“Who’s the woman?”
“I don’t know. She’s got dealer blanks, so I can’t run a plate.”
“Does it look like a new car?”
“No, it’s a scratched-up Prius.”
“Can you get a photo of her without getting noticed? I’m here with Haller and he might know who she is.”
“I can try. I can do the old walk-by on a call and grab video. I’ll text it to both of you.”
“Do it.”
Bosch disconnected. He knew the maneuver Cisco was undertaking. He’d start recording on his phone’s video app, then hold the phone to his ear like he was on a call and walk by the front of the subject’s car, hopefully focusing on the woman behind the wheel.
“Spencer is talking to a woman,” he reported to Haller. “Cisco’s going for some video.”
Haller nodded and they waited.
“At some point I should tell Soto,” Bosch said, mostly to himself.
“What do you mean?” Haller asked.
“She’s my ex-partner. We sandbag Cronyn, we sandbag her.”
“Do I have to remind you that she’s part of a machine that’s trying to take everything you have away from you?”
“She’s following a case where it goes.”
“Well, she took a wrong turn, didn’t she?”
“It happens.”
“Do me a favor, don’t talk to her. Not yet, at least. Wait till we’re closer and we’ve confirmed some of these theories as facts. Don’t give the LAPD the chance to flip this on us.”
“Fine. I can wait. But she wouldn’t flip things. If we set her straight with facts, we wouldn’t have to go after Cronyn or Spencer or Borders. She would.”
Before Haller could respond, their phones buzzed in unison as a text came to them both. It was the video from Cisco. They each watched on their phones. Bosch saw an unsteady frame as the camera moved down a line of cars in the bookstore parking lot. It was accompanied by the audio of Cisco’s fake phone-call banter, which was designed to help document the time and place of the recording.
“Hi, I’m at Vroman’s, the bookstore in Pasadena. It’s eight o’clock Wednesday and I’ll be here for a while. Hit me back…”
The camera moved across a row of parked cars as Cisco spoke until it came to one backed into a spot. The camera moved across the windshield and showed a woman behind the wheel. She was in profile because she was turned toward the open side window and was talking to someone in the car parked next to her. Cisco wisely stopped his faux message as he crossed in front of the car. It allowed the camera to pick up a snippet of dialogue as it was spoken by the woman and Spencer, who could not be seen in the other car.
“You’re overreacting,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”
“I’m telling you, it better be,” he said.
A few steps past the two cars, Cisco turned the phone’s camera on his own face and identified himself.
“This is Dennis Wojciechowski, California private investigator license oh-two-sixty-two, ending this recording. Ciao.”
The video ended. Bosch looked expectantly at Haller.
“It’s not a good view and I haven’t seen Kathy Cronyn since she was Kathy Zelden,” he said.
He was replaying the video and froze the playback at one point and then used two fingers to enlarge the image. He paused for a long moment as he studied it.
“Well?” Bosch finally asked.
“Yes,” Haller said. “I’m pretty sure it’s her. Katherine Cronyn.”
Bosch immediately called Cisco back. He answered Bosch with a question.
“Did he ID her?”
“He did. Katherine Cronyn. You did good, Cisco. You’re done for the night.”
“Just let him go?”
“Yeah, we got what we need and we don’t want to risk them finding out we know.”
“You got it. Tell Mick I’ll check in with him in the morning.”
“Will do.”
Bosch disconnected and looked at Haller. He was beaming.
“Can you run with it from here?” Bosch asked. “Like I told you, I’m going to drop out for a few days. At least.”
“I can run with it, but are you sure you’ve got to drop out?” Haller said. “You’re a part-timer up there. Can’t somebody else take the reins on that case?”
Bosch thought about it. His mind filled with the image of José Esquivel Jr. sprawled on the floor of the back hallway.
“No,” he finally said. “Only me.”
Part Two
The South Side of Nowhere
22
Bosch stood in front of the counter with his eyes down. A man sat there reading a newspaper printed in a foreign language. It was a different man than the goateed driver of the van. This man was older, his hair flecked with gray. He looked to Bosch like an aged enforcer who now relied on the younger generation to do the heavy lifting.
He didn’t bother to look up when he spoke to Bosch with a thick Russian accent.
“Who sent you here?” he asked.
“Nobody,” Bosch said.
The man finally looked up at him and studied his face for a moment.
“You walk here?”
“Yes.”
“From where?”
“I just want to see the doctor.”
“From where?”
“The shelter over by the courthouse.”
“That is long walk. What do you want?”
“To see the doctor.”
“How do you know there is doctor?”
“At the shelter. Somebody told me. Okay?”
“What for you need doctor?”
“I need pain medication.”
“What pain?”
Bosch stepped back, raised his cane, and lifted his leg. The man leaned forward so he could see over the counter. He then sat back and eyed Bosch.
“The doctor is very busy,” he said.
Bosch looked behind him and around the room. There were eight plastic chairs in the waiting area and all of them were empty. There was only him and the Russian.
“I can wait.”
“ID.”
