The Black Ice

15

The Hall of Justice took up an entire block across from the criminal courts building. The first six floors housed the sheriff’s department and the top four the county jail. Anyone could tell this from the outside. Not just because of the bars behind the windows, but because the top four floors looked like an abandoned, burned-out shell. As if all the hate and anger held in those un-air-conditioned cells had turned to fire and smoke and stained the windows and concrete balustrades forever black.

It was a turn-of-the-century building and its stone-block construction gave it an ominous fortresslike appearance. It was one of the only buildings in downtown that still had human elevator operators. An old black woman sat on a padded stool in the corner of each of the wood-paneled cubicles and pulled the doors open and worked the wheel that leveled the elevator with each floor it stopped at.

“Seven thousand,” Bosch said to the operator as he stepped on. It had been some time since he had been in the Hall and he could not remember her name. But he knew she had been working the elevators here since before Harry was a cop. All of the operators had. She opened the door on the sixth floor where Bosch saw Rickard as soon as he stepped out. The narc was standing at the glass window at the check-in counter, putting his badge case into a slide drawer.

“Here you go,” Bosch said and quickly put his badge in the drawer.

“He’s with me,” Rickard said into the microphone.

The deputy behind the glass exchanged the badges for two visitor clearance badges and slid them out. Bosch and Rickard clipped them to their shirts. Bosch noticed they were cleared to visit the High Power block on the tenth floor. High Power was where the most dangerous criminal suspects were placed while awaiting trial or to be shipped out to state prisons following guilty verdicts.

They began walking down a hall to the jail elevator.

“You got the kid in High Power?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah. I know a guy. Told him one day, that’s all we needed. The kid’s going to be shitless. He’s going to tell you everything he knows about Dance.”

They took the security elevator up, this one operated by a deputy. Bosch figured it had to be the worst job in law enforcement. When the door opened on ten they were met by another deputy, who checked their badges and had them sign in. Then they moved through two sets of sliding steel doors to an attorneys’ visiting area, which consisted of a long table with benches running down both sides of it. There was also a foot-high divider running lengthwise down the table. At the far end of the table a female attorney sat on one side, leaning toward the divider and whispering to a client, who cupped his ears with his hands to hear better. The muscles on the inmate’s arms bulged and stretched the sleeves of his shirt. He was a monster.

On the wall behind them was a sign that readNO TOUCHING,KISSING,REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDER. There was also another deputy at the far end, leaning against the wall, his own massive arms folded, and watching the lawyer and her client.

As they waited for the deputies to bring out Tyge, Bosch became aware of the noise. Through the barred door behind the visiting table he could hear a hundred voices competing and echoing in a metallic din. There were steel doors banging somewhere and occasionally an unintelligible shout.

A deputy walked up to the barred door and said, “It’ll be a few minutes, fellas. We have to get him out of medical.”

The deputy was gone before either of them could ask what happened. Bosch didn’t even know the kid but felt his stomach tighten. He looked over at Rickard and saw he was smiling.

“We’ll see how things have changed now,” the narc cop said.

Bosch didn’t understand the delight Rickard seemed to take in this. For Bosch, it was the low end of the job, dealing with desperate people and using desperate tactics. He was here because he had to be. It was his case. But he didn’t get it with Rickard.

“So, how come you’re doing this? What do you want?”

Rickard looked over at him.

“What do I want? I want to know what’s going on. I think you’re the only one that might know. So if I can help out, I’ll help out. If it costs this kid his asshole, then that’s the cost. But what I want to know from you is what is happening here. What did Cal do and what’s going to be done about it?”

Bosch leaned back and tried to think for a few moments about what to say. He heard the monster at the end of the table start to raise his voice, something about not accepting the offer. The deputy took a step toward him, dropping his arms to his sides. The inmate went quiet. The deputy’s sleeves were rolled up tight to reveal his impressive biceps. On his bulging left forearm Bosch could see the “CL,” tattoo, almost like a brand on his white skin. Harry knew that, publicly, deputies who had the tattoo claimed the letters stood for Club Lynwood, after the sheriff’s station in the gang-infested L.A. suburb. But he knew the letters also stood forchango luchador, monkey fighter. The deputy was a gang member himself, albeit one sanctioned to carry weapons and paid by the county.

Bosch looked away. He wished he could light a cigarette but the county had passed a no-smoking code, even in the jail. It had nearly caused an inmate riot.

