Michael Connelly (42 page)

“You think they’ll come through tonight?” Wish asked.

“Hard to say. Without Meadows, they’re down a man. They might be behind schedule.”

They had told Avery III to go home and be ready for a callout. The owner had agreed but remained skeptical of the whole scenario
Bosch and Wish had spun for him.

“We are going to have to get them from underground,” Bosch said, his hands holding the steering wheel as if he were driving.
“We’d never get that door open fast enough.”

Bosch idly looked to his left, up Wilshire. He saw a white LTD with police wheels parked at the curb a block away. It was
parked next to a fire hydrant and there were two figures in it. He still had company.

• • •

Bosch and Wish stood next to his car, which was parked on the second level of the garage facing the retainer wall at the south
end. The garage had been virtually empty for more than an hour, but the drab concrete enclosure smelled of exhaust fumes and
burning brakes. Bosch was sure the brakes smell was from his car. The stop-and-go tail from Little Saigon had taken its toll
on the replacement car. From their position they could look across Wilshire and west a half block to the vault showroom of
Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Farther down Wilshire the sky was pink and the setting sun a deep orange. Evening lights were coming
on in the city and traffic was thinning out. Bosch looked east up Wilshire and could see the white LTD parked at the curb,
its occupants shadows behind the tinted windshield.

At eight o’clock a procession of three cars, the last a Beverly Hills patrol car, came up the ramp and cut across the empty
parking spaces to where Bosch and Wish stood at the wall.

“Well, if our perps have their lookout in any of these high rises and they saw this little parade, you can bet he is pulling
them out now,” Bosch said.

Rourke and four other men got out of the two unmarked cars. Bosch could tell by the suits that three of them were agents.
The fourth man’s suit was a little too worn, its pockets baggy like Bosch’s. He carried a cardboard tube. Harry figured him
for the DWP supe Wish had said was coming. Three Beverly Hills uniforms, one with captain’s bars on his collar, got out of
the patrol car. The captain was also carrying a rolled tube of paper.

Everybody converged at Bosch’s car and used its hood as the meeting table. Rourke made some quick introductions. The three
from BHPD were there because the operation was in their jurisdiction. Interdepartmental courtesy, Rourke said. They were also
on hand because Beverly Hills Safe & Lock had filed a design plan with the local police department’s commercial security division.
They would only observe the meeting, Rourke said, and be called on later if their department was needed for backup. Two of
the FBI agents, Hanlon and Houck, would work the overnight surveillance with Bosch and Wish. Rourke wanted a view of Beverly
Hills Safe & Lock from at least two angles. The third agent was the FBI’s SWAT coordinator. And the last man was Ed Gearson,
a DWP underground facilities supervisor.

“Okay, let’s set the battle plans,” Rourke announced at the end of the introductions. He took the cardboard tube from Gearson
without asking and slid out a rolled blueprint. “This is a DWP schematic print for this area. It has all the utility lines,
the tunnels and culverts. It tells us exactly what is down there.”

He unfurled the grayish map with smeared blue lines on it across the hood. The three Beverly Hills cops anchored the other
end with their hands. It was getting dark in the garage and the SWAT man, an agent named Heller, held a penlight with a surprisingly
wide and bright beam over the drawing. Rourke took a pen out of his shirt pocket, pulled on it until it telescoped into a
pointer.

“Okay, we are …right…” Before he could find the spot Gearson reached his arm into the light and put a finger on the map. Rourke
brought his pen point over to the spot. “Yes, right here,” he said and gave Gearson a don’t-fuck-with-me look. The DWP man’s
shoulders seemed to stoop a little more in his threadbare jacket.

Everyone around the car leaned in closer over the hood to study the location. “Beverly Hills Safe & Lock is here,” Rourke
said. “The actual vault is here. Can we see your blueprint, Captain Orozco?”

Orozco, who was built like an inverted pyramid, broad shoulders over thin hips, unrolled his drawing across the top of the
DWP print. It was a copy of the drawing Avery III had shown Bosch and Wish earlier.

