Two Kinds of Truth

22

Bosch stood in front of the counter with his eyes down. A man sat there reading a newspaper printed in a foreign language. It was a different man than the goateed driver of the van. This man was older, his hair flecked with gray. He looked to Bosch like an aged enforcer who now relied on the younger generation to do the heavy lifting.

He didn’t bother to look up when he spoke to Bosch with a thick Russian accent.

“Who sent you here?” he asked.

“Nobody,” Bosch said.

The man finally looked up at him and studied his face for a moment.

“You walk here?”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

“I just want to see the doctor.”

“From where?”

“The shelter over by the courthouse.”

“That is long walk. What do you want?”

“To see the doctor.”

“How do you know there is doctor?”

“At the shelter. Somebody told me. Okay?”

“What for you need doctor?”

“I need pain medication.”

“What pain?”

Bosch stepped back, raised his cane, and lifted his leg. The man leaned forward so he could see over the counter. He then sat back and eyed Bosch.

“The doctor is very busy,” he said.

Bosch looked behind him and around the room. There were eight plastic chairs in the waiting area and all of them were empty. There was only him and the Russian.

“I can wait.”

“ID.”

Bosch pulled the worn leather wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. It was connected by a chain to a loop on his belt. He unsnapped the flap and pulled out the driver’s license and the Medicare card and dropped them on the counter. The Russian reached up, took them both, and then leaned back in his chair as he looked them over. Bosch hoped that his distancing himself was a reaction to Bosch’s body odor. He had actually made the long walk over from the shelter as part of his dropping into character. He was wearing three shirts and the walk had soaked the first layer in sweat and dampened the next two.

“Dominic H. Reilly?”

“That’s right.”

“Where is this Oceanside place?”

“Down near San Diego.”

“Take off glasses.”

Bosch raised his sunglasses up over his brow and looked at the Russian. It was the first big test. He needed to show the eyes of a drug addict. Just before being dropped at the shelter, he had spread peppermint oil provided by his DEA handler on the skin below his eyes. Now the cornea of each was irritated and red.

The Russian looked for a long moment and then tossed the plastic cards back on the counter. Bosch dropped his sunglasses back into place.

“You can wait,” the Russian said. “Maybe doctor have time.”

Bosch had passed. He tried not to show any relief.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

Bosch picked his backpack up off the floor and limped over to the waiting area. He picked a chair closest to the clinic’s front door and sat down, using the backpack as a stool for his braced leg. He put the cane on the floor and slid it under the chair, then folded his arms, rested his head against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyes he reviewed what had just transpired and wondered if he had given any sort of tell to the Russian. He felt he had handled his initial interaction as a UC well and knew the wallet-and-ID package put together by the DEA team was perfect.

He had spent several hours the day before with the DEA handler, being trained in the art of going undercover. The first half of the all-day session dealt with the nuts and bolts of the operation: who would be watching and from where, what his cover was, what would be at his disposal in his wallet and backpack, how and when to call for an extraction. The second half was largely role-playing, with his handler teaching him the look of an oxycodone addict and putting him through different scenarios that could come up while he was under.

The interaction he had just had with the Russian behind the counter had been one of those scenarios, and Bosch had played it the way he had several times the previous day. The key point of the one-day UC school was to help Bosch conceal fear and anxiety and channel them into the persona he would be taking on.

The handler, who claimed his name was Joe Smith, also drilled Bosch on court credibility — being able to testify in court or privately before a judge that he had not committed crimes or moral transgressions while acting in an undercover capacity. This would be vital to winning over juries should a prosecution arise from the operation. The cornerstone of court credibility was to avoid taking the drug he was posing as being addicted to. Short of that, he carried two doses of Narcan secreted in the hem of one of his pant legs. Each yellow pill was a fast-acting opioid antagonist that would counteract the effect of the drug if he was forced physically or by circumstances to ingest it.

A few minutes went by and Bosch heard the Russian get up. He opened his eyes and tracked him as he disappeared into the hallway behind the counter. Soon afterward, he heard him speaking. It was a one-sided conversation and in Russian. A phone call, Bosch assumed. He picked up an urgent tone to the Russian’s words. He guessed that word was coming in that some of their shills had been taken down by the DEA and the state medical board. This was part of the UC insertion plan. Thin the herd, so to speak, and increase the need to recruit replacements, Dominic H. Reilly among them.

Bosch checked the walls and ceiling. He saw no cameras. He knew it would be unlikely that members of a criminal operation would set up cameras that could document their transgressions. He slid the brace down over his knee so he could walk normally and moved quickly to the counter. While the Russian continued to talk in the rear area of the clinic, Bosch looked over the counter to see what was there. There were several Russian-language and English-language newspapers, including the L.A. Times and the San Fernando Sun, scattered haphazardly, most of them folded open to stories about the past election and the investigation of the Russian connection. The counterman seemed to be as captured by the story as Legal Siegel had been.

Bosch moved a stack of menus from food-delivery services and found a spiral notebook. Bosch quickly opened it and found several pages of notes in Russian. There were tables with dates and numbers but he could decipher none of it.

The Russian abruptly stopped talking and Bosch quickly closed and replaced the notebook and went back to his chair. He pulled the brace back into place and was just leaning back again when the Russian returned to his position behind the counter. Bosch watched him through squinted eyes. The Russian showed no sign that he had noticed anything out of place at the counter.

Forty minutes of inactivity went by before Bosch heard a vehicle come to a stop out front. Soon the door opened and several bedraggled men and women entered the clinic. Bosch recognized some of them from his surveillance of the van earlier in the week. They followed the Russian down the hallway and out of sight. The van’s driver, the same one Bosch had seen before, stayed behind at the counter and soon approached Bosch, his hands on his hips.

“What do you want here?” he asked, his accent easily as thick as the counterman’s.

“I want to see the doctor,” Bosch said.

He raised his leg off the backpack in case the knee brace had not been noticed. The driver proceeded to ask Bosch many of the same questions the counterman had. He kept his hands on his hips. After the last question was answered, there was a long moment of silence while the driver decided something.

“Okay, you come back,” he finally said.

He started walking toward the hallway. Bosch got up, grabbed his cane and backpack, and hobbled after him. The hallway was wide and led to an unused nursing station and then branched to the right and left. The driver took Bosch to the left into a hallway where there were four doors of what Bosch assumed were examination rooms from a time when there was a legitimate clinic operating here.

“In here,” the driver said.

He pushed open a door and held his arm out, gesturing for Bosch to go in. As Bosch stepped across the threshold, he saw that the room was furnished only with a single chair. He was suddenly and violently shoved forward and across the room. He dropped both backpack and cane so he could raise his hands and stop himself from crashing face-first into the opposite wall.

He immediately spun around.

“What the fuck was that, man?”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I told you and I told that other guy. You know what? Forget it, I’m out of here. I’ll find another doctor.”

Bosch reached down to the backpack.

“Leave it there,” the driver ordered. “You want pills, you leave it there.”

Bosch straightened up and the man came forward, put his hands on his chest, and pushed him back against the wall.

“You want pills, take your clothes off.”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“The doctor will come. Take off clothes for examine.”

“No, fuck this. I know other places to go.”

He slid the brace down off his knee so he could bend it. He reached down for the cane, knowing it would be more useful than the backpack as a weapon. But the driver quickly took a step forward and put his foot on it. He then grabbed Bosch by the collar of his denim jacket. He pulled him up and shoved him back against the wall, bouncing his head hard off the drywall.

He leaned in close, his breath sour in Bosch’s face.

“Take off clothes, old man. Now.”

Bosch raised his hands up until his knuckles were against the wall.

“Okay, okay. No problem.”

The driver stepped back. Bosch started by pulling off his jacket.

“And then I see the doctor, right?” he asked.

The driver ignored the question.

“Put clothes on the floor,” he said.

“No problem,” Bosch said. “And then the doctor, right?”

“The doctor will come.”

Bosch sat on the chair to unstrap the brace and remove it. Then his work boots and dirty socks. He started peeling off the three layers of shirts. The DEA code name given to his UC personality and the whole operation was Dirty Denim and it fit. His DEA handler had at first objected to the knee brace and cane but eventually gave in to Bosch’s wish to put a little bit of his own spin on the character. The handler of course wasn’t aware of the weapon hidden in the cane.

Soon Bosch had peeled away the layers and was down to his boxer shorts and one dirty and sweat-stained T-shirt. He dropped his jeans on the pile of clothes after disconnecting the chain and keeping the wallet in his hand.

“No,” the driver said. “Everything.”

“When I see the doctor,” Bosch said.

He stood his ground. The driver stepped closer. Bosch was expecting more words but instead the man’s right fist shot out, and Bosch took a hard punch into his lower stomach. He immediately doubled over and brought his arms in for protection, expecting more. His wallet fell to the floor, its chain rattling on the dirty linoleum. Instead, the driver grabbed Bosch by the hair and leaned down to speak directly into his right ear.

“No, clothes off now. Or we kill you.”

“Okay, okay. I get it. Clothes off.”

Bosch tried to straighten up but needed to put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He pulled off the T-shirt and threw it onto the pile, then dropped the boxers and kicked them to the pile as well. He spread his arms, displaying himself.

“Okay?” he said.

The driver was looking at the tattoo on Bosch’s upper arm. It was barely recognizable after nearly fifty years — a tunnel rat holding a pistol, a Latin slogan above it, “Cu Chi” below it.

“What is Cu Chi?” he asked.

“A place,” Bosch said. “Vietnam.”

“You were in the war?”

“That’s right.”

Bosch felt bile rising in his throat from the punch.

“They shot you, the communists?” the driver asked.

He pointed to the scar from a gunshot wound on Bosch’s shoulder. Bosch decided to stick to the script that he had been given for the character.

“No,” he said. “The police did that. Back here.”

“Sit,” the driver said.

He pointed to the chair. Keeping one hand on the wall for balance, Bosch made his way over and sat down, the plastic cold against his skin.

The driver crouched down, grabbed the backpack and slung it over one shoulder. He then started gathering the pile of Bosch’s clothes. He left the cane on the floor.

“You wait,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Bosch said. “Don’t take my—”

He didn’t finish. The driver was heading for the door.

“You wait,” he said again.

He opened the door and was gone. Bosch sat naked on the chair. He leaned forward and gathered his arms in close. Not for modesty or warmth. The position eased the pain in his gut. He wondered if the punch from the driver had torn muscle tissue or damaged internal organs. It had been a long time since he had taken a punch unguarded like that. He chastised himself for not having been ready for it.

He knew, however, that except for the punch, things had gone exactly as planned. Bosch guessed that the driver and the other Russian were probably going through the clothes he had been wearing and the contents of the wallet and backpack.

In addition to the very valid-looking driver’s license, the wallet had various pieces of identification with a variety of names on them, all exemplars of things a drifter addict might carry in order to help him scam the next hit and next prescription. There was also a worn photo of a woman long out of Dominic Reilly’s life as well as cards and notes about other clinics scattered across Southern California.

The backpack had been completely designed to be searched and to help convince those who looked through its contents of Dominic Reilly’s legitimacy as a drifter addict. They would find the paraphernalia of opiate addiction — over-the-counter laxatives and stool softeners — as well as a gun wrapped in a T-shirt and secreted at the bottom of one of the compartments. They would also find a burner cell complete with fake text files and call log.

It was all put together by careful design. Reilly carried the things a drifter would have. The gun was an old revolver missing one of its grips. It was loaded but the firing pin had been filed down so that it could not function as a firearm. It was anticipated that it would be confiscated as Bosch hopefully worked his way into the Santos operation, but the DEA did not want to be responsible for giving a functioning weapon to the enemy. There was no telling how that could come back at the agency later. The reputation of the ATF was still recovering from an undercover program that ended up putting weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Most important, the backpack contained a plastic pill vial with the name Dominic Reilly on the prescription label. It would have a West Valley pharmacy listed as the provider and the prescribing doctor as Kenneth Vincent of Woodland Hills. These would come back as legitimate if checked out. There would be only two pills in the vial, Reilly’s last two eighty-milligram doses of generic oxycodone. They would help make clear why he had come to the clinic in Pacoima.

The backpack also contained a pill crusher made out of an old fountain pen, which could serve double-duty as a sniffer — place the pill inside, turn the barrel to grind it to dust, remove the top, and snort. Powdered oxycodone produced the best high, and crushing pills defeated the manufacturer’s time-release additives.

It was all there in the backpack, the complete persona. The only thing Bosch had to worry about at the moment was the wallet and chain. The wallet contained a GPS transmitter secreted within one of its leather bifolds. The attached security chain was both an antenna and a rescue switch. If it was pulled loose from the wallet, it would add an emergency code to the GPS pulse and bring the DEA’s ghost team crashing in.

Bosch hoped that wouldn’t happen. He didn’t want the ghost team to descend on the clinic and end his mission before it had actually even started.

Bosch sat patiently on the plastic chair, naked and waiting to find out.

23

By Bosch’s estimate, more than an hour went by without anyone coming into the room. Several times he heard voices or movement from the hallway but no one opened the door. He reached to the floor and grabbed the cane, holding it across his thighs with the curved handle near his left hand.

The minutes went by like hours but still Bosch’s mind raced. His attention was focused on his daughter and on his decision not to call her to say he would be out of contact for a while. He didn’t want her to worry or ask him questions. He realized in choosing not to call and tell her, he had robbed himself of what might be a last conversation with the most important person in his world. Realizing his mistake, he vowed to himself that it wouldn’t matter. That he would do everything possible to return to his life and make his first call one to her.

The door was suddenly flung open, startling Bosch. He almost turned the handle on the cane to pull out the blade but he held back. The counterman entered, carrying everything the driver had left with. He threw the clothes into Bosch’s lap and dropped the backpack off his shoulder to the floor with a thud.

“You get dress,” he said. “No gun, no phone.”

“What are you talking about?” Bosch said. “I paid for those. They’re mine. You can’t just take them.”

Bosch stood up, letting his clothes drop to the floor. He held the cane halfway down the barrel like he was ready to start cracking heads with it, unashamed of being naked.

“Get dress,” the counterman repeated. “No gun, no phone.”

“Fuck this,” Bosch said. “Give me my gun and give me my phone and I’m out of here.”

The counterman smirked.

“The boss come back, talk to you,” he said.

“Yeah, he better,” Bosch said. “I want to talk to him. This is bullshit.”

The Russian went back through the doorway and closed the door behind him. Bosch got dressed but took a fresh but still dirty T-shirt out of the backpack to put on as his first layer. He found the wallet in the backpack, chain still attached, and checked through it. He was able to determine that the seams in the partition where the GPS tracker was located had not been tampered with. He found his driver’s license and Medicare card missing, however.

Before he finished dressing, the door opened again, and this time both Russians entered. Bosch was on the chair lacing up one of his work boots. The counterman went to the far wall and leaned back in the corner with his arms folded as the driver stood front and center.

“We have work for you,” the driver said.

“You mean a job?” Bosch asked. “What can I tell you — I don’t work.”

The driver took a step toward him and Bosch braced himself this time. But the driver only held out a folded slip of paper. Bosch hesitated and then took it. He opened it to find it was a prescription slip. Dr. Efram Herrera’s name was printed at the top along with his required state and federal drug license numbers. Handwritten on the slip was a sixty-count prescription for oxycodone in eighty-milligram form. For a pill shill or a user it was the Holy Grail. For Bosch it was pay dirt. Not only did he have the makings of a case against the operators of the clinic, he had clearly gotten inside the wire.

“What’s this?” he asked. “You put me through all of this, punch me in the gut, and then just give me the scrip?”

The driver snatched the prescription back out of Bosch’s hand.

“You don’t want it, fine, we give it somebody else,” he said.

“Look, I want it, okay?” Bosch said. “I just want to know what the fuck is going on here.”

“We have business,” the driver said. “You want pills, you work. We share.”

“Share what?”

“Share pills. One for you, two for me, like that.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good deal for me. I think I’ll just—”

“Unlimited supply. We handle scrips, you pick up pills. Easy. We pay you one dollar for each. So, pills and money, do you say yes?”

“One dollar? I know a place I can get twenty.”

“We offer quantity. We have protection. We have beds.”

“Beds where?”

“You join, you see.”

Bosch looked at the man still leaning on the back wall. The message was clear. Join up or get beat down. Bosch put a look of resignation on his face.

“How long I gotta work?” he asked.

The driver shrugged.

“Nobody quits,” he said. “Money and pills too good.”

“Yeah, but what if I want to?”

“You want to quit, you quit. That’s it.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

The driver walked out of the room. The counterman came over and handed Bosch his ID and Medicare card.

“You go now,” he said.

“Go where?” Bosch asked.

“The van. Out front.”

“Okay.”

The counterman pointed toward the door. Bosch grabbed his backpack and cane from the floor and moved toward the door. He walked normally. He had the brace down below his knee.

Bosch went back through the clinic and out the front door, with the counterman behind him. The van was parked in front and the shills were climbing in through the side door. Bosch could see the driver behind the wheel, turned and staring at him through the door. He and Bosch both knew that this would be the moment he would bolt if he was going to. He looked around and then off across San Fernando Road toward the tower at Whiteman. He knew he was being watched from there and the ghost team was also stashed somewhere nearby. One quick fist pump into the air was the signal. If Bosch did that, they would come charging in to get him. And it would be the end of the whole operation.

He looked back at the driver. The last shill was climbing in and then it was Bosch’s turn. He shook his head like a man with no choice and climbed into the van. He pushed in on the bench seat behind the driver and sat next to a woman with a shaved head. He put his backpack in the space between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat, which was empty.

The counterman slid the door shut with a bang and slapped the roof twice. The van pulled away from the curb. Everyone was silent, even the driver. Bosch leaned forward to get the best angle on the driver’s face.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To the next location,” the driver said.

“Where?”

“Don’t speak. Just do what you are told, old man.”

“Where’s my phone? I have a daughter I need to call.”

