Michael Connelly (70 page)

“I figure we can make a righteous bust,” Rickard said. “After that, we might squeeze Dance out of his ass. I think Dance has
blown, but the kid might know where. It’s up to you. I don’t know how important Dance is to you.”

“Where do you want me?” Bosch asked.

“Come west on the Boulevard and just when you pass Cahuenga come south at the very next alley. The one that comes down behind
the porno shops. It’s dark but you’ll see the blue neon arrow. That’s the place. I’m about a half block north in a red piece-of-shit
Camaro. Nevada plates. I’ll be waiting. Hafta figure out a scam or something to grab him with the shit.”

“You know where the dip is?”

“Yeah. He’s got it in a beer bottle in the gutter. Keeps going in and out. Brings his clients outside. I’ll think of something
by the time you get here.”

Bosch hung up and went back out to the car. It took him fifteen minutes to get there because of all the cruisers on the Boulevard.
In the alley he parked illegally behind the red Camaro. He could see Rickard sitting low in the driver’s seat.

“Top of the morning to ya,” the narc said when Bosch slipped into the Camaro’s passenger seat.

“Same. Our boy still around?”

“Oh, yeah. Seems like he’s having a good night, too. He’s selling shermans like they’re the last thing on earth. Too bad we
gotta spoil his fun.”

Bosch looked down the dark alley. In the intervals of blue light cast by a blinking neon arrow he could see a grouping of
people in dark clothes in front of a door in the brick siding of the warehouse. Occasionally, the door would open and someone
would go in or come out. He could hear the music when the door was open. Loud, techno-rock, a driving bass that seemed to
shake the street. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the people outside were drinking and smoking, cooling off after dancing.
A few of them held blown-up balloons. They would lean on the hoods of the cars near the door, suck from the balloon and pass
it on as if it were a joint.

“The balloons are full of nitrous oxide,” Rickard said.

“Laughing gas?”

“Right. They sell it at these raves for five bucks a balloon. They can make a couple of grand off one tank stolen from a hospital
or dentist.”

A girl fell off a car hood and her balloon of gas shot away into the dark. Others helped her up. Bosch could hear their shrieks
of laughter.

“That legal?”

“It’s a flopper. It’s legal to process — a lot of legit uses for it. But it’s a misdee to consume recreationally. We don’t
even bother with it, though. Somebody wants to suck on it and fall down and split their head open, have at it, I say. Why
should — there he is now.”

The slight figure of a teenager walked through the warehouse door and over to the cars parked along the alley.

“Watch him go down,” Rickard said.

The figure disappeared behind a car, dropping down.

“See, he’s making a dip. Now he’ll wait a few minutes ’til it dries a little and his customer comes out. Then he’ll make the
deal.”

“Want to go get him?”

“No. We take him with just the one sherm, that’s nothing. That’s personal possession. They won’t even keep him overnight in
the drunk tank. We need him with his dip if we wanna squeeze him good.”

“So what do we do?”

“You just get back in your car. I want you to go back around on Cahuenga and come up the alley the other way. I think you
can get in closer. Park it and then try to work your way up to be my backup. I’ll come down from this end. I got some old
clothes in the trunk. Undercover shit. I got a plan.”

Bosch then went back to the Caprice, turned it around and drove out of the alley. He drove around the block and came up from
the south side. He found a spot in front of a Dumpster and stopped. When he saw the hunched-over figure of Rickard moving
down the alley, Harry got out and started moving. They were closing in on the warehouse door from both sides. But while Bosch
remained in the shadows, Rickard — now wearing a grease-stained sweatshirt and carrying a bag of laundry — was walking down
the center of the alley, singing. Because of the noise from the warehouse Bosch wasn’t sure but he thought it was Percy Sledge’s
“When a Man Loves a Woman,” delivered in a drunken slur.

