Harry Bosch 01 - The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  "Now, what's this?" Lewis said.

  "Some kid," Clarke said after looking up from his notes. "He's looking for a stereo to snatch. If he makes a move, what are we going to do? Blow the surveillance to save some asshole's tape deck?"

  "We aren't going to do anything. And he's not going to make a move: He sees the Motorola two-way. He knows it's a cop car. He's backing away now."

  The boy revved the bike and did another two circles in the street. As the bike circled, he kept his eyes on the front of the motel. He then cruised through the side parking lot and back out onto the street. He stopped behind an old Volkswagen bus that was parked at the curb and shielded him from the motel. He seemed to be watching the entrance to the Chateau through the windows of the beat-up old bus. He did not notice the two IAD men in the car parked a half-block behind him.

  "Come on kid, get going," Clarke said. "I don't want to have to call out patrol on you. Fucking delinquent."

  "Use the Nikon and get his picture," Lewis said. "You never know. Something might happen and we'll need it. And while you're at it, get the number off the motel sign. We'll have to call later and see what Bosch and the FBI girl were doing."

  Lewis could have easily picked the camera up off the seat himself and taken the photos, but that would set a dangerous precedent that could harm the delicate balance of the rules of surveillance. The driver drives. The rider writes—and does all such related work.

  Clarke dutifully picked up the camera, which was equipped with a telephoto lens, and took the photos of the boy on the bike.

  "Get one with the bike's plate," Lewis said.

  "I know what I am doing," Clarke said as he put the camera down.

  "Did you get the motel number? We'll have to call."

  "I got it. I'm writing it down. See? What's the big deal? Bosch is prolly in there knocking off a piece. A nice federal piece. Maybe when we call we find out they rented a room."

  Lewis watched to make sure Clarke wrote down the number on the surveillance log.

  "And maybe we don't," Lewis said. "They just met and, anyway, I doubt he'd be so stupid. They've got to be in there looking for somebody. A wit maybe."

  "But there was nothing about any witness in the murder book."

  "He held it back. That's Bosch. That's how he works."

  Clarke didn't say anything. Lewis looked back down the street to the Chateau. He then noticed that the kid was gone. There was no sign of the motorbike.

  Bosch waited a minute to give Eleanor Wish time to get behind the Chateau to watch the sliding door on the back of room 7. He bent and held his ear to the door and thought he heard a rustling sound and an occasional word mumbled. There was someone in the room. When it was time, he knocked heavily on the door. He heard the sound of movement—fast steps on carpet—from the other side of the door, but no one answered. He knocked again and waited, then heard a girl's voice.

  "Who is it?"

  "Police," Bosch said. "We want to talk to Sharkey."

  "He's not here."

  "Then I guess we want to talk to you."

  "I don't know where he is."

  "Open the door, please."

  He heard more noise, like someone banging into furniture. But nobody opened the door. Then he heard a rolling sound, a glass door sliding open. He put the key in the doorknob and opened the door in time to catch a glimpse of a man going through the back doorway and jumping off the porch to the ground. It wasn't Sharkey. He heard Wish's voice outside, ordering the man to stop.

  Bosch took a quick inventory of the room. An entrance hall with closet to the left, bathroom to the right, both empty except for some clothes on the closet floor. Two large double beds pushed up against opposite walls, a dresser with a mirror on the wall above it, a yellow-brown carpet worn flat on the pathways around the beds and to the bathroom. The girl, blond-haired, small, maybe seventeen years old, sat on the front edge of one of the beds with a sheet around her. Bosch could see the outline of a nipple pressing out against the dingy, once-white cloth. The room smelled like cheap perfume and sweat.

  "Bosch, you all right in there?" Wish called from outside. He could not see her because of a sheet hung like a curtain over the sliding door.

  "Okay. You?"

  "Okay. What have we got?"

  Bosch walked to the sliding door and looked out. Wish stood behind a man who had his arms extended and his hands on the motel's back wall. He was about thirty, with the sallow skin of a man who just did a month in county lockup. His pants were open in the front. His plaid shirt was buttoned incorrectly. And he stared straight down to the ground with the bug-eyed look of a man who had no explanation but needed one badly. Bosch was momentarily struck by the man's apparent decision to button his shirt before his pants.

  "He's clean," she said. "Looks a little winded, though."

  "Looks like soliciting sex with a minor if you want to spend the time with it. Otherwise kick him loose."

  He turned to the girl on the bed.

  "No bullshit, how old are you and what did he pay? I'm not here to bust you."