“No. Not anymore.”

The woman with the shaved head pushed her elbow into Bosch’s ribs. He turned to look at her. She just shook her head. Her dark eyes told him that there would be consequences for all of them if he continued to speak.

Bosch leaned back in the seat and stopped talking. He first made a quick look around the van. He counted eleven other people in the seats behind the driver. Many of them he recognized from the surveillance on Tuesday. Men and women: older, haggard, defeated. He lowered his chin to now mind his own business. He saw the hands of the woman next to him clasped tightly together on her lap. In the webbing between her left thumb and forefinger he saw a small tattoo of three stars by what looked like an amateur hand. The ink was dark, the points of the stars sharp, the tattoo not old like his own.

The van took the same route Bosch and Lourdes had watched it take earlier in the week. It drove through the gate into Whiteman and to the hangar where the jump plane waited. The van unloaded and the group started to board the plane through the jump door. Bosch held back, letting the woman climb past him to get out of the van.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” he yelled at the driver. “What the fuck is this?”

“This is the plane,” the driver said. “You get on.”

“Where the hell are we going? I didn’t sign up for this. Give me my scrip. I’m out of here.”

“No, you get on. Now.”

He reached down under his seat, and Bosch saw his arm muscles flex as he grasped something. He turned to look back at Bosch without revealing what it was. The message, though, was clear.

“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “I’m getting on.”

He was the last one to board the plane. There were benches running lengthwise down both sides of the interior, with seat belts hanging loose. People were buckling in. Bosch saw an open space next to the woman with the stars and took it, this time on her left side.

Behind the noise of the plane’s engine she leaned into him and spoke into his ear.

“Welcome to hell.”

Bosch pulled back and looked at her. He could see that she had once been a beauty, but her eyes were dead now. He guessed that she was at least fifty years old, maybe a few years younger. Maybe a lot of years younger, depending on how long she’d been ravaged by addiction. He picked up an earthy smell about her. She reminded him of someone — the angle of her cheekbones. She looked like she had Indian blood. He wondered if her shaved head was part of the sell, like his cane and knee brace. She presented as someone who was sick, maybe going through radiation.

Who knew? Maybe it was all legit. He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what to say to her.

Bosch looked around the plane and noticed that in getting on, he had passed by a man sitting at the front who was obviously part of the operation. He was young and muscular and had an Eastern European look to him. His back was to a makeshift aluminum wall that separated the cockpit from the passenger hold. There was a small sliding window but the opening was closed and Bosch could not see the pilot.

The man at the front reached back and knocked on the separation panel. Immediately, the plane started moving out to the airfield. Once on the runway, the aircraft picked up speed and seemed to effortlessly take off and climb into the sky. The steep incline and gravity pulled the woman sliding into Bosch and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. It was as though she had been touched with dry ice. She violently jerked away from him and he raised his arm in a hands-off gesture.

While still climbing, the plane began to bank right in a southerly direction. Bosch leaned toward the woman without touching her and spoke as low as he could while still being heard.

“Where are we going?”

“Where we always go. Don’t talk to me.”

“You talked to me.”

“A mistake. Please stop talking.”

The plane hit an air pocket and was buffeted. She was thrown toward him again but she managed to steady herself by gripping an overhead handle once used by skydivers to approach the jump platform.

“Okay?” he tried.

“Yes,” she said. “Fuck off.”

Bosch made a hand gesture signaling he was finished. He had wanted to ask about the tattoo but he could see fear in her eyes. He looked toward the front of the plane and saw the reason. His efforts to communicate with her had caught the eye of the muscleman at the front. Bosch made a hands-off gesture to assure him that he was finished trying to communicate.

He turned to the window that was behind him and tried to lift the shade, but it appeared to be permanently closed. Only the jump-door window was uncovered, but it was too far forward for Bosch to check the geography passing below. All he could see from his angle was blue, cloudless sky.

He wondered if Hovan and the DEA were tracking the plane, as had been promised. They had already checked and knew the Cessna’s transponder had been disabled. They would need to rely on visual tracking from the air. The device hidden in Bosch’s wallet was for short-range ground-level tracking.

He looked at the faces of the people lined along both sides of the plane. Eleven men and women who looked as gaunt and hapless as the people in Dust Bowl photos of a century before. People with no hope in their eyes, no place to call home, trapped by addiction. People who couldn’t fit in before and never would now, all herded like cattle at the low edge of a national crisis.

He leaned back and did the math. With twelve of them on the plane, if they were each producing a hundred pills a day for the Santos operation, that was twelve hundred pills going for a minimum of thirty bucks a pop on the street. That added up to $36,000 a day coming out of this one crew. More than thirteen million a year. Bosch knew there were other crews and other operations too.

The money and numbers were staggering. It was a giant corporation feeding a demand that infiltrated every state, city, and town. He began to see why the woman with the stars had welcomed him to hell.

24

While in the air Bosch could feel the plane going through maneuvers, making wide circles and changing altitude, going up and then down. He guessed these were efforts to determine if there was any aerial surveillance. What he didn’t know was whether this was routine or because of him. He thought about the man Jerry Edgar had mentioned. The shill who had been flipped by the DEA, who had gone up in a plane but had not been aboard when it landed.

Eventually, the plane went into a gradual descent and landed hard, almost two hours after takeoff. That was just a guess on Bosch’s part. He was not wearing a watch, part of the pose of a drifter who had checked out of society.

Everyone climbed out of the plane in a quiet and orderly fashion. Bosch saw that they were on a desert runway, a range of brown mountains ringing the sun-torched flats. For all he knew they might be in Mexico, but as he followed the others to a waiting van, he looked around. The dense odor and white, salty crust of the land told him that they were likely close to the Salton Sea. The intel from Jerry Edgar had helped.

Bosch got a window seat in the van and was able to further observe his position. He saw two other jump planes parked further down the strip, and beyond them the sun hung low in the sky. It oriented him and soon he knew the van was moving south from the airstrip.

Bosch looked around for the woman with stars on her hand and saw her sitting two benches ahead of him. He watched her lean forward and tighten her shoulders as she crossed her arms in front of her chest. He recognized the behavior, and it was a reminder that he was only posing as an addict. Everybody else on the van was the real thing.

After a thirty-minute drive, the van pulled into what looked like the kind of shantytown Bosch had seen when he had followed cases into the barrios in Mexicali and other places across the border. There was a collection of RVs, buses, tents, and shacks made of aluminum sheeting, canvas tarps, and other construction debris.

Before the van came to a stop, people were up from their seats and crowding toward the side door as if they couldn’t wait for the next leg of the journey. Bosch stayed seated and watched as the shills that had been sitting so quietly and peacefully moments before now pushed and shoved for position. He saw the woman with stars on her hand grabbing at a man’s arm to pull him away from the scrum so she could improve her position.

The door slid open and people nearly fell out of the van. Through a side window Bosch saw why. The man who had come out from the encampment to open the door was giving each of the van riders their nightly dosage. He put pills into the outstretched hands of the shills as they came through the van door.

Realizing he had to act to support his cover, Bosch got up, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and slid out of his bench seat. He moved up behind the last man in the line to get out, put his free hand on his shoulder and yanked him backward so that he could move up into the open slot.

“Hey, motherfucker!” the man yelped.

Bosch felt him coming back for his place. He turned, raised the cane up, and held it crosswise in his hands. The man coming at him was much younger but was weak from addiction. Bosch easily deflected his efforts with the cane and the man fell backward into the open channel next to the bench seats. Bosch kept his eyes on him as he inched toward the door.

Bosch was the second to last out of the van, and the man waiting put a pale green pill into his raised palm. Bosch looked at it as he stepped away from the van and saw the 80 stamped on it. The man he had struggled with came out next, and he got one pill as well.

“No, no, no, wait a minute,” he said. “I need more. I need the two. Give me the two.”

“No, one,” said the distributor. “You fight, you get one, that’s it. Keep moving now.”

His accent was slightly different from that of the men at the clinic back in Pacoima but he was still, Bosch believed, from an Eastern Bloc country.

The addict Bosch had struggled with studied the single pill in his hand with the same look of anguish that Bosch had seen on the faces of the most desperate — refugees he had seen decades earlier in Vietnam, drug addicts he had seen in squats in Hollywood. The look always said the same thing: What am I going to do?

“Please,” he said.

“You keep moving, Brody, or you’re gone,” said the distributor.

“Okay, okay,” said the addict.

They followed the others, forming a line that led into the encampment. Bosch took the last position in line so he could keep an eye on the man called Brody. As he walked, he noticed the woman with stars, who was several spots ahead, pull something out of her pocket. She then put her hands down in front of her body, and Bosch could tell by the way she was working her shoulders that she was turning something in her unseen hands. He knew it was a crusher. She either needed a hit so badly she couldn’t wait or she feared one of the men, maybe Brody, would take her pills away.

Bosch watched as she brought her hands up to her face and cupped her mouth and nose as if she were going to sneeze. She snuffed the powdered pill as she walked.

Brody turned his head as he walked to give Bosch the evil eye. Bosch reached out and pushed him in the center of his back with the rubber-capped tip of his cane, a firm shove.

“Keep going,” Bosch said.

“You owe me an eighty, old man,” Brody said.

“Yeah, come and get it. Anytime.”

“Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see.”

Brody had the sleeves of a windbreaker tied around his waist and a yellowed T-shirt clinging to his bony shoulders. From his rear vantage point Bosch could see tattoos running down both of his triceps but they were blurred and unreadable, made with cell-mixed ink in prison.

The man from the plane as well as the greeter and drug distributor walked them into an open area that appeared to be the center of the encampment. Triangular canvas sails were strung overhead to offer shade during the day, but the sun was now behind the mountains on the horizon and it was starting to cool. There was concrete underfoot and Bosch assumed it was one of the slabs that gave the area its unofficial name.

There was a man sitting at a table beneath one of the shade triangles. The group was followed into the space by the van’s driver. They looked at the man at the table, who gave them a nod. Bosch saw a badge pinned to the seated man’s red shirt. It looked like a tin private security badge. But it apparently made him the sheriff of Slab City. There were two cardboard boxes on the table.

During an intel meeting that morning before the UC operation began, Bosch had viewed the few photos that the DEA had of Santos, and while they were all a minimum of three years old, he was sure that the man at the table was not him. The sheriff stood and looked at the sunken eyes of all those standing in front of him.

“Food is here,” he said. “One each. Take it with you.”

He started opening the boxes on the table. There was no rush from the group as there had been when pills were being distributed. Food was clearly not the most sustaining part of their lives. Bosch moved forward without pushing and when he got to the table, he saw that one box contained power bars and the other contained foil-wrapped burritos. He took a power bar and turned away.

The group started to break up, with people going in different directions. It was clear to Bosch that everybody had a destination but him. Brody threw him another look and then headed toward the open flap of a large yellow-and-black tent that looked like it had been made with tarps previously used for tenting houses for termite treatment.

Using the cover of people moving in different directions, Bosch dropped to one knee, put the cane down and the power bar next to it, and then started retying his work boot. While the hem of the right leg of his jeans contained the doses of Narcan, the left leg had an open slot in the inside hem. It was a place to stash any pills given to him so he could avoid ingesting but still keep them to be used as evidence in an eventual prosecution. He had practiced the boot-tying maneuver several times during the previous day’s training. When he hiked the bottom of his pant leg up to reach the high-top boot’s laces, he slipped the pill through the hole in the inside hem.

As he stood up, the woman with the stars brushed by him and whispered, “Be ready. Brody will come for you tonight.”

And then she was gone, heading to the tent where Brody had gone. Bosch watched her go without saying anything.

“You.”

Bosch turned and looked at the man at the table. He pointed behind Bosch.

“You’re in there,” he said. “Take the open bed and put your shit underneath it. You don’t take that pack with you tomorrow.”

Bosch checked behind him while he finished tying his boot. The sheriff was pointing to the back of an old school bus that looked like it had followed its career in student transport with a decade or two spent moving field-workers. It was painted green back then and now was in shambles. Its paint had long been faded and had oxidized. The windows were either painted over or covered with aluminum foil from the inside.

“It’s got all my stuff,” Bosch said. “I need it.”

“There is no room for it,” the sheriff said. “You leave it here. No one will touch it. You try to take it and it gets tossed outta the fucking plane. You understand?”

“Yeah, I understand.”

Bosch climbed to his feet and walked toward the bus. There were two steps up to the back door and he was in. It was dark inside and the air was dead and sour. It was sweltering. The beds the sheriff was talking about were Army Surplus cots and they were lined end to end down both sides with a narrow aisle in between. Starting to slowly make his way down the aisle, he quickly realized that the cleaner air was near the door he had just entered through and that those cots were already occupied by men who were sleeping or lying there watching Bosch with dead eyes.

The last cot on the right was open and appeared to be unused. Bosch dropped his backpack to the floor and used his foot to push it underneath. He then sat down and looked about. The air was putrid, a combination of body odor, bad breath, and the smell of the Salton Sea, and Bosch remembered something Jerry Edgar had told him years ago, after they had attended an autopsy: that all odors were particulate. Bosch sat there realizing he was breathing in microscopic particles from the drug-addicted men on the bus.

He reached down and pulled the backpack out from under his cot. He unzipped it and dug around in the clothing until he found a bandanna that had been shoved in by one of the DEA undercover tutors. He folded it into a triangle and tied it around his head and across his mouth and nose like a train robber from the Old West.

“Doesn’t do any good.”

Bosch looked around. Because the ceiling of the bus had only rounded corners, the voice could have come from anywhere. Everyone appeared to be asleep or uninterested in Bosch.

“Here.”

Bosch turned and looked the other way. There was a man sitting in the driver’s seat, looking at Bosch through a mirror on the dusty dashboard. Bosch had not noticed him before.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because this place is like cancer,” said the man. “Nothing stops it.”

Bosch nodded. The man was probably right. But still he kept the mask on.

“Is that where you sleep?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the man said. “Can’t lie down. Get vertigo.”

“How long you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“How many people they got here?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Sorry, just making conversation.”

“They don’t like conversation here.”

“So I heard.”

Bosch put his hands back into his pack. He took out one of the T-shirts and rolled it up to serve as a pillow. He lay down with his feet toward the rear of the bus so he could watch the door. He looked at the power bar. It was a brand he had never seen before. He wasn’t hungry but he wondered if he should eat it to keep his energy up.

“So what’s your name?” he whispered.

“What’s it matter?” said the man in the driver’s seat. “It’s Ted.”

“I’m Nick. What’s the deal here?”

“There you go with the questions again.”

“Just wondering what I’ve gotten into. It feels like a labor camp or something.”

“It is.”

“And you can’t leave?”

“You can leave. But you need a plan. We’re in the middle of nowhere out here. You wait till you’re in the city. You just better be sure you’re clear, because they’ll be watching you. Every one of us is worth a lot of money to them. They ain’t going to just let that go.”

“I knew I should’ve said no.”

“Ain’t really that bad. They keep you in food and pills. You just gotta follow their rules.”

“Right.”

Bosch let his eyes wander down the center aisle to the open back door of the bus. He pulled the bandanna down below his chin and started opening the power bar. He hoped it would keep him awake and on edge.

The natural light was almost gone now. For the first time, Bosch began to feel the tension of fear in his chest. He knew that there was great danger here — from all directions. He knew he couldn’t risk sleeping for five minutes, let alone through the night.

25

Brody came at him in the dead of night. But Bosch was ready for him. Moonlight revealed him as a silhouette in the back doorway of the bus and then as he made his way stealthily down the aisle between the cots where the others slept. Bosch could see an object gripped in one hand. Something small like a knife. Bosch was lying on his right side, the corresponding arm bent at the elbow and seemingly cradling his head. But back behind the end of the cot he gripped the cane tightly.

Bosch didn’t wait to determine if Brody had come to rob or assault him. Before the shadowed figure could make any kind of close-in move, Bosch swung the cane viciously and caught Brody flush at an angle that extended the impact up his jawline and across his ear. The noise was so loud that he thought he might have broken the cane. Brody immediately dropped onto the cot behind him, awakening a sleeping man who groaned and shoved him off. His weapon, a screwdriver, clattered on the floor. Bosch was immediately off the cot and on top of him in the aisle between the cots, straddling him and holding the cane like a crossbar on his neck. Brody put both hands on the cane to try to keep it from crushing his throat.

Bosch held the pressure steady. Enough to seriously impede Brody’s breathing but not cutting it off all the way. He leaned down and spoke in a hard whisper.

“You come at me again and I’m going to kill you. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. Do you understand me?”

Brody couldn’t talk but he nodded as best as he could.

“Now I’m going to let you go and you’re going to go back to your hole, and you’re not going to give me any more problems. Got it?”

Brody nodded again.

“Good.”

Bosch released the pressure but hesitated a moment before getting off the man. He wanted to be ready for the double-cross. Instead, Brody released his grip on the cane and held his hands open, fingers splayed.

Bosch started to get up.

“All right, get out of here.”

Without a word, Brody gathered himself and stood up. He hurried down the aisle to the rear exit of the bus. Bosch didn’t think for one moment that he would hesitate if he got another shot at Bosch.

He picked up the screwdriver and pulled the backpack out from under his cot. While he hid the screwdriver at the bottom of the main compartment, he heard a whisper from the front seat of the bus.

“Nice stick work,” said Ted.

“It’s a cane,” Bosch said.

He waited and listened to hear whether Brody was confronted outside the bus by the sheriff or anyone else who might have heard their struggle. But there was only silence from out there. Bosch crouched down and went into his backpack, quickly changing into a black T-shirt with the Los Angeles Lakers logo on it. He then stuffed the bottle of laxatives into one of his pockets, stood up, and turned toward the exit at the back of the bus.

“Where are you going?” Ted whispered. “Don’t go out there.”

“Where do people go to the bathroom around here?” Bosch said.

“Just follow your nose, man. It’s on the south side of the camp.”

“Got it.”

