“Sergeant, I need to talk to him alone.”
“Can’t do it. It’s a security issue.”
“We’re not going to talk anyway,” Goshen interjected.
“Sergeant,” Bosch said. “What I tell this man, whether he chooses to talk to me or not, could put you in danger if it becomes known you have this knowledge. Know what I mean? Why add that potential danger to your list? Five minutes. It’s all I want.”
Hackett thought a moment and without a word left them alone.
“Pretty smooth, Bosch, but I’m not talking to you. Weiss said you might try a backdoor run. He said you’d want to try to get into the candy jar before it’s time. I’m not playing with you. Get me to L.A., sit me in front of the people who can deal, and then we’ll deal. Everybody will get what they want then.”
“Shut up and listen, you stupid fuck. I don’t give a shit about any deal anymore. The only deal I’m worried about now is whether to keep you alive or not.”
Bosch saw he had his attention now. He waited a few moments to turn the squeeze up and then began.
“Goshen, let me explain something to you. In all of Las Vegas there is exactly one person I care about. One. You take her out of the picture and the whole place could dry up and blow away and I really wouldn’t worry about it. But there’s that one person I care about. And out of all the people in this place, she’s the one that your employer decides to grab and hold against me.”
Goshen’s eyes narrowed in concern. Bosch was talking about his people. Goshen knew exactly what was coming.
“So the deal I’m talking about is this,” Bosch said. “You for her. Joey Marks said if you never get to L.A., then my friend comes back. And vice versa. You understand what I’m telling you?”
Goshen looked down at the table and slowly nodded.
“Do you?”
Bosch pulled his gun and pointed it three inches from the big man’s face. Goshen went cross-eyed looking at the barrel’s black hole.
“I could blow your shit away right here. Hackett would come in here and I’d tell him you made a move for my gun. He’d go along. He set the meeting up here. It’s against the rules. He’d have to go along.”
Bosch withdrew the gun.
“Or tomorrow. This is how it goes tomorrow. At the airport we’re waiting for our flight. There’s a commotion over at the machines. Somebody’s won a big fucking jackpot and my partner and I make the mistake of looking over there. Meantime, somebody—maybe it’s your pal Gussie—puts a six-inch stiletto in your neck. End of you, my friend comes home.”
“What do you want, Bosch?”
Bosch leaned across to him.
“I want you to give me the reason not to do it. I don’t give a shit about you, Goshen, dead or alive. But I’m not going to let any harm befall her. I’ve made mistakes in my life, man. I once got somebody killed that shouldn’t have been killed. You understand that? It’s not going to happen again. This is redemption, Goshen. And if I have to give a piece of shit like you up to get it, I’ll do it. There’s only one alternative. You know Joey Marks, where would he have her?”
“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know.”
Goshen rubbed a hand over his scalp.
“Think, Goshen. He’s done this kind of thing before. It’s routine for you people. Where would he hold somebody he doesn’t want anyone to find?”
“There was . . . there’s a couple of safe houses he uses. He’d, uh, . . . I think for this he’d use the Samoans.”
“Who are they?”
“These two big fuckers he uses. Samoans. They’re brothers. Their names are too hard to say. We call them Tom and Jerry. They’ve got one of the safe houses. Joey would use their place for this. The other place is mostly for counting cash, putting up people from Chicago.”
“Where is the house with the Samoans?”
“It’s in North Vegas, not too far from Dolly’s, actually.”
On a piece of notebook paper Bosch gave him, Goshen drew a crude map with directions to the house.
“You’ve been there, Goshen?”
“A few times.”
Bosch turned the piece of paper over on the table.
“Draw the layout of the house.”
Bosch pulled the dusty detective car he had picked up at the airport into the valet circle at the Mirage and jumped out. A valet approached but Bosch walked past him.
“Sir, your keys?”
“I’ll only be a minute.”
The valet was protesting that he couldn’t just leave the car there when Bosch disappeared through the revolving door. As he crossed through the casino toward the lobby, Bosch scanned the players for Edgar, his eyes stopping on every tall black man, of whom there were few. He didn’t see Edgar.
On a house phone in the lobby he asked for Edgar’s room and then breathed an almost audible sigh of relief when his partner picked up the phone.
“Jerry, it’s Bosch. I need your help.”
“What’s up?”
“Meet me out front at the valet.”
“Now? I just got room service. When you didn’t call I —”
“Right now, Jerry. And did you bring your vest from L.A.?”
“My vest? Yeah. What’s —”
“Bring your vest with you.”
Bosch hung up before Edgar could ask any questions.
As he turned to head back to the car, he came face to face with someone he knew. At first, because the man was well dressed, Bosch thought it was one of Joey Marks’s men, but then he placed him. Hank Meyer, Mirage security.
“Detective Bosch, I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Just got in tonight. Came to pick somebody up.”
“You got your man then?”
“We think so.”
“Congratulations.”
“Listen, Hank, I gotta go. I’ve got a car blocking traffic in the front circle.”
“Oh, that’s your car. I just heard that on the security radio. Yes, please move it.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
Bosch made a move to pass him.
