Angels Flight

Chapter 38

IT took Bosch twenty-five minutes to get to the Seventy-seventh Street Division station. He was delayed because the 110 Freeway had been closed in all directions by the California Highway Patrol. The freeway was a conduit from downtown to the South Bay area, directly through South L.A. In the last riot, snipers had fired on cars passing through and concrete blocks had been dropped from pedestrian overpasses onto cars below. The CHP was not taking any chances. Motorists were advised to take the circuitous route of the Santa Monica Freeway to the San Diego Freeway and then south. It would take twice as long but it was safer than a run through the expected war zone.

Bosch took surface streets the whole way. Almost all of them were deserted and he never stopped once for a traffic light or stop sign. It was like driving through a ghost town. He knew there were hot spots of looting and arson, but he never passed through them. He thought about the picture the media was projecting compared to what he was seeing.

Most of the people were inside, locked down and waiting for this to pass. They were good people waiting out the storm, staring at the television and wondering if that was really their city that was being shown on fire.

The front of the Seventy-seventh station was also strangely empty when Bosch finally pulled up. A police academy bus had been pulled across the entranceway as a guard against drive-by shots and other attacks. But there were no protesters out front and no cops. As Bosch pulled to the no-parking curb in front, Chastain stepped out from the rear of the bus and approached. He was in uniform, his weapon holstered on his hip. He came to Bosch’s window and Bosch lowered it.

“Where you been, Bosch, you said fif – ”

“I know what I said. Get in.”

“No, Bosch. I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the hell you’re doing here. I’m on duty, remember?”

“I want to talk about Sheehan and the ballistics. About the Wilbert Dobbs case.”

He noticed Chastain take a slight step back from the car. Mentioning Dobbs had landed a punch. Bosch noticed the sharpshooter ribbon on Chastain’s uniform below the badge.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about but the case on Sheehan is closed. He’s dead, Elias is dead. Everybody’s dead. That’s it. Now we have this – the whole city coming apart again.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Chastain stared at him, trying to read him.

“You’re not making sense, Bosch. You need to get some sleep. We all do.”

Bosch opened the door and stepped out. Chastain moved back another step and drew his right hand up a little until he hooked his thumb on his belt near his gun. There were unwritten rules of engagement. That was one of them. Bosch was now on deadly ground. He understood this. He was ready.

Bosch turned and swung his car door closed. While Chastain’s eyes involuntarily followed that movement, Bosch swiftly reached inside his coat and pulled his pistol out of his holster. He had it pointing at Chastain before the IAD detective could make a move.

“All right, we do it your way. Put your hands on the roof of the car.”

“What the hell are you – ”

“PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE CAR!”

Chastain’s hands went up.

“Okay, okay… easy, Bosch, be easy.”

He moved to the car and put his hands flat on the roof. Bosch came up behind him and took his gun from its holster. He stepped back and put it into his own holster.

“I guess I don’t have to check you for a throw-down. You already used yours on Frankie Sheehan, right?”

“What? I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“That’s okay.”

Keeping his right hand pressed against Chastain’s back, Bosch reached around and took the handcuffs off the man’s belt. He pulled one of Chastain’s arms behind his back and cuffed his wrist. He then pulled the other arm back and completed the handcuffing.

Bosch walked him around and sat him in the backseat of the slickback opposite the driver’s side. He then got back behind the wheel. He took Chastain’s gun out of his holster, put it into his briefcase and reholstered his own weapon. Bosch adjusted the rearview mirror so he could quickly see Chastain at a glance and flicked the lock switch which rendered the rear doors inoperable from the inside.

“You stay right there where I can see you. At all times.”

“Fuck you! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Where are you taking me?”

Bosch put the car in drive and headed away from the police station. He headed west until he could turn north on Normandie. Almost five minutes went by before he answered Chastain’s question.

“We’re going to Parker Center,” he said. “When we get there you’re going to tell me about killing Howard Elias, Catalina Perez… and Frankie Sheehan.”

Bosch felt anger and bile back up in his throat. He thought about one of the unsaid messages he had received from Garwood. He wanted street justice, and at that moment so did Bosch.

“Fine, we’ll go back,” Chastain said. “But you don’t know what you’re talking about. You are full of shit! The case is CLOSED, Bosch. Live with it.”

Bosch started reciting the list of Constitutional rights against self-incrimination and then asked Chastain if he understood them.

“Fuck you.”

Bosch pressed on, glancing up at the mirror every few seconds.

“That’s okay, you’re a cop. No judge in the world would say you didn’t understand your rights.”

He waited a moment and checked his prisoner in the mirror one last time before going on.

