Michael Connelly (37 page)

“Shit,” Bosch said. “Okay. Don’t come up till I say it’s clear, okay?”

“Got it,” she said.

Bosch had to throw his weight hard against the door to open it. He came out of the car, gun in one hand and flashlight in
the other. He held the light out away from his body and trained its beam on the driver of the car ahead. The roar of passing
traffic in his ears, Bosch started to shout, but a diesel horn drowned him out and a blast of wind from the passing semi shoved
him forward. Bosch tried again, shouting for the driver to stick both hands out the side window where Bosch could see them.
Nothing. Bosch shouted the order again. After a long moment, with Bosch poised off the left rear fender of the maroon car,
the driver finally complied. Bosch ran the flash beam through the back window and saw no other occupants. He ran up and put
the light on the driver and ordered him to step out slowly.

“What is this?” the man protested. He was small, with pale skin, reddish hair and a transparent mustache. He opened the car
door and stepped out with his hands up. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and beige pants held up by suspenders. He
looked out into the passing field of cars, almost as if beckoning for a witness to this commuter’s nightmare.

“Can I see a badge?” he stammered. Bosch rushed forward, spun him around and slammed his body into the side of his car, his
head and shoulders over its roof. With one hand on the back of the man’s neck, holding him down, and the other holding the
gun to his ear, Bosch shouted to Eleanor that it was clear.

“Check the front side.”

The man beneath Bosch let out a moaning sound, like a scared animal, and Bosch could feel him shaking. His neck felt clammy.
Bosch never took his eyes off him to see where Eleanor was. Suddenly her voice was right behind him.

“Let him go,” she said. “It’s not him. There’s no damage. We’ve got the wrong car.”

FRIDAY, MAY 25

They were interviewed by the Santa Monica police, the California Highway Patrol, LAPD and the FBI. A DUI unit had been called
to give Bosch a sobriety test. He passed. And by 2
A.M.
he sat in an interview room at the West Los Angeles bureau, bone-tired and wondering if the Coast Guard or IRS would be next.
He and Eleanor had been separated and he hadn’t seen her since they had arrived three hours earlier. It bothered him that
he could not be with her to protect her from the interrogators. Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds came into the room
then and told Bosch they were finished for the night. Bosch could tell that Ninety-eight was angry, and it wasn’t just because
he had been rousted from home.

“What kind of cop doesn’t get the make of the car that tries to run him down?” he asked.

Bosch was used to the second-guessing tone to the questions. It had been that way all night.

“Like I told every one of those guys before you, I was a little busy at the time. I was trying to save my ass.”

“And this guy you pull over,” Pounds cut in. “Jesus, Bosch, you rough him up on the side of the freeway. Every asshole with
a car phone is dialing nine one one reporting kidnap, murder, who knows what else. Couldn’t you have tried to get a look at
the right side of his car before you pulled him over?”

“It was impossible. All of this is covered in the report we typed up, Lieutenant. I’ve gone over it, seems like ten times
already.”

Pounds acted as though he didn’t hear. “And he’s a lawyer no less.”

“So what?” Bosch said, now losing his patience. “We apologized. It was a mistake. The car looked the same. And if he is going
to sue anybody it will be the FBI. They’ve got deeper pockets. So don’t worry about it.”

“No, he’ll sue us both. He’s already talking about it, fer crissake. And this is not the time to try to be funny, Bosch.”

“It’s also not the time to be worried about what we did or didn’t do right. None of the suits that have come in here to interview
me have seemed to care that somebody might be trying to kill us. They just want to know how far away I was when I fired and
whether I endangered bystanders and why I pulled that car over without probable cause. Well, fuck it, man. Somebody is out
to kill my partner and me. Excuse me if I’m not feeling particularly sorry for the lawyer who got his suspenders twisted.”

Pounds was ready for that argument.

