Lost Light

39

On the way home I stopped at the twenty-four-hour Ralph’s on Sunset and bought a bag of coffee. I didn’t expect that I’d be getting much sleep between the night and the multi-agency confab the following morning.

On the drive up the hill to my house there are too many curves to use the rearview mirror to check for a tail. But there is one sweeping curve halfway up that allows you to look to your right out the passenger window and across the drop-off to the road you just covered. It’s always been my habit to slow at this spot and check for a trailer.

This night I slowed more than usual and watched a little longer. I didn’t expect my visit to Chet’s to be taken as anything other than a threat and I wasn’t wrong. As I looked across the drop-off I saw a car with no lights on round the hill and move into the sweeping curve. I eased the gas pedal down and slowly picked up speed again. After the next curve I punched it and put a little more distance between us. I pulled all the way into the carport next to my house and quickly got out with the bag from the store. I moved into the darkest corner of the carport and waited. I heard the trail car before I saw it. Then I watched it glide by. A long Jaguar. Someone was lighting a cigarette in the backseat, and in the glow from the flame I saw the car was full. The four kings were coming for me.

After the Jag had gone by I saw the bushes across the street glow red and I knew they were stopping just past my house. I moved to the door that led into the kitchen and went inside, making sure to lock the door afterward.

This was the moment when people without badges called the police for help. It’s when they desperately whispered, “Hurry, please! They are coming!” But badge or no badge, I knew that was not an option for me now. This was my play and I didn’t care in that moment about what authority I had or didn’t have.

I had not carried a gun since the night I left my badge and service pistol in a drawer at Hollywood Division and walked out. But I had a weapon. I’d bought a Glock P7 for personal protection. It was wrapped in an oil rag and in a box on the shelf of the walk-in closet in the bedroom. I put the bag from Ralph’s down on the counter and moved into the hallway and down to the bedroom without turning on any lights.

When I opened the closet door I was suddenly shoved backwards with great force by a man who had been waiting in there for me. I hit the opposite wall and slid to the floor. He was on me immediately, straddling and pushing the barrel of a pistol up under my jaw. I managed to look up and in the pale light coming in through the French door leading to the deck I could see who it was.

“Milton. What the -”

“Shut up, asshole. You surprised to see me? Did you think I was going to let them wash me down the toilet without doing something about it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Listen, there are people -”

“I said, shut the fuck up. I want the disks, you understand? I want the original data chip.”

“Listen to me! There are people about to come in here for me. They want -”

He shoved the barrel in so deep under my jaw that I had to stop talking. The pain sent shards of red glass across my vision. Milton held the gun there and leaned down, his breath in my face as he spoke.

“I’ve got your gun right here, Bosch. And I’m going to turn you into another suicide statistic if you don’t -”

There was a sudden crashing sound from the hallway and I knew it was the front door coming in off its hinges. Then there were footsteps. Milton jumped up off of me and stepped through the bedroom door into the hallway. Almost immediately, there was the booming thunder of a shotgun blast and Milton was slammed back against the wall, his eyes wide with the terror of knowing he was dying. He then slid down the wall, his heels pushing back the hallway rug to reveal the handle of the trapdoor that led beneath the house.

I knew they had mistaken him for me. It was a break worth a few seconds at the most. I rolled over and quickly moved to the French door. As I opened it I heard someone’s panicked voice call out from the hallway.

“It’s not him!”

The door squealed when I opened it, its hinges protesting from lack of use. I quickly crossed the deck and went over the railing like a cowboy mounting a stolen horse. I went down the railing until I was hanging from the deck, twenty feet above the sharply sloping ground below. In the dim moonlight I looked for one of the iron support beams that held the deck and house to the side of the hill. I was intimately familiar with the design of the house from having supervised its reconstruction from the ground up after the ’ninety-four earthquake.

I had to move six feet along the edge of the deck before I could reach in and grab hold of one of the support beams. I wrapped my arms and legs around it and slid down to the ground. As I went down I heard their footsteps on the deck above me.

“He went down there! He went down there!”

“Where? I don’t see -”

“He went down there! You two go. We’ll take the street.”

I was on the ground beneath the shelter of the deck. I knew if I stepped out and tried to make my way down the steep slope to one of the streets or houses in the canyon below I would be exposed to my armed pursuers. Instead I turned and climbed up the hill under the house and further into the shelter of the structure. I knew there was a trench dug into the ground up there, where the sewer main had to be replaced after the quake. Above me there would also be the trapdoor that opened in the hallway. But I had designed it during the rebuilding of the house as an escape route, not a means of ingress. It was locked from inside and no use to me at the moment.