“Three thousand square feet of vault space,” said Orozco, indicating the vault area with his hand. “Small private boxes along
the sides and free-standing closets down the middle. If they are under there, they could come up through the floor anywhere
along these two aisles. So we are talking about a range of about sixty feet in which they could come through the floor.”

“Now, Captain,” Rourke said, “if you pick that up and we look back at the DWP chart, we can place that breakthrough zone right
here.” With a DayGlo yellow underliner he outlined the floor of the vault on the utility map. “Using that as a guide, we can
see the subterranean structures that offer the closest proximity. What do you think, Mr. Gearson?”

Gearson leaned over the car hood another few inches and studied the utility map. Bosch also leaned in. He saw thick lines
he assumed indicated major east-west drainage lines. The kind the tunnelers would seek. He noticed that they corresponded
to major surface streets: Wilshire, Olympic, Pico. Gearson pointed out the Wilshire line, saying it ran thirty feet below
ground and was large enough to drive a truck through. With his finger, the DWP man traced the Wilshire line east ten blocks
to Robertson, a major north-south stormwater line. From that intersection, he said, it was just a mile south to an open drainage
culvert that ran alongside the Santa Monica Freeway. The opening at the culvert was as big as a garage door and blocked only
by a gate with a padlock on it.

“I’d say that’s where they could’ve come in,” Gearson said. “Like following surface streets. You take the Robertson line up
to Wilshire. Take a left and you’re practically here by your yellow line. The vault. But I don’t think they’d dig a tunnel
off the Wilshire line.”

“No?” Rourke said. “How so?”

“Too busy is how so,” Gearson said, sensing he was the man with the answers as nine faces peered at him from around the car
hood. “We got DWP people underground all the time in these main lines. Checking for cracks, blockages, problems of any sort.
And Wilshire’s the main drag down there, east and west. Just like up top. If somebody knocked a hole in the wall it’d get
noticed. See?”

“What if they were able to conceal the hole?”

“You’re talking about like they did a year or so ago in that burglary downtown. Yeah, that might work again, maybe somewhere
else, but there is a good chance on the Wilshire line that it’d be seen. We look for that sort of thing now. And, like I said,
there’s a lot of traffic on the Wilshire line.”

There was silence as they took time to consider this. The engines of the cars ticked away the heat.

“Then where would they dig, Mr. Gearson, to get into this vault?” Rourke finally said.

“We got all manner of linkups down there. Don’t think us guys don’t think of this from time to time when we’re working down
there. You know, the perfect crime and all that. I’ve hashed stuff like this around, especially when I read about that last
one in the papers. I think if you are saying that’s the vault they want to get into, then they’d still do just like I said:
come up Robertson and then over on the Wilshire line. But then I think they’d move down one of the service tunnels to sort
of stay out of sight. The service tunnels are three to five feet wide. They’re round. Plenty of room to work and move equipment.
They hook up the main artery lines to the street storm drains and the utility systems in the buildings along here.”

He put his hand back into the light and traced the smaller lines he was talking about on the DWP map.

“If they did this right,” he said, “what they did was get in the gate down by the freeway and drive their equipment and all
up to Wilshire and then over to your target area. They unload their stuff, hide it in one of these service tunnels, as we
call ’em, and then take their vehicle back out. They hike back in on foot and set to work in the service tunnel. Hell, they
could be working in there five, six weeks before we might have occasion to go up that particular line.”

Bosch still thought it sounded too simple.

“What about these other storm lines?” he asked, indicating Olympic and Pico on the map. There was a crosshatch pattern of
the smaller service tunnels running from these lines north toward the vault. “What about using one of these and coming up
behind the vault?”

Gearson scratched his bottom lip with a finger and said, “That’s fine. There’s that too. But the thing is, these lines aren’t
going to get you as close to the vault as these Wilshire offshoots. See what I mean? Why would they dig a hundred-yard tunnel
when they could dig a hundred-footer here?”

Gearson liked holding court, the idea of knowing more than the silk suits and uniforms around him. Having finished his speech,
he rocked back on his heels, a satisfied look on his face. Bosch knew the man was probably correct on every detail.

“What about earth displacement?” Bosch asked him. “These guys are digging a tunnel through dirt and rock, concrete. Where
do they get rid of it? How?”