He moved down the aisle, careful not to run into the human limbs that were extending from some of the cots. When he got to the door, he stayed back in shadow and looked out into the open space where the sheriff had sat upon his arrival. It was empty. Even the table was gone.

Bosch stepped down from the bus and then stood still. The air still carried the odor of the Salton Sea but it was cooler and fresher than any breath taken inside the bus. Bosch pulled the bandanna down over his chin and left it hanging loose around his neck. He listened. The night was cool and quiet, the stars brilliant in the black sky above. He thought he could hear the low hum of an engine coming from somewhere in or near the camp. He just couldn’t place the direction it was coming from.

Asking Ted where he could go to relieve himself had been a front. He had no plan other than to scope out the camp so he could learn its landmarks and dimensions and could later be helpful in drawing up search warrants should that be part of any follow-up to the Dirty Denim operation.

He moved away from the bus and randomly chose a path between the tent where he knew Brody was assigned and a row of shanty structures. He walked quickly and quietly and soon realized he was moving away from the engine sound. He followed the pathway to the southern terminus of the camp, and here the air was fouled by a lineup of four portable toilets on a flatbed trailer. They smelled like they had not been serviced by the clean-out pump in weeks, if not months.

Bosch kept moving, following the circumference of the camp in a clockwise manner. From the outside it looked no different from the homeless encampments that had sprung up in the past few years in almost every empty lot and park in Los Angeles.

As he walked toward the north side of the camp, the low hum of the engine got steadily louder, and soon he was approaching a double-wide trailer with a light on inside and an air conditioner powered by an electric generator placed fifty yards out in the scrub behind it.

Bosch guessed that he was looking at the staff quarters. The sheriff and the distributor, maybe even the pilots of the planes he had seen, were housed in air-conditioned comfort.

His guess was confirmed as he cautiously approached at a passing angle and soon saw two vans parked side by side behind the trailer. He also saw a shadow pass behind the curtain of the one window that was lit. Somebody was moving about inside.

Bosch quickly moved toward the vans so he could use them as cover. Once there, he pressed himself against the back corner of one of them and studied the upper edges of the structure, looking for cameras.

He saw no evidence of cameras but knew it was too dark to be sure. He also knew that there were all kinds of other electronic measures that might be taken to guard against intrusion. Nevertheless, he decided to risk it in order to get an inside look at the double-wide.

He moved in toward the lighted window. The door next to it had a large NO ADMITTANCE sign posted, with a threatening kicker: “Violators Will Be Shot.”

Bosch proceeded undaunted. The curtain had not been closed all the way. There was a two-inch gap that allowed Bosch to visually sweep the room by shifting to his right or left outside.

There were two men in the room. They were white, dark-haired, and both wearing wifebeaters that revealed heavily tattooed arms and shoulders. They were at a table, playing cards and drinking a clear liquid directly from a bottle with no label. In the center of the table was a pile of pale-colored pills, and Bosch realized that the dosage levels of oxycodone pills made up the betting scheme of the game.

One of the men apparently lost a bet, and while his opponent gleefully used his hand to pull the pot to his side, the other angrily swiped some of the cards off the table and to the floor. The arm movement made Bosch’s eyes follow, and it was then that he saw a third person in the room.

There was a nude woman lying on a threadbare couch to the left side. Her face and body were turned in toward the rear cushions and she appeared to be asleep or unconscious. Bosch could not see her face, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. He leaned his head down for a moment as he filled with revulsion. He had avoided undercover work for all his years in law enforcement for this very reason. As a homicide investigator he had seen the worst of what humans can do to one another. But by the time Bosch was a witness, the crime had been committed and the suffering was over. Every case left its psychological mark but it was balanced by the fulfillment of justice. Bosch didn’t solve every case, but there was still accomplishment in giving every case his best work.

But when you went undercover, you moved from the safe confines of justice done and entered the world of the depraved. You saw how humans preyed on one another, and there was nothing you could do about it without blowing cover. You had to take it in and live with it to see the case through. Bosch wanted to charge into the trailer and save that woman from another minute of abuse, but he couldn’t. Not now. There was a greater justice he was looking for.

Bosch turned his eyes from the woman and looked at the two men. It seemed clear to him that they were speaking Russian, and the words inked on their arms appeared to be Russian as well. Both men had what cops called convict bodies: outsize upper torsos heavily muscled by years of prison workouts — push-ups, sit-ups, chin-ups — and legs neglected in the process. One was clearly older. He was midthirties, with a soldier’s short haircut. Bosch placed the other man at about thirty, with dyed blond hair.

He studied their body sizes and movements and compared them to what he recalled of the videos from the pharmacy shooting and the drop-off and pickup at Whiteman. Could these two be the shooters? It was impossible to know for sure, but Bosch believed that there was a clue in the apparent casualness with which the men in the room had abused the woman. They had most likely drugged her, raped her, and left her unclothed on the couch. Bosch believed any man who did that was capable of the same casualness when it came to murder. His gut told him these were the two men who had gunned down José Esquivel and his son.

And they would lead him to Santos.

Bosch saw a reflection of light on the aluminum skin of the mobile home and turned to see a man with a flashlight approaching. He quickly ducked down and then moved back toward the vans and slipped into the channel between them.

“Hey!”

He had been spotted. He moved to the rear of the vehicles and had to make a decision.

He quickly dropped below the window level of the vans and moved back up on the outside of the van farthest from the mobile home. The man with the flashlight came running up and proceeded down the passage between the vans, the last place he had seen the intruder.

Bosch waited a second and broke for the corner of the trailer. He knew if he could get there, he could use the structure as a blind between him and the flashlight. As he ran, he heard the man talking feverishly and realized he must have a radio. That meant there might be at least one other person in the camp on security patrol.

Bosch made it to the corner of the trailer without drawing another shout. He pressed hard against the wall and looked around the edge. He located the flashlight out near the generator. That gave him an almost fifty-yard lead. He was about to break for the encampment when he saw another flashlight moving down a pathway in his direction. Bosch had no choice. He charged to his left, hoping to get to the cover of an old RV before the second searcher spotted him.

Lungs burning, he passed the back end of the RV before being hit with light. He heard more voices and shouting and realized the commotion had drawn the Russians out of the mobile home to see what was going on.

Bosch kept moving, even as fatigue from the exertion started to grip him. He followed the edge of the camp all the way around until he reached the portable toilets. He thought about hiding inside one but decided against it. He turned and entered the camp and started following the pathway back to the bus. He walked casually after using his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face.

He didn’t make it. In the clearing behind the bus, they were waiting. Bosch was hit with the lights first and then shoved to the ground from behind.

“What the fuck you think you are doing?” a voice said.

Bosch held his hands up off the dirt and sand and splayed his fingers.

“I was just using the toilet,” he called out. “I thought that was okay. Nobody told me I couldn’t leave the—”

“Get him up,” said a Russian.

Bosch was roughly pulled up off the ground and held by both arms by the sheriff and a man he assumed was his deputy.

The two men Bosch had seen playing cards were standing in front of him. The older one came in close enough for Bosch to smell the vodka on his breath.

“You like a Peeping Tom?” he asked.

“What?” Bosch exclaimed. “No, I had to use the shitter.”

“No, you Peeping Tom. Sneaking around, peeping in the window.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Who else, then? You see any Peeping Tom? No, just you.”

“I don’t know but it wasn’t me.”

“Yah, we see about dat. Search him. Who is this guy?”

The sheriff and deputy started going through Bosch’s pockets.

“He’s new,” said the sheriff. “He’s the one who had the gun.”

He pulled Bosch’s wallet out of his pocket and was about to yank it off its chain.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bosch said.

He unsnapped the belt loop so the wallet and chain came free. The sheriff threw it to the Russian.

“Gimme the light,” he said.

The deputy held his light out while the Russian looked through the wallet.

“Reilly,” he said.

He pronounced it really.

The sheriff found the bottle of laxatives and held it up for the Russian to see. The blond Russian said something in their native tongue but the one holding Bosch’s wallet seemed to ignore it.

“Why do you sweat, Reilly?” he asked instead.

“Because I need a hit,” Bosch said. “They only gave me one.”

“He was fighting on the van,” the sheriff said.

“There was no fight,” Bosch said. “Just some pushing. It wasn’t fair. I need the hit.”

The Russian slapped the wallet against his other hand as he contemplated the situation. He then handed it back to Bosch.

Bosch thought he had made it. Returning the wallet meant the Russian would let his trespass go.

But he was wrong.

“On his knees,” the Russian said.

Strong hands gripped Bosch’s shoulders simultaneously and he was pushed down to his knees. The Russian reached behind his back and produced a gun. Bosch immediately recognized it as the one taken from his backpack.

“Is this your piece-of-shit gun, Reilly?”

“Yes. They took it from me at the clinic.”

“Well, it is mine now.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“You know I am Russian, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then how about we play a Russian game and you tell me what you were doing tonight peeping in my window.”

“I told you, I wasn’t. I was taking a shit. I’m old. It takes me a long time.”

The deputy laughed but then cut it off when he was hit by a grim stare from the sheriff. The Russian opened the gun’s cylinder and dumped the six bullets into his palm. He then held one bullet up into the light and made a show of loading it into the cylinder, snapping it closed and spinning it.

“Now we play Russian roulette, yes?”

He held the gun out and pressed the barrel against Bosch’s left temple.

Bosch had confidence in the DEA’s saying they had tricked the weapon, but there was nothing like the barrel of a gun being pressed against the temple to make one contemplate fate. Bosch closed his eyes.

The Russian pulled the trigger and Bosch jerked at the sound of the metal snap. In that moment he knew the two Russians were the pharmacy killers. He opened his eyes and looked directly at the man in front of him.

“Ah, you are lucky man,” said the Russian.

He spun the gun’s cylinder again and laughed.

“We try for two now, lucky man? Why were you looking in my window tonight?”

“No, please, it wasn’t me. I don’t even know where your window is. I just got here. I even had to ask where the bathrooms were.”

This time the Russian pressed the gun’s muzzle to Bosch’s forehead. His partner spoke to him in an urgent tone. Bosch guessed that he was reminding the man with the gun of what the impact would be on pill production if Bosch was killed.

The Russian withdrew the gun without pulling the trigger. He started reloading it. When he was finished, he snapped the barrel closed and pointed to the spot where the missing grip should be.

“I will fix your gun and keep it,” he said. “I want your luck. Do you agree, Reilly?”

“Sure,” Bosch said. “Keep it.”

The Russian reached behind his back and tucked the gun into his pants.

“Thank you, Reilly,” he said. “You go back to sleep now. No more Peeping Tom shit.”

26

The Santos air fleet left the ground early Saturday after a morning distribution of pills, power bars, and burritos. Bosch was in a group on the same plane he had come in on, but this time the passenger count was higher and there were more than a few new faces, men and women, on the plane’s benches. He did see Brody, a stripe of purple bruising on the right side of his face, and the woman with the stars on her hand. They were both on the bench opposite him. Maybe it was the shaved head, which gave the false impression that she was ill from something other than addiction, but Bosch felt a sympathetic need to watch over her. At the same time, he knew never to turn his back on Brody.

This time Bosch was smart enough to muscle his way to a seat at the end of the bench near the jump door and the uncovered window. He’d now have a shot at tracking where the plane was going.

They took off in a northerly direction and stayed on that course, the plane maintaining an altitude of only a few thousand feet. Looking over his shoulder and down through the glass, he could see the Salton Sea below. And then he saw the bright colors painted on the man-made monument known as Salvation Mountain. From high above he saw the warning: JESUS IS THE WAY.

Next it was Joshua Tree National Park and then the Mojave, the land below beautiful in its untouched starkness.

They were in the air almost two hours before the plane landed hard on a strip used by crop dusters. As it made its final descent, Bosch had seen a wind farm in the distance set against hills dotted with cattle, and he knew where they were. In the Central Valley, near Modesto, where Bosch had worked a case a few years before and had seen a helicopter hit one of the windmills and go down.

There were two vans waiting, and the group was split up seven and seven. Bosch was separated from both Brody and the woman with the stars. His van had two men from the organization in the front seats, a driver and a handler, both with Russian accents. They stopped first in Tulare, where they started working a series of mom-and-pop pharmacies for pills. At each stop, the handler gave each of the shills, including Bosch, a new ID — driver’s license and Medicare card — as well as a prescription and cash for the co-pay. The ID cards were crudely manufactured fakes that any bouncer in his first week on the job would’ve alerted to in any club in L.A. But that didn’t matter. The pharmacists — like José Esquivel Sr. — were part of the game, profiting from the seemingly legitimate fulfillment of seemingly valid prescriptions. The ripple effects of the Santos corruption went on endlessly from there to the halls of government and industry.

Despite there seemingly being no need for him to pose as an injured man, Bosch kept up the pretense of wearing the knee brace and carrying the cane. He did it because he did not want to be separated from the cane, his only weapon.

At each stop, the group spent close to an hour, the handler usually breaking the shills into singles and couples at each pharmacy so that seven bedraggled addicts standing in line together would not cause concern among the legitimate customers in the store. From Tulare they moved up into Modesto and then Fresno, a steady supply of amber vials of pills going into the handler’s backpack.

The plane had moved and was waiting at another unrestricted airstrip outside a pecan farm in Fresno. The other van was already there, and when Bosch climbed on board, the spots on the benches in front of the windows were already taken. He did get a seat next to the woman with the stars. As previously instructed, he said nothing to her.

Before the plane took off, Bosch saw the capper from his van hand his backpack through the cockpit window to the pilot. The pilot actually signed some sort of receipt or accounting statement on a clipboard and handed it to the capper. The plane then rumbled down the unpaved strip and took off to the south. They stayed on course without banking or taking any antisurveillance measures.

Bosch kept his counsel for a half hour before finally leaning toward the woman next to him and speaking in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the engine noise.

“You were right,” he said. “He came last night. I was ready.”

“I can tell,” she said, referring to the bruise running the length of Brody’s face.

“Thank you.”

“Forget it.”

“How long have you been trapped in this?”

She turned her body on the bench to literally give him the cold shoulder. Then, as if thinking better of it, she turned her head back to him and spoke.

“Just leave me alone.”

“I thought maybe we could help each other out, that’s all.”

“What are you talking about? You just got here. You’re not a woman, you don’t know what it’s like.”

Bosch flashed on the image of the woman lying discarded on the couch while the Russians gambled for the pills that were the source of all this degradation and disaster.

“I know,” he said. “But I’ve seen enough to know this is like being a slave.”

She didn’t respond and kept her shoulder turned to Bosch.

“When I make a move, I’ll let you know,” he tried.

“Don’t,” she said. “You’re just going to get yourself killed. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to be saved, okay? Like I said from the beginning, leave me alone.”

“Why’d you warn me about Brody if you want to be left alone?”

“Because he’s an animal, and one doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

“Got it.”

She tried to turn even further away from Bosch, but the lower edge of the pale yellow jacket she wore was trapped under his leg. The move pulled the jacket down over her shoulder, exposing the tank top below it and part of a tattoo.

She angrily jerked her jacket out from under his leg and back into place, but Bosch had seen enough to know it was part of an RIP tattoo on the back of her shoulder. She had lost someone important eight years before. Important enough to always carry the reminder. He wondered if it was that loss that ultimately put her on the plane.

Bosch leaned away from her and caught Brody watching them from the bench on the other side of the plane. He gave Bosch a knowing smile and Bosch realized he had made a mistake. Brody had recognized Bosch’s attempt to connect to the woman. He would now realize that he could get to him through her.

The plane landed an hour later with an easier glide pattern and touchdown. Bosch couldn’t tell where they were until he climbed out the jump door and recognized that he was inside the hangar at Whiteman. There were two vans waiting and this time he tried to stick close to the woman with the stars. When the group was split, he ended up in a van with her as well as Brody.

From Whiteman the van turned right on San Fernando Road but then took Van Nuys Boulevard to the first pharmacy stop. They were in Pacoima and apparently staying clear of San Fernando.

The driver, who was the same Russian who had punched Bosch while in the clinic the day before, broke his seven shills into two groups and sent Bosch and two others into the pharmacy first. Brody and the woman with the stars were left in the second group. Bosch went through the process of providing a prescription and bogus ID to the pharmacist and then waited for the pills to be put into the bottle. In most of the previous stops, the pills were already bottled and ready, the pharmacists wanting to limit the time the shills spent in the drugstore. But in this store Bosch was told to either wait outside or come back in thirty minutes.

Bosch went outside and told the Russian. He was not happy. He told Bosch and the two other shills to go back and wait inside the drugstore in order to hurry the pharmacist along. Bosch did as instructed and was milling about in the foot-care aisle, within full view of the pharmacist, when he turned around and saw another shopper looking at the Dr. Scholl’s insole cushions. It was Bella Lourdes. She spoke in a low voice without looking at Bosch.

“How are you doing, Harry?”

Bosch checked the location of the other two shills before responding. They had separated and one was looking in the Mexican apothecary aisle and the other was maintaining a vigil at the prescription counter.

“I’m good. What are you doing in here?”

“Needed to check. We lost contact with you last night. Didn’t pick you up till you landed at Whiteman.”

“Are you shitting me? Hovan said they were the eye in the sky. They lost the plane?”

“They did. Hovan claimed upper atmospheric interference. Valdez hit the ceiling about it. Where’d they take you?”

“Jerry Edgar’s intel was on the button. It’s an encampment near Slab City, southeast of the Salton Sea.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I am but I almost wasn’t. I think I met the two shooters. One of them played Russian roulette on me with that revolver the DEA gave me.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Lucky it was tricked out.”

“I’m sorry. Do you want out? I give the word and we’ll swarm this place and pull you out, make it look like a bust.”

“No, but I want you to do something else. Where’s Jerry?”

“He’s out there watching. We obviously freaked last night when they lost you, but now we’re on you and won’t drop the ball.”

Bosch checked the shills again. They were not paying attention to him. He checked the front door of the drugstore and saw no sign of the Russian driver.

