The Wrong Side of Goodbye

32

After disconnecting he went back into the house and signaled down the hallway to Valdez, who was back in the same spot under the archway entrance to the kitchen.

The police chief hurried down the hallway to where Bosch waited by the front door. Bosch heard voices from the kitchen but this time it wasn’t Trevino talking. It was Dockweiler.

Valdez spoke before Bosch could tell him about the telephonic warrant he had just procured.

“Trevino broke him,” he whispered excitedly. “He’s going to tell us where she is. Says she’s still alive.”

The news took Bosch by surprise.

“Trevino broke him?”

Valdez nodded.

“It was deny, deny, deny, then ‘okay, you got me.’”

Bosch had to see this. He started down the hallway toward the kitchen, questioning whether it was his own vanity and wounded pride that made him doubt Trevino’s success, or something else.

He entered the kitchen and Dockweiler was still at the table, hands double-cuffed behind his back and to the chair. When he glanced up and saw it was Bosch and not Valdez, a momentary look passed over his face. Bosch wasn’t sure if it was disappointmentor some other reaction. He had never seen Dockweiler before the events of this night and had no precursors for facial reads of him. But soon enough he got a translation.

Dockweiler pointed at him with his chin.

“I don’t want him in here,” he said. “I’m not talking if he’s here.”

Trevino turned around and saw it was Bosch, not Valdez, who had upset the suspect.

“Detective Bosch,” he said. “Why don’t you-”

“Why not?” Bosch said over the captain’s voice. “Afraid I’ll know that you’re spinning a line of bullshit?”

“Bosch!” Trevino barked. “Leave the room. Now. We are getting this man’s full cooperation, and if he wants you out, then you’re out.”

Bosch didn’t move. This was ridiculous.

“She’s only got so much air,” Dockweiler said. “If you want to play games, what happens is on you, Bosch.”

Bosch felt Valdez grab his upper arm from behind. He was about to be pulled out of the room. He looked over at Sisto, who was leaning against the counter behind Trevino. He smirked and shook his head like Bosch had become some sort of pitiful nuisance that had to be put up with.

“Harry, let’s walk out,” Valdez said.

Bosch looked at Dockweiler one last time and tried to get a read on him. But his eyes were dead. A psychopath’s eyes. Unreadable. In that moment he knew there was a play here. He just didn’t know what it was.

Now Bosch felt a tug on his arm from Valdez and he finally turned toward the archway. He stepped out of the kitchen and started down the hallway to the front door. Valdez followed him to make sure he didn’t double back.

“Let’s go out,” Valdez said.

They stepped through the front door and Valdez closed it behind them.

“Harry, we have to play it this way,” Valdez said. “The guy’s talking and says he’ll take us to her. We have no choice.”

“That’s a ploy,” Bosch said. “He’ll just be looking for a chance to make a move.”

“We know that. We’re not stupid. We’re not taking him on a field trip in the middle of the night. If he really wants to cooperate and show us where Bella is, then he can draw us a map. But he’s staying in that chair, no question.”

“Look, Chief…there’s something not right here. Things don’t add up with what I’m seeing in his truck and the house and everything. We need-”

“What doesn’t add up?”

“I don’t know yet. If I had been in there and heard what he was saying or if I was asking the questions, then I’d have a handle on it. But-”

“Look, I have to go back in there and watch over this. Just sit tight and when we get what we need from him, I’ll relay it right to you. You can lead the charge and go get Bella.”

“I don’t need to be the hero-that’s not what this is about. I still think it’s bullshit. He’s not going to do this. You read the Screen Cutter profile. It’s all in there. Guys like this don’t ever admit to anything. They have no guilt, so there’s nothing to admit to. They’re manipulators to the end.”

“I can’t keep debating it, Harry. I have to go in. You stay out of the house.”

Valdez turned and went back in through the front door. Bosch stood there for a long moment, thinking and trying to get a read on the look he had seen on Dockweiler’s face.

After a few moments he decided to move around to the back ofthe house to try to see what was going on in the kitchen. Valdez had instructed him to stay outside the house. He didn’t say where outside.

Bosch quickly moved down the side and into the backyard. The kitchen was at the opposite corner and the table where Dockweiler and Trevino sat facing each other was in an eating nook located in the glass sunroom. The blinds were three-quarters open and the room glowed with the interior lights. Bosch knew that the men inside would only see their own reflections in the glass and not him standing outside.

