“No shit. Who bagged them?”

“Their boss.”

“No honor among scumbags. What was the butcher’s bill?”

“Three. Their boss is still up, but these three are down. One more to go.”

Stone paused between the Jeep’s headlights, and studied the dial. After a moment, he continued on around the Jeep, making a full sweep of the vehicle until he returned to the front end. Then he put the pole aside, and wiggled under the engine.

“Here you go.”

He rolled to his feet, and showed Pike a small gray box the size of a pack of cigarettes.

“GPS locator. High-end piece made by Raytheon under an NSA contract. This is top-dollar equipment. Federal?”

“ATF.”

Stone grinned.

“Right now, there’s an agent with a laptop staring at a real-time map overlay. X marks the spot, bro—right here at the car wash on Santa Monica Boulevard.”

He tossed it to Pike.

“Three choices—kill it, toss it, or—my personal favorite—tack it to a FedEx truck and let’m watch it roll all over town.”

Pike didn’t want Walsh to know he found it or had even thought to look for it, but he didn’t want her watching his path. If he put it on another vehicle, she would realize what he had done within a matter of hours. Pike tossed it back.

“Kill it, and I need you to do something else.”

“For Frank?”

“Yes.”

“I’m there.”

Pike told him about the guns—three thousand Chinese AKs stolen from the North Koreans.

Pike said, “Jakovich didn’t steal them. He bought them from someone. See what you can find out.”

Stone hesitated.

“About Frank?”

“About the guns. Frank didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Stone hesitated again, but made a slow nod.

“I know a guy who knows a guy, but I want a piece of the hunt. I’ll help, but I want some trigger time. For Frank.”

“You got it.”

Chapter 24

24

PIKE DROVE TO COLE’S HOUSE when he left the car wash, climbing the narrow canyon roads to the top of the hills, then along Woodrow Wil son Drive through a heavily wooded canyon. He decided Walsh had planted the locator on his Jeep the day they stopped him at Runyon Canyon. Maybe that was why they stopped him the way they did, to keep him clear of the Jeep until they finished installing the locator.

Pike wondered now if she bugged him to follow his own investigation, or because she believed Frank was involved with the guns. There would have been no reason for her to believe Pike was involved in an arms deal, but maybe she knew something Pike didn’t yet know.