“Okay, as soon as we get our scrips filled and are out of here, they’re going to send in four more. A woman and three men.”

“Okay.”

“Have Jerry swing in on random enforcement and bust them for fraudulent IDs, prescriptions, the whole works.”

“All right, we can do that. Why?”

“The guy named Brody is causing me a problem. I need him gone. He’s got a line of purple down the right side of his face.”

Bosch proffered the cane in explanation.

“And the woman, I want to get her into detox and rehab.”

For the first time, Lourdes looked up from her shelf-shopping and tried to get a read on him.

“You sound sympathetic. Is this getting personal? You heard what the DEA undercover trainer said about that.”

“I’ve only been under twenty-four hours, and I don’t even know her name. It’s not personal. I just saw some stuff down there in Slab City and I want her pulled out. Besides, the more people they’re down, the more important I become. Maybe they’ll think twice about playing Russian roulette with me again.”

“Okay, we’ll do it. But that will pull a lot of us off the surveillance. I’ll make sure at least one car stays with you.”

“Doesn’t matter. You can wait for us at Whiteman. We’ll be going back for the plane.”

Bosch heard the name that was on his phony ID called out by the pharmacist.

“Gotta go.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“What about it?”

“It’s Sunday. These mom-and-pop places are usually closed Sundays.”

“Then I guess I get a day off in Slab City. Tell them not to lose me this time.”

“You better believe I will. Take care of yourself.”

Bosch pointed the cane toward the ceiling and twirled it like a musketeer brandishing a sword. He then limped toward the counter to get his pills.

Twenty minutes later he was sitting in the back of the van, waiting for the second crew of shills to complete their pharmacy run. He watched Edgar and Hovan enter the pharmacy, and fifteen minutes after that, with the van’s driver getting restless and talking to himself in Russian, a pair of LAPD cruisers pulled up.

The Russian cursed.

“Tvoyu mat’!”

He turned around in his seat and looked at the three men sitting in the back. He pointed at Bosch.

“You. You go in and see. Find out what is going on in there.”

Bosch slid off his seat and moved to the side door. He got out and crossed the parking lot to the pharmacy. He guessed he had been chosen by the driver because he had the cleanest clothes of those in the van. He walked in, saw the four shills lined up and in handcuffs by the pharmacy counter. The uniformed officers were checking their pockets.

Bosch’s entering had rung an overhead bell. The woman with the stars on her hand looked over her shoulder and saw Bosch. She widened her eyes and jutted her chin in the direction of the door. Bosch turned around and walked back out.

Acting as though he had just seen a ghost, Bosch quickly legged it back to the van, dropping any gentleness about his knee. He jumped in through the side door.

“The cops got them! They’re all in handcuffs.”

“Close the door! Close the door!”

The van was moving before Bosch could pull the sliding door closed. The driver took an exit onto Van Nuys Boulevard and headed back toward Whiteman. He hit a speed dial on his phone and soon was yelling in Russian at someone at the other end of the line.

Bosch looked through the back windows at the plaza shopping center as it retreated in the distance. For all her fuck-offs and leave-me-alones, the woman with the stars on her hand had warned him about Brody and then about the bust going down. It made him believe that there was still something inside her worth salvaging.

27

There was no calamitous wakeup call on Sunday morning. No one walked down the side of the bus, hitting it with a broomstick and yelling for everyone in the camp to get up. On Sunday the camp slept late. Having not been able to sleep at all his first night in the camp, Bosch had succumbed to his exhaustion Saturday night and slept deeply, moving through murky dreams of tunnels. When he was roused by the Russian with the dyed-blond hair shaking his cot, he was completely disoriented and at first unsure of where he was and who the man looking down at him was.

“Come,” the Russian said. “Now.”

Bosch finally came to and realized that the guy was the one who spoke the least English and had hung back on Friday night when his partner had put a gun against Harry’s head and pulled the trigger.

In his mind, Bosch had labeled them Ivan and Igor, and this was Igor, the one who didn’t normally speak.

Bosch swung his legs off the cot and sat up. He rubbed his eyes, got his bearings, and started pulling on his work boots, wondering if they were going to fly off to hit pharmacies again, even though most of the non-chain stores were likely to be closed on Sunday, especially those in low-income Latino neighborhoods, where a reverence for the day of rest and religious reflection was strong.

Igor was waiting for him, holding the front of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose because of the stench in the bus. He pointed to the door.

“Come. Hurry.”

At first Bosch panicked, because he thought Igor had called him Harry and that his cover had somehow been blown. But then he understood what had been said in the Russian’s thick accent.

“Okay, okay,” he said.

Bosch looked around and saw that he was the only one Igor had rousted. Everybody else in the bus was still dead to the world.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Igor didn’t respond. Before pulling on his left boot, Bosch reached to the floor and grabbed the knee brace. He pulled it up over his left calf for use later and then put the other boot on. He tied his laces, grabbed his cane, and stood up, ready to go fill prescriptions, though he had a growing suspicion that wasn’t the plan for the day.

Igor pointed to the floor.

“Backpack.”

“What?”

“Bring backpack.”

“Why?”

Igor turned and headed out of the bus without another word. Bosch grabbed the backpack and followed, stepping out of the bus into blinding sunlight. He kept asking questions, hoping for some hint of what awaited him.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.

There was no answer.

“Hey, where’s your pal with the English?” Bosch tried. “I want to talk to somebody.”

The Russian continued to ignore Bosch’s words and just used his hands to signal him to keep following. They walked through the camp to the clearing where the vans had picked up the shill groups the morning before. There was a van waiting with an open side door. Igor pointed to the opening.

“You go.”

“Yeah, I get it. Go where?”

No answer. Bosch came to a stop and looked at him.

“You go.”

“I need to hit the head first.”

Bosch could tell the Russian didn’t understand the slang. He pointed the cane toward the south side of the encampment and started walking that way. Igor grabbed him by the shoulders and roughly redirected him to the van.

“No. You go!”

Igor shoved him hard toward the van and Bosch almost dropped the cane while grabbing for the doorframe.

“Okay, okay. I’m going.”

He climbed onto the bench seat behind the driver. The Russian then climbed in, slid the door closed behind him, and took the bench behind Bosch.

The van started moving, and soon enough Bosch could tell they were heading to the airstrip. He knew the man behind him did not have the language skills to answer questions, but Bosch’s growing concern over what was happening left him unable to stop asking. He leaned forward to catch the driver’s peripheral vision.

“Hey, driver? What are we doing? Why am I the only one going to the plane?”

The driver acted like he neither saw nor heard him.

In less than ten minutes they were at the airstrip. The van pulled up to a plane with an already spinning prop. It wasn’t the “minivan” Bosch had taken all of his previous flights on but still clearly a jump plane that could carry several passengers. The other Russian, Ivan, was standing next to the open jump door, using the overhead wing to shade his face from the sun.

Igor got up and opened the van door. He grabbed a handful of Bosch’s shirt and yanked him toward the opening.

“You go. Plane.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

Bosch nearly tumbled out of the van, but used his cane to keep upright. He immediately started walking toward Ivan. He carried the cane by the barrel rather than walking as if he needed it. He wanted to dispense with any sign of weakness in front of the man he was about to confront.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why am I the only one going?”

“Because you go home,” Ivan said. “Now.”

“What are you talking about? What home?”

“We take you back. We don’t want you here.”

“What? Why?”

“Just get on plane.”

“Does your boss know this? I got you four hundred pills yesterday. That’s a lot of money. He’s not going to like losing that.”

“What boss? Get on plane.”

“All you guys do is say the same thing. Why? Why should I get on the plane?”

“Because we take you back. We don’t want you.”

Bosch shook his head like he didn’t get it.

“I heard people talking. His name is Santos. Santos is not going to like it.”

Ivan smirked.

“Santos long gone. I am boss. Get on plane.”

Bosch stared at him for a moment, trying to get a read for a sign of truth.

“Whatever. Then I want my money and pills. We had a deal.”

Ivan nodded and pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. It contained pills and currency, the outside bill a hundred. He shook it and handed it to Bosch.

“There. You good. Get on plane.”

Bosch climbed through the jump door and went to the back of the plane, as far from the door as he could get. He sat down on the bench that ran along the rear bulkhead and looked back. Both Ivan and Igor climbed on board and took seats on benches on either side of the plane at the front. They looked like they were guarding the exit.

Bosch knew he was in trouble. Giving him the money was the tell. They could easily have gotten away with stiffing him. But giving him what he had earned was a move designed to put him at ease, to make him believe they were actually taking him home.

Ivan knocked a fist on a small aluminum door that separated the cockpit from the passenger compartment, and the plane started to taxi to the head of the airstrip. Bosch thought of what Ivan had said about Santos and saw where it made sense. The DEA had no current intel on the man who had set up this operation. Hovan said the last known photo they had was almost a year old. Santos and those loyal to him could have been taken out by the Russians, especially if they had gotten wind of the indictment and warrant for his arrest, making him a liability to the operation. This would also help explain why the operation seemed to be short on manpower and why the two apparent bosses were doing the wet work.

Bosch realized that if Ivan and Igor were indeed the killers who had wiped out the pharmacy in San Fernando, then they had made the call themselves. The end of the case was right in front of him.

The plane turned and positioned for a run down the airstrip. Bosch felt he knew how this ride was supposed to end for him. He put the cane across his thighs and pulled out his wallet, yanking it off the chain seemingly by accident. He hoped the pulse alert was delivered to the DEA team that supposedly was watching over him.

Bosch made a show of taking the currency from the plastic bag and putting it into his wallet. He then put the wallet and the bag of pills into his pockets.

The plane started moving down the runway, gathering momentum. Wind started blasting through the compartment. The Russians hadn’t closed the jump door. Bosch pointed at the opening and yelled.

“You going to close that?”

Ivan shook his head and gestured toward the opening.

“No door!” he yelled back.

Bosch hadn’t noticed that before.

The plane took off. It rose steeply and Bosch was pushed back against the rear wall of the passenger compartment. Almost immediately, the craft started to bank left while still in its climb. It then leveled and was on a course west.

Bosch knew that would take them over the center of the Salton Sea.

28

The unseen pilot throttled back once the plane leveled off. The engine whine lowered significantly and that served as a signal to Ivan. He got up and started moving toward Bosch at the back of the plane. He had to hunch down to keep his head from hitting the curved ceiling. As he came forward, he reached into a front pocket and pulled out a phone. When he got to Bosch, he crouched on his haunches like a baseball catcher. He looked at Bosch, then at the screen of his phone, and then back at Bosch.

“You cop,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

“What?” Bosch said. “What are you talking about?”

Ivan referred to his phone again. Over his shoulder Bosch could see Igor still in his seat watching.

“Har-ree Boosh,” Ivan said. “You cop.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bosch said. “I’m not—”

“San Fernando PD! It say so.”

“What says so?”

Ivan turned the phone so Bosch could see the screen. On it was a photo of a folded section of a newspaper. There was a photo of him that he could tell had been taken last week outside La Farmacia Familia on the day of the murders. It was the continuation page of a story, but not a story on the pharmacy murders. The headline across the body of the story continuation and his photo told Bosch all he needed to know.

Somebody had leaked the story to the Times. Kennedy. He had gotten word that Bosch and Haller were going to make a move in the Borders hearing and had acted to push Haller back on his heels and vilify Bosch. The story had included his current employment, and the photo of him outside the pharmacy had been a big glaring tip-off to the Russians.

Ivan lowered the phone and put it in his back pocket. A crooked smile formed on his lips as he grabbed hold of the barrel of Bosch’s cane and they struggled for control of it. Ivan reached his free hand behind him and pulled a gun from under his shirt. With his other hand he pushed the barrel of the cane in on Bosch and leaned into him.

“Get up, cop,” he said. “You’re going to jump now. Maybe you find your friend Santos, yah?”

Bosch checked the gun. It was a chrome-plated automatic, not the disabled revolver the DEA had planted in Bosch’s backpack and that Ivan had brandished on Friday night.

He riffed off of the Russian’s last words, hoping to distract him.

“You killed Santos, didn’t you? You killed him and took over. And that boy in the pharmacy. You killed him and his father.”

“That boy was punk. He did not listen to his father and the father could not control the son. They got what they deserved.”

Ivan tilted his head back toward Igor as if to acknowledge their work on eliminating the problem of José Esquivel Jr. For a split second his attention was divided, and that was all the time Bosch needed. He twisted his wrist and turned the curved handle of the cane. He heard the release snick and in one quick motion pulled the handle and stiletto free, then drove the point into Ivan’s right side with an upward thrust. The thin, sharp blade punctured the skin and went through the ribs and deep into the Russian’s chest.

Ivan’s eyes widened and his mouth formed a silent O. The two men stared at each other for a second that seemed to last a minute. Then Ivan dropped the gun to clutch at the stiletto’s handle. But blood had already spilled over the weapon and Bosch’s hand. The surfaces were too slippery for Ivan to find purchase. He brought his left hand up and grabbed Bosch’s throat. But he was weakening and it was the desperate move of a dying man.

Bosch looked past Ivan to Igor, who was still seated at the front. He was smiling because he had not seen the blood yet and thought that his partner was sadistically choking Bosch out before throwing him from the plane.

Bosch had killed men face-to-face before — as a young man in the tunnels back in Vietnam. He knew what he needed to do to finish the job. He pulled back on the stiletto and went in again, two quick thrusts up into the neck and near the armpit, where he knew major arteries waited. He then pushed the Russian back. As Ivan fell to the floor, dying, Bosch grabbed the gun.

He stood up, the stiletto dripping blood in his left hand, the gun in his right. He started moving up the plane toward Igor.

Igor rose from his seat, ready for battle. Then his eyes fell to the pistol. He made a stutter move, first to one side, then the other, as if his body were moving ahead of his mind and seeking escape. Then, inexplicably, he lunged to his left and went through the jump door.

Bosch held still for a moment, stunned by the move, then quickly went up to the door, dropping the stiletto and grabbing the steel handle that skydivers hold before stepping out onto the jump platform. He leaned out. They were flying over the Salton Sea at about two hundred feet. Bosch guessed that they had flown low to cut down on the chance that someone might witness Bosch’s drop from the plane.

Bosch leaned further out to look down on the water behind the plane. The sun’s reflection off the surface was almost blinding and he could see no sign of Igor. If he had survived the jump, he was miles from shore.

Bosch went to the cockpit door and rapped hard on it with the pistol. He figured the pilot took it as a signal that the disposal of Bosch had been completed. The plane throttled up and started to climb.

He then tried the door and found it locked. He grabbed on to overhead handles for leverage and kicked his heel into the door, bending it on its frame enough that the lock snapped loose. He quickly flung the door open and thrust himself through the narrow opening, leading with the gun.

“What the fuck?” the pilot yelled.

He then did a double-take when he saw that it was Bosch and not one of the Russians.

“Oh, hey, wait, what’s going on?” he yelped.

Bosch dropped into the empty copilot’s seat. He reached over and put the muzzle of the gun against the pilot’s temple.

“What’s going on is I’m a police officer and you are going to do exactly what I tell you to do,” he said. “You understand me?”

The pilot was late sixties and white, with gin blossoms across his nose. A pilot no one else would hire.

“Yes, sir, no problem,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

His English was unaccented. He was likely native-born American. Bosch took a chance, noting the man’s age and the blurred tattoos on his arms.

“You remember the A-six from Vietnam?” he asked.

“I sure do,” the pilot said. “The Intruder, great plane.”

“I flew ’em back then and haven’t flown since. But you make one wrong move and I’ll put a bullet in your head and have to learn to fly all over again.”

Bosch had never flown a plane before, let alone an Intruder. But he needed a believable threat to keep the pilot in line.

“No problem, sir,” the pilot said. “Just tell me where you want to go. I don’t have any idea what was going on back there. I just fly the plane. They tell me where.”

“Save it,” Bosch said. “How much fuel do we have?”

“I tapped it this morning. We’re full.”

“What’s the range?”

“Three hundred miles easy.”

“Okay, take me back to L.A. Up to Whiteman.”

“Not a problem.”

The pilot started going through maneuvers to change course. Bosch saw the radio mic hooked to the instrument panel. He grabbed it.

“This on?”

“Yes, press the button on the side to transmit.”

Bosch found the transmit button and then hesitated, unsure what to say.

“Hello, any airport tower that can read this. Come back.”

Bosch looked at the pilot, wondering if he had just revealed that he had never flown a plane before. The radio saved him.

“This is Imperial County Airport, go ahead.”

“My name is Harry Bosch. I’m a detective with the San Fernando Police Department. I am flying in a plane after an in-air event leaving one passenger dead and one missing over the Salton Sea. Requesting radio contact be made with Agent Hovan of the DEA. I can give a number when you are ready to copy.”

Bosch clicked off and waited for the response. He felt the tensions that had gripped him for nearly forty-eight hours start to slacken off as the plane headed north toward safety and home.

From two thousand feet up, the land below looked beautiful to Bosch and nothing like the badlands he knew it to be.

29

Bosch got a crowded reception from state, local, and federal authorities when the plane landed under DEA air escort at Whiteman Airport. There were DEA agents, Jerry Edgar with a team from the state medical board, and Chief Valdez and the investigators from San Fernando standing front and center. There was also a coroner’s van and death team, a pair of LAPD detectives from Foothill Division, their own forensic tech, and a pair of paramedics just in case Bosch required medical attention.

The plane was directed into an empty hangar so that it could be processed as a crime scene without media or public scrutiny. Bosch squeezed through the cockpit door and into the passenger section and the pilot followed. He told the pilot to climb through the jump door with his hands up. As he did so, Bosch stepped to the back of the compartment. He took a long look at the man he had killed, his body lying still on the floor of the plane. Blood had run from the body in crisscross patterns as the plane had banked and changed altitude during the flight. Bosch moved back up to the jump door and exited the plane.