“Bosch, for all we have evidence of, it could have just been a drunk. And what do you mean ‘partner’? You are on a day-to-day
loan to this investigation. And after tonight, I think the loan is going to be withdrawn. You’ve spent five solid days on
this case, and from what I understand from Rourke, you’ve got nothing.”

“It was no drunk, Pounds. We were a target. And I don’t care what Rourke says we have, I’m going to clear this one. And if
you’d quit undermining the effort, believe in your own people for once and maybe get those Internal Affairs assholes off me,
you might be in line for a piece of the honors when it happens.”

Pounds’s eyebrows arched like roller coasters.

“Yeah, I know about Lewis and Clarke,” Bosch said. “And I know their paper was being copied to you. I guess they didn’t tell
you about the little talk we had? I caught ’em snoozing outside my house.”

It was clear from his expression that Pounds had not heard. Lewis and Clarke were staying low and Bosch would not get jammed
up over what he had done to them. He began to wonder where the two IAD detectives had been when he and Eleanor had almost
been run down.

Meanwhile, Pounds remained silent for a long time. He was a fish swimming around the bait Bosch had cast, seeming to know
there was a hook in it but thinking there might be a way to get the bait without the hook. Finally he told Bosch to give him
a rundown on the week’s investigation. He was on the hook now. Bosch ran the case down for him, and though Pounds never spoke
once during the next twenty minutes Bosch could tell by his roller-coasting eyebrows whenever he heard something that Rourke
had neglected to bring up.

When the story was finished, there was no more talk from Pounds of Bosch’s being withdrawn from the case. Nevertheless, Bosch
felt very tired of the whole thing. He wanted to sleep, but Pounds still had questions.

“If the FBI isn’t putting people into the tunnels, should we?” he asked.

Bosch could see he was thinking in terms of being in on the bust, if there was one. If he put LAPD people into the drainage
tunnels, the FBI wouldn’t be able to crowd the department out when the credit for the bust came. Pounds would receive a slap
on the back from the chief if he could defend against such a maneuver.

But Bosch had come to believe that Rourke’s reasoning was sound and correct. A tunnel crew would stand a good chance of stumbling
into the thieves and maybe getting killed.

“No,” Bosch told Pounds. “Let’s first see if we can get a fix on Tran and where he keeps his stash. For all we know, it might
not even be a bank.”

Pounds stood up, having heard enough. He said Bosch was free to go. As the lieutenant headed to the interview room door he
said, “Bosch, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with this incident tonight. It sounds to me like you did what you could.
The lawyer got his feathers ruffled but he’ll settle down. Or just settle.”

Bosch didn’t say anything or smile at his meager joke.

“One thing,” Pounds continued. “The fact that this happened in front of Agent Wish’s home is a bit troubling because it has
the appearance of impropriety. Just a hint, no? You were just walking her to the door, weren’t you?”

“I don’t really care how it appeared, Lieutenant,” Bosch answered. “I was off duty.”

Pounds looked at Bosch a moment, shook his head as if Bosch had ignored his outstretched hand, and then went through the door
of the small room.

Bosch found Eleanor sitting by herself in an interview room next to his. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped
on her hands, her elbows up on the scarred wooden table. Her eyes opened as he walked in. She smiled and he immediately felt
healed of fatigue, frustration and anger. It was a smile a child gives another when they’ve gotten away with something on
the adults.

“All done?” she said.

“Yeah. You?”

“Been done more than an hour. You are the one they wanted to grill.”

“As usual. Rourke has left?”

“Yeah, he split. Said he wants me to check in with him every other hour tomorrow. After what happened tonight, he thinks he
hasn’t kept a tight enough rein on this.”

“Or you.”

“Yeah. It looks like there is some of that, too. He wanted to know what we were doing at my place. I told him you were just
walking me to my door.”

Bosch sat down wearily at the other side of the table and dug a finger into a cigarette pack in search of the last one. He
put it in his mouth but didn’t light it.