He could hear what was being said in the room because of the open window over the sink. And almost all of it was coming from Dockweiler. One of his hands had now been uncuffed so that he could use a pencil to draw a map on a large piece of paper spread on the table.

“They call this section the John Ford Forty,” he said. “I think he filmed part of one of his John Wayne epics there and it’s mostly used for westerns and horror stuff-the cabin-in-the-woods screamers they make all the time and go straight to streaming. There’s like sixteen different cabins back in there that can be used for filming.”

“So where is Bella?” Trevino pressed.

“She’s in this one here,” Dockweiler said.

He used the pencil to draw something on the map but his upper torso blocked Bosch’s view from behind him. Dockweiler then put the pencil down on the table and did some tracing on the map with his finger.

“You go in here, tell whoever’s at the gate that you need to get to the Bonney house. They’ll take you up there and that’s where you’ll find her. Everything’s breakaway in these houses. Walls, windows, floors. You know, for filming. Your girl’s in a camera trench under the flooring. It lifts up in one piece.”

“This better not be bullshit, Dockweiler,” Valdez said.

“No bullshit,” Dockweiler said. “I can lead you there if you want.”

Dockweiler gestured as if to say, Why not give me a chance? And when he did so, his elbow hit the pencil and it rolled off the table, bouncing off his thigh to the floor.

“Oops,” he said.

He leaned down and reached to the floor to retrieve the pencil, a maneuver made difficult because his left wrist was still handcuffed behind his back to one of the rungs of the chair.

Through the window behind Dockweiler, Bosch had a unique vantage point on what happened next. It seemed to unfold before him in slow motion. Dockweiler took a swipe at the fallen pencil on the floor, but couldn’t quite reach it because he was bound to the chair in which he sat. However, the momentum of the swing carried his arm up and under the table. He gripped something attached to the underside of the table, then swung his arm out and above it.

He was now pointing a semiautomatic pistol directly across the table at Trevino.

“Nobody fucking move!”

The three men facing Dockweiler froze.

Bosch slowly and quietly pulled his weapon from its holster and put a two-handed aim on Dockweiler’s back. He knew in a legal sense he was clear to shoot and it would be a righteous kill, but he didn’t have a clean shot, with Trevino sitting on the other side of the target.

Dockweiler used the barrel of his gun to point Valdez farther into the kitchen. The police chief complied, holding his hands up in front of his chest.

In front of Dockweiler the kitchen counters created a U wherehe corralled the three cops. He told Trevino to stand up and back into the U with Valdez and Sisto.

“Easy now,” Trevino said as he backed up. “I thought we were talking and that we were going to figure this thing out.”

“You were talking,” Dockweiler said. “And now it’s time to shut the fuck up.”

“Okay, okay, no problem.”

Dockweiler then ordered them one at a time to unholster their weapons, put them on the floor, and kick them across the floor toward him. Dockweiler rose from the chair and brought his left arm around, the chair dangling by the handcuffs. He brought his hand down on the table and ordered Sisto to come over and remove the cuffs from his wrist. Sisto complied and then moved back into the confines of the kitchen counters.

With Dockweiler now standing, Bosch had a bigger target but he still didn’t have a safe shot. He didn’t know enough about the science of ballistics to guess how much a shot through glass would deviate from aim. He just knew that if he fired multiple shots, those that followed the first should be clean.

Additionally, there was the risk that Dockweiler might be able to squeeze off a shot if the first bullet through the glass did not hit its mark.

Bosch looked down to be sure of his footing on the concrete patio and took a step closer to the glass. Dockweiler was less than eight feet away with a plate of glass of unknown thickness between them. Bosch was resigned to hold off until he had to fire.

“Where’s Bosch?” Dockweiler asked.

“He’s out front going through your truck,” Valdez said.

“I want him in here.”

“I can get him.”

Valdez made a move toward the archway, which immediately drew Dockweiler’s aim.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dockweiler said. “Call him and tell him to get in here. Don’t tell him why, just tell him to get in here.”

Valdez slowly reached to his belt and pulled off his phone. Bosch realized that his own phone was about to ring and it would give away his position. He was about to reach into his pocket to silence it, when he realized that he wanted exactly that to happen.

Bosch shifted one step to his right so that he was on an angle that put Dockweiler directly between his aim and Valdez. Trevino and Sisto were in the clear and Bosch was counting on LAPD training still being ingrained in Valdez and his knowing when the shot would come.