Two men in black tactical pants and shirts, their sidearms held down by their sides, helped him off the jump platform.

“DEA?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, sir,” said one agent. “We are going to go in and clear the plane now. Is there anyone else inside?”

“Nobody alive.”

“Okay, sir. There are some people here who want to talk to you now.”

“And I want to talk to them.”

Bosch stepped away from the plane’s wing, and Bella Lourdes was there waiting for him.

“Harry, you all right?”

“Better than the guy in the plane. How are we handling the debrief?”

“The DEA has a mobile command post. You’re supposed to go in there with us, the LAPD, Edgar, and Hovan. You ready, or you want to—”

“I’m ready. Let’s get this over with. But I want to see the L.A. Times first. That story today almost got me killed.”

“We have it for you.”

“Talk about bad timing.”

She led him to a huddle with Valdez, Sisto, Luzon, and Trevino. The chief clapped him on the upper arm and said he had done good. There was an awkwardness about the greeting, considering what Bosch had been through, and it was the first indication that the Times story was going to be difficult to deal with.

Bosch pressed on with the case at hand.

“Our case is closed,” he said. “The dead guy in the plane was one of the shooters. The other one jumped out. I don’t think he made it.”

“The fricking guy just jumped out of the plane?” Sisto said.

He said it in a tone that implied he thought otherwise, like maybe the Russian had help jumping.

Bosch held his eyes with a stare.

“Crazy Russians,” Sisto said. “Just saying.”

“Let’s wait on all of that until we sit down with everybody,” Valdez said. “Bella, you take Harry to the debriefing, I’ll get the paper. Harry, you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“I’ll have somebody get you something and bring it in.”

Bella had walked Bosch halfway through the hangar when they encountered Edgar. He smiled at Bosch as he approached.

“Partner, you made it,” he said. “Can’t wait to hear the rundown. Sounds like a close fucking call.”

Bosch nodded.

“You know what?” he said. “If you hadn’t told me that rumor about people going up in the plane and not coming back, I might not be here right now, partner. That gave me the edge on these guys.”

“Well, I’m glad I did something,” Edgar said.

The mobile command post was an unmarked RV that had probably been seized in a drug case, then gutted on the inside and reequipped. Bosch and Lourdes stepped into what looked like a mini board of directors’ meeting room. There was a separation wall with a door that led to an electronics nest. Agent Hovan stepped out of the nest, shook Bosch’s hand, and welcomed him back.

“Anything on the second Russian?” Bosch asked.

Bosch had reported on Igor’s jump without a parachute while on the plane flying toward Whiteman. The DEA had dispatched a rescue effort.

“Nothing,” Hovan said. “It’s a long shot.”

Hovan instructed Bosch to sit at one end of the table so he would be visible to all who would gather for the briefing. Lourdes took the seat to his right, and the rest of the SFPD team took the chairs down that side of the table. Valdez came in and dropped the A section of the Times on the table in front of Bosch and then sat down.

The story had been a front-page lead, its headline a kick to Bosch’s gut. He tried to read it as agents and officers started to file into the command post and take seats.

The story jumped inside from there, but Bosch had read enough and was not inclined to unfold the section to the page with his photograph. He was aware that everyone crowded into the room now was watching him and knew what the newspaper report said about him.

He put the paper down on the floor next to his chair. It had no doubt been a hit piece orchestrated by either Cronyn or Kennedy. There was no mention, before the jump at least, of an opposing view of Borders’s innocence. No mention that Mickey Haller had by now hopefully filed a motion seeking to stop the D.A.’s action.

Bosch looked up at the faces lining both sides of the table. Opposite him at the other end was Hovan. And next to him was Joe Smith, his UC trainer.

“Okay, two things before we start,” Bosch said. “I haven’t had a shower since Wednesday and I apologize for that. If you think it’s funky from where you’re sitting, just be glad you’re not where I am. The other thing is that the story today in the Times is complete bullshit. I planted no evidence in that or any other case and Preston Borders will never walk free. You can check back after the hearing Wednesday, and the Times will be running a story that says so.”

Bosch checked the faces in the room. There were a few nods of approval, but for the most part the investigators in the room gave no indication whether they believed him or not. It was what he had expected.

“Okay, then,” he said. “The sooner we get to this, the sooner I get to a shower. How do you want to start?”

He looked down the length of the table to Hovan. It was his agency’s RV. Bosch figured that made him the man in charge.

“We’ll have questions, but I think you can start anywhere you want,” Hovan said. “Why don’t you give us the headlines and go from there?”

Bosch nodded.

“Well, the big headline is that there is no Santos anymore,” he said. “The Russians threw him out of a plane into the Salton Sea. One of them told me that right before they were going to do the same to me.”

“Why would he tell you that?” asked an agent Bosch didn’t know. “Russians don’t usually break so easy.”

“He didn’t break,” Bosch said. “He was about to kill me. He had the upper hand and wanted to gloat, I guess. He also indicated that he and his partner, the one who jumped, killed the father and son in the pharmacy Monday.”

“Indicated?” Lourdes said.

“Yes, indicated,” Bosch said. “I asked him straight out if they had killed the father and son. He didn’t deny it. He said that they got what they deserved. He was smiling when he said it. But soon after that, things changed and I got the upper hand. That’s when I killed him.”

30

They kept him for three hours in the mobile command post, at least half of that time spent going into great detail about what had happened that morning on the plane. All parties except for Edgar, the medical board investigator, had stakes in the death investigation and had questions to cover. Because the actual killing of the Russian occurred in the air over the Salton Sea, it became a jurisdictional dilemma. It was agreed that the National Transportation Safety Board would be apprised of the death, but the LAPD would handle the lead because the plane with the body on board touched land at Whiteman Airport in the city of Los Angeles.

The session in the command post was followed by a two-hour walk-through in the constricted confines of the plane, during which Bosch tried to show the investigators what he had been talking about for the previous three hours. It was agreed at the end that Bosch would make himself available later in the week for follow-up questions from all agencies. He was released at about the same time as the body of the Russian he had referred to as Ivan was removed from the plane and transported to the Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy.

Meanwhile, he was told, the DEA was putting together a raid team to hit the encampment near Slab City and gather up the remaining players in the drug operation. It was decided that a media blackout would be kept tight on the case until that raid had concluded.

Bosch was given a ride back to the SFPD station by Lourdes. He had left his Jeep there as well as his real ID and cell phone. She also had to collect his bloody clothes as evidence in the use of the deadly force investigation. He lowered the window as they drove because he couldn’t stand his own stink.

“You going to talk to Mrs. Esquivel about all of this?” he asked.

“I think we should wait until we get the all clear from the DEA,” Lourdes said. “You want to go with me?”

“Nah. She’ll be more comfortable with you and speaking Spanish. It’s your case.”

“Yeah, but you cleared it.”

“I won’t feel certain of that until they find Igor.”

“Right, well, more salt, more buoyancy. They’ll find him one way or the other.”

She knew who both Ivan and Igor were from the debriefing. Assigning names to the various principals had made it easier to tell the story, but the truth was, no one knew the real names of any of the individuals. Bosch thought about that and remembered the woman with the stars on her hand, another person he didn’t have a real name for.

“What happened with the woman Edgar and Hovan popped at the pharmacy on Saturday?”

“She got booked and sent to Van Nuys.”

The SFPD’s jail was not used for holding female arrestees. They were transported to the Van Nuys jail, which was operated by the LAPD and had a female ward as well as a detox center.

“Did you happen to get her name?”

“Uh, yeah, I did. It was... what was it?... Elizabeth something. Clayburgh or Clayton, one of those. I’ll remember in a sec.”

“Was she cooperative?”

“You mean like was she thanking us for pulling her out of the virtual slavery you described in the debrief? No, Harry, she didn’t mention it. She was pretty pissed off, in fact, that she was under arrest and not going to be able to get her next fix in jail.”

“You don’t sound like you have a lot of sympathy.”

“I do to an extent. I’ve dealt with addicts all my life, including in my own family, and it’s hard to balance sympathy for them with the damage they do to their families and others.”

Bosch nodded. She had a point. But he could tell she was also upset about something else.

“You think I planted evidence in that case thirty years ago?”

“What? Why are you bringing that up?”

“’Cause I can tell I’ve got people upset all around me. If it’s that case, then you don’t have to worry. The paper makes it look bad, I know, but it’s not going to stick. It’s a frame.”

“You’re being framed?”

The skepticism in her voice began to offend Bosch but he tried to keep it in check.

“That’s right and it will all come out at the hearing,” he said.

“Good. I hope so.”

They got to the station and parked in the side lot. Bosch went into the new jail, where he took off his clothes in front of the duty officer and dropped them all into a cardboard box. While the officer took the box out to Lourdes to process, Bosch went into the jail shower and stood under the lukewarm spray for twenty-five minutes, repeatedly using the jail’s industrial-strength antibacterial soap on every part of his body.

When he was clean and dry, he was given a pair of jail pants and a golf shirt left over from the department’s annual fund-raiser tournament. There had been blood on his shoes, so they had gone into the box as well and were replaced with a pair of paper jail slippers.

Bosch didn’t care how he looked. He was clean and felt human again. He went to the detective bureau to get the key to his office in the old jail — he had left his car keys, phone, and real ID there. Lourdes was in the war room. She had spread butcher paper on the meeting-and-eating table and was taking photos of the individual pieces of Bosch’s clothing before bagging each item individually in a plastic evidence bag.

“You cleaned up nice,” she said.

“Yeah, ready to take up golf for the cause,” he said. “I’m sorry you got stuck with the nasty job.”

“Lot of blood.”

“Yeah, I went for his bleeders.”

She looked up at him. Her face told him that she understood how close he had come to being killed.

“So you still have the key I gave you to the old jail.”

“Yeah, in my top drawer. You taking off?”

“Yeah, I want to call my lawyer and my daughter and then I want to sleep for about twenty hours.”

“We have follow-up on all of this tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I was just kidding about the twenty hours. I just need to get some sleep.”

“Okay, then I’ll see you tomorrow, Harry.”

“Right, see you.”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks, Bella.”

Bosch crossed the street, ducked through the Public Works yard, and entered the old jail. When he got to his makeshift desk, he saw that someone — probably Lourdes — had used the key to enter the cell and drop off a stamped letter addressed to him at the police department. Bosch decided to get to it later. He folded it and was about to put it in his back pocket when he realized that his jail pants had no pockets. He tucked it into the waistband, then gathered his things and headed back out, locking the doors behind him.

His phone screen said he had seventeen messages. He waited until he got on the freeway heading south and then played them over the phone’s speaker as he drove.

Friday, 1:38 p.m.: Just wanted you to know that we are locked and loaded. Request-to-be-heard motion filed, salvos fired. And word to the wise, my brother? Be prepared; there could be some major pushback on this. Okay, later, talk next week. Oh, and by the way, this is your attorney and it’s Friday afternoon. I know you are off doin’ secret cop stuff somewhere. Give a call if you need to over the weekend.

Friday, 3:16 p.m.: Harry, it’s Lucy, call me back. It’s important.

Friday, 4:22 p.m.: Detective Bosch, Alex Kennedy. I need you to give me a call as soon as possible. Thank you.

Friday, 4:38 p.m.: Harry, Lucy again, what the fuck did you do? I was trying to watch out for you and now you do this? You just — Kennedy is out for blood now. Call me back.

Friday, 5:51 p.m.: Shit, Harry, this is your old partner, remember me? I had your back and you had mine. Kennedy wants to blow you out of the water. I’m trying to contain this but I’m not sure he’s listening to me. You gotta call me back and you have to tell me what you have. I want the truth just as much as you do.

Friday, 7:02 p.m.: Hello, Detective Bosch, this is David Ramsey at the Los Angeles Times. Sorry to call you on your personal line but I am working on a story for this weekend about the Preston Borders case. I would love to have your response to some of the things that have come up in court documents. I’ll be at this number all night. Thank you.

Saturday, 8:01 a.m.: You don’t miss a trick, do you? I thought if I called from a strange number, you might pick up and talk to your old partner. I don’t understand you, Harry. But my hands are tied now. The Times is running with this. Supposedly it’s hitting the website today and in the paper tomorrow. I didn’t want this and if you had just talked to me, I think it could have been avoided. Just remember, I tried.

Saturday, 10:04 a.m.: Detective Bosch, this is David Ramsey from the Times again. I really want to get your side of things on this story. Court documents allege that you planted key evidence that tied Preston Borders to the murder of Danielle Skyler in nineteen eighty-seven. I really need you to respond to that. It’s in documents filed by the D.A.’s Office so it’s fair game to report but I would want your side of it. I’m at this number all day.

Saturday, 11:35 a.m.: Hey, Dad, just wanted to say hi and see what you’re up to this weekend. I was thinking of coming up today. Okay, love you.

Saturday, 2:12 p.m.: Dad, oh Dad, hello, this is your daughter. Remember me? Are you there? My window for coming up is closing. Call me back.

Saturday, 3:00 p.m.: David Ramsey again. We aren’t holding the story any longer, Detective Bosch. I’ve been to your house, I’ve called all your numbers. No response. It’s been almost twenty-four hours. If I don’t hear back from you in the next couple of hours, then my editors say we go with the story without your response. We will, however, out of fairness, document our many efforts to reach you. Thank you. I hope you will call back.

Saturday, 7:49 p.m.: Haller here. Have you seen the fucking Times online? I knew there would be pushback but this is beyond the pale. They didn’t even call me. They make no mention of our petition or our side of it. This is what you call a hit job. This asshole Kennedy is trying to stack the deck. Well, he just poked the wrong fucking beehive. I’m going to eat his lunch. Call me, bro, so we can put our heads together on this.

Saturday, 9:58 p.m.: Dad, now I’m getting worried. You’re not answering either phone and I’m getting scared. I called Uncle Mickey and Lucy and both said they’ve been trying to get you, too. Mickey said you told him you were going off the grid. I don’t know what’s going on but call me back. Please, Dad.

Sunday, 9:16 a.m.: Dad, I’m really scared. I’m coming up there.

Sunday, 11:11 a.m.: Call me as soon as you get this, my brudder. We need an attorney-client meeting. I have a few ideas about how to bolster our case and go right at these fucks. Call me.

Sunday, 12:42 p.m.: Dad, I saw the paper and I know what’s going on. Nothing is that bad. It doesn’t mean a thing. You have to come home. Right now. I’m here. Come home.

Sunday, 2:13 p.m.: Call your attorney. I’m waiting.

Bosch was overcome by the emotion he heard in his daughter’s voice. She was holding back tears, being strong for him. She thought the worst. That the professional humiliation and suspicion promulgated by the Times story had caused him to disappear or worse. In that moment, he vowed to make those behind the story pay for their crime against his daughter.

His first call was to her.

“Dad! Where are you?”

“I’m so sorry, baby. I haven’t had my phone. I’ve been working and—”

“How could you not get all those messages? Oh my god, I thought you were — I don’t know, I thought you did something.”

“No, they’re wrong. The paper’s wrong and the D.A.’s wrong and your uncle and I are going to show it in court this week. I promise you I did nothing wrong, and no matter what, I would not do anything to myself. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. My mind just went crazy when I couldn’t reach you.”

“I went undercover for a couple days on a case and I—”

“What? You went undercover? That’s crazy.”

“I didn’t want to tell you ahead of time because you’d worry. But I didn’t have my phone. I couldn’t carry it. Anyway, where are you? Are you still at the house?”

“Yes, I’m here. There was a business card in the door from the reporter who wrote that story.”

“Yeah, he was trying to call me too. He got used. I’ll deal with that later. I’m on my way home. Will you wait for me?”

“Of course. I’m here.”

“Okay. I gotta go and make some other calls. I’ll be there in less than thirty.”

“Okay, Dad. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Bosch disconnected. He took a deep breath and then hit the heel of his palm hard on the steering wheel. The sins of the father, he thought. His life and his world had once again clobbered his daughter. If he vowed to make those who did this pay, didn’t that include himself?

He called Haller back next.

“Bosch! Where you been, man?”

“Out of the loop, obviously. I was without a phone. And of course the shit hit the fan.”

“I’ll say. I think the whole thing is actionable. Careless, reckless, you name it.”

“You talking about the newspaper?”

“Yeah, the Times. Let’s go at them. Defamation of character.”

“Forget it. That guy Ramsey was used. I want Kennedy and Cronyn. Maddie couldn’t reach me either. She thought I rolled up in a ball somewhere and killed myself.”

“I know. She called me. I didn’t know what to tell her. You didn’t tell me.”

“Cronyn and Kennedy are going to pay for this. Somehow, some way.”

“Wednesday, baby. We take them down Wednesday.”

“I’m not so sure about relying on a judge to do the right thing.”

“Well, we gotta meet. What are you doing right now?”

“I’m heading home and I have to spend some time with my daughter.”

“Okay, call me. I’m free tonight if you want to get together. Otherwise, what’s your schedule tomorrow?”

“I can meet in the morning.”

“Why don’t we just do that? You take Maddie to dinner and we meet tomorrow. Du-par’s at eight?”

“Which one?”

“You pick.”

Haller lived just off the edge of Laurel Canyon, which put him within striking distance of the Du-par’s locations in Studio City and the farmers’ market in Hollywood.

“Let’s do Studio City in case they need me up at the PD tomorrow morning for follow-ups.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Listen, before you go. I got calls from you, Maddie, Kennedy, and the reporter. I also heard from Lucy Soto. Sounded to me like she saw the bullshit in what Kennedy was doing and isn’t happy about it. I think she could be on our side on this. If we show her what we’ve got, we could have somebody on the inside working for us.”

There was silence.

“You there, Haller?”

“I’m here. I’m just thinking. Let’s wait on that till tomorrow. We’ll figure it out over pancakes.”

“All right.”

