Chapter 76
AT ELEVEN MINUTES to noon that day, Johnson Rollerbladed along Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. He wore white-framed, sequined sunglasses with a built-in fiber-optic camera, pink stretch pants, a platinum-blond wig cut à la Marilyn, and, over a heavily padded bra, a white T-shirt that read “Blonde Ambition.” But for a backpack carrying two suppressed pistols, and four pink sweatbands on each forearm that hid spare clips, he could have been any old drag queen out for a skate on a fine October day.
“Location?” Cobb asked through the earbud Johnson wore.
“Coming onto Londonderry Place, turning north,” Johnson replied, adding a little butt shake to his skate as he passed the patrons sitting outdoors at the Mexican place on the corner, as if he were listening to some throbbing Latin beat, instead of plotting with his coconspirators to commit mass murder.
Londonderry Place climbs steeply north off the Sunset Strip. Johnson cut diagonally northwest across the narrow street to where the opposite sidewalk met a low chain-link fence. He straddle-vaulted it, landed in thick ground cover atop a retaining wall that had been turned into a planter for five palm trees.
Below him was a parking lot. Johnson took it in at a glance, seeing nine vehicles parked there in all, including one he wasn’t expecting. He lowered himself four feet down the wall behind a blue Toyota sedan.
“LAPD cruiser in lot, empty,” Johnson said. He skated out from behind the car, knelt in the wide open, pretended to retie his skates, but took glances at the cruiser and the entry to Mel’s Drive-In. “Mr. Cobb?”
“Take them first,” Cobb said.
“If they’re not outside?”
“Take them first.”
Johnson had been trained since the age of seventeen not only to follow orders, but also to adapt to evolving orders. He was what Mr. Cobb liked to call mission proficient. Johnson called it getting things done.
The diner’s exterior almost exactly matched the one in the seventies movie American Graffiti. Mel’s was a chain now, but a good one that attracted tourists and locals alike. The initial plan had Johnson getting the guns out at the far end of the parking lot and then skating around toward the front of the diner and its terrace, which faced the Sunset Strip. But he kept the weapons in the pack for now, skated toward Mel’s, eyes everywhere as he went left at the dogleg in the parking lot and back onto the sidewalk along Sunset heading west.
He took in everyone eating on Mel’s terrace before skating on past Drybar into a second entry to the parking lot. He’d seen a Hispanic couple and their kid, three duffers wearing golf jackets, and two moms with teenage daughters having ice cream sundaes. But no cops.
Which meant they were inside. He glanced down at the Rollerblades, which he’d decided to use because they had originally conceived this as an exterior job—swoop in, execute, and leave.
A new strategy evolved in Johnson’s brain almost instantly. He skated back past the people eating outside, and around into the entry to Mel’s. A startled old woman wearing a green sweatshirt that featured a leaping trout and the words “Thief River Falls Is Paradise” opened the door, carrying a pack of Marlboros. She gaped at him as he rolled past her into the diner, where he caught the full whiff of burgers frying, heard Elvis crooning from the jukebox, came face to face with a cheery hostess, who said brightly, “No blades inside, ma’am, uh, sir.”
Johnson had looked deeper into the diner, seen the two cops, male-female partners, sitting at the counter. A waitress had just served them cheeseburgers and fries.
“Ma’am?” the hostess said, a big grin.
“Oh, honey cheeks, I know,” Johnson said, turning to her and laying on a sweet effeminate accent. “I’ll take ’em off ’fore I eat, but this girl’s gotta pee.”
Without waiting for an answer, Johnson darted by her toward the restrooms. “Sir!” the hostess called after him. “Ma’am?”
But Johnson paid her no mind as he pushed into the men’s room and let the door shut behind him. Finding an empty stall, he entered, got the guns from the pack, and put it back on. He held the suppressed pistols reversed, butts facing the front, palm to the action, fingers cradling the trigger guards, barrels flush to his lower forearms, a carry that often fooled the best trained of men and women, even if only for an extra moment or two.
Stepping from the stall less than twenty-five seconds after he’d entered, Johnson said, “Minute thirty, maybe less.”
“He’s waiting,” Cobb said.
From that point forward, Johnson did not pause. He pulled open the door, skated past a family of five chatting with the hostess. Dodging around them, he passed between a waitress filling a coffeepot next to the stainless kitchen door and a mom with three Cub Scouts, never heard them giggling at him.
Rolling now across the gray-green floor, seeing the cops in tunnel vision, Johnson crossed his hands, popped the left gun into the air and let go of the right weapon. He grabbed the guns with opposite hands. Unfolding his arms, swinging the suppressed barrels inward, past each other, and forward, he found the triggers and aimed at point-blank range.