The Crossing (35 page)

There was more gunfire, and Ellis felt the impacts through his partner’s body. At the doorway he dropped Long and fired two more shots in the direction of where Bosch’s fire had come from. He backed into the hallway and then turned and ran toward a door marked with an exit sign.

As he raced down the stairway to the garage, Ellis had one question bouncing through the impulses of his brain.

Fight or flight?

Was it all over or was there still a chance he could contain this, somehow turn it all on Bosch? Tell them Bosch was the one. Bosch opened fire. Bosch had some kind of crazy vendetta going. Bosch—

He knew he was kidding himself. It couldn’t work. If Bosch was still alive up there, then it wouldn’t work.

Ellis ran across the garage to his car. He could hear an approaching siren—Sheriff’s deputies responding to Bosch’s 911 call. He judged it to be two or three blocks away. He had to get out before they got here. That was priority one. After that, he knew it was time to fly.

He was prepared. He had known it might someday come to this and he had planned for it.

H
is gun braced in two hands, Bosch moved in on Long, who was collapsed in the doorway. He was writhing in pain and gasping for breath. Bosch saw the last two bullets he had fired embedded in Long’s shirt, held in place by the bulletproof vest underneath. Bosch yanked the gun out of Long’s hand and slid it across the floor behind him. He put his weight down on Long and leaned forward to cautiously look into the hallway and make sure Ellis wasn’t waiting out there.

Satisfied that Ellis was gone, Bosch pulled back into the room and turned Long over onto his chest. He took the vice cop’s cuffs off his belt and used them to bind his wrists behind his back. He then saw the blood on Long’s right side. One of Bosch’s shots had found skin below the vest. Long was bleeding from a wound just above his right hip. Bosch knew that a .45 slug fired from ten feet was going to do major internal damage. Long might be mortally wounded.

“You motherfucker,” Long finally managed to get out. “You’re going to die.”

“Everybody dies, Long,” Bosch said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Bosch heard multiple sirens now and wondered if the Sheriff’s had gotten Ellis on his way out.

“Your partner abandoned you, Long,” he said. “First, he uses you as a human shield and then he drops you like a bag of oranges. That’s some partner.”

Bosch patted him on the back and then moved away. He went to the other doorway to check on Schubert. The doctor was lying on his back, his head under the bathroom sink and his left leg folded awkwardly underneath his body. There were two impact wounds in his upper chest and one in the center of his neck. One of them had clipped his spine, causing him to drop the way he had. His eyes were open and he wasn’t breathing. There was nothing Bosch could do. He couldn’t fathom why Schubert thought that if he gave himself up to Ellis and Long, he would be spared. He wondered if he should feel remorse for leading him on, convincing him he was a cop on a case.

He didn’t.

As Bosch knelt next to Schubert, he became aware of a pulsing tone from the desk phone on the floor behind him. It had disconnected from the call to the Sheriff’s communication center when Bosch had tipped over the desk. He turned from the body, found the handset, and reunited it with the base, leaving it on the floor. He also saw a shattered frame that had fallen from the desk. It contained a photo of Schubert and his wife sitting in the cockpit of a sailboat and smiling at the camera.

The desk phone started to ring, one of the buttons flashing. Bosch picked up the handset and pushed the button.

“Harry Bosch.”

“This is Sheriff’s Deputy Maywood, who am I speaking with?”

“I just told you, Harry Bosch.”

“We are outside the Center for Cosmetic Creation. What is the situation in there?”

“We’ve got one dead and one wounded. And then me—I made the nine-one-one call. One gunman escaped. Did you get him?”

Maywood ignored Bosch’s question.

“Okay, sir, I want you to listen closely. I need you and the wounded man to come out of the building with your hands behind your head, fingers laced. If you have any weapons, leave them inside the building.”

“I don’t think the wounded man’s going to be walking anytime soon.”

“Is he armed?”

“Not anymore.”

“Okay, then, sir, I need you to come out now—hands laced behind your head. Leave all weapons inside.”

“You got it.”