  She thought it over a moment. Bosch never took his eyes off hers.

  "Almost seventeen," she said in a bored monotone. "He didn't pay me anything. He said he would, but he didn't get to that yet."

  "Who's in charge of your crew, Sharkey? Didn't he ever tell you to get the money first?"

  "Sharkey ain't always around. And how'd you get his name?"

  "Heard it around. Where is he today?"

  "I tol' you, I don't know."

  The plaid-shirted man came into the room through the front door followed by Wish. His hands were cuffed behind him.

  "I am going to book him. I want to. This is sick. She looks—"

  "She told me she was eighteen," Plaid Shirt said.

  Bosch walked up to him and pulled open his shirt with a finger. There was a blue eagle with its wings spreading across his chest. In its talons it carried a dagger and a Nazi swastika. Beneath that it said One Nation. Bosch knew that meant the Aryan Nation, the white supremacist prison gang. He let the shirt fall back into place.

  "Hey, how long you been out?" he asked.

  "Hey, come on, man," Plaid Shirt said. "This is bullshit. She pulled me in from the street. And let me at least button my goddam pants. This is bullshit."

  "Give me my money, fucker," the girl said.

  She jumped from the bed, the sheet falling to the floor, and lunged naked at the john's pants pockets.

  "Get her off me, get her off," he called out as he squirmed to avoid her hands. "See, you see! She should be going, not me."

  Bosch moved in and separated the two and pushed the girl back to the bed. He moved behind the man and said to Wish, "Give me your key."

  She made no move, so he reached into his own pocket and got out his own cuff key. One size fits all. He unlocked the cuffs and walked Plaid Shirt over to the room's front door. He opened it and pushed him through. In the hallway the man stopped to button his pants, which gave Bosch the opportunity to put his foot on his butt and push. "Get out of here, short eyes," he said as the man stumbled down the hall. "This is your lucky day."

  The girl was wrapped in the dirty sheet again when Bosch went back into the room. He looked at Wish and saw anger in her eyes. He knew it wasn't just for the man in the plaid shirt. Bosch looked at the girl and said, "Get your clothes, go into the bathroom and get dressed." When she didn't move, he said, "Now! Let's go!"

  After she grabbed up some clothes from the floor next to the bed and walked to the bathroom, letting the sheet fall to the ground, Bosch turned to Wish.

  "We've got too much else to do," he began. "You would have spent the rest of the afternoon getting her statement and booking that guy. In fact, it's a state beef, so I would've had to book him. And it's a flopper; can go felony or misdemeanor. And one look at that girl and the DA would have gone misdee if he filed it at all. It wasn't worth it. It's the life down here, Agent Wish."

  She looked at him with
smoldering eyes, the same eyes he had seen when he had gripped her wrist to keep her from leaving the restaurant.

  "Bosch, I had decided it was worth it. Don't ever do that again."

  They stood there trying to outstare each other until the girl came out of the bathroom. She wore faded jeans that were split at the knees and a black tank top. No shoes, and Bosch noticed her toenails were painted red. She sat on the bed without saying anything.

  "We need to find Sharkey," Bosch said.

  "About what? You got a cigarette?"

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out for her. He gave her a match and she lit it herself.

  "About what?" she said again.

  "About Saturday night," Wish said curtly. "We do not want to arrest him. We do not want to hassle him. We only want to ask him a few questions."

  "What about me?" the girl said.

  "What about you?" Wish said.

  "Are you going to hassle me?"

  "You mean are we going to turn you over to Division of Youth Services, don't you?" Bosch looked at Wish to try to gauge a reaction. He got no reading. He said, "No, we won't call DYS if you help us. What's your name? Your real name."

  "Bettijane Felker."

  "All right, Bettijane, you don't know where Sharkey is? All we want to do is talk to him."

  "All I know is that he's working."

  "What do you mean? Where?"

  "Boytown. He's probably taking care of business with Arson and Mojo."

  "Those the other guys in the crew?"

  "Right."

  "Where in Boytown did they say they were going?"

  "They didn't. They just go where the queers are, I guess. You know."

  The girl either couldn't be more specific or wouldn't be. Bosch knew it didn't matter. He had the addresses from the shake cards and knew he'd find Sharkey somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  "Thank you," he said to the girl and started heading toward the door. He was halfway down the hall before Wish came out of the room, walking after him at a brisk, angry pace. Before she said anything he stopped at a pay phone in the hallway by the office. He took out a small phone book he always carried, looked up the number for DYS and dialed. He was put on hold for two minutes before an operator transferred him to an automated tape line on which he reported the date and time and the location of Bettijane Felker, suspected runaway. He hung up wondering how many days it would be before they got the message and how many days after that it would be before they got to Bettijane.