“Look,” he said to Rickard, “I don’t know what to tell you about Moore. I’m working on it but I’m not, you know what I mean? Thing is, it runs across two cases I do have. So, it’s unavoidable. If this kid can give me Dance, then it’s a help. I could look at Dance for my two cases, maybe even Moore’s. But I don’t know that. I do know, and they will go public with this today, that Moore looks like a homicide. What they won’t go public with is that he crossed. That’s why IAD was sniffing around. He crossed.”

“Can’t be,” Rickard said, but there was no conviction in it. “I’d’ve known.”

“You can’t know people that well, man. Everybody’s got a private room.”

“So what’s Parker Center going to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they know what to do. I think they wanted to let it go as suicide. But the ME started making waves, so they’ll call it homicide. But I don’t think they are going to put the dirty laundry basket out there on Spring Street for every reporter in town to pick through.”

“Well, they better get their shit together. I’m not going to stand by. I don’t care if he crossed, man. I’ve seen him do things. He was a good cop. I’ve seen him go into a gallery and take out four dealers without a backup. I’ve seen him step between a pimp and his property and take the punch meant for her, pop his teeth right onto the sidewalk. I been with him when he blew nine stoplights trying to get a wretched old hype to the hospital before he went out on a heroin overdose.

“Those aren’t things a cop on the pad does. So what I’m saying is that if he crossed, then I think he was trying to cross back and that’s why somebody did him.”

He stopped then and Bosch didn’t interrupt the silence. They both knew that once you cross, you can never come back. Bosch could hear footsteps coming toward the bars.

Rickard said, “They better show me something down there at Parker, not let this thing go. Or I’ll show them something.”

Bosch wanted to say something but the deputy was at the door with Tyge. He looked like he had aged ten years in the last ten hours. Now he had a distance in his eyes that reminded Bosch of men he had seen and known in Vietnam. There was also a bruise high on his left cheekbone.

The door was slid open by means of unseen electronics and the boy/man walked to the bench after the deputy pointed the way. He sat down tentatively and seemed purposely to keep his eyes away from Rickard.

“How’s it hanging, Kerwin?” Rickard asked.

Now the boy looked at Rickard and his eyes made Bosch’s stomach knot. He remembered the first night he had spent in McLaren Youth Hall as a boy. The pure fear and screaming loneliness. And there he had been surrounded by kids, most of them nonviolent. This boy had been surrounded for the last twelve hours by wild animals. Bosch felt ashamed to be part of this but said nothing. It was Rickard’s show.

“Look, my man, I know you’re probably having a not-so-fun time in there. That’s why we came by, t’see if you changed your mind any about what we discussed last night.”

Rickard was speaking very low so the monster at the end would not hear.

When the boy said nothing, gave no indication that he even heard, Rickard pressed on.

“Kerwin, you want out of here? Here’s your man. Mr. Harry Bosch. He’ll let me drop the whole thing, even though it was a righteous bust, if you talk to us about this cat Dance. Here, look-it here.”

Rickard unfolded a piece of white paper from his shirt pocket. It was a standard case-filing form from the district attorney’s office.

“Man, I have forty-eight hours to file a case on you. ’Cause of the weekend, that’s puts it over ’til Monday. This here is the paperwork about you. I haven’t done nothing with it ’cause I wanted to check with you one more time to see if you wanted to help yourself out. If you don’t, then I’ll go file it and this will be your home for the next-probably you’re looking at a year with good time.”

Rickard waited and nothing happened.

“A year. What do you think you’ll be like after a year back in there, Kerwin?”

The boy looked down for a moment and then the tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Go to hell,” he managed to say in a strangled voice.

Bosch already was there. He would remember this one for a long time. He realized that he was clenching his teeth and tried to relax his jaw. He couldn’t.

Rickard leaned forward to say something to the boy but Bosch put his hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Fuck it,” Bosch said. “Cut him loose.”

“What?”

“We’re dropping it.”

“The fuck you talking about?”

The boy looked over at Bosch, an expression of skepticism on his face. But it was no act with Bosch. He felt sick at what they had done.

“Look,” Rickard said. “We got two ounces of PCP off this asshole. He’s mine. If he don’t want to help out, then too fucking bad. He goes back into the zoo.”

“No, he doesn’t.” And then Bosch leaned close to Rickard so the deputy behind the boy could not hear. “No, he doesn’t, Rickard. We’re taking him out. Now do it, or I’m going to fuck you up.”

“What did you say?”

“I’ll go to the fifth floor with it. This boy should’ve never been up here with that charge. That’s on you, Rickard. I’ll make the complaint. Your connection in here will get burned too. You want that? Just because you couldn’t get this kid to talk?”

“You think IAD’s going to give a shit about a little punk pusher?”