Bosch disconnected. He started to even out, now that he had spoken to his daughter and his lawyer. There was a good short-term plan in place. He thought about Lucy Soto and whether he should reach out to her on his own and under the radar. They had only been partners for a brief period during his last year on the job for the LAPD, but unlike in his partnership with Edgar, they had gotten to the point of deep trust. He could blow through an intersection on her “clear” without hesitation. Any day.

His gut told him that hadn’t changed.

31

Maddie came charging out of her room as soon as she heard the front door close. She grabbed Bosch in a desperate embrace that made him feel like he was on top and at the bottom of the world at the same time.

“Everything’s all right,” he said.

He held her head against his heart, then he let her go. She stepped back and appraised him while he did the same to her. He could see dried tracks from tears on her face. She also somehow seemed more grown-up since the last time he had seen her. Bosch didn’t know if that had come in the past twenty-four hours or was just the natural course of things. It had been a month since they had been together and she looked taller and thinner and had changed her sandy-blond hair into a shorter, layered cut. There was something professional about it.

“OMG, what are you wearing?” she exclaimed.

Bosch looked down at himself. The jail pants and paper slippers were indeed shocking.

“Uh, yeah, well, it’s a long story,” he said. “They had to take my clothes for evidence and this is all they had.”

“Why would your clothes be evidence?” she asked.

“Well, that’s the part that’s a long story. What are you doing about dinner? You staying up here or do you have to go back? I know you’ve got your trip to IB, right?”

“We’re not leaving till tomorrow but it’s my Sunday to cook.”

Bosch knew that his daughter and her three roommates had a Sunday-evening tradition of rotating cooking duties — the only night of the week they had promised to always eat together. Maddie was up and couldn’t let the others down.

“But I want to hear the story, Dad,” she said. “I’ve been waiting here all day and deserve to hear it.”

Bosch nodded. She was right.

“Okay, give me five minutes to change into my own stuff,” he said. “I don’t like looking like a prisoner.”

He headed down the hall to his room, calling back to her a request that she water the plants. Throughout her high school years, she had insisted on buying several potted plants for the back deck. She had dutifully maintained them with a watering cycle but then went off to college, and Bosch was left holding the responsibility, which proved difficult for a man with his schedule.

“Already did,” she called back down the hall to him. “I was so nervous I did it twice!”

“Good!” he called down the hall. “I won’t have to worry about it for a week.”

It felt good to get out of the jail pants and slippers. As he did so, the envelope that had been mailed to him at the police station fell to the floor. Bosch put it on the bed table to open and read later. Before putting on his own clothes, he slipped into the bathroom and shaved five days of stubble off his face. He pulled on blue jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a pair of black running shoes. On his way back up the hall, he stopped in the kitchen to put the jail pants and slippers in the trash can under the sink.

He then went to the refrigerator for a beer. But there was none and his leaning down to look into the far recesses of the box didn’t change that.

He straightened up and looked at the bottle of bourbon on top of the refrigerator. He decided against it, even though he could have used something to help chill things out. Seeing the bottle, however, made him think that he should give what remained of the precious brand to Edgar to thank him for his warning about the plane ride over the Salton Sea.

“Dad?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

He went out to the living room to tell the story. There was no one in the world Bosch trusted more than his daughter. He told her everything, more detail than he had even told the collective in the mobile command post. He felt the details would mean more to her, and at the same time, he knew he was telling her about the dark side of the world. It was a place she had to know about, he believed, no matter where she went with her life. He ended the story with an apology.

“Sorry,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t need to know all of that.”

“No, I did,” she said. “I can’t believe you volunteered for it. You were so lucky. What if you had gotten killed by those guys. I would have been all alone.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I figured you’d be all right. You’re strong. You’re on your own now. I know you have roommates but you’re independent. I thought...”

“Thanks a lot, Dad.”

“Look, I’m sorry. But I wanted to catch these guys. What that kid did, the son, it was noble. When this all comes out, people will probably say he was stupid and naive and didn’t know what he was doing. But they won’t know the truth. He was being noble. And there isn’t a lot of that out there in the world anymore. People lie, the president lies, corporations lie and cheat... The world is ugly and not many people are willing to stand up to it anymore. I didn’t want what this kid did to go by without... I didn’t want them to get away with it, I guess.”

“I understand. Just think of me next time, okay? You’re all I have.”

“Right. I will. You’re all I have too.”

“So now tell me the other story. About what’s in the paper today.”

She held up the business card from David Ramsey she had found left at the front door. It reminded Bosch that he had not read the full Times story. He now told her about the Danielle Skyler case and the move by Preston Borders to get off death row and frame Bosch for planting evidence in the process. This story ran right up until she felt pressed for time, having to drive all the way back to Orange County. She had already decided to pick up dinner on the way instead of cooking it late.

She gave Bosch another long embrace and he walked her out to her car.

“Dad, I want to come up for the hearing on Wednesday,” she said.

Normally Bosch didn’t like her to go to hearings on his cases. But this one would be different because it would feel like he was on trial. He could use all the moral support he could get.

“What about Imperial Beach?” he asked.

“I’ll just come back early,” she said. “I’ll take the train up.”

She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and opened an app.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s the Metrolink app. You keep saying you’re going to take the train down to see me. You gotta get the app. There’s a six thirty I could take up, gets to Union Station at eight twenty.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it says it right—”

“No, I mean about you coming up.”

“Of course. I want to be there for you.”

Bosch hugged her again.

“Okay, I’ll text you the details. I don’t think court starts till about ten. Maybe we do breakfast before — unless I have to meet with your uncle.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

“What are you going to pick up for dinner?”

“I want to get Zankou and bring it down, but then my car will smell like garlic for about a month.”

“That might be worth it.”

Zankou Chicken was a local chain of Armenian fast-food restaurants that had been a favorite takeout source for them over the years.

“Bye, Dad.”

He stayed on the curb until he watched her car make the turn and disappear down the hill. Back in the house, he looked at the business card she’d left on the table and thought about calling Ramsey to set him straight. He decided against it. Ramsey wasn’t his opponent and it would be better not to use the newspaper to let his real opponents know what was coming. The Times reporter would undoubtedly be in court Wednesday and would get the full story then. Bosch just had to nut it out for three days under the shadow the newspaper story had shrouded his life in.

Bosch opened his phone and, after doing some research online to get the number, called the Van Nuys jail and asked for the control officer. He identified himself and said he wanted to set up an interview with a custody on the female tier.

“Can it wait?” the officer asked. “It’s Sunday night and I don’t have people to sit on an interview room.”

“It’s a double homicide,” Bosch said. “I need to talk to her.”

“Okay, what’s the name?”

“Elizabeth Clayburgh.”

Bosch heard him type it into his computer.

“Nope,” the officer said. “We don’t have her.”

“Sorry, I meant Clayton,” Bosch said. “Elizabeth Clayton.”

More typing.

“We don’t have her either,” the officer said. “She R-O-R’ed a couple hours ago.”

Bosch knew that meant she was released on her own recognizance.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You let her go?”

“No choice,” the officer said. “Capacity protocol. Nonviolent offense.”

Countywide, the jail system was overcrowded, and nonviolent offenders were regularly released early from minor sentences or released without having to post bail. Elizabeth Clayton had apparently fallen into the latter category and was released after one day and before she could be placed in a drug rehabilitation unit.

“Wait a minute, wasn’t she in detox?” Bosch asked. “You release early from detox now?”

“I don’t have her on the box as having been in detox,” the officer said. “They have a waiting list in detox, anyway. Sorry, Detective.”

Bosch held his frustration in check and was about to thank the officer and hang up. Then he thought about something else.

“Can you put another name in, just to see if you have him?”

“Give it to me.”

“Male, white, last name Brody. I don’t have a first handy.”

“Well, that might be a — no, I found him. James Brody, also arrested Saturday, same charge — prescription fraud. Yeah, he got kicked too.”

“Same time as Clayton?”

“No, earlier. By a couple hours. Most violent offenders are male and that’s who we need to make room for. So the male NVs get out sooner than the ladies.”

Bosch thanked the officer and disconnected. Five minutes later he was in his Jeep, following the winding road down to the 101. He took the freeway north, back into the Valley, and over to Van Nuys. He made a call along the way to Cisco, attempting to make arrangements for Elizabeth Clayton, if he could find her.

The jail from which Clayton and Brody had been released was located on the top floor of the LAPD’s Valley Bureau Headquarters, which anchored a mini — civic center, where local courthouses, a library, and satellite city hall and federal buildings were located at the edges of a public plaza.

Bosch parked on Van Nuys Boulevard at the western end of the plaza and started walking toward the Valley Bureau at the far end of the concrete-and-tree-lined concourse. It was a Sunday evening and the plaza was largely deserted except for the homeless strays who inhabited every parcel of public property in the city. Bosch could not remember the last time he had been in the plaza but thought it had been at least a couple of years. The bushes and shade trees around the contours of the buildings had all been cut back. Many had been replaced with palm trees that offered no cover. He knew this was a disguised effort to keep to a minimum the homeless population who were living in the plaza.

He checked every corner he passed and every homeless face that looked at him. He did not see Clayton or Brody. The library — usually a bastion for those with nowhere to go — was closed. Bosch covered one side of the plaza, until he got to the Valley Bureau building and then turned back and went down the other side. His search turned up nothing and he returned to his car.

Sitting behind the wheel, he thought about things and then called the number Jerry Edgar had given him when Bosch and Lourdes had visited his office. Edgar answered and it sounded like he had been asleep.

“Jerry, it’s Harry. You up?”

“Just taking a nap. I bet you took a long one.”

“Yeah, sort of, but I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“The woman you and Hovan arrested at the pharmacy yesterday with the others?”

“Yeah, with the shaved head.”

“Exactly. I wanted to talk to her. Bella said she got booked into Van Nuys. I just went there and they kicked her loose a couple hours ago.”

“Like I told you, Harry, this is not a high-priority crime. I don’t know what it will take. Maybe if a million people die from this, people will wake up and pay attention.”

“Right, I know. I got a question. Where would she go? She’s put out on the street in Van Nuys, needs a hit pretty bad by now, and she’s on foot.”

“Shit, man, I have no idea where she—”

“Did you book her?”

“Yeah, I did. Me and Hovan booked them all.”

“Did you go through her stuff? What did she have?”

“She had a fake ID, Harry. There was nothing there.”

“Right, right, I forgot. Shit.”

There was a pause before Edgar finally spoke.

“What do you need her for? She’s a lifer, man, I could tell.”

“It’s not like that. One of the guys you busted her with, Brody — he was kicked too.”

“He’s the guy you wanted out of the picture.”

“Yeah, because he had it in for me and for her. Now today I find out he got released a couple hours ahead of her from the same jail. If she runs into him on the street, he’s gonna either hurt her because of me or find a way to use her to get his next hit. Either way, I can’t let that happen.”

Bosch knew that it was not unusual in the drug underworld for a male user to connect with a female in an alliance where one could provide protection while the other procured drugs through sexual barter. Sometimes the alliance wasn’t voluntary on the woman’s part.

“Fuck, Harry, I don’t know,” Edgar said. “Where are you?”

“The Van Nuys jail,” Bosch said. “I looked around, she’s not here.”

There was a longer pause this time before Edgar broke the silence.

“Harry, what’s going on? I mean, it’s been a while, but I remember Eleanor.”

Bosch’s ex-wife and the mother of his daughter. Now deceased. Bosch had forgotten that he and Edgar were partners when he met her and later when he married her. Edgar had picked up on the resemblance in Elizabeth Clayton.

“Look, it’s not that,” Bosch said. “She did me a solid when I was under. I owe her and now she’s out here somewhere on the street. And that guy Brody is too.”

Edgar said nothing, his silence making it clear he was not convinced.

“I gotta go,” Bosch said. “If you think of something, call me back, partner.”

Bosch disconnected.

32

Bosch started driving north on Van Nuys Boulevard, looking at every pedestrian and in every recess behind the facade of every store and business. He knew it was a needle-in-a-haystack proposition but he had no other ideas. He considered calling the Van Nuys Division watch office to ask the lieutenant to put a flag out to all patrol units, but he knew that on a Sunday evening the number of cars on the street would be low and the request from the SFPD would not be treated with any kind of enthusiasm. It could also blow back on him with Chief Valdez asking the same sort of questions Edgar had asked.

So he continued the solo search, turning around at Roscoe and making his way south. He was twenty minutes into it when he got a call back from Edgar.

“Harry, you still up there looking for her?”

“Yeah, you got something?”

“Look, man, I’m sorry about my assumptions from before, okay? I’m sure you have good reason to—”

“Jerry, you have something for me, or are you just calling to shoot the breeze? Because I don’t—”

“I have something, okay? I have something.”

“Then give it to me.”

Bosch pulled to the curb to listen and possibly take notes.

“We have something at the office we call the hot one hundred,” Edgar said. “These are doctors who are on our radar as likely being involved with cappers and shady scrip writing. Doctors we’re building cases on.”

“Was Efram Herrera on there?”

“Not yet, because I hadn’t taken up that complaint, remember?”

“Right.”

“Anyway, I just called one of my colleagues and asked about Van Nuys. She told me there’s a hot one hundred guy up there who runs a clinic on Sherman Way. It’s supposedly seven days a week and some of the intel on him is that if you’re a woman and need a scrip, he is more than likely going to offer a discount for special favors, if you know what I mean. This doctor’s in his seventies, but—”

“What’s the name of the clinic?”

“Sherman Health and Med, at Sherman Way and Kester. The doctor’s name is Ali Rohat. People call him Chemical Ali because he comes through with the meds — the chems — and he’s one-stop shopping. Known to prescribe and fill. If your girl is plugged into the scene up there at all, she’d know about him.”

“She’s not my girl, but I appreciate it, Jerry.”

“I was joking, man. Jesus. Still Hard-Ass Harry, after all these years.”

“That’s right. This guy Chemical Ali, how come he wasn’t shut down with all that you’re saying?”

“Like I told you before, Harry, these things are tough. Medical bureaucracy, Sacramento bureaucracy... We’ll shut him down eventually.”

“Okay, thanks for your help. Anything else comes to mind, hit me back.”

Bosch disconnected and pulled away from the curb. He made a U-turn and took Van Nuys back up to Sherman Way, where he turned west. He drove through the intersection at Kester without seeing the clinic. He continued a few blocks and then turned around.

On the second go-by he saw the clinic in the inside corner of the small shopping plaza. A liquor store and a pizza shop were open as well, and the parking lot was half-filled with cars. Bosch pulled down the sun visor to give him a bit of a visual blind and pulled in. He cruised through the lot, keeping an eye on the clinic. There was a pass-through to either a rear alley or another parking lot. The clinic’s entrance was in this passage, which gave it visual protection. At a quick glance, he saw people milling about outside the door to the clinic but he could not identify anyone.

He turned out of the lot and went down a block before finding an alley that would take him to the rear of the shopping plaza. He cruised by and saw a line of head-in parking spaces behind the plaza’s stores. Parked first in line by the pass-through was a Mercedes-Benz coupe with a vanity plate that said DR ALI. As he went by, he got a better look at the people congregating by the clinic door. Three men, none of whom Bosch recognized, other than that they had the haggard and desperate look of addicts. He almost smiled when he saw one of them was wearing a knee brace similar to the one he had employed.

At Sherman Way he turned right and entered the front lot of the plaza again. He went down the first lane and took a parking place that would allow him to see into the pass-through. The clients were mostly just in silhouette, but he was confident that he would be able to identify a female figure if a woman left the clinic.

Bosch pulled his phone, Googled the name of the clinic, and got a phone number. He called and asked the woman who answered how long the clinic would be open.

“We are closing soon,” she said. “The doctor must leave at eight.”

Bosch thanked her and disconnected. He checked his wrist and realized he had forgotten to put his watch back on after coming in from undercover. He looked at the dash and saw he had twenty minutes until closing time. He settled in and kept his eyes on the clinic’s entrance.

Ten minutes into the surveillance, Bosch’s attention was drawn to his right, to the pizza shop. It appeared to be largely a takeout-and-delivery operation, but two tables were set up on the sidewalk out front. Bosch noticed a man wearing an apron leaning through the front door, gesturing and talking to a man sitting by himself at one of the tables. The seated man was partially hidden from Bosch’s view by a row of potted plants. He would not have even noticed him if the man with the apron had not come to the door.

It looked to Bosch like the aproned man was telling the other man to leave. He was pointing toward the parking lot. Bosch lowered his windows so he might be able to hear the confrontation, but it ended abruptly with the man behind the plants standing up and cursing the pizza man. He then walked out from the seating area and headed down the line of shops toward Sherman Way.

Bosch immediately recognized him. It was Brody.

All at once Bosch felt a charge and a sense of dread. He thought he understood things. Brody knew about Chemical Ali but had no money upon his release from jail and nothing to offer. Brody had followed Elizabeth Clayton from the jail and was watching and waiting for her to emerge with pills in her possession so he could take them and then exact his misguided revenge.

He knew the situation could also be that Clayton and Brody had come to the clinic together and he was simply waiting for her to come out, but from what Bosch knew of her leave-me-alone personality, he didn’t see her as a team player.

Bosch got out of the Jeep, quickly went to the back, and raised the tailgate. Because he was not assigned a vehicle at SFPD, he carried his work kit in the back of his own car. This was a duffel bag filled with personal equipment he might need in any circumstance that might come up during an investigation. He looked back over his shoulder and caught sight of Brody making it to the end of the plaza and turning the corner heading west. Bosch knew that would take him to the back alley and possibly down to the pass-through, where Clayton would emerge if she was in the clinic.

Bosch quickly unzipped the go bag and rummaged through it. He found a Dodgers baseball hat and, putting it on, pulled the brim down over his forehead. Then he found the plastic zip ties and took two. He coiled them so they would fit in the back pocket of his jeans. He zipped the bag closed and dropped the tailgate. He was ready.

After checking the corner of the plaza for any sign of Clayton, Bosch headed to the end of the plaza where he had last seen Brody. He quickly covered the distance and turned onto the sidewalk fronting Sherman Way. There was no sign of Brody, and that confirmed for Bosch that he had slipped down the alley behind the plaza. He moved quickly to the alley entrance and made the turn as well.