“You were Elias’s source. All these years, you were the guy giving him whatever he needed on whatever case he had. You – ”

“Wrong.”

“-sold out the department. You are the lowest of the low, Chastain. Isn’t that what you called it before? The lowest of the low? That was you, man, a bottom feeder, a scumbag… a motherfucker.”

Bosch saw police barricades across the street ahead. Two hundred yards beyond them he saw flashing blue lights and fire. He realized they were heading toward the hot spot where the firefighters had been attacked and their truck set ablaze.

At the blockade he turned right and started looking north at each intersection he passed through. He was out of his element here. He had never worked an assignment at any of the department’s South Central divisions and didn’t know the geographic territory well. He knew he could become lost if he strayed too far from Normandie. He gave no indication of this when he checked Chastain in the mirror again.

“You want to talk to me, Chastain? Or play it out?”

“There is nothing to talk about. You are enjoying your last precious moments with a badge. What you’re doing here is pure suicide. Like your buddy, Sheehan. You’re killing yourself, Bosch.”

Bosch slammed on the brakes and the car swerved to a stop. He drew his weapon and leaned over the seat, pointing it at Chastain’s face.

“What did you say?”

Chastain looked genuinely scared. He clearly believed that Bosch was on the edge of losing it.

“Nothing, Bosch, nothing. Just drive. Let’s go to Parker and we’ll get this all straightened out.”

Bosch slowly dropped back into the driver’s seat and started the car moving again. After four blocks he turned north again, hoping to run parallel to the disturbance spot and cut back onto Normandie after they were clear.

“I just came from the basement at Parker,” he said.

He glanced in the mirror to see if that had changed anything in Chastain’s face. It hadn’t.

“I pulled the package on Wilbert Dobbs. And I looked at the sign-out log. You pulled the package this morning and you took the bullets. You took the bullets from Sheehan’s service nine, the bullets he shot Dobbs with five years ago, and you turned three of them in to ballistics saying they were the bullets from the Howard Elias autopsy. You set him up to take the fall. But it’s your fall, Chastain.”

He checked the mirror. Chastain’s face had changed. The news Bosch just delivered had hit like the flat side of a shovel in the face. Bosch moved in for the finish.

“You killed Elias,” he said quietly, finding it hard to pull his eyes away from the mirror and back onto the road. “He was going to put you on that stand and expose you. He was going to ask you about the true findings of your investigation because you had told him the true findings. Only the case was too big. He knew how high he could go with it and you became expendable. He was going to burn you in order to win the case… You lost it, I guess. Or maybe you’ve always been cold in the blood. But on Friday night you followed him home and when he was getting on Angels Flight, you made your move. You put him down. And then you looked up and there was the woman sitting there. Shit, that must’ve shocked the hell out of you. I mean, after all, the train car had been sitting there. It was supposed to be empty. But there was Catalina Perez on that bench and you had to put one in her, too. How am I doing, Chastain? I have the story right?”

Chastain didn’t answer. Bosch came to an intersection, slowed and looked left. He could see down to the lighted area that was Normandie. He saw no barricades and no blue lights. He turned left and headed that way.

“You lucked out,” he continued. “The Dobbs case. It fit perfectly. You came across Sheehan’s threat in the files and took it from there. You had your patsy. A little research on the case and a little maneuvering here and there and you got to handle the autopsy. That gave you the bullets and all you had to do was switch them. Of course, the coroner’s ID markings on the bullets would be different but that discrepancy would only come up if there was a trial, if they took Sheehan to trial.”

“Bosch, shut up! I don’t want to hear anymore. I don’t – ”

“I don’t care what you want to hear! You’re going to hear this, douche bag. This is Frankie Sheehan talking to you from the grave. You understand that? You had to put it on Sheehan but it wouldn’t work if Sheehan ever went to a trial. Because the coroner would testify and he’d say, ‘Wait a sec, folks, these aren’t my marks on these bullets. There’s been a switch.’ So you had no choice. You had to put Sheehan down, too. You followed us last night. I saw your lights. You followed us and then you did Frankie Sheehan. Made it look like a drunken suicide, lots of beers, lots of shots. But I know what you did. You put one in him, then you fired a couple more with his hand wrapped around the gun. You made it all fit, Chastain. But it’s coming apart now.”

Bosch felt his anger overtaking him. He reached up and slapped the mirror so he wouldn’t have to look at Chastain’s face. He was coming up to Normandie now. The intersection was clear.

“I know the story,” Bosch said. “I know it. I just have one question. Why did you snitch to Elias all those years? Was he paying you? Or did you just hate cops so much that you’d do whatever you could to nail them any way you could?”

