The Crossing

51

Ellis waited in darkness, his face a dim shade of blue cast by the light of a phone screen. He waited to take care of the last detail before his exit. His final touch and statement on this place that had changed him in so many ways.

He checked his news feed and reread the story. It contained the slimmest grouping of facts and had not been updated in at least two hours. He knew it was all that would be released tonight. The press conference had been scheduled for the morning, when the sheriff and chief of police would share a podium and address the media together. Ellis considered sticking around to watch it live on local TV, to see how the chief tried to spin it. But his survival instinct overrode that desire. He knew that the hours in between would be best used to put distance between himself and the city. This ugly city that hollows people, corrodes them from the inside out.

Besides, he would get everything on the news feed. The story would no doubt break big and national. Especially after they found Bosch. And after they found the twins.

He thought about the twins. They had not been watching the news. They knew nothing and expected nothing but the usual from him. Even when they saw the weapon in his hand, they believed he was there to protect them from some outside threat. They died thinking that.

He opened the photo app on the phone and went to the archives. He had taken three shots of the twins in final repose. But he realized it was impossible to tell that they were dead in these photos. Their faces had been so sculpted and stretched and reshaped by surgeries as to look frozen in both life and death.

After a while he went back to the news feed once more. Still nothing new on the events in Schubert’s office. There wasn’t even an update on Long’s medical status. All that had been reported so far was that he was alive and being treated at Cedars, where he was listed in critical condition.

Long’s name had not been put out publicly. The stories just said he was an LAPD vice officer who was off duty at the time of the shooting. No explanation was offered for what he was doing at the plastic surgery center where the events occurred.

There was no mention of Ellis either. No word that they were looking for him or that he had even been at the site. All of that would come in the morning when the chief of police stood before the media and tried to put the spin on another story of cops gone wrong.

Ellis wondered how much time he would have before Long started talking. He had no doubt that it would happen eventually. Long was the weak one. He could be manipulated. That was why Ellis had chosen him. But now the others would manipulate him. The investigators. The interrogators. The attorneys. They would squeeze him, break him down, and then finally give him a glimpse of light, and he would go for it. It would be a false light but he would not know that.

Once more Ellis reviewed his situation. Had he ever made any mention to Long about his exit strategy? The getaway plan was only as good as its self-containment. It only worked if just one person knew the plan, and once more Ellis reassured himself that Long knew nothing. He was safe.