Dark Sacred Night

31

Bosch’s phone buzzed. The screen said UNKNOWN CALLER but he guessed it was Bella Lourdes again. The last two times, he had let the call go to message and she had left him voice mails saying she wanted to talk about his suspension and his taking the bullet for the Luzon plan they had both signed off on and taken part in. But Bosch didn’t want to talk about any of that yet.

He took another gulp of black coffee and kept his eyes on the entrance to the clinic on Van Nuys Boulevard. There had been a steady flow of activity there for the past two hours but Bosch had not seen Elizabeth Clayton among those wandering in and out. It would be eight p.m. soon and the clinic was due to close.

He checked his texts again. He had sent a message to his daughter, inquiring about his coming down on the train for a breakfast or a dinner, maybe even an Angels game over the weekend, but it had been forty minutes and there was no response. He had her schedule and knew she didn’t have night class but she could be studying in the library with her cell phone turned off. He thought about what Ballard had said about her not carrying the phone when she didn’t want to be tracked. He wondered if this was one of those times.

He opened up the tracking app on his phone, but before he could locate his daughter, the phone buzzed with another call. This time, the ID wasn’t blocked and he took the call.

“Renée, what’s up?”

“Hey, Harry, where are you at?”

He could tell she was driving.

“Van Nuys,” he said. “I’m watching a pain clinic, looking for Elizabeth.”

“I thought you said you tracked her to North Hollywood,” Ballard asked.

“I did but I was there last night. No sign. Tonight I’m watching a clinic she went to before. Maybe she’ll show. Where are you? Sounds like a freeway.”

“The 101 coming in from Ventura.”

She told him about the landfill dig and the need to clean up at her grandmother’s house.

“Am I going to see you later tonight at the shop?” she asked.

“Unless something happens here, I’ll be by,” Bosch said.

“I got a message from Professor Calder. He said he has the GRASP files on a thumb drive for us. He’ll have it with him at the school tomorrow. I’ll head back to USC after my shift if you’re interested in joining. We can print out hard copies for you.”

“Yeah, count me in for all of it.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight and have a quiet shift and then I’ll be able to finish off the shake cards.”

“Good luck.”

Ballard disconnected and Bosch went back to watching the pain clinic.

He wasn’t sure why he was doing it. Despite Elizabeth’s previous connection to Dr. Ali Rohat, the shady doctor who ran the place, there were thousands of clinics in the Los Angeles area. She could be at any of them or none. He guessed he was doing it to be doing something. The alternative was to go home to an empty house and wonder about her.

He’d take his chances on a long shot. Besides, concentrating on the clinic kept some of the darker thoughts about his recent miscues out of the front of his mind. He knew that he was putting off a critical self-evaluation of his recent moves, an evaluation that might conclude with his deciding that he was unfit to do the work anymore. That would be his call to make, but he knew he set his standards higher than any other person he’d come across. If he believed it was time to retire, then that would be it.

His phone buzzed again. It was an unknown caller. This time he decided to get the conversation with Bella Lourdes over with. He took the call.

But it wasn’t Bella Lourdes.

“Hey, asshole.”

He didn’t recognize the voice. It had a Spanish accent and he placed the age at mid- to late thirties. It had some weight to it.

“Who’s this?”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are fucking with the wrong people.”

“Which people is that?”

“You’ll find out, muthafucker. Real soon, too.”

“Cortez? Is this Cortez?”

The caller disconnected.

Bosch had received many threats over the years. Most of them were anonymous like this one. Receiving it gave him no pause. He had to assume the caller was Cortez or a member of the SanFers. And that would explain how the caller had his private cell number. Bosch had written it on the business card that had been given to Martin Perez and then ended up slotted between his teeth after his murder. It was another in a lengthening line of missteps Bosch had made recently, beginning with his acquiescing to Perez’s not wanting protection and ending with Luzon’s getting the drop on Bosch and locking him out of the cell so he could try to kill himself.

He decided to call Bella Lourdes back and tell her about the threat. Threats were rarely carried out, but he thought there should be a record of this one should it prove to be the exception. He got her while she was still in the office doing accumulated paperwork.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day, Harry.”

“I know. I’ve been busy and just got the chance to call. What’s up?”

“At some point we need to talk about Luzon and this bullshit suspension, but at the moment, there’s something more important. The gang guys picked up some intel today. The SanFers put a hit out on you.”

Bosch was silent for a long moment, thinking about the threat he’d just gotten.