Again there was no answer from the backseat. At the stop sign Bosch looked to his left and could see the blue lights and the flames again. They had circumnavigated the police perimeter. The barricades started a block down and he paused with his foot on the brakes and took in the scene. He could see a line of police cruisers behind the barricades. There was a small liquor store on the corner with the windows shattered and jagged pieces of glass still hanging in the frames. Outside its doors the ground was littered with broken bottles and other debris left by the looters.

“You see that down there, Chastain? All of that? You -”

“Bosch – ”

“- did that. That’s – ”

“- you didn’t go far enough!”

“- all on you.”

Picking up on the fear in Chastain’s voice, Bosch began turning to his right. In that instant the windshield shattered as a chunk of concrete crashed through it and hit the seat. Through the falling glass Bosch saw the crowd moving toward the car. Young men with dark angry faces, their individualities lost inside the mob. He saw a bottle in midair coming at the car. He saw it all so clearly and with seemingly so much time that he could even read the label. Southern Comfort. His mind began registering some kind of humor or irony in that.

The bottle came through the opening and exploded on the steering wheel, sending a blast of glass and liquid into Bosch’s face and eyes. His hands involuntarily came up off the wheel to cover himself too late. His eyes began burning from the alcohol. He heard Chastain begin screaming from the backseat.

“GO! GO! GO!”

And then there were two more explosions of glass as other windows in the car were shattered by missiles of some sort. There was a pounding on the window next to him and the car began to rock violently right to left. He heard someone yanking on the door handle and more glass being shattered all around him. He heard shouts from outside the car, the angry, unintelligible sounds of the mob. And he heard shouts from the backseat, from Chastain. Hands grabbed at him through the broken windows, pulling at his hair and clothes. Bosch slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and yanked the wheel to the left as the car jerked forward. Fighting against the involuntary instincts of his eyes to stay closed, he managed to open them enough to allow a small slice of blurred and painful vision. The car jumped into the deserted lanes of Normandie and he headed toward the barricades. He knew there was safety at the barricades. He kept his hand on the horn all the way and when he got to the barricades he crashed through and only then did he hit the brakes. The car slid into a tailspin and stopped.

Bosch closed his eyes and didn’t move. He heard footsteps and shouts but he knew they were cops coming for him this time. He was safe. He reached forward and put the car into park. He opened his door and quickly there were hands there to help him out and the comforting voices of the blue race.

“Are you okay, man? You need paramedics?”

“My eyes.”

“Okay, hold still. We’ll get somebody here. Just lean here against the car.”

Bosch listened as one of the officers barked orders into a rover, announcing he had an injured officer needing medical attention. He demanded that attention right now. Bosch had never felt safer than at that moment. He wanted to thank every one of his rescuers. He felt serene and yet giddy for some reason; like the times he had emerged unscathed from the tunnels in Vietnam. He brought his hands up to his face again and was trying to open one of his eyes. He could feel blood running down the bridge of his nose. He knew he was alive.

“Better leave that alone, man, it doesn’t look too good,” one voice said.

“What were you doing out there alone?” demanded another.

Bosch got his left eye open and saw a young black patrolman standing in front of him. A white officer was standing to the right.

“I wasn’t.”

He ducked and looked into the backseat of the car. It was empty. He checked the front and it was empty, too. Chastain was gone. Bosch’s briefcase was gone. He straightened up and looked back down the street at the mob. He reached up and cleared the blood and booze from his eyes so that he could see better. There were fifteen or twenty men down there, all gathered in a tight group, all looking inward at what was at the center of their undulating mass. Bosch could see sharp, violent movements, legs kicking, fists raised high and then brought down out of sight and into the center.

“Jesus Christ!” the patrolman next to him yelled. “Is that one of us? They got one of us?”

He didn’t wait for Bosch’s reply. He brought the rover back up and quickly called for all available units for an officer-needs-assistance call. His voice was frantic, infected with the horror of what he was seeing a block away. The two officers then ran to their patrol cars and the vehicles stormed down the street toward the crowd.

Bosch just watched. And soon the mob changed its form. The object of its attention was no longer on the ground but was rising, being brought up. Soon Bosch could see Chastain’s body raised above their heads and held aloft like a trophy being passed by the hands of the victors. His shirt was now badgeless and torn open, his arms were still bound by the handcuffs. One shoe and the accompanying sock were gone and the ivory-white foot stood out like the white bone of a compound fracture through the skin. It was hard to tell from where he stood but Bosch thought Chastain’s eyes were open. He could see that his mouth was wide open. Bosch heard the start of a sharp shrieking sound that at first he thought might be the siren of one of the patrol cars racing to the rescue. Then he realized it was Chastain screaming, just before he dropped back into the center of the mob and out of sight.