I moved up the hill, found the trench and rolled into it. I blindly moved my hands around at the bottom, looking for a weapon. All I found were cracked pieces of the old sewer main. I found one shard that was triangular and might work as a weapon. It would have to do.

Two men moved like shadows down the support beams to the ground below the deck. The moonlight reflected off the steel of their pistols. The reflections also showed me that one had on eyeglasses and I remembered him from the magazine story and photo. His name was Bernard Banks, known as B.B. King among the night crawlers. He had been at the bar at Chet’s when I had left.

The two shadows exchanged whispers and then split up, one moving down the hill and to the left, the other-Banks-maintaining his position. It was some kind of tactical strategy in which one would hopefully chase me into the waiting pistol of the other.

From my angle above him Banks was a hard target silhouetted by the lights from the canyon below. He was fifteen feet from me but I had nothing to use as a weapon except a shard of old iron pipe. Still, it was enough. I had survived more missions into the tunnels of Vietnam than I could remember. I’d once spent a whole night in the elephant grass with the enemy moving all around me. And I had lived and worked for twenty-five-plus years on the streets of this city with a badge. This kid was going to be no match for me. I knew none of them would be.

When Banks turned to look down the canyon slope, I rose up in the trench and threw the pipe shard into the brush out to his right. It made a sound like an animal moving through high grass. As he turned, tensed and raised his weapon I slid over the top of the trench and started moving down the slope toward him, all the while keeping one of the iron beams between us as a sound and visual blind.

I got to the beam and he still had not turned from the direction of the sounds in the brush. He was just putting the misdirection together and finally turning back when I got to him. My left fist hit him squarely between the eyes while my right closed over the gun and I put a finger through the trigger guard. I had actually been aiming for his mouth but the punch broke his glasses in half at the bridge and staggered him just the same. I pivoted and swung him in a 180-degree arc, gathering momentum and putting him headfirst into one of the support beams. His skull made a sound like a water balloon breaking and the iron beam hummed like a tuning fork. He dropped to the ground like a bag of wet laundry.

I put his gun into the waistband of my pants and then turned him over. The blood on his face looked black in the moonlight. I quickly propped his back against the beam, brought his knees up and folded his arms on top of them. I leaned his face down on his arms.

Soon I heard the other one call for him from further down the hillside.

“B.B., you got him? Hey, Beeb!”

I backed away from Banks and crouched in the bushes ten feet away. I pulled the gun from my pants. In the moonlight I could not tell the make. It was a black steel pistol with no safety. Probably a Glock. I then realized it was probably my own gun. It must have been the one Milton had shoved into my neck. Banks had taken it from his body.

I heard the other one approaching in the brush. He was coming from my left and would cross within five feet of me when he approached Banks. I waited until I heard him and knew he was close.

“Banks, what are you doing? You pussy, get up and -”

He shut up when he felt the barrel of the gun against his neck.

“Drop the gun or you die right here.”

I heard it hit the ground. With my free hand I reached up and grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him around and then back underneath the shelter of the deck where we couldn’t be seen from above. We were both facing the lights of the canyon and the freeway below. He was the fourth king, the one in the magazine picture who had the bar towel over his shoulder. I couldn’t remember his name in all of the excitement. He’d been sitting at the bar at Chet’s with Banks.

“What’s your name, asshole?”

“Jimmy Fazio. Look, I -”

“Shut up.”

He was quiet. I leaned forward and whispered into his ear.

“Look at the lights. You are going to die here, Jimmy Fazio. The lights are the last thing you’ll ever see.”

“Please…”

“Please? Is that what Angella Benton said? Did she say please to you?”

“No, please, no, I mean, I wasn’t even there.”

“Convince me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Or die.”

“Okay, it wasn’t me. Please believe me. It was Linus and Vaughn. It was their idea and they did it without even telling the rest of us. We couldn’t stop it because we didn’t know about it.”

“Yeah, what else? You’re only alive because you’re talking.”

“That’s why we shot Vaughn. Linus said we had to because he was going to take the money and pin the girl on Linus.”

“What about Linus getting shot? Was that part of the plan?”

He shook his head.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen but we figured out how to make it work. Like a cover for us buying the clubs.”

“Yeah, it worked all right. What about Marty Gessler and Jack Dorsey?”

“Who?”

I jammed the gun’s muzzle hard into his neck.

“Don’t give me that shit. I want the whole goddamn story.”

“I don’t -”

“Faz! You fucking coward!”