  They were all the way into West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard and she was still hot. Bosch had tried to defend himself but realized there was no chance. So he sat there quietly and listened.

  "It's a matter of trust, that's all," Wish said. "I don't care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed."

  He stared at the mirror on the passenger's side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis's huge neck and crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn't tell Wish they were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn't said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.

  Finally he said, "Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood, of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I'm sorry. I did not think it would help us to waste a day booking some asshole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty. I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people's jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It's one of the spots I got off the shake cards."

  "We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don't be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along for the ride. We are both on it. Don't forget it."

  She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking iced tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn't see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.

  They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.

  Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren't just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie's Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay phone near the old bar's screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer, answered the phone.

  "Is Lewis or Clarke there?"

  "No, sir, they're not. Can I take a message?"

  "No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point with them."

  "I believe they are code seven till P.M. watch."

  He hung up. They were off duty until four. They were scamming, or Bosch had simply kicked them too hard in the balls this time and now they were going after him on their own time. He got back in the car and told Wish he had checked his office for messages. It was as she merged the car back into traffic that he saw the yellow motorbike leaning on a parking meter about a half block from Barnie's. It was parked in front of a pancake restaurant.

  "There," he said and pointed. "Go on by and I'll get the number. If it's his, we'll sit on it."

  It was Sharkey's bike. Bosch matched the plate to his notes from the kid's CRASH file. But there was no sign of the boy. Wish drove around the block and parked in the same spot in front of Barnie's that they had been in before.

  "So, we wait," she said. "For this kid you think might be a witness."

  "Right. It's what I think. But two of us don't need to waste the time. You can leave me here if you want. I'll go in the beanery, order a pitcher of Henry's and a bowl of chili and watch from the window."

  "That's all right. I'm staying."

  Bosch settled back for a wait. He took out his cigarettes but she nailed him before he got one out of the pack.

  "Have you heard of the draft risk assessment?" she asked.

  "The what?"

  "Secondhand cigarette smoke. It's deadly, Bosch. The EPA came out last month, officially. Said it's a carcinogen. Three thousand people are getting lung cancer a year from passive smoking, they call it. You are killing yourself and me. Please don't."

  He put the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. They were quiet as they watched the bike, which was chain-locked to the parking meter. Bosch took a few glances at the sideview mirror but didn't see the IAD car. He glanced over at Wish, too, whenever he thought she wasn't looking. Santa Monica Boulevard steadily got crowded with cars as the apex of rush hour approached. Wish kept her window closed to cut down on the carbon monoxide. It made the car very hot.

  "Why do yo
u keep staring at me?" she asked about an hour into the surveillance.

  "At you? I didn't know that I was."

  "You were. You are. You ever have a female partner before?"

  "Nope. But that's not why I would be staring. If I was."

  "Why then? If you were."

  "I'd be trying to figure you out. You know, why you are here, doing this. I always thought, I mean at least I heard, that the bank squad over at the FBI was for dinosaurs and fuckups, the agents too old or too dumb to use a computer or trace some white-collar scumbag's assets through a paper trail. Then, here you are. On the heavy squad. You're no dinosaur, and something tells me you're no fuckup. Something tells me you're a prize, Eleanor."

  She was quiet a moment, and Bosch thought he saw the trace of a smile play on her lips. Then it was gone, if it had been there at all.

  "I guess that is a backhanded compliment," she said. "If it is, thank you. I have my reasons for choosing where I am with the bureau. And believe me, I do get to choose. As far as the others in the squad, I would not characterize any of them as you do. I think that attitude, which, by the way, seems to be shared by many of your fellow—"

  "There's Sharkey," he said.

  A boy with blond dreadlocks had come through a side alley between the pancake shop and a mini-mall. An older man stood with him. He wore a T-shirt that said The Gay 90s Are Back! Bosch and Wish stayed in the car and watched. Sharkey and the man exchanged a few words and then Sharkey took something from his pocket and handed it over. The man shuffled through what looked like a stack of playing cards. He took a couple of cards and gave the rest back. He then gave Sharkey a single green bill.

  "What's he doing?" Wish asked.

  "Buying baby pictures."

  "What?"

  "A pedophile."

  The older man headed off down the sidewalk and Sharkey walked to his motorbike. He hunched over the chain and lock.

  "Okay," Bosch said, and they got out of the car.