The tunnel alternately curved left and then right for fifty yards, causing Bosch to become confused about his direction. At one point it dipped below a utility pipeline. And at times he could hear the rumble of traffic, making the tunnel sound like it was breathing. Every thirty feet burned a candle placed in a notch dug into the tunnel wall. In the sandy, chunky rubble at the bottom of the tunnel he looked for trip-wires but found a trail of blood.
After a few minutes of slow travel, he turned the flashlight off and sank back on his calves to rest and try to control the sound of his breathing. But he could not seem to get enough air into his lungs. He closed his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them he realized there was a pale light coming from the curve ahead. The light was too steady to be from a candle. He started moving slowly, keeping the flashlight off. When he made his way around the bend, the tunnel widened. It was a room. Tall enough to stand in and wide enough to live in, he thought, during the dig.
The light came from a kerosene lantern sitting on top of an Igloo cooler in the corner of the underground room. There were also two bedrolls and a portable Coleman gas stove. There was a portable chemical toilet. He saw two gas masks and also two backpacks with food and equipment in them. And there were plastic bags full of trash. It was the camp room, like the one Eleanor had assumed was used during the dig into the WestLand vault. Bosch looked at all the equipment and thought of Eleanor’s warning about there possibly being more than two. But she had been wrong. Just two of everything.
The tunnel continued on the other side of the camp room, where there was another three-foot-wide hole. Bosch turned the lantern flame off so he wouldn’t be backlit and crawled into the passageway. There were no candles in the walls here. He used the flashlight intermittently, turning it on to get his bearings and then crawling a short distance in the dark. Occasionally, he stopped, held his breath and listened. But the sound of traffic seemed farther away. And he heard nothing else. About fifty feet past the camp room the tunnel reached a dead end, but Bosch saw a circular outline on the floor. It was a plywood circle covered with a layer of dirt. Twenty years earlier he would have called it a rathole. He backed away, crouched down and studied the circle. He saw no indication it was a trap. In fact, he did not expect one. If the tunnelers had rigged the opening, it would have been to guard against entry, not exit. The explosives would be on this side of the circle. Nevertheless, he took his key-chain knife out and carefully ran its edge around the circle, then lifted it up a half inch. He pointed the light into the crack and saw no wires or attachments to the underside of the plywood. He then flipped it up. There were no shots. He crawled to the edge of the hole and saw another tunnel below. He dropped his arm and the flashlight through the hole and flicked on the beam. He swept it around and braced for the inevitable gunfire. Again, none came. He saw that the lower passageway was perfectly round. It was smooth concrete with black algae and a trickle of water at the bottom of its curve. It was a stormwater drainage culvert.
He dropped through the hole and immediately lost his footing on the slime and slipped onto his back. He propped himself up and with the flash-light began looking for a trail in the black slime. There was no blood, but in the algae there were scrape marks that could have been made with shoes digging for purchase. The trickle of water moved in the same direction as the scrape marks. Bosch went that way.
By now, he had lost his sense of direction, but he believed that he was heading north. He turned off the beam and moved slowly for twenty feet before flicking it on again. When he did so, he saw that the trail was confirmed. A smeared handprint of blood was at about three o’clock on the curved wall of the pipe. Two feet farther and at five o’clock there was another. Franklin was losing blood and strength quickly, he guessed. He had stopped here to check the wound. He would not be too much farther ahead.
Slowly, trying to lower the noise of his breathing, Bosch moved forward. The pipe smelled like a wet towel and the air was damp enough to put a film on his skin. The sound of traffic rumbled from somewhere nearby. There was the sound of sirens. He felt the pipe was on a gradual downward slope that kept the trickle of water moving. He was going deeper underground. There were cuts on his knees that bled and stung as he slipped and scraped along the bottom.
After maybe a hundred feet Bosch stopped and put on the beam, still holding it out to the side of his body and ready with the gun in his other hand. There was more blood on the curving wall ahead. When he switched off the flashlight, he noticed that the darkness changed farther ahead. There was light with a gray-dawn quality to it. He could tell that the pipeline ended, or rather, connected with a passageway where there was dim light. He realized then that he could hear water. A lot of water compared to what was running between his knees. It sounded like there was a river channel up ahead.
He moved slowly and quietly to the edge of the dim light. The pipeline he crouched in was a porthole on the side of a long hallway. He was in the tributary. Across the floor of the huge hallway, silvery black water moved. It was an underground canal. Looking at it, Bosch could not tell if the water was three inches or three feet deep.
Squatting at the edge, he first listened for sounds other than lapping water. Hearing nothing, he slowly extended his upper body forward to look down the hallway. The water was flowing to his left. He first looked that way and could see the dim outline of the concrete passageway curving gradually to the right. There was shadowy light filtering down at intervals from holes in the ceiling. He guessed that this light came from drain holes drilled in manholes thirty feet above. This was a main line, as Ed Gearson would say. Which one it was Bosch didn’t know and no longer cared. There was no blueprint for him to follow, to tell him what to do.
He turned to look upstream and immediately pulled his head back into his pipe like a turtle. There was a dark form against the inside wall of the passage. And Bosch had seen two orange eyes glowing in the darkness, looking right at him.
