Private

No words were spoken for a long time. Time expanded beyond the beveled glass windows in the great room, out past the man-made paradise and into the desert.

As I've said, Del Rio is a patient man when he wants to be. I needn't have worried, because he was showing me what he'd proven many times as my copilot in Afghanistan. He was waiting, watching and waiting.

Carmine Noccia finally blinked.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

Chapter 103

CARMINE NOCCIA had asked me what I wanted. It was like a genie granting one of those fairy-tale wishes-you just have to be careful not to wish for a sausage on the end of your nose.

"I've shown good faith," I said. "I cleaned up a mess you didn't know you had. I want your father to know what we did. Here's my point in all of this. You're not going anywhere and neither are we. Let's accept the reality of that."

"You want detente. Peace between our operations. Stay out of one another's way."

"Pretty much. And I want to know who put out a hit on Shelby Cushman."

Noccia smiled. It was a small smile, but it seemed real. "No better friend. No worse enemy," he said.

I'd been expecting him to say anything, anything but that. The words Noccia had just spoken were what the Marines say about themselves.

No better friend. No worse enemy.

Like Del Rio and me, Carmine Noccia had been in the Corps.

"Can I get you boys something to drink?" he said. "Or maybe you'll be my guests for di

"Thanks very much for the offer, but it's late. And I'm flying."

Noccia nodded, got up from his chair, and asked me and Del Rio to follow him into the billiards room. He said to the men around the table, "Go outside, guys. Take a break."

The room emptied quickly. There was a score counter over the billiards table, but Noccia walked past it to the chalkboard that hung on the wall. It appeared to be the long-ru

Noccia picked up an eraser from the tray below the board and wiped out some phone numbers that had been written in the corner.

His back was to me as he spoke. "We have a partner in a number of construction projects: a hotel in Nevada, a couple of malls in LA and San Diego. This partner came to us with a request," said Noccia. "We had no choice except to honor it."

I was mesmerized as he began to write his partner's name with a square of blue pool chalk. At first I didn't get it. I thought maybe he was going to draw a diagram from the partner to the man who had hired the hit.

But that's not what happened.

Carmine Noccia scratched letters onto the slate and said, "This is who contracted the hit on your friend Shelby Cushman."

When he was sure that I had seen what he'd written, he spat on the eraser and rubbed the name out.

He put the eraser down and walked me and Del Rio to the door, where he said good night.

And he shook my hand.

Chapter 104

IT WAS PAST midnight again, and I was back in LA. I had told Del Rio I'd see him in the morning, and he looked at me like he was a dad who'd just put his small son on a school bus for the first time.

"I'll be okay," I said.

But would I? Rick was still watching me as I got into my Lambo and strapped myself in. I got on the 10 East and then took the exit toward Sunset.

If I'd been driving a Volkswagen, I could've gone faster. It was the downside of owning a fast car. It alerted every cop in the state and every good-doin' citizen with a cell phone.

My mind was flying out in front of my hood, and still I stayed within the speed limits, finally slowing down and stopping at the entrance to the Chateau Marmont Hotel.

I took the elevator from the parking garage without seeing anyone, and pressed the button for Andy's floor. I stood outside his door and used my cell phone to call him.

The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, he answered.

"Jack? What's wrong? It's one in the morning."

"Everything's wrong. I'm right outside your door. Open up."

Andy was wearing the same pajamas he'd worn the last time I saw him. Crumpled silk, wide maroon stripes interspersed with thin black lines.

The room smelled like flatulence and the garlic bread sitting on the coffee table.

"You don't look so good," Andy said.

"I just flew in from Vegas," I told him. "Then I drove here."

"Sit down, Jack."

I stood.

"I spent some quality time with Carmine Noccia. I was at his house."

Andy looked into my face. There was no fear in his eyes.

How could he not have thought that I would find out? Had he underestimated how I would react? Or was Andy a far cooler customer than I'd ever known? This was not how I thought of my fraternity brother, my close friend since we were little kids.

I said in a voice that was ringing with shock, "Carmine told me about your request, that you were the one who asked him to have Shelby killed. How could you have done that? Tell me something I can believe."

Andy's face fell and his knees caved. I watched him drop to the floor, then I grabbed him up roughly, two steely hands at his shoulders, and threw him into an armchair that almost went over.

He was sobbing now, but I'd seen this embarrassing and pathetic act before.

"Come on, Andy. Really pour it on, you fuck."

"She was a whore, Jack. You told me so yourself, but I already knew that. She was doing every perversion with every scumbag with a buck. And I had to find out about it from some lowlife greaser who didn't know or care that Shelby was my wife."

"There are divorce courts," I said, but I was thinking of Shelby, seeing her face, remembering the belly laughs at the Improv, how she'd been a rock for me and maybe my salvation right after I'd come back from the war.

It killed me that she'd gone into whatever drug hell had made her fall so far. And then I thought about how I had introduced her to a man who had paid to have her murdered. If I hadn't introduced them, Shelby would still be alive. I had loved her, and I had trusted him. And I missed her badly.

How could Andy have done that to Shelby? How could anybody want to kill Shelby? She was gentle and kind and she made us all laugh-she made me laugh.

Andy's weeping was infuriating. The last time he'd sobbed his heart out, I'd felt his grief. Now there was no hiding it from myself: I'd been perfectly played. And my friend had done it to me.

I didn't know Andy Cushman anymore.

I said, "For a bean counter, you're a damned fine actor. Maybe overplaying it a touch right now."

The sobbing stopped, and Andy sobered. "Please, Jack. You don't understand what it was like living in the same house with her. Knowing what she was doing: the junk, the men. I had to do it-but I couldn't do it myself. I did love her, Jack. I honestly did. Please. Don't tell the police."

"Don't worry about it. I won't call the cops. You're a client, you shit."

"And a friend?"

The pleading look just enraged me more.

By way of an answer, I punched him in the face. His chair fell back, and when he was down, I yanked him up by his hair, kicked him everywhere: legs, kidneys, ribs. I poured a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Scotch over his head. I couldn't think of anything else to say, nothing else I could do without actually killing him.

Andy Cushman, my former client, my former friend, was still crying when I left his suite.