“Oh, Detective? Just wanted you to know we still haven’t had that betting slip come in.”
Bosch stopped.
“What?”
“You asked if we’d check to see if anyone cashed the bet your victim put down Friday night. On the Dodgers?”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“Well, we went through the computer tapes and located the sequence number. I then checked the number on the computer. No one has collected on it yet.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“I called your office today to let you know but you weren’t there. I didn’t know you were coming here. We’ll keep an eye out for it.”
“Thanks, Hank. I gotta go.”
Bosch started walking away but Meyer kept talking.
“No problem. Thank you. We look forward to opportunities to cooperate with and hopefully help our law enforcement brethren.”
Meyer smiled broadly. Bosch looked back at him and felt like he had a weight tied to his leg. He couldn’t get away from him. Bosch just nodded and kept going, trying to remember the last time he had heard the phrase law enforcement brethren. He was almost across the lobby when he glanced back and saw that Meyer was still behind him.
“One more thing, Detective Bosch.”
Bosch stopped but lost his patience.
“Hank, what? I’ve got to get out of here.”
“It will just take a second. A favor. I assume your department will go to the press with this arrest. I’d appreciate it if you kept any mention of the Mirage out of it. Even our help, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem. I won’t say a word. Talk to you later, Hank.”
Bosch turned and walked away. It was unlikely the Mirage would have been mentioned in any press release anyway, but he understood the concern. Guilt by association. Meyer was mixing public relations with casino security. Or maybe they were the same thing.
Bosch go
t to the car just as Edgar came out, carrying his bulletproof vest in his hand. The valet looked at Bosch balefully. Bosch took out a five and handed it to him. It didn’t do much to change his disposition. Then Bosch and Edgar jumped in the car and took off.
The safe house Goshen told Bosch about looked deserted when they drove by. Bosch pulled the car to a stop a half block away.
“I still don’t know about this, Harry,” Edgar said. “We should be calling in Metro.”
“I told you. We can’t. Marks has to have somebody inside Metro. Or else he wouldn’t have known to snatch her in the first place. So we call Metro, he finds out and she’s dead or moved somewhere else before Metro even makes a move. So we go in and we call Metro afterward.”
“If there is an afterward. Just what the hell are we going to do? Go in blasting? This is cowboy shit, Harry.”
“No, all you’re going to do is get behind the wheel, turn the car around and be ready to drive. We might have to leave in a hurry.”
Bosch had hoped to use Edgar as a backup but after he’d told him the situation on the way over, it was clear that Edgar wasn’t going to be solid. Bosch went to plan B, where Edgar was simply a wheelman.
Bosch opened his door and looked back at Edgar before getting out.
“You’re going to be here, right?”
“I’ll be here. Just don’t get killed. I don’t want to have to explain it.”
“Yeah, I’ll do my best. Let me borrow your cuffs and pop the trunk.”
Bosch put Edgar’s cuffs into his coat pocket and went to the trunk. At the trunk, he took out his vest and put it on over his shirt and then put his coat back on to hide his holster. He pulled up the trunk liner and lifted up the spare tire. Below it was a Glock 17 pistol wrapped in an oily rag. Bosch popped the clip on it, checked the top bullet for corrosion and then put the weapon back together. He put it in his belt. If there was going to be any shooting on this mission, he wasn’t going to use his service gun.
He came up alongside the driver’s window, saluted Edgar and headed down the street.
The safe house was a small concrete-block-and-plaster affair that blended in with the neighborhood. After jumping a three-foot fence, Bosch took the gun from his belt and held it at his side as he walked along the side of the house. He saw no light emitted from any of the front or side windows. But he could hear the muffled sound of television. She was here. He could feel it. He knew Goshen had told the truth.
When he got to the rear corner, he saw there was a pool in the backyard as well as a covered porch. There was a concrete slab with a satellite dish anchored to it. The modern Mafia crash pad, Bosch thought. You never knew how long you’d have to hole up, so it was good to have five hundred channels.
The backyard was empty but as Bosch turned the corner he saw a lighted window. He crept down the back of the house until he was close. The blinds were drawn on the window, but by getting close and looking between the cracks he could see them in there. Two huge men he immediately assumed were the Samoans. And Eleanor. The Samoans sat on a couch in front of a television. Eleanor sat on a kitchen chair next to the couch. One wrist and one ankle were handcuffed to the chair. Because the shade of a floor lamp was in the way, he could not see her face. But he recognized her clothes as those she had worn on the day they had dragged her into Metro. The three of them were sitting there watching a rerun of a Mary Tyler Moore show. Bosch felt the anger building in his throat.
Bosch crouched down and tried to think of a way to get her out of there. He leaned his back against the wall and looked across the yard and the shimmering pool. He got an idea.
After taking one more glimpse through the blinds and seeing that no one had moved, Bosch went back to the corner of the house to the slab where the satellite dish sat. He put his gun back in his belt, studied the equipment for a few moments and then simply used two hands to turn the dish out of alignment and point its focus toward the ground.