Bosch didn’t move and barely breathed for a whole minute. Stinging sweat dripped into his eyes. He closed them but heard nothing but the sound of the black water. Then slowly he moved back to the edge until he could see the dark form again. It hadn’t moved. Two eyes, like the alien eyes of someone who looks into the flash in a snapshot, stared back at Bosch. He edged the flashlight around the corner and hit the switch. In the beam he saw Franklin slumped against the wall; his M-16 was strapped around his chest, but his hands had fallen away from it into the water. The end of the barrel dipped to the water also. Franklin wore a mask that Bosch took a few seconds to realize was not a mask. He wore NVGs — night-vision goggles.
“Franklin, it’s over,” Bosch called. “I’m police. Give it up.”
There was no reply and Bosch didn’t expect one. He glanced up and down the main line one more time and then jumped down into the water. The water just covered his ankles. He kept his gun and the light on the still figure but didn’t believe he would need the weapon. Franklin was dead. Bosch saw that blood still seeped from a chest wound and down the front of his black T-shirt. Then it mixed into the water and was carried away. Bosch checked the man’s neck for a pulse and found none. He holstered his gun and lifted the M-16 over the dead man’s head. Then he pulled the night goggles off the corpse and put them on.
He looked one way down the long hallway and then the other. It was like looking at an old black-and-white TV. But the whites and grays had an amber tint. It would take some getting used to, but he could see his way better with the goggles and he kept them on.
Next he checked the supply pockets on the thighs of Franklin’s black fatigue pants. He found a sopping wet package of cigarettes and matches. There was an extra clip of bullets, which Bosch put in his jacket pocket, and a folded piece of wet paper on which blue ink was bleeding through and blurring. He carefully unfolded it and could tell that it had been a hand-drawn map. No names identifying anything. Just smeared blue lines. There was a square box near the center, which Bosch took to represent the
vault. The blue lines were the drainage tunnels. He turned the map around in his hand, but the pattern did not seem familiar. A line running along the front of the box was the heaviest drawn. He figured that might be Wilshire or Olympic. Lines that intersected this were the cross streets, Robertson, Doheny, Rexford and others. There was a crosshatching of more lines continuing to the side of the page. Then a circle with an X through it. The exit point.
Bosch decided the map was useless, for he didn’t know where he was or what direction he had taken. He dropped it into the water and watched it float off. In that moment he decided that he would follow the current. As good a choice as any.
• • •
Bosch splashed through the water, moving with the current, in a direction he thought was west. The black water curled against the wall in orange-tinted eddies. The water was above his ankles and filled his shoes, making his steps plodding and unsteady.
He thought about how Rourke had played it so well. It didn’t matter if the Jeep and the ATVs had been found down by the freeway. That was all a decoy, a setup. Rourke and his bandits had shown the obvious, then done the opposite. Rourke had talked everybody into believing it while setting the battle plans the night before. The SWAT team was waiting down there with a reception no one would attend.
He looked for signs of a trail in the passageway but found nothing. The water took all chance of that away with it. There were painted markings on the walls, even gang graffiti, but each scribble could have been there for years. He looked at it all but recognized none as a signal or direction. This time, Hansel and Gretel didn’t leave a trail.
The traffic sounds grew louder now, and there was more light. Bosch flipped up the NVGs and saw shadowy cones of bluish light filtering down every hundred feet or so from manholes and drains. After a while he came to an underground intersection, and as the water from his line collided and splashed with water moving in the other channel, Bosch crept along the side wall and slowly looked around the corner. He saw and heard no one. He had no clue as to which way to go. Delgado could have gone in any of three different directions. Bosch decided to follow the new passageway to the right because it would take him, he believed, farther away from the SWAT setup.
He had taken no more than three steps into the new tunnel when he heard a loud whisper from ahead.
“Artie, you going to make it? Come on, hurry. Artie!”
Bosch froze. It came from about twenty yards dead ahead. But he couldn’t see anyone. He knew that it had been the NVGs he wore — the orange eyes — that had prevented him from walking into an ambush. But the cover wouldn’t last long. If he got much closer, Delgado would know that he wasn’t Franklin.
“Artie!” the voice called hoarsely again. “Come on!”
“Coming,” Bosch whispered. He took one step forward and felt instinctively that it hadn’t worked. Delgado would know. He dove forward, bringing the M-16 up as he went down.
Bosch saw a whirl of movement ahead and to the left, then saw a muzzle flash. The sound of gunfire was deafening in the concrete tunnel. Bosch returned fire and kept his finger tight on the trigger until he heard the injector go dry of bullets. His ears were ringing, but he could tell that Delgado, or whoever was up there, had stopped also. Bosch heard him snap a new clip into his weapon, then running footsteps on a dry floor. Delgado was moving away, in another passageway ahead. Harry jumped up and followed, pulling the empty clip out of his borrowed gun and replacing it with the backup as he went.
In twenty-five yards he came to a tributary pipeline. It was about five feet in diameter and Bosch had to take a step up to move into it. There was black algae rimming the bottom but no running water. Lying in the scum was the empty clip from an M-16.