Again, there was no sign of the man. The alley was much darker than when Bosch had driven through earlier. The dimming light of dusk was reduced to shadow because of the structures on either side of the alley. Bosch proceeded cautiously, trying to hold to the shadows himself as he moved along.

“Where’s your cane now, shitbird?”

Bosch turned at the sound of the voice in time to see Brody stepping out from between two Dumpsters and swinging a broomstick. Bosch was able to cock his left arm like a chicken wing, raise it, and take the main force of the blow across the forearm.

The impact sent a jolt of pain shooting up Bosch’s arm. But it only served to sharpen his response. Rather than step back, Bosch stepped into Brody, whose momentum was carrying him forward. He brought his knee up hard into Brody’s crotch and heard the air blast out of him. The broomstick clattered to the asphalt and Brody doubled over. Bosch grabbed the back of his shirt, pulled it up over his head and shoulders, and swung him around 180 degrees before releasing him headfirst into the side of one of the Dumpsters. Brody hit and went down with a groan.

Bosch moved in. Because Brody’s arms and wrists were tangled in the shirt, Bosch went to his ankles.

“Nice move,” Bosch said. “Warning me like that. Smart.”

Bosch pulled the zip ties out of his back pocket and secured Brody’s ankles tightly, using both plastic strips to double down on the bindings. Of course, Brody could easily work his hands free of the shirt, Bosch knew, but then he would be faced with the dilemma of how to free his feet. He would have to pogo out of the alley and find someone willing to cut him loose. It would slow him down long enough for Bosch to do what he needed to do.

The quickest way to the clinic was to continue down the alley. As Bosch went along, he noticed two figures moving away in the darkness from the pass-through. It was too dark for him to determine their gender, so he picked up his pace to a trot and soon he got close enough to see they were men.

Bosch moved by the Mercedes, cut into the pass-through, and went to the clinic door. It was locked. He rapped hard on the glass with his fist. He noticed an intercom box mounted on the door’s frame and pushed the button three times.

A few moments later, a woman’s voice sounded from the box. Bosch recognized it from the call he had made to the clinic earlier.

“We’re closed. I’m sorry.”

Bosch pushed the button to respond.

“Police. Open the door.”

There was no response. Then a man’s voice with a Middle Eastern accent came from the box.

“Do you have a warrant?”

“I just want to talk, Doctor. Open up.”

“Not without a warrant. You need a warrant.”

“Okay, Doc. Then what I’m going to do is wait for you at your Mercedes in the alley. I’ve got all night.”

Bosch waited. Ten seconds went by while the doctor apparently considered his options. The door was then opened by a woman wearing nursing scrubs. Behind her stood a man with white hair who Bosch assumed was Dr. Rohat.

The woman pushed her way through the door and past Bosch.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

“I’m going home,” the woman said.

She kept going toward the alley.

“We are closed,” the man said. “Her work is done today.”

Bosch looked at him.

“You’re Chemical Ali?”

“What?” the man exclaimed indignantly. “I am Dr. Rohat.”

He gestured toward a wall behind a reception counter, where there were several framed diplomas with writing too small to read.

Bosch couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that Clayton was in the clinic. Brody could have been waiting and watching for any frail-looking patient to rip off. But the intel from Edgar about Rohat’s proclivities made him feel like he was on firm ground.

“Elizabeth Clayton, where is she?” Bosch asked.

Rohat shook his head.

“I do not know that name,” he said.

“Sure you do,” Bosch said. “Is she in there?”

“There is no one here. We are closed.”

“Bullshit. You would’ve walked out with the nurse if you were done here. Do I have to go through this whole place? Where is she?”

“We are closed.”

The sound of something clattering to the floor came from behind the closed door behind the reception counter. Bosch immediately pushed by Rohat and headed toward the door, assuming it led to the rear offices and exam rooms.

“All right!” Rohat exclaimed. “I have a patient in room three. She is resting and should not be disturbed. She is sick.”

Bosch didn’t break stride. He went through the door, Rohat calling after him.

“Wait! You can’t go in there.”

There were no markings on any of the doors that lined the rear hallway. Bosch went to the third door on the left and flung it open. It was a storage room that looked like it was managed by a hoarder. There was junk piled upon junk. Bicycles, TVs, computer equipment. Bosch assumed these were the things Rohat took in trade for prescriptions and drugs. He left the door open and went across the hall to the door directly opposite.

Elizabeth Clayton was in the room. She was sitting on an examination table, a paper drape sheet wrapped around her shoulders and covering most of her body, her bare legs dangling off the table. On the floor was the source of the sound Bosch had heard. A stainless-steel cup lying in a pool of spilled water.

Clayton was naked beneath the drape sheet and one of her breasts was exposed, though she seemed unaware of it. The skin of her breast was a shocking white against her chest and neck, which had been burned dark brown by so many days spent in the desert sun. Her hair was bedraggled and she was in a daze. She did not even look up as Bosch entered. She was staring at the tattoo of the stars on her hand.

“Elizabeth!”

She slowly raised her chin as Bosch came to her. She dropped her hand into her lap, and her eyes held on his. He saw recognition in them but no understanding of where she knew him from.

“I’m going to take care of you. How much did he give you?”

He started to pull the sheet around her to cover her nakedness. Her body was emaciated and he wanted to look away but didn’t. She held one of her hands between her legs, not in a show of modesty but in what Bosch interpreted was a meager protective gesture.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “You remember me? I’m here to help.”

He got no response.

“Can you get up? Can you get dressed?”

Rohat came into the room behind him.

“You are not allowed in here! She is a patient and what you—”

“What did you give her?”

Bosch turned on him.

“I don’t discuss patient care with—”

Bosch lunged at him and drove him backward into the wall. Ali’s head banged against a print showing the vital organs of the human body. Bosch gripped the lapels of his white lab coat and pushed hard against him.

“You’re not a doctor, you’re a monster. And I don’t care how old you are, I will beat you to death in this room if you don’t answer my questions. How much did you give her?”

Bosch could see real fear in Rohat’s eyes now.

“I prescribed two eighty-milligram oxycodone pills for pain. It is time-release and to be taken separately, but when I was not in the room, she crushed and snorted them both. This tripped her into an overdose. It is not my fault.”

“Bullshit, not your fault. How long ago?”

“Two hours. I am treating her with naloxone and she’ll be fine, as you can see by her sitting up.”

“And what did you do to her while she was out? You fuck her, you piece of shit?”

“I did not.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that when I take her to the rape center.”

“We had sex before, yes. She agreed. It was completely consensual.”

“Fuck you, consensual. You’re going to go to jail.”

Bosch’s anger overcame him, and he swung Rohat away from the wall so that when he punched him he’d have the satisfaction of seeing Rohat’s head snap back before he dropped like a wet blanket. Bosch pulled his left arm back to deliver the blow. But before he brought his fist forward, there was a loud beep from the intercom box on the wall next to the door.

Bosch hesitated. That gave Rohat time to bring his hands up to block or at least slow down the coming impact.

“Please,” the doctor begged.

“Hey, I know you,” Elizabeth said.

Bosch dropped his left and used his right to shove Rohat toward the intercom.

“Tell them to get lost.”

Rohat pushed the intercom button.

“We are closed, sorry.”

He looked back at Bosch for approval. Then a voice Bosch recognized came through the intercom.

“Jerry Edgar, Medical Board of California. Open up.”

Bosch nodded. His old partner had come through.

“Go let him in,” he said.

33

Edgar came into the examination room as Bosch was helping Elizabeth get dressed.

“Harry, I saw your car out there. I thought maybe you needed help.”

“I do, partner. Help me get her dressed. I have to get her out of here.”

“We should call an ambulance or something. This is crazy.”

“Just hold her up. She’s coming out of it.”

Bosch was trying to pull her blue jeans up her rail-thin legs. He coaxed her into a standing position and then Edgar held her steady as Bosch brought the pants up over the bony points of her hips.

“I wanna leave,” she said.

“That’s exactly what we’re doing, Elizabeth,” Bosch said.

“He’s a mean motherfucker,” she said.

Bosch was about to agree and looked around the room.

“Hey, where’s Rohat?”

Edgar did the same quick survey. Rohat wasn’t in the room.

“I don’t—”

“I’ve got her. Go check.”

Edgar left the room. Bosch turned Elizabeth so her back was to him. He quickly reached down to the pale yellow jacket that was in the pile of her clothes on the floor. He held it around in front of her.

“Can you put this on? We’ll take the rest of your clothes with us.”

She took the jacket and slowly started to put one of her arms into a sleeve. Bosch gently pulled the paper sheet off her shoulders and dropped it to the floor. He saw the full RIP tattoo on the back of her shoulder.

A fifteen-year-old girl, Bosch thought. That gave him a clue and an understanding that made him all the more resolved to stay on this path with Elizabeth.

Operating mechanically, Elizabeth managed to pull the jacket on but fumbled with the zipper. Bosch turned her around and zipped it up. He then gently pushed her back onto the exam table so he could put on her socks and shoes.

Edgar returned from his search for Rohat.

“He’s gone. He must’ve slipped out after he let me in.”

He looked relieved and Bosch realized it had nothing to do with Rohat. It was because Elizabeth was now fully dressed.

“Probably because I told him he was going to jail. Doesn’t matter. We can hook him up later. Let’s get her out of here.”

“To where? No shelter’s going to take her in this condition. We have to go to a hospital, Harry.”

“No, no hospital, and I’m not talking about a shelter. Hold her steady.”

“You can’t be serious, Harry. You’re not taking her home.”

“I’m not taking her home. Let’s get her to the door and then I’ll pull my car up.”

It took almost ten minutes to move Elizabeth through the clinic and out the exit to the passage connecting the front and back of the plaza.

“This way,” Bosch said.

He led her toward the front parking area. Once there, he left her leaning against Edgar and ran across the asphalt to his Jeep. He scanned his surroundings as he went and saw no sign of Brody.

Bosch brought the Jeep up to Edgar and Elizabeth and then hopped out to help get her into the front passenger seat and secure her with the seat belt.

“Harry, where are you going?”

“A treatment center.”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“Harry, what the fuck?”

“Jerry, you gotta trust me. I’m doing what’s best for her, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what the rules are. I am past all of that, okay? What you need to worry about is how to secure these premises now that Chemical Ali is on the run. There are probably enough pills in that clinic to create an army of zombies like her.”

Bosch stepped back, closed the door to the Jeep, and moved around to the driver’s side.

“And that army’s going to be here by sunup.”

As Bosch slipped into the Jeep, he saw Edgar glance back at the entrance to the unlocked clinic. Once inside the car, he checked Elizabeth and saw that she was leaning her head against the window of the passenger-side door and already nodding off.

Bosch pulled away and headed for the parking lot exit. He checked Edgar in the rearview. His former partner was just standing there, watching Bosch drive away.

The good news was that they didn’t have far to go. He got back over to Van Nuys Boulevard and took it north to Roscoe. He turned west at that point and took Roscoe under the 405 freeway and into an industrial neighborhood dominated by the size and smell of the giant Anheuser-Busch brewery, its stacks billowing beer smoke into the night.

Bosch made two wrong turns in the neighborhood before finally finding the place he was looking for. The entrance gate in the metal and barbed-wire fence that surrounded the property was open. There was no sign on the building, not even an address, but the row of six Harleys parked out front was the dead giveaway.

Bosch parked as close as he could to the black door at the center of the structure’s facade. He got out and went around to help Elizabeth. He put his arm across her back and half held her up as they approached the door.

“Come on, Elizabeth, help me here. Walk. You gotta walk.”

The door opened before they got to it.

Cisco stood there.

“How is she?” he asked.

“She was able to get a heavy hit before I could find her,” Bosch said. “She OD’d and then was given Narcan and is coming out of it. Are you ready for her?”

“We’re ready. Let me take her.”

Cisco bent down and simply picked Elizabeth up and carried her inside. Bosch followed and, once past the threshold, saw what was not revealed on the outside — a clubhouse. There were two pool tables in a large room, as well as an unmanned bar, couches, tables, and chairs. Neon signs depicted skulls and motorcycle wheels with halos — the symbols of the Road Saints. A couple of large men with long beards watched Cisco and company parade through.

Bosch followed Cisco down a dimly lit hallway and into a small room that was equally dim and contained only an army cot like the one Bosch had spent the past two nights on in the migrant bus in the desert.

Cisco put Elizabeth down gently on the cot and then took a step back and looked at her skeptically.

“You sure you shouldn’t have taken her to the hospital?” he asked. “We can’t have her croak in here. If she does, she disappears. They aren’t going to call in the coroner, you know what I mean.”

“I know,” Bosch said. “But she’s coming out of it. I think she’ll be okay. The doctor said so.”

“The quack doctor, you mean?”

“He wouldn’t have wanted her dying in his place either.”

“How much did she take?”

“She crushed two eighties.”

Cisco whistled.

“Sounds like she maybe kinda wanted to end things, you know?”

“Maybe, maybe not. So... this is where you did it? This room?”

“Different room, same place. I was nailed in. This one’s got locks on the outside of the door.”

“And she’s safe here?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Okay. I’m going to leave and come back in the morning. Early. I’ll talk to her then. And you’re all set?”

“We’re set. I’ll wait on the Suboxone until you come back and she can decide. Remember, she’s gotta make the call or we’re done here.”

“I know. Just keep an eye on her and I’ll be back.”

“Will do.”

“And thanks.”

“Pay it forward, isn’t that what they say? This is me paying it forward.”

“That’s good.”

Bosch stepped close to the cot and bent over to look down at Elizabeth. She was already asleep but seemed to be breathing normally. He then straightened up and turned toward the door.

“Need me to bring anything when I come back?” he asked.

“Nope,” Cisco said. “Unless you want to bring me back my cane and knee brace, if you’re done with them.”

“Uh, yeah, that might be a problem. Both were seized as evidence in the case.”

“Evidence of what?”

“That’s a long story. But I may have to replace those for you.”

“Forget it. In a way, they were a temptation. Good to be rid of them, I guess.”

“I get that.”

Bosch got back into the Jeep and considered the trek home — at least forty minutes in Sunday-night traffic — and felt so besieged and tired that he knew he could not make it. He thought about how easily Elizabeth had fallen asleep with her head against the glass. He reached down to the seat’s side lever and popped the back rest to its farthest recline angle.

He closed his eyes and was soon dead to the world in a deep sleep.

Eight hours later the unfiltered light of dawn snuck in under Bosch’s eyelids and woke him. He looked around and saw that there was only one motorcycle parked next to the Jeep. The others had somehow left in the night without their pipes penetrating his sleep. It was a testament to his exhaustion.

The one remaining bike had a black fuel tank with orange flames painted on it. Bosch recognized a match to the paint job of the cane Cisco had lent him. It told him that Cisco was still on duty.

After getting his bearings, Bosch unlocked the glove compartment and checked to make sure his gun and badge were still there.

Nothing had been taken. He relocked the compartment, climbed out of the Jeep, and went inside. He saw no one in the front room and proceeded down the hallway toward the rear of the structure. He found Cisco sitting on a cot that had been set up across the door to the room where Bosch had left Elizabeth Clayton almost eight hours before.

Next to the cot there was a short stool used for sitting on while working on a motorcycle engine.

“You’re back.”

“Technically, I never left. How is she?”

“It was a good night — no bumps. She’s been awake now for about an hour and is starting to hit the wall. So you should go in the room and talk to her before she starts chewing her fingernails off.”

“Right.”

Cisco got up to move the cot out of the way.

“Take the stool. Be on her level when you talk.”

Bosch grabbed the stool, turned the lock on the door, and entered the room.

Elizabeth was in a sitting position on her cot, leaning back against the wall, arms folded in front of her chest, showing the early stages of need. She leaned forward when she saw Bosch enter.

“You,” she said. “I thought it was you last night.”

“Yeah, me,” he said.

He put the stool down four feet from the cot and sat down.

“Elizabeth, my name’s Harry. My real name, that is.”

“What the fuck is this? Am I in jail again? Are you a narc?”

“No, you’re not in jail and I’m not a narc. But you can’t leave yet.”

“What are you talking about? I need to go.”

She made a move to get up but Bosch shot up off the stool and put his hands out, ready to push her back down on the cot. She stopped.

“What are you doing to me?”

“I’m trying to help you. You remember what you said to me when I got on the plane the first time? You said, ‘Welcome to hell.’ Well, all of that is gone now. The Russians, the camp down there, the planes, everything. All shut down, the Russians are dead. But you’re still in hell, Elizabeth.”

“I really need to go now.”

“Where? Chemical Ali’s gone. He was shut down last night. There’s nowhere to go. But we can help you here.”

“What do you have? I need it.”

“No, not like that. I mean, really help you. Get you off this addiction and out of this life.”

She shrieked with laughter, a short staccato burst.

“You think you can save me? You think you’re the only one who’s ever tried? Forget it. Fuck you. I can’t be saved. I told you before. I don’t want to be saved.”

“I think you do. Deep down, everybody does.”

“No, please. Just let me go.”

“I know it’s going to be rough. A week in this room, it will probably feel like a year. I’m not going to lie to you about anything.”

Elizabeth raised her hands to her face and started crying. Bosch couldn’t tell whether it was a last-ditch effort to use his sympathy to get out of the room or whether the tears were truly for herself and what she knew lay ahead. Bosch didn’t want her to leave the room but he needed to get her to acknowledge and approve of what was happening.

“There’s a guy sitting outside the door who is here for you. His name’s Cisco. He’s been where you are.”

“Please, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. But you’ve got to want it. Deep down. You have to know that you are in the abyss and that you want to climb out.”

“No,” she moaned.

Bosch now knew the tears were real. Between her fingers he could see true fear in her eyes.

“Has any doctor ever put you on Suboxone? It helps. You still carry the weight of withdrawal, but it helps.”