Rickard had the undivided attention of the people standing outside the warehouse door. A couple of the stoned girls cheered
his singing. The distraction allowed Bosch to move within four cars of the door and about three cars from the spot where Tyge
had his dip.

As he passed the spot, Rickard stopped his song in mid-chorus and acted as if he had just spotted a treasure. He ducked between
the two parked cars and came up with the beer bottle in hand. He was about to place it in his bag when the boy moved quickly
between the cars and grabbed the bottle. Rickard refused to let go and spun so that the boy’s back was now to Bosch. Harry
started moving.

“It’s mine, man,” Rickard yelled.

“I put it there, bro. Let it go before it spills.”

“Go get your own, man. This here’s mine.”

“Let it go!”

“You sure it’s yours?”

“It’s mine!”

Bosch hit the boy forcefully from behind. He let go of the bottle and doubled over the trunk of the car. Bosch kept him pinned
there, pushing his forearm against the boy’s neck. The bottle stayed in Rickard’s hand. None of it spilled.

“Well, if you say so, I guess it’s yours,” the narc said. “And I guess that makes you under arrest.”

Bosch pulled his cuffs off his belt and hooked the boy up and then pulled him off the trunk. Some of the others were gathering
around now.

“Fuck off, people,” Rickard said loudly. “Go back inside and sniff your laughing gas. Go get deaf. This here don’t concern
you unless you want to go along with this boy to the shit can.”

He bent down to Tyge’s ear and said, “Right,
bro?
”

When nobody in the crowd moved, Rickard took a menacing step toward them and they scattered. A couple of the girls ran back
into the warehouse. The music drowned out Rickard’s laugh. He then turned around and grabbed Tyge by the arm.

“Let’s go. Harry, let’s take your wheels.”

They drove in silence for a while toward the station on Wilcox. They hadn’t discussed it earlier but Harry was going to let
Rickard make the play. Rickard was riding in the back with the boy. In the mirror, Harry saw he had greasy, unkempt brown
hair that fell to his shoulders. About five years earlier he should have had braces put on his teeth but one look at him and
Bosch could tell he came from a home where things like that were not a consideration. He had a gold earring and an uninterested
look on his face. But the teeth were what got to Bosch. Crooked and protruding, they more than anything else showed the desperation
of his life.

“How old are you now, Kerwin?” Rickard said. “And don’t bother lying. We got a file on you at the station. I can check.”

“Eighteen. And you can wipe your ass with the file. I don’t give a shit.”

#8220;Wooo!” Rickard yelped. “Eighteen. Looks like we got ourselves an Adult here, Harry. No holding hands all the way to
the juvie hall. We’ll go put this kid in seven thousand, see how quick he starts keeping house with one of the heavies.”

Seven thousand was what most cops and criminals called the county adult detention center, on account of the phone number for
inmate information, 555-7000. The jail was downtown and it was four floors of noise and hate and violence sitting atop the
county sheriff’s headquarters. Somebody was stabbed there every day. Somebody raped every hour. And nothing was ever done
about it. Nobody cared, unless you were the one getting raped or stabbed. The sheriff’s deputies who ran the place called
it an NHI detail. No Humans Involved. Bosch knew if they were going to squeeze this kid that Rickard had picked the right
way to go.

“We got you bagged and tagged, Kerwin,” Rickard said. “There’s at least two ounces in here. Got you cold for possession with
intent to sell, dude. You’re gone.”

“Fuck you.”

The kid drew each word out with sarcasm. He was going to go down fighting. Bosch noticed that Rickard was holding the green
beer bottle outside the window so the fumes wouldn’t fill the car and give them headaches.

“That’s not nice, Kerwin. Especially, when the man driving here is willing to do a deal. …Now if it was me, I’d just let you
make your deals with the brothers in seven thousand. Couple days in there and you’ll be shaving your legs and walking ‘round
in pink underwear they dipped in the Hawaiian Punch.”

“Fuck off, pig. Just get me to a phone.”