The voice came from above us. I looked up and saw the upper body of a man hanging down over the edge of the deck. His arms were extended, two hands on a gun. I let go of my captive and dove left just as the gunfire erupted. The shooter was Oliphant. He screamed as he fired. Just blindly screamed. The whole shelter area beneath the house lit up with the flashes. Slugs ricocheted off the iron beams. I came up on the side of one of the beams and fired three times in a quick burst at him. His shout cut off and I knew I’d hit him. I watched as he dropped his gun, lost his balance and fell the twenty feet down, making a heavy thud in the bushes.

I looked around for Fazio and found him on the ground near Banks. He’d been hit in the upper chest but was still alive. It was too dark to see his eyes but I knew they were open and panicked, looking at me for help. I grabbed his jaw and turned his face to mine.

“Can you talk?”

“Uh… it hurts.”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Tell me about the FBI agent. Where is she? What happened to her?”

“Uh…”

“Who killed the cop? Was that Linus, too?”

“Linus…”

“Is that a yes? Did Linus do it?”

He didn’t answer. I was losing him. I lightly patted his cheeks and then shook him by the collar.

“Come on, man, stay with me. Was that a yes? Fazio, did Linus Simonson kill the cop?”

Nothing. He was gone. Then a voice came from behind me.

“I think that would be a yes.”

I turned. It was Simonson. He had found the trapdoor and come down out of the house behind me. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun. I slowly stood up, leaving my gun on the ground next to Fazio’s body and raising my hands. I backed away from Simonson, stepping further down the hill.

“Cops on the payroll are always a pain in the ass,” he said. “I had to put an end to that pronto.”

I took another step backwards, but for every step I took, Simonson did likewise. The shotgun was only three feet away. I knew I’d be unable to escape its kill range if I tried to make a move. All I could do was play for time. Somebody in the neighborhood had to have heard the shots and made a call.

Simonson aimed the weapon at my heart.

“I’m going to enjoy this. This one’s for Cozy.”

“Cozy?” I asked, though I had already put it together. “Who the hell is Cozy?”

“You hit him that day. With your bullets. And he didn’t make it.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think happened? He died in the back of the van.”

“You buried him? Where?”

“Not me. I was sort of busy that day, remember? They buried him. Cozy liked boats. They gave him a burial at sea, you could say.”

I took another step back. Simonson followed. I was walking out from beneath the deck. If the cops ever showed up they could put a bead on him from above.

“What about the FBI agent? What happened to Marty Gessler?”

“See that’s the thing. When Dorsey told me about her and what the plan was, that was when I knew he had to go. I mean, he was -”

The shotgun suddenly pointed skyward as the foot Simonson had put his weight down on went out from under him. He took a classic pratfall, landing on his back. I was on him then like a wild man. We rolled and fought for control of the shotgun. He was younger and stronger and quickly was able to hold the top position. But he was an inexperienced fighter. His focus was on controlling the struggle rather than on simply overpowering his opponent.

I had my left hand wrapped around the snubbed barrel while the other was gripped at the trigger guard. I managed to squeeze my thumb into the guard behind his finger. I closed my eyes and an image came to me. Angella Benton’s hands. The image from memory and dreams. I channeled all my strength into my left arm and pushed. The angle of the gun shifted. I closed my eyes and depressed the trigger with my thumb. The loudest sound I have ever heard in my life roared through my head as the shotgun discharged. My face felt like it had caught on fire. I opened my eyes and looked up at Simonson and saw that he no longer had a face.

He rolled off of me and an inhuman sound gurgled from the pulp that had been his face. His legs kicked like he was riding an invisible bicycle. He rolled back and forth as his hands balled into fists as tight as stones, and then he stopped and went still.

Slowly, I sat up, registering what had happened. I touched my own face and found it intact. I was burned from the discharge gases but otherwise I was okay. My ears were ringing and for once I couldn’t hear the ever present sound of the freeway below.

I saw a glint in the brush and reached for the object. It was a water bottle. It was full, unopened. I realized that Simonson had slipped on the water bottle I had knocked off the deck a few days before. And it had saved my life. I twisted the cap off the bottle and poured water over my face, washing away the blood and the sting of the burn.

“Don’t move!”

I looked up from my position and saw a man leaning over the deck railing, pointing another gun at me. The moon reflected off the badge on his uniform. The cops had finally arrived. I dropped the bottle and spread my hands wide.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not moving.”

I leaned back, my arms still spread. My head rested on the ground and I pulled great gulps of air into my lungs. The ringing in my ears was still there but I could now also hear my heart as it slowed its cadence to the normal beat of life. I looked up into the dark, sacred night, to the place where those not saved on earth wait for the rest of us above. Not yet, I thought. No, not yet.