“Bosch, Mr. Gearson is not a detective,” Rourke said. “I doubt that he knows every nuance of —”

“Easy,” Gearson said. “The floors of the main lines like Wilshire and Robertson are graded three degrees to center. There
is always water running down the center, even most days during a drought. It might not be raining up top but water flows,
you know. You’d be surprised how much. Either it’s runoff from the reservoirs or commercial use or both. Your fire department
gets a call, where you think the water goes when they are done puttin’ the fire out? So what I am saying is, if they had enough
water they could use it to move the displaced earth or whatever you want to call it.”

“It’s got to be tons.” Hanlon spoke for the first time.

“But it’s not several tons at once. You said they took days to dig this. You spread it out over days and the runoff could
handle it. Now, if they are in one of the service tunnels they’d have to figure a way to get water through there, down to
your main line. I’d check your fire hydrants in the area. You got one leaking or had a report of somebody opening one up,
that’d be your boys.”

One of the uniforms leaned to Orozco’s ear and said something. Orozco leaned over the hood and raised his finger above the
map. Then he poked it down on a blue line. “We had a hydrant vandalized here two nights ago.”

“Somebody opened it up,” the uniform who had whispered to the captain said, “and used a bolt cutter to cut the chain that
holds the cap. They took the cap with them, and it took the fire department an hour to get out here with a replacement.”

“That would be a lot of water,” Gearson said. “That would have taken care of some of your earth displacement.”

He looked at Bosch and smiled. And Bosch smiled back. He liked when pieces of the puzzle began to fit.

“Before that, let’s see, Saturday night it was, we had an arson,” Orozco said. “A little boutique in behind the Stock Building
off Rincon.”

Gearson looked at the spot Orozco pointed to on the blueprint as being the location of the boutique. He put his own finger
on the fire hydrant location. “The water from both of those things would have gone into three street catches, here, here and
here,” he said, moving his hand deftly over the gray paper. “These two drain to this line. The other drains here.”

The investigators looked at the two drainage lines. One ran parallel to Wilshire, behind the J. C. Stock Building. The other
ran perpendicular to Wilshire, a straight offshoot, and next to the building.

“Either one and we’re still looking at, what, a hundred-foot tunnel?” Wish said.

“At least,” Gearson said. “If they had a straight shot. They might’ve hit ground utilities or hard rock and had to divert
some. Doubt any tunnel down there could be a straight shot.”

The SWAT expert tugged Rourke’s cuff and the two walked away from the crowd for a whispered conversation. Bosch looked at
Wish and softly said, “They’re not going to go in.”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t Vietnam. Nobody has to go down there. If Franklin and Delgado and anybody else are down there in one of these
lines, there’s no way to go in safely and unannounced. They hold all the advantages. They’d know we’re coming.”

She studied his face but didn’t say anything.

“It would be the wrong move,” Bosch said. “We know they’re armed and probably have trips set up. We know they’re killers.”

• • •

Rourke came back to the gathering around the car hood and asked Gearson to wait in one of the bureau cars while he finished
up with the investigators. The DWP man walked to the car with his head down, disappointed he was no longer part of the plan.

“We’re not going in after them,” Rourke said after Gearson shut the car door. “Too dangerous. They have weapons, explosives.
We have no element of surprise. It adds up to heavy casualties for us…. So, we trap them. We let things take their course
and then we will be there waiting, safely, when they come out. Then we’ll have surprise on our side.

“Tonight SWAT will make a recon run through the Wilshire line — we’ll get some DWP uniforms from Gearson — and look for their
entry point. Then we’ll set up and wait in whatever’s the best location. Whatever’s safest from our standpoint.”

There was a beat of silence, punctuated by a horn from the street, before Orozco protested.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He waited until every face was on his. Except Rourke’s. He didn’t look at Orozco at all.

“We can’t be talking about sitting out here with our thumbs up our asses and letting these people blast their way into that
vault,” Orozco said. “To let them go in and pry open a couple hundred boxes and then just back out. My obligation is to protect
the property of the citizens of Beverly Hills, who probably happen to constitute ninety percent of that business’s customers.
I’m not going along with this.”