“Besides being titillated or jealous of what we might have been doing, who does Rourke think tried to take us out?” he asked.
“A drunk driver, like my people seem to think?”

“He did mention the drunk driver theory. He also asked whether I have a jealous ex-boyfriend. Other than that, there doesn’t
seem to be a great amount of concern that it might have something to do with our case.”

“I hadn’t thought of the ex-boyfriend angle. What did you tell him?”

“You’re as conniving as he is,” she said, flashing her brilliant smile. “I told him it wasn’t any of his business.”

“Good going. Is it mine?”

“The answer is no.” She let him hang over the cliff a few seconds, then added, “That is, no jealous ex-boyfriends. So, can
we leave now and get to where we were” — she looked at her watch — “about four hours ago?”

• • •

Bosch was awake in Eleanor Wish’s bed long before dawn light crept around the curtain drawn across the sliding glass door.
Unable to defeat insomnia, he finally got up and took a shower in the downstairs bathroom. After, he looked through her kitchen
cabinets and refrigerator and began to put together a breakfast of coffee, eggs and cinnamon raisin bagels. He couldn’t find
any bacon.

When he heard the shower upstairs go off, he carried a glass of orange juice up and found her in front of the bathroom mirror.
She was naked and braiding her hair, which she’d divided into three thick hanks. He was entranced by her and watched as she
expertly maneuvered her hair into a French braid. She then accepted the juice and a long kiss from Bosch. She put on her short
robe and they went downstairs to eat.

After, Harry opened the kitchen door and stood just outside it while he smoked a cigarette.

“You know,” he said, “I’m just happy nothing happened.”

“You mean last night on the street?”

“Yeah. To you. I don’t know how I’d’ve handled it. I know we just met and all, but … uh, I care. You know?”

“Me too.”

Bosch had taken a shower, but his clothes were as fresh as the ashtray in a used car. After a while he said he had to leave,
to go by his house and change. Eleanor said she would go into the bureau and check for fallout from last night’s activities
and get whatever was on file about Binh. They agreed to meet at Hollywood Station, on Wilcox, because it was closest to Binh’s
business, and Bosch needed to turn in his damaged car, anyway. She walked him to the door and they kissed as if she were seeing
him off to a day at the office at the accounting firm.

When Bosch got to his house, he found no messages on the phone machine and no sign that the place had been entered. He shaved
and changed clothes and then headed down the hill through Nichols Canyon and then over to Wilcox. He was at his desk, updating
the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report forms, when Eleanor came in at ten. The squad room was full and most of the
detectives who were male stopped what they were doing to check her out. She had an uncomfortable smile on her face when she
sat down in the steel chair next to the homicide table.

“Anything wrong?”

“I just think I would rather walk through Biscailuz,” she said, referring to the sheriff’s jail downtown.

“Oh. Yeah, these guys can leer better than most flashers. You want a glass of water?”

“No. I’m fine. Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

They took Bosch’s new car, which was actually at least three years old and had seventy-seven thousand miles on it. The station
fleet manager, a permanent desk assignee since he’d had four fingers blown off by a pipe bomb he stupidly picked up one Halloween,
said it was the best he could do. Budget restraints had halted the replacement of cars, though repairing the old ones actually
cost the department more. At least, Bosch learned after starting the car, the air conditioner worked reasonably well. There
was a light Santa Ana condition kicking up and the forecast was for an unseasonably warm holiday weekend.

Eleanor’s research on Binh showed he had an office and business on Vermont near Wilshire. There were more Korean-run shops
in the area than Vietnamese, but they coexisted. As near as Wish had been able to find out, Binh controlled a number of businesses
that imported cheap clothing and electronic and video merchandise from the Orient and then moved it through Southern California
and Mexico. Many of the items turistas thought they were getting on the cheap in Mexico and then bringing back to the States
had already been here. It all seemed successful on paper, though it was small-time. Still, it was enough to make Bosch question
if Binh even needed the diamonds. Or ever had any.