It took about five minutes. Bosch figured most of this must have been spent with one or the other of the Samoans fiddling with the TV and trying to get the picture back. Finally, an outdoor floodlight came on, the back door opened and one of them stepped out onto the porch. He wore a Hawaiian shirt as big as a tent and had long dark hair that flowed over his shoulders.
When the big man got to the dish, he clearly wasn’t sure how to proceed. He looked at it for a long moment, then came around to the other side to see if this afforded him a better angle. He now had his back to Bosch.
Bosch stepped away from the corner of the house and came up behind the man. He placed the muzzle of the Glock against the small of the man’s back, though even the small of his back wasn’t small.
“Don’t move, big man,” he said in a low, calm voice. “Don’t say a word, ’less you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair with your piss sloshing around in a bag.”
Bosch waited. The man did not move and said nothing.
“Which are you, Tom or Jerry?”
“I’m Jerry.”
“Okay, Jerry, we’re going to walk over to the porch. Let’s go.”
They moved to one of two steel support beams that held up the porch roof. Bosch kept the gun pressed against the man’s shirt the whole time. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out Edgar’s cuffs. He handed them around the girth of the man and held them up.
“Okay, take ’em. Cuff yourself around the beam.”
He waited until he heard both cuffs click, then came around and checked them, clicking them tightly around the man’s thick wrists.
“Okay, that’s good, Jerry. Now, do you want me to kill your brother? I mean I could just walk in there and waste him and get the girl. That’s the easy way. You want me to do it that way?”
“No.”
“Then do exactly what I tell you. If you fuck up, he dies. Then you die ’cause I can’t afford to leave a witness. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, without saying his name, because I don’t trust you, just call to him and ask if the picture’s back on the TV. When he says no, tell him to come out here and help. Tell him she’ll be fine, she’s handcuffed. Do it right, Jerry, and everybody lives. Do it wrong and some people aren’t going to make it.”
“What do I call him?”
“How ’bout ‘Hey, Bro’? That oughta work.”
Jerry did as he was told and did it right. After some back-and-forth banter, the brother stepped out onto the porch, where he saw Jerry with his back to him. Just as he realized something wasn’t right, Bosch came from the blind spot to his right rear and put the gun on him. Using his own cuffs this time, he locked the second brother, who he guessed was slightly larger than the first and had on a louder shirt, to the porch’s other support beam.
“Okay, take five, boys. I’ll be back in a minute. Oh, who has the key to the cuffs on the woman?”
They both said, “He does.”
“That’s not smart, guys. I don’t want to hurt anybody. Now who has the cuff key?”
“I do.”
The voice came from behind him, from the porch door. Bosch froze.
“Slowly, Bosch. Toss the gun into the pool and turn around real slow like.”
Bosch did what he was told and turned around. It was Gussie. And Bosch could see the delight and hate in his eyes, even in the dark. He stepped onto the porch and Bosch could see the shape of a gun in his right hand. Bosch immediately became angry with himself for not casing the house further or even asking Jerry if there was anyone other than his brother and Eleanor in the house. Gussie raised the gun and pressed its barrel against Bosch’s left cheek, just below the eye.
“See how it feels?”
“Been talking to the boss, huh?”
“That’s right. And we’re not stupid, man, you’re stupid. We knew you might try something like this. Now we gotta call him and see what he wants to do. But first off, what you’re gonna do is unhook Tom and Jerry. Right the fuck now.”
“Sure,
Gussie.”
Bosch was contemplating reaching into his coat and going for his other gun but knew it was suicide as long as Gussie held his gun at point-blank range. He started slowly reaching into his pocket for his keys when he saw the movement to his left and heard the shout.
“Freeze it up, asshole!”
It was Edgar. Gussie didn’t move an inch. After a few moments of this standoff, Bosch reached into his coat, pulled his own gun and pushed the muzzle up into Gussie’s neck. They stood there staring at each other for a long moment.
“What do you think?” Bosch finally said. “You want to try it? See if we both get one off?”
Gussie said nothing and Edgar moved in. He put the muzzle of his gun against Gussie’s temple. A smile broke across Bosch’s face and he reached up and took Gussie’s gun from him and threw it into the pool.
“I didn’t think so.”
He looked over at Edgar and nodded his thanks.
“You got him? I’ll go get her.”
“I got him, Harry. And I’m hoping he does something stupid, the big fat fuck.”
Bosch checked Gussie for another weapon and found none.
“Where’s the cuff key?” he asked.
“Fuck you.”
“Remember the other night, Gussie? You want a repeat performance? Tell me where the fucking key is.”
Bosch figured his own cuff key would fit but he wanted to make sure he got one away from Gussie. The big man finally blew out his breath and told Bosch the key was on the kitchen counter.
Bosch went inside the house, his gun out, his eyes scanning for more surprises. There was nobody. He grabbed the cuff key off the kitchen counter and went into the back den where Eleanor was. When he stepped into the room and her eyes rose to his, he saw something that he knew he would always cherish. It wasn’t something he believed he could ever put into words. The giving way of fear, the knowledge of safety. Maybe thanks. Maybe that was how people looked at heroes, he thought. He rushed to her and knelt in front of her chair so that he could unlock the cuffs.
The Harry Bosch Novels, Volume 2 Page 61