They were on Sunset, coming up to Wilcox. Almost there and Rickard hadn’t even gotten around to what they wanted. It didn’t
look as if the kid was going to deal, no matter what they wanted.

“You’ll get a phone when we feel like giving you a phone. You’re tough now, white boy, but it don’t last. Everybody gets broken
down inside. You’ll see. Unless you want to help us out. We just want to talk to your pal Dance.”

Bosch turned onto Wilcox. The station was two blocks away. The kid said nothing and Rickard let the silence go for a block
before giving another try.

“What do you say, kid? Give an address. I’ll dump this shit right now. Don’t be one of those fools who think seven thousand
makes them the man. Like it’s some fucking rite of passage. It ain’t, kid. It’s just the end of the line. That what you want?”

“I want you to die.”

Bosch pulled into the driveway that led to the station’s rear parking lot. They would have to process the arrest here first,
book the evidence, then take the kid downtown. Harry knew they would have to go through with it. The kid wasn’t talking. They
had to show him that they weren’t bluffing.

Bosch didn’t get back to his search for Porter until four in the morning. By then he had had two cups of coffee in the station
and was holding his third. He was back in the Caprice, alone and roaming the city.

Rickard had agreed to ferry Kerwin Tyge downtown. The kid had never talked. His shell of hardened rejection, cop hate and
misguided pride never cracked. At the station, it had become a mission for Rickard to break the kid. He renewed the threats,
the questions, with a zeal that Bosch found disturbing. He finally told Rickard that it was over. He told the narc to book
the kid and they’d try again later. After stepping out of the interview room, the two decided to meet at seven thousand at
2
P.M.
That would give the kid about a ten-hour taste of the big house, enough time to make a decision.

Now Bosch was cruising the bottle clubs, the after-hour joints where “members” brought their own bottles and were charged
for the setups. The setups, of course, were a ripoff, and some clubs even charged a membership fee. But some people just couldn’t
drink at home alone. And some people didn’t have much of a home.

At a stoplight on Sunset at Western, a blur passed the car on the right and a figure lunged over the passenger side of the
hood. Bosch instinctively drew his left hand up to his belt and almost dropped his coffee but then realized the man had begun
to rub a newspaper on the windshield. Half past four in the morning and a homeless man was cleaning his windshield. Badly.
The man’s efforts only smudged the glass. Bosch pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it out the window to the man
when he came around to do the driver’s side. He waved him away.

“Don’t worry about it, partner,” he said and the man silently walked away.

Bosch headed off, hitting bottle clubs in Echo Park near the police academy and then Chinatown. No sign of Porter. He crossed
over the Hollywood Freeway into downtown, thinking of the kid as he passed the county lockup. He’d be on seven, the narco
module, where the inhabitants were generally less hostile. He’d probably be okay.

He saw the big blue trucks pulling out of the garage on the Spring Street side of the
Times
building, heading off with another morning’s cargo of news. He tried a couple of bottle clubs near Parker Center, then one
near skid row. He was scratching bottom now, getting near the end of the line and running out of places to check.

The last place he stopped was Poe’s, which was centrally located on Third Avenue near skid row, the
Los Angeles Times,
St. Vibiana’s and the glass bank towers of the financial district, where alcoholics were manufactured wholesale. Poe’s did
a good business in the morning hours before downtown came alive with hustle and greed.

Poe’s was on the first floor of a prewar brick walkup that had been tagged for demolition by the Community Redevelopment Agency.
It had not been earthquake-proofed and retrofitting it would cost more than the building was worth. The CRA had bought it
and was going to knock it down to put up condos that would draw live-in residents downtown. But the whole thing was on hold.
Another city agency, the Office of Preservation, wanted the Poe building, as it was informally known, granted landmark status
and was suing to stop the demolition. So far they had held up the plan four years. Poe’s was still open. The four floors above
it were abandoned.