“If we see a weapon, we will consider it a provocative action. Are we clear, sir?”

“Crystal. I’m coming down in the elevator.”

“We’ll be waiting.”

Bosch disconnected and stood up. He looked around for a place to leave his Glock and saw Long’s gun on the floor next to the right side of the desk. He went over and picked it up, careful not to touch the trigger and obliterate a fingerprint with his own. He put both weapons on top of a glass display cabinet that contained a collection of antique surgical instruments.

Before leaving the office, Bosch looked around in the debris on the floor for his phone. It had slid across the floor when he had tipped over the desk. He picked it up and looked at the screen. It was still recording. He turned it off and named the file “Schubert.” He then texted it to Mickey Haller and put the phone in his pocket.

He started toward the doorway but thought about something. He had no idea how long he would be held and questioned by the Sheriff’s Department. He had no idea if news of the shooting would reach the mountains outside the city. But just in case, he made a call to his daughter. He knew she had spotty cell service but he left her a message.

“Maddie, it’s me. Just wanted you to know I’m okay. Whatever you hear, I’m okay. If you call and can’t reach me, call Uncle Mickey. He’ll fill you in.”

Bosch pulled the phone away and was about to disconnect, when he had a second thought and raised the phone again.

“I love you, Mads, and I’ll see you soon.”

He ended the call.

As he left the office, Bosch had to step around Long in the doorway. The vice cop was not moving. His breathing was shallow now and his face was very pale and dotted with sweat. There was also a growing stain of blood on the floor next to him.

“Get me an ambulance,” Long managed to say, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I’m dying.”

“I’ll tell them that,” Bosch said. “Anything else you want to tell me before I go? Maybe something about Ellis? Like where he would run from here?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you something. How ’bout fuck you.”

“Good one, Long.”

Bosch stepped into the hall and started to retrace his path to the elevator. But two steps into it, he realized that there was a possibility that Ellis was still in the building. He could have been too late with his escape and seen Sheriff’s deputies responding. It was possible he had retreated and was hiding.

Bosch quickly returned to the office and retrieved his Glock. He then moved back into the hallway and toward the elevator, moving in a combat stance with the gun up and braced.

He got to the elevator without seeing any sign of Ellis. He pushed the button and the doors opened immediately. The stainless steel box was empty and he stepped in. He pushed the button for the ground floor and the doors closed. As the elevator dropped, Bosch quickly took the magazine out of the Glock and ejected the round in the chamber. He loaded the loose bullet into the magazine and put it and the weapon down on the floor in the back corner of the elevator. He then turned to the doors, raised his hands, and laced his fingers together behind his head.

When the doors opened a moment later, Bosch saw a Sheriff’s patrol car parked sideways across the elevator entry area with two deputies using it as cover, their weapons drawn and aimed at him. One man had his two-handed grip extended over the front hood, the other was similarly positioned across the rear trunk.

“Step out of the elevator,” the front man called out. “Keep your hands behind your head.”

Bosch started to step out as instructed.

“My gun is on the floor of the elevator,” Bosch called out. “It is unloaded.”

The moment Bosch cleared the elevator, he saw the men on the car raise their weapons. That gave him a split-second notice that he was about to be taken to the ground. Deputies came from either side of the elevator and grabbed him. He was taken down face-first on the tiled floor, then his arms were yanked behind his back and he was handcuffed.

Pain shot through Bosch’s jaw. He had turned his face at the last moment during the takedown but still took the full impact along the left side of his face and jaw.

He felt hands roughly going through his pockets and removing his phone, wallet, and keys. He saw a pair of polished black patrol boots take a position in front of his face. The deputy squatted down and Bosch could see the lower half of his face if he turned his eyes up toward him. He saw sergeant stripes on the sleeves of the uniform. The man was looking at Bosch’s retired officer ID card. He then squatted down to look at Bosch.

“Mr. Bosch, I’m Sergeant Cotilla. Who else is inside the building?”