Bosch had the right tunnel, but he no longer heard Delgado’s footsteps. He began moving in the pipe quickly. There was a slight incline and in about thirty seconds he reached a lighted junction room thirty feet below a grated drain. On the other side of this room the pipeline continued. Bosch had no choice but to follow, this time with the pipe running on a gradual decline. He went another fifty yards before he could see that the line he was in emptied into a larger passage — a main line. He could hear water running up ahead.
Bosch realized too late that he was moving too fast to stop. As he lost his footing and slid on the algae toward the opening, it became clear to him that he had followed Delgado into a trap. Bosch dug his heels into the black slime in a worthless effort to stop himself. Instead, he went feet first, arms flailing for balance, into the new passageway.
It seemed odd to him, but he felt the bullet tear into his right shoulder before he heard the gunfire. It felt as though a hook on a rope had swung down from above, embedded in his right shoulder and then yanked him backward off his feet and down.
He let go of the gun and fell what seemed to him to be a hundred feet. But, of course, it wasn’t. The floor of the passageway with its two inches of water came up like a wall of water and hit him in the back of the head. The goggles flew off and he watched, idly and detached, as sparks arced above him and bullets bit into the wall and ricocheted away.
When he came to it felt like he had been out for hours, but he quickly realized it was only a few seconds. The sound of the gunfire still echoed down the tunnel. He smelled cordite. He heard running steps again. Running away, he thought. He hoped.
Bosch rolled in the darkness and water and spread his hands out to find the M-16 and the goggles. He gave up after a while and tried to draw his own gun. The holster was empty. He sat up and pushed himself against the wall. He realized his right hand was numb. The bullet had hit him in the ball of the shoulder, and his arm hummed with dull pain from the point of impact down to the dead hand. He could feel blood running under his shirt and down his chest and arm. It was a warm counterpoint to the cool water swirling around his legs and balls.
He became aware that he was gasping for air and tried to regulate his intake. He was going into shock and he knew it. There was nothing he could do.
The sound of the steps, the running away, stopped then. Bosch held his breath and listened. Why had he stopped? He was home free. Bosch scissored his legs along the floor of the tunnel, still looking for one of the weapons. There was nothing there, and it was too dark to see where they had fallen. The flashlight was gone as well.
There was a voice then, too far away and too muffled to be distinguished or understood, but someone was talking. And then there was a second voice. Two men. Bosch tried to make out what was said but couldn’t. The second voice suddenly grew shrill, then there was a shot, and then another. Too much time had elapsed between shots, Bosch thought. That wasn’t the M-16.
As he thought about the significance of this, he heard the sound of steps in water again. After a while, he could tell the steps were coming through the darkness toward him.
• • •
There was nothing hurried about the steps that came through the water toward Bosch. Slow, even, methodical, like a bride coming down the aisle. Bosch sat slumped against the wall and again swished his legs along the watery, slimy floor in hopes of locating one of the weapons. They were gone. He was weak and tired, defenseless. The humming pain in his arm had moved up a notch to a throb. His right hand was still useless, and he was pressing his left against the torn flesh of his shoulder. He was shaking badly now, his body in shock, and he knew he would soon pass into unconsciousness and not wake up.
Now Bosch could see the beam of a small light moving toward him in the tunnel. He stared fixedly at it with his mouth dropped open. Some of his muscle controls were already shutting down. In a few moments the sloshing steps stopped in front of him and the light hung there above his face like a sun. It was just a penlight but it was still too bright; he couldn’t see behind it. Just the same, he knew whose face would be back there, whose hand held the light and what was in the other.
“Tell me,” he said in a hoarse whisper. He hadn’t realized how parched his throat had become. “That and your little
pointer a matched set?”
Rourke lowered the beam until it pointed to the floor. Bosch looked around and saw the M-16 and his own gun side by side in the water next to the opposite wall. Too far to reach. He noticed that Rourke, dressed in a black jumpsuit tucked into rubber boots, held another M-16 pointed at him.
“You killed Delgado,” Bosch said. A statement, not a question.
Rourke didn’t speak. He hefted the gun in his hand.
“You going to kill a cop now, that the idea?”
“It’s the only way I’ll come out of this. The way it will look is Delgado gets you first with this.” He held the M-16 up. “Then I get him. I come out a hero.”
Bosch didn’t know whether to say anything about Wish. It would put her in danger. But it might also save his life.
“Forget it, Rourke,” he finally said. “Wish knows. I told her. There’s a letter in Meadows’s file. It ties you in. She’s probably already told everybody up there. Give it up now and get me some help. It will go better for you if you get me out of here. I’m going into shock, man.”
Bosch wasn’t sure but he thought he saw a slight change in Rourke’s face, his eyes. They stayed open, but it was as if they had stopped seeing, as if the only thing he was seeing was what was inside. Then they were back, looking at Bosch without sympathy, just contempt. Bosch braced his heels in the slime and tried to push himself up the wall into a standing position. But he had moved only a few inches when Rourke leaned over and easily pushed him back down.
The Harry Bosch Novels Page 37