“No. But they’ll give a shit about bagging you. They’ll love you. You’ll come out walking slower than this boy.”

Harry leaned back away from him. Nobody said anything for a few moments and Bosch could see Rickard thinking it through, trying to decide if it was a bluff.

“A guy like you, going to IAD. I can’t see it.”

“That’s the risk you take.”

Rickard looked down at the paper in his hand and then slowly crumpled it.

“Okay, my man, but you better put me on the list.”

“What list?”

“The one you got of people you have to watch your back with.”

Bosch stood up and so did Rickard.

“We’re cutting him loose,” Rickard said to the guard.

Bosch pointed to the boy and said, “I want an escort with this man until he is out of there, got it?”

The deputy nodded. The boy said nothing.

It took an hour to get him out. After Rickard signed the appropriate papers and they got their badges back, they waited wordlessly by the glass window on the seventh floor.

Bosch was disgusted with himself. He had lost sight of the art. Solving cases was simply getting people to talk to you. Not forcing them to talk. He had forgotten that this time.

“You can go if you want,” he said to Rickard.

“As soon as he walks out that door and you’ve got him, I’m gone. Want nothing to do with him. But I want to see him leave with you, Bosch. In case any of this comes back on me.”

“Yeah, that’s smart.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But you still’ve got a lot to learn, Rickard. Everything isn’t black and white. Not everybody has to be ground into the sidewalk. You take a kid like that and-”

“Spare me the lesson, Bosch. I might have a lot to learn but it won’t be from you. You’re a class A fuckup. Think the only thing you could teach me is how to climb down the ladder. No thanks.”

“Sure,” Bosch said and walked to the other side of the room where there was a bench. He sat down and fifteen minutes later the boy came out. He walked between Rickard and Bosch to the elevator. Outside the Hall of Justice, Rickard headed off to his car after simply saying to Bosch, “Fuck you.”

“Right,” Bosch said.

He stood on the sidewalk, lit a cigarette and offered one to the boy. He declined.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the boy said.

“I know. That’s cool. You want me to take you anywhere? A real doctor? A lift back to Hollywood?”

“Hollywood’s fine.”

They walked to Bosch’s car, which was parked two blocks away at Parker Center and he took Third Street toward Hollywood. They were halfway there before either one spoke.

“You have a place? Where do you want me to drop you?”

“Anywhere.”

“No place?”

“No.”

“Family?”

“Nope.”

“What will you do?”

“Whatever.”

Harry turned north on Western. They were silent for another fifteen minutes or so, until Bosch pulled to a stop in front of the Hideaway.

“What’s this?”

“Sit tight. I’ll only be a minute.”

Inside the office, the manager tried to rent Bosch room seven but Harry flipped him his badge and told him try again. The manager, who was still wearing a dingy sleeveless T-shirt, gave him the key to room thirteen. He went back to the car and got in and gave the boy the key. He also took out his wallet.

“You’ve got a room in there for a week,” Bosch said. “For what it’s worth, which you probably don’t think is much, my advice is that you think about things and then get as far away from this town as you can. There are better places to live than this.”

The boy looked at the key in his hand. Bosch then handed him all the money he had, which was only $43.

“What, you give me a room and money and you think I’m going to talk to you? I’ve seen TV, man. The whole thing was a hoax, you and that guy.”

“Don’t misunderstand, kid. I’m doing this because it’s something that I need to do. It doesn’t mean I think what you do for a living is okay. I don’t. If I ever see you out on the street again I’m going to come down on you. It’s a pretty fucking desperate chance but it’s a chance just the same. Do with it what you want. You can go. It’s no hoax.”

The boy opened the car door and got out. He looked back in at Bosch.

“Then why’re you doing it?”

“I don’t know. I guess ’cause you told him to go to hell. I should’ve said that and I didn’t. I gotta go.”

The boy looked at him a moment before speaking.

“You know, man, Dance’s gone. I don’t know why you’re all worried about him.”

“Look, kid, I didn’t do-”

“I know.”

Harry just looked at him.

“He left, man. Left town. He said our source split and so he went down to see if he could get the thing going again. You know, he wants to step up and be the source, now.”

“Down?”

“He said Mexico, but that’s all I know. He’s gone. That’s why I was doing sherms.”

The boy closed the door and disappeared into the courtyard of the motel. Bosch sat there thinking and Rickard’s question came back to him. Where would the boy be in a year? Then he thought of himself staying in rundown motels so many years ago. Bosch had made it through. Had survived. There was always the chance. He restarted the car and pulled out.