“Like I said on the phone, you got one dead and one wounded,” Bosch answered. “That’s all I know for sure. There was a third man but he ran. He could possibly be hiding in there but I don’t know for sure. The wounded man will be dead soon if you don’t get a medical team to him. He’s an LAPD vice officer named Kevin Long. As near as I could tell, he was hit once in the side, above the left hip.”

“Okay, we have paramedics en route. And the dead man is who?”

“Dr. Schubert, the guy who owns this place.”

“And you are former LAPD.”

“Retired this year. I’m now a private detective. I’m also the one who shot Long—before he could shoot me.”

There was a long silence as Cotilla digested that last piece of information. Like a smart street cop, he decided that Bosch’s statement was for others to respond to.

“We’re going to put you in a car, Mr. Bosch,” he said. “The detectives will want to talk to you about all of that.”

“Can you make a call out to Detective Sutton?” Bosch asked. “This is related to the two-bagger yesterday in the Sunset Plaza jewelry store. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be his case.”

T
his time they didn’t put him in the boardroom at the West Hollywood substation. He was placed in a gray-walled interrogation room, the eye of a camera watching him from above. They kept him handcuffed and didn’t give him back his phone, wallet, or keys.

The Glock was as good as gone, too.

At the two-hour mark Bosch’s hands were numb and he was growing increasingly restless from the wait. He knew full well that the investigators—whether led by Dick Sutton or not—would be at the crime scene, supervising the collection and documentation of physical evidence. But what frustrated Bosch was that no one had even conducted a five-minute preliminary interview with him. For all he knew, the information he had given Sergeant Cotilla had not been forwarded to the investigators and there wasn’t even a Wanted alert out yet on Don Ellis. Bosch figured that he could be across the Mexican border before the Sheriff’s Department finally put out the alert.

At the 150-minute mark he got up and walked to the door of the box. He turned his back to it and used his hands to try to turn the knob. As he expected, the door was locked. Angrily he started kicking backwards toward the door, driving his heel into the kick panel. It created a loud noise that Bosch expected would bring a response—if not directly to the box, then to the cameras.

He looked up, certain that his actions were now being monitored by the camera gazers.

“Hey!” he yelled up. “I want to talk. Send somebody in to talk to me. Now!”

Twenty more minutes went by. Bosch was considering whether to start breaking the furniture. The table was old and scarred and looked as though it had withstood the assaults of many. But the chairs were different. They were newer and the support struts were thin enough that Bosch knew he could break them with his feet.

He looked up at the camera.

“I know you can hear me,” he called out. “Get somebody in here now. I have important information. Dick Sutton, Lazlo Cornell, Sheriff Martin himself. I don’t care, a killer is getting away.”

He waited a beat and was about to start another rant when he heard the door being unlocked. It opened and in stepped Dick Sutton. He acted like he had no idea what Bosch had been through for the last three hours.

“Harry, sorry to hold you up in here,” he began. “I’ve been working the crime scene and am just now getting back over here to talk to you and see what we’ve got.”

“Well,” Bosch said, “you just saved the station having to replace the furniture in here, because I was about to start busting the place up. I can’t feel my hands, Dick.”

“Oh, Jesus, they shouldn’t have done that. Turn around and let me get those.”

Bosch turned his back to Sutton and soon felt the relief of blood circulating in his hands again.

“Sit down,” Sutton said. “Let’s talk.”

Bosch was rubbing his hands together, trying to get rid of the pins and needles sensation. He kicked out a chair and sat down.

“Why was the door locked, Dick?” he asked.

“Precaution,” Sutton said. “We had to see what we had first.”

“And?”

“And it’s a complicated scene. You told the sergeant out there that a fourth man was involved and that he got away.”

“That’s right, Don Ellis. He’s Long’s partner, though he threw him under the bus back there.”

“How so?”

“Used him as a shield when the shooting started. Then left him behind. Speaking of Long, did he make it?”

“Yeah, he made it. Just a few blocks from Cedars—that was lucky. My partner’s over there now, hoping to get in a room with him and hear his story.”

“I wish I could be there for that. The guy’s going to lie his ass off and put everything on me, or if he’s smart, he’ll put it on Ellis.”