he was coughing out a fine pink mist. I couldn’t hear anything but the sirens now but knew Cobb was probably making a gurgling sound, sign of a sucking chest wound, a sound that would have ordinarily sent me spinning back to Afghanistan, in country, where anything deadly was possible.
But not that day. I was cold and utterly rooted in reality when I stepped up, gun trained on Cobb’s scarred face. As more frothy blood began to appear at his nostrils and lips, he gazed at me with utter bewilderment.
“Chopper pilot?” he whispered. “How did I …? How did you …?”
He couldn’t finish, but I understood. He knew who I was. He knew some of my background. He considered me a stark inferior.
“Everyone gets lucky once in a while,” I said as the patrol cars skidded to a stop. “Why did you do it, Cobb?”
His expression mutated into derision, as if I were an idiot not to understand why he and his men had killed twenty-one people, blown up the Huntington Beach Pier, extorted the City of Los Angeles, and looted a state revenue account for a hundred and fifty million.
“We needed the money,” he rasped, laughed, hiccupped, and then shuddered when blood poured from his mouth in a torrent, washing away the makeup and exposing that spider’s web of scars.
I heard someone shout, “Drop your weapon!”
I did, still watching Cobb.
He looked at me as he bled out.
I can honestly say there was not a lick of self-pity in his eyes as they lost their light and went dead, dull, and gone.