“Harry, you there?”

“Yeah, I was just thinking. How good is the intel?”

“They said it was good enough to want to warn you.”

“Well, I just got an anonymous call on my phone. My cell. Guy threatened me.”

“Shit, did you recognize the voice?”

“Not really. Coulda been Cortez, coulda been anybody. But why call and tip me off if the hit is legit? That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“No, not really, but you have to take this seriously.”

“Think they know where I live?”

“I have no idea. Maybe you should stay away from there to be safe.”

Bosch saw a woman with a bandanna around her head come out of the clinic and start walking south on Van Nuys. She had the same thin build as Elizabeth but she had turned from Bosch’s direction so fast that he was unable to confirm whether it was her. The bandanna hid her hair color and length.

“Bella, I need to go,” he said. “Keep me posted. I think it’s all talk, but let me know if you hear different.”

“Harry, I think you need—”

Bosch disconnected and started the car. He drove slowly down the street, keeping his eyes on the woman. She was almost to the end of the block now and Bosch planned to go past her, pull to the curb, and then get out to see if it was Elizabeth. He realized that he had concentrated so much on finding her that he wasn’t sure how he would handle things once he did.

As the woman got to the corner, she turned and Bosch lost sight of her. His plan to identify and confront her on the well-lit Van Nuys Boulevard now changed. He sped up and made the same turn the woman had. Immediately he saw her standing with two men in the shadows of a closed paint store. One of the men had his hands cupped and the woman was placing something in them. Bosch still could not get a good look at her face. He pulled to the curb directly in front of them.

Immediately one of the men ran off toward an alley perpendicular to Van Nuys. The woman and the remaining man stood frozen. Bosch’s old Cherokee did not resemble a police vehicle in any way. He jumped out, grabbing a mini-light from the center console, and held his hands up so they could see them over the roof of the Jeep.

“It’s all right. I just want to talk. Just want to talk.”

As he came around, Bosch saw the man pull something from a back pocket and use the woman’s body as a blind. Bosch could not tell if it was a gun or knife or pack of cigarettes. But in his experience, if you had a gun, you showed a gun.

Bosch stopped six feet from them, his arms still raised.

“Elizabeth?”

He peered into the darkness. He could not tell and she didn’t answer. His hands still over his head, he snapped on the light and put the beam on her.

It wasn’t Elizabeth.

“Okay, sorry, wrong person,” Bosch said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

He started backing away.

“Damn right, it’s the wrong person,” the man said. “What the fuck you doing, runnin’ up on people like that?”

“I told you, I’m looking for somebody, okay? I’m sorry.”

“I coulda had a gun, you fucking idiot. I coulda blown your shit away.”

Bosch reached under his jacket and snapped his gun off his belt. He held it barrel up and took a step back toward the couple.

“You mean like this?” he said. “This what you have?”

The man dropped whatever he was holding and raised his hands.

“Sorry, man. Sorry,” he called out.

“Put that damn thing away,” the woman yelled. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”

Bosch looked down at the pavement and saw what the man had dropped. It was a plastic pill crusher. They were about to turn the pills she got at the clinic into powder for snorting. Bosch had carried a crusher just like it while working undercover the year before.

All at once he was struck by how pitiful the lives of the two people in front of him were. He wondered how Elizabeth could have gone back to this. He put his gun back into its holster and returned to the door of the Cherokee, the two addicts watching him.

“What are you, some kind of cop?” the woman yelled.

Bosch looked at her before getting back in.

“Something like that,” he said.

He got in, dropped the transmission into drive, and peeled off.

He decided to call it a night. If Elizabeth was out there on her own, she would no longer have Bosch looking for her. He headed home, resigned to the idea that he had done what he could for her. He would continue to look for her daughter’s killer, but finding Elizabeth would no longer be a priority.

He picked up tacos at the Poquito Más on Cahuenga and then went up the hill to his house. The plan was to eat, shower, and put on fresh clothes. He would then head to Hollywood to read shake cards with Ballard.

The house was dark because he had forgotten to leave any lights on. He came in through the kitchen door and grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator before heading out to the back deck to eat his dinner.

As he crossed the living room, he noticed that the sliding door to the deck was halfway open. He stopped. He knew he hadn’t left it that way. He then felt the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head.

An image of his daughter went through his mind. It was from a few years ago, of a moment when he had been teaching her how to drive and told her she had done well. She smiled proudly at him.