He maintained the two-handed grip and waited for the call. His phone buzzed at first, giving him a split-second warning. Then came the chirping sound-a piercing ringtone chosen long ago by his daughter. Bosch had his aim on center mass-Dockweiler’s back-but his attention was focused on the back of his head.

He saw Dockweiler react. He had heard the phone. He raised his head a few centimeters and then turned it slightly left as he attempted to locate the origin of the sound. Bosch waited another split second for Valdez to react and then opened fire.

Bosch put six bullets through the window in less than three seconds. The sound reverberated off the glass and the roof overhang, creating a tremendous blowback of sound. Glass crashed and the blinds kicked up and splintered as bullets tore through them. Bosch was careful to keep his aim on a horizontal plane. He wanted no shots to angle down toward the floor, where he hoped Valdez was.

Dockweiler dropped forward onto the table and then rolled left and fell off onto the floor. Bosch raised his aim and watched while Trevino and Sisto, who were still standing, moved toward the man.

“Hold fire!” Trevino yelled. “He’s down, he’s down!”

The glass in the window frame was gone and the blinds hung in tatters. The smell of burnt gunpowder seared Bosch’s nose. He grabbed the blinds and tore them down so he could enter through the door-size window.

He first checked Valdez, who was sitting on the floor, his legs spread in front of him, his back to the lower cabinets. His phone was still in his hand but his call to Bosch had now gone to message. He was staring at Dockweiler on the floor five feet from him. His eyes came up to Bosch’s.

“Everybody okay?” Bosch asked.

Valdez nodded and Bosch noticed the bullet hole in the drawer two feet to the left of his head.

Bosch next looked down on Dockweiler. The big man was chest-down on the floor, his face turned to the left. He was not moving but his eyes were open and he was breathing, a labored whistling sound to each of his intakes. Bosch saw three bullet impacts. One was center left about halfway down his back, one was on his left buttock, and one was on his left elbow.

Bosch got down on the floor next to the suspect and looked across his torso at Trevino.

“Good shooting,” Trevino said.

Bosch nodded. He then leaned further down and looked up under the table. He saw the holster attached to the underside of the tabletop. Trevino followed his eye line and did the same.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“A good survivalist is ready for anything,” Bosch said. “I think we’re going to find weapons hidden all over the place in here.”

Bosch pulled a set of latex gloves out of his pocket. As he was putting them on, he leaned down close to Dockweiler’s face.

“Dockweiler, can you hear me?” he asked. “Can you talk?”

Dockweiler swallowed hard before trying to respond.

“Get me…hosp…hospital.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, we’re going to get to that,” he said. “But first, we need to know where Bella is. You tell us that and we call in the RA.”

“Harry,” Valdez said.

Bosch leaned back on his haunches.

“You guys might want to step out,” he said. “I’ll handle this.”

“Harry,” Valdez said again. “We can’t do it this way.”

“You want Bella alive?” Bosch asked.

“You said before you doubted she was alive.”

“That was before I found hot food for her in the truck. She’s alive and he’s going to tell us where.”

Sisto stepped over to the table and grabbed the map that Dockweiler had drawn.

“We have this,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s a treasure map,” Bosch said. “If you think that’s where she is, you better run over there and be the hero.”

Sisto looked over at Valdez and then down at Trevino, not quite comprehending that Dockweiler had been playing them the whole time in order to get a hand free to grab his hidden gun.

Valdez raised his phone and clicked off the call to Bosch. He then hit a speed-dial button.

“We need a rescue ambulance to this address,” he said. “Suspect is down, multiple gunshot wounds. We’ll need the Sheriff’s Department to roll. Tell them we need an OIS team.”

Valdez looked at Bosch as he disconnected, the silent message being that they would do this by the book.

Bosch leaned down and tried one more time with Dockweiler.

“Where is she, Dockweiler?” he said. “Tell us now or you won’t make it to the hospital alive.”

“Harry,” Valdez said. “Get up and go outside.”

Bosch ignored him. He leaned further down to Dockweiler’s ear.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“Fuck…you,” Dockweiler said between gulps of air. “I tell you, nothing changes for me. Better you know…that you failed her.”

He managed to curl his lip back, in what Bosch assumed was a smile. Bosch started to reach a gloved hand toward the bullet wound on his back.

“Bosch!” Valdez yelled. “Outside now! That’s an order!”

The chief climbed to his feet and moved in to yank Bosch away from Dockweiler if necessary. Harry looked up at him and then stood. They stared at each other until finally Bosch spoke.

“I know she’s here,” he said.