She shook her head and was back to holding her arms tightly across her chest.

“It will help you. But you have to gut it out and you’ve got to want to.”

“I’m telling you, nothing works. I can’t be saved.”

“Look, I know you lost somebody. You’ve got it written on your skin. I know it can drive you down into a hole. But think of Daisy. Is this the end she would want for you?”

Elizabeth didn’t answer. She brought a hand up to cover her eyes again while she cried.

“Of course it’s not,” Bosch said. “It’s not what she would want.”

“Please,” Elizabeth said. “I want to go now.”

“Elizabeth, just tell me you want this to end. Give me the nod and we’ll get through it.”

“I don’t even know you!” she screamed.

“You’re right,” Bosch said, his voice remaining calm. “But I know there is something better than this for you. Tell me you want it. For Daisy.”

“I want to go.”

“There’s nowhere to go. This is it.”

“Fuck.”

“Stay here, Elizabeth. Say you want to try.”

She stopped hiding behind her hand and dropped it lifelessly into her lap. She looked away from him to her right.

“Come on,” Bosch said. “For Daisy. It’s time.”

Clayton closed her eyes and held them closed as she spoke.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.”

34

Bosch got to his breakfast meeting fifteen minutes late. Haller was in a booth near the back of the restaurant. Bosch slid in across from him, wondering if he could stomach any food. He decided not.

“You’re late and you look like shit,” Haller said.

“Thanks,” Bosch said. “Let’s just say the past seventy-two hours haven’t been the best of my life.”

“Then, good news, my brother. We’re here to plot your rise from the ashes.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You know, a lot has happened in the past seventy-two hours. I wish I had Cisco here to talk about his end of it, but he seems to be off the grid.”

“You can’t fill me in?”

“Of course I can. The main thing is, we have a strong lineup of testimony for Wednesday, as long as we can get our foot in the door. That’ll be the key. The D.A. and Cronyn are going to argue like hell to exclude us from the hearing, but I think we have a strong argument for standing. So I need you to practice your outrage.”

“I don’t need to practice it. And Borders will be there?”

“The judge issued a transfer order. He’s probably coming down in a van as we sit here.”

“Yeah, well, if he’s there and that close to freedom, then I’ll have all the outrage you need.”

Haller nodded. That’s what he wanted to hear.

“Now, as upsetting as that article in the Times was, it’s going to work in our favor,” the lawyer said. “Because that kicks this thing out into the open, and the state’s not going to be able to argue that your professional reputation hasn’t taken a big hit. It’s clear as day, right there in black and white.”

“Good,” Bosch said. “I’m glad that’s backfiring on that asshole Kennedy.”

“Right. Now, we have to be ready for all eventualities. After I make my argument, the judge might want to question you back in chambers. The story yesterday guarantees full media coverage of this, so the judge may want to take you back and hear your side of it before he puts it out in front of the media. You have a problem with that?”

“No, none.”

The waitress came to the table and Bosch ordered coffee. Haller ordered a short stack of pancakes and the waitress left them alone.

“You don’t want to eat?” Haller asked.

“No, not now,” Bosch said. “So what about Spencer, the counter guy? Where’s that gone since I’ve been out of the loop?”

“We put a solid buzz in his ear last night.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I had him hit with a subpoena. It freaked him the fuck out because he didn’t know we were onto where they were hiding his ass.”

“Okay, back up. I’ve been out of the loop since Thursday, you remember? Last I heard, Cisco was on him and saw him meet with Cronyn’s wife in the bookstore parking lot. What happened after that?”

“The next morning, I put Cisco back on him. Cronyn and Cronyn obviously suspected you were up to something and not going to take this lying down. So they tried to stash Spencer until after the hearing so we wouldn’t have him. But fuck that, Cisco and his guys already had him and followed him to the stash house they set up down in Laguna. It was their own weekend house. You should’ve seen the look on Spencer’s face when he got the subpoena.”

“You were there?”

“No, that would have been against the rules, me delivering a subpoena. But I’ve got the next best thing to being there.”

Haller pulled out his phone and continued as he set up the playback of a video.

“I issued a subpoena and faxed it to a P.I. I know down in OC. Lauren Sachs, ex — Orange County sheriff and a real looker. People call her Sexy Sachsy. She does a lot of matrimonial work now — you know, going into bars to see if the husband’s got the wandering eye, that sort of thing. She’s got these glasses with the hidden camera she wears on those jobs, and I told her I wanted a video record of service on this thing. This is what she got.”

Haller turned his phone so Bosch could see it. Harry leaned across the table so he could pick up the audio. On the screen was a door. It was shot through the point of view of Sachs’s video glasses. Bosch saw her arm reach out as she knocked on the door. There was silence but then a shadow could be seen through an ornamental stained-glass square set in the center of the door. Someone was standing silently on the other side.

“Mr. Spencer,” Sachs said. “I need you to open the door, please.”

Her stern tone was met with a long silence.

“Mr. Spencer, I can see you,” Sachs said. “Please open the door.”

“Who are you?” said a voice. “What do you want?”

“I have legal documents for you to sign. From Los Angeles.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your law firm is Cronyn and Cronyn, right? Then these are for you.”

No response. Then a lock could be heard turning, and the door opened three inches. A man looked out with one eye. But enough of his face appeared in the opening for Bosch and anyone else to confirm it was Spencer. Sachs quickly shoved a folded white document through the door. Spencer tried to close it but, unseen in the video, Sachs had put her foot over the threshold. The document got through and Spencer let it fall to the floor in the hallway behind him.

“That is a subpoena demanding your appearance in court this coming Wednesday morning,” Sachs said. “It is all clear in the document you have been served with. If you do not appear, you will be subject to warrant and arrest by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. I’d be there if I were you.”

Spencer’s eyes widened as he realized that his worst nightmare was about to unfold. When he spoke, he stuttered.

“I–I — I’m not Terry Spencer.”

“Well, sir, I never used the name Terry here and the subpoena says ‘Terrence.’ If I were you, I would not try that tack to avoid appearance in court. You have been duly and legally served, sir. I have documented service. To not show up or to claim you have not been served will only anger a Superior Court judge and probably your employer, the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Sachs removed her foot and Spencer closed the door. His shadow remained behind the stained-glass panel. Sachs held at the door for a moment, then reached out and knocked again, this time employing a gentle, almost sympathetic tap.

“A piece of advice, Mr. Spencer? Come with a lawyer. And you should know that using Kathy Cronyn would be a conflict of interest. Her firm represents the interests of Preston Borders, not yours. Have a good day, sir.”

The POV of the video swung 180 degrees as Sachs turned and walked down a stone pathway to a waiting car. The location was clearly the hills of Laguna. and Bosch could see the cobalt blue ocean over the roofline of the house across the street.

The video ended and Haller took his phone back. He looked at Bosch with a smile.

“Pretty neat, huh?” he said. “I think we teed up Mr. Spencer pretty good.”

“What do you think he’ll do?”

“I’m hoping he shows up. I told her to say that part about angering the judge and his employer. Maybe that will make him show.”

“Did you tell her to suggest he bring a lawyer? A lawyer might tell him to take the fifth.”

“Maybe. But I thought it was worth the risk. We need him to cut the Cronyns loose. The hope is he won’t let them know what’s going on.”

“I get that, but if he takes the fifth, we’ll never know how he played the evidence and got into that box.”

“Some secrets you live with if you win your case. Know what I mean?”

“I guess. What else have we got?”

“Well, that’s where I need you, broheim. Cisco is at large — I hope he hasn’t slipped up — and I need an investigator. I want to locate—”

“Just so you know, Cisco’s been working for me. Since yesterday afternoon. Not on this. On a personal matter.”

Haller laughed, thinking it was a joke.

“I’m serious,” Bosch said.

“A personal matter,” Haller said. “What personal matter?”

“He’s helping a friend of mine and it’s confidential. It’s got nothing to do with this.”

“It has everything to do with this if I don’t have my investigator. What the fuck is going on?”

“Look, it was an emergency and I needed him. He’ll be clear later on and I’ll be able to tell you all about it then. But you’ve got me. You said you want to locate something or somebody. What? Who?”

Haller stared at him for a long moment before answering.

“It’s a who,” he finally said. “I pulled the court file on the original trial and have been reading the transcription. I want to locate Dina Skyler.”

Bosch didn’t need long to place the name. Dina was Danielle Skyler’s younger sister. She was the one who had been scheduled to visit Danielle through the holidays.

The visit never happened but Dina did come out from Hollywood, Florida, during the trial to testify about the plans the sisters had for living together and taking Hollywood, California, by storm. Dina was eighteen months younger and Danielle had been protective of her. While testifying, she spoke of their loving the movie White Christmas because it was a show business story about two sisters. She told the jury that every holiday season, they would put on a rendition of the song “Sisters” for their parents.

Dina was a powerful witness during the penalty stage of the trial. Bosch had always felt that her hour of tearful testimony was what swayed both the jury and then the judge toward the death penalty.

“I’m thinking we might need her for the emotional pull,” Haller said. “I want the judge to know the family still cares, that the victim’s sister is right there in the courtroom, and he had better get this thing right.”

“She was a strong presence at the trial.”

“Did she ever move out here, like she and her sister planned?”

“Yeah, she did. I stayed in touch with her at the beginning and then it kind of tapered off. I think I was a reminder of what had happened to Dani. I got the message and stopped checking on her.”

“Dani?”

“Danielle. People who knew her called her Dani.”

“If you are allowed to testify Wednesday — and I will go apeshit crazy if you’re not — make sure you call her that.”

Bosch didn’t respond. These kind of subtle manipulations were part of Haller’s daily life but they always bothered Bosch, even if they were done in his favor. He felt that if he didn’t condone them from attorneys working against him, he shouldn’t accept them from one working for him.

Haller moved on.

“So, did she make it?” he asked. “I looked her up on IMDB and there was nothing. Did she change her name or something?”

“Uh, I didn’t really track that. I don’t know whether she stayed in the business.”

“Do you think you can find her?”

“If she’s alive, I’ll find her. But if she’s not in L.A., I don’t know about getting her here by Wednesday morning.”

“Right. Just see what you can do. Maybe we get lucky.”

“Maybe. What else?”

“For you, that’s it. I’m going to work here this morning and figure out a case path.”

“What’s that?”

“The one thing we can count on is that our request to intervene on the motion to vacate will draw heavy fire from both the D.A. and Borders. I’ll make an argument and I’ll offer a proffer to the judge — sort of an unofficial look at what we’ll present if granted standing. I’ll run down our witness list and say what each of them is willing to testify to. If we convince the judge, then we’re in and then we kick their asses.”

“Got it. Do you mind if I split? I gotta go in for some follow-up stuff this morning and I want to go to work on finding Dina.”

“No problem, Harry. Go get ’em. But between now and Wednesday get some sleep. I don’t want you coming into that courtroom looking like you’re guilty.”

Taking a last gulp of coffee, Bosch pointed a finger at Haller like a gun and then slid out of the booth. Haller spoke again before he could walk away.

“Hey, Harry, one last thing? You are a damn fine detective, brother, but I want my man Cisco back.”

“Right. I’ll tell him.”

35

Bosch saw a TV truck from one of the Spanish-language stations parked in front of the SFPD headquarters when he drove in. He assumed it was there because of the farmacia murders, but he didn’t think that what had happened over the weekend could be contained for very long, and the Spanish-language media was often ahead of the game when it came to the news in San Fernando.

Before going to his office in the jail across the street, Bosch went in the side door of the station to get more coffee and check on things in the detective bureau. It was a full house this time, with all three detectives in their work pods and even Captain Trevino visible behind his desk through the open door of his office.

Only Bella Lourdes looked up at Bosch’s entrance, and she immediately signaled him over to her cubicle.

He held up a finger, telling her to hold a moment. He turned to the nearby coffee station and quickly poured his second jolt of the day into a cup. He then worked his way around the three-desk module to get to Bella’s spot in the back.

“Morning, Harry.”

“Morning, Bella. What’s up?”

She pointed to her computer screen, where a video was playing. It was obviously taken from a helicopter and shot downward at a water recovery of a body. Two divers were wrestling with the body of a man floating facedown. He was clothed but the T-shirt he wore was torn off and held to his body by the collar only. The rest of it waved in the water like a white flag of surrender. The divers were struggling as they tried to roll the body onto a rescue stretcher attached to a cable extending down from the chopper.

“Salton Sea,” Lourdes said. “This was two hours ago. They spotted the body on a flyover at dawn.”

Bosch leaned down, careful not to spill his coffee, to look more closely at the screen and the body.

“That the second Russian?” Lourdes asked.

Before Bosch could answer, he noticed that they had been joined by Sisto, who was looking over Bella’s other shoulder.

“Clothes look the same,” Bosch said. “From what I can remember. Gotta be him.”

“I asked them to send us a close-up of the face once they have the body at the coroner’s,” Lourdes said.

“That would wrap things up nice,” Sisto said. “On our case at least.”

“Sure would,” Lourdes added. “Why don’t we all go into the war room for updates and to figure out who’s doing what on this today?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sisto said.

Lourdes got up and called to Trevino and Luzon.

Bosch could still smell the breakfast he had missed lingering in the air of the war room. The four detectives took seats around the table and Trevino joined as well. Bosch spoke first.

“Uh, before we start divvying up paperwork and stuff, I’m here to do what I need to do and be available for any follow-ups with other agencies. But as you all know, I have a thing in court Wednesday morning with my reputation and possible future with this department on the line. So I need some prep time for that today. There are some things I have to do, and they can’t wait.”

“Understood, Harry,” Trevino said. “And if there’s anything we can do here to help with that, you let me know. I’ve talked to the chief and, speaking for him and everybody in this room, we are behind you one hundred percent. We know what kind of detective and person you are.”

Bosch could feel his face turning red with embarrassment. In all his years in law enforcement, he had never heard such accolades from a supervisor.

“Thanks, Cap,” he managed to say.

They settled down and got to the business at hand, starting with Lourdes summarizing a report she had gotten that morning from Agent Hovan on the DEA’s activities since the previous afternoon. She reported that the encampment down near Slab City had been raided and shut down. The addicted inhabitants were evacuated to the naval base in San Diego, where they were being medically evaluated before being offered placement in pro bono rehab programs.

Lourdes reported that the DEA had also shut down the clinic in Pacoima and arrested the men operating it, along with the physician of record, Efram Herrera. Among those arrested was the driver of the van. Though he was suspected of being the getaway driver in the farmacia murders, he had so far been charged under federal law only for taking part in a continuing criminal organization.

From there, report writing, follow-up inquiries, and notifications were distributed among the detectives, with Bosch getting a full pass. Lourdes and Luzon were assigned to go to the federal detention facility downtown and take a shot at interviewing the driver about the farmacia shootings, a task all of those in the room predicted would be fruitless. Fifteen minutes later Bosch was crossing the street to the old jail, carrying his third cup of coffee of the day. He noticed that the TV truck was now gone and he guessed that the reporter and crew had been shined on by Chief Valdez. A joint press conference on the case would be held at three p.m. at the station with DEA and state medical board officials. It would be announced that the double murder at La Farmacia Familia had been solved and that the suspects were dead, provided that Bosch was able later to identify the body recovered that morning from the Salton Sea as the second Russian.

Because Bosch had worked undercover on the case, he had an out and would not be required to appear at the press conference.

Besides his coffee, Bosch carried a file containing copies of documents that had been pulled together overnight on the case. The one he was most interested in studying was the Interpol report on the man he had killed on the plane. Once in his cell in the old jail, he sat down behind his makeshift desk and opened the file.

It turned out that the man he killed was not technically Russian, though it was clear from the Interpol data that he grew up speaking the language. Fingerprints had identified him as Dmitri Sluchek, born in 1980 in Minsk, Belarus. He had served time in two different Russian prisons for theft and assault. The Interpol file tracked him until 2008, when he slipped into the United States illegally and never returned. It described him at that time as a “six” who was associated with a Minsk-based subset of the Russian Bratva — meaning “brotherhood,” a general word encompassing all of Russian organized crime. The report stated that a six was a low-level mob associate used on the front line of criminal enterprises. The reference came from the lowest rank in a deck of cards used in a Russian game called The Sixes. Such associates were often used as enforcers until they showed leadership skills and were moved up to the position of bratok, or soldier.

It appeared to Bosch that once he was in the United States, Sluchek started showing leadership skills and had moved Santos out of the picture in the California operation. He assumed that if the man pulled that morning from the Salton Sea was identified, he would have a history similar to Sluchek’s.

The report concluded that Sluchek was most likely still connected to the Bratva and reported to and contributed profits from the California operation to a pakhan, or boss, back in Minsk who had been identified as Oleg Novaschenko.

Bosch closed the file and thought about the chain of events that resulted in the Esquivels’ being executed in their place of business and people like Elizabeth Clayton being literally enslaved in the desert. The seeds were planted thousands of miles away by faceless men of greed and violence. Bosch knew that people like Novaschenko and the men between him and Sluchek would never pay for their crimes here, and that their operation, though down now, would rise again in another spot with other sixes stepping up and showing their leadership skills. The men who fired bullets into José Esquivel Jr. and his father were dead, but the justice gained was small. Bosch could not bring himself to take part in a press conference to laud the quick closing of the case. Some cases were never closed.

Bosch put the file on a shelf behind his chair, where he put the cases he believed he had worked to the extent of his ability and reach.

He turned back to the desk and went to work on the computer, attempting to locate Dina Skyler. Using the department computer to further his own private investigations had been forbidden when he had first come to work in San Fernando. But once he built an impressive record of closing cases, that rule was treated with a wink and a nod. Valdez and Trevino wanted to keep him happy and in the office as often as possible.

The search didn’t take long. Dina was still alive and still in L.A. She had gotten married and her last name was now Rousseau. The address on her current driver’s license placed her on Queens Road above the Sunset Strip.

Bosch decided to go knock on her door.