Bosch pulled the worn leather wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. It was connected by a chain to a loop on his belt. He unsnapped the flap and pulled out the driver’s license and the Medicare card and dropped them on the counter. The Russian reached up, took them both, and then leaned back in his chair as he looked them over. Bosch hoped that his distancing himself was a reaction to Bosch’s body odor. He had actually made the long walk over from the shelter as part of his dropping into character. He was wearing three shirts and the walk had soaked the first layer in sweat and dampened the next two.
“Dominic H. Reilly?”
“That’s right.”
“Where is this Oceanside place?”
“Down near San Diego.”
“Take off glasses.”
Bosch raised his sunglasses up over his brow and looked at the Russian. It was the first big test. He needed to show the eyes of a drug addict. Just before being dropped at the shelter, he had spread peppermint oil provided by his DEA handler on the skin below his eyes. Now the cornea of each was irritated and red.
The Russian looked for a long moment and then tossed the plastic cards back on the counter. Bosch dropped his sunglasses back into place.
“You can wait,” the Russian said. “Maybe doctor have time.”
Bosch had passed. He tried not to show any relief.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
Bosch picked his backpack up off the floor and limped over to the waiting area. He picked a chair closest to the clinic’s front door and sat down, using the backpack as a stool for his braced leg. He put the cane on the floor and slid it under the chair, then folded his arms, rested his head against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyes he reviewed what had just transpired and wondered if he had given any sort of tell to the Russian. He felt he had handled his ini
tial interaction as a UC well and knew the wallet-and-ID package put together by the DEA team was perfect.
He had spent several hours the day before with the DEA handler, being trained in the art of going undercover. The first half of the all-day session dealt with the nuts and bolts of the operation: who would be watching and from where, what his cover was, what would be at his disposal in his wallet and backpack, how and when to call for an extraction. The second half was largely role-playing, with his handler teaching him the look of an oxycodone addict and putting him through different scenarios that could come up while he was under.
The interaction he had just had with the Russian behind the counter had been one of those scenarios, and Bosch had played it the way he had several times the previous day. The key point of the one-day UC school was to help Bosch conceal fear and anxiety and channel them into the persona he would be taking on.
The handler, who claimed his name was Joe Smith, also drilled Bosch on court credibility—being able to testify in court or privately before a judge that he had not committed crimes or moral transgressions while acting in an undercover capacity. This would be vital to winning over juries should a prosecution arise from the operation. The cornerstone of court credibility was to avoid taking the drug he was posing as being addicted to. Short of that, he carried two doses of Narcan secreted in the hem of one of his pant legs. Each yellow pill was a fast-acting opioid antagonist that would counteract the effect of the drug if he was forced physically or by circumstances to ingest it.
A few minutes went by and Bosch heard the Russian get up. He opened his eyes and tracked him as he disappeared into the hallway behind the counter. Soon afterward, he heard him speaking. It was a one-sided conversation and in Russian. A phone call, Bosch assumed. He picked up an urgent tone to the Russian’s words. He guessed that word was coming in that some of their shills had been taken down by the DEA and the state medical board. This was part of the UC insertion plan. Thin the herd, so to speak, and increase the need to recruit replacements, Dominic H. Reilly among them.
Bosch checked the walls and ceiling. He saw no cameras. He knew it would be unlikely that members of a criminal operation would set up cameras that could document their transgressions. He slid the brace down over his knee so he could walk normally and moved quickly to the counter. While the Russian continued to talk in the rear area of the clinic, Bosch looked over the counter to see what was there. There were several Russian-language and English-language newspapers, including the L.A. Times and the San Fernando Sun, scattered haphazardly, most of them folded open to stories about the past election and the investigation of the Russian connection. The counterman seemed to be as captured by the story as Legal Siegel had been.
Bosch moved a stack of menus from food-delivery services and found a spiral notebook. Bosch quickly opened it and found several pages of notes in Russian. There were tables with dates and numbers but he could decipher none of it.
The Russian abruptly stopped talking and Bosch quickly closed and replaced the notebook and went back to his chair. He pulled the brace back into place and was just leaning back again when the Russian returned to his position behind the counter. Bosch watched him through squinted eyes. The Russian showed no sign that he had noticed anything out of place at the counter.
Forty minutes of inactivity went by before Bosch heard a vehicle come to a stop out front. Soon the door opened and several bedraggled men and women entered the clinic. Bosch recognized some of them from his surveillance of the van earlier in the week. They followed the Russian down the hallway and out of sight. The van’s driver, the same one Bosch had seen before, stayed behind at the counter and soon approached Bosch, his hands on his hips.
“What do you want here?” he asked, his accent easily as thick as the counterman’s.
“I want to see the doctor,” Bosch said.
He raised his leg off the backpack in case the knee brace had not been noticed. The driver proceeded to ask Bosch many of the same questions the counterman had. He kept his hands on his hips. After the last question was answered, there was a long moment of silence while the driver decided something.
“Okay, you come back,” he finally said.
He started walking toward the hallway. Bosch got up, grabbed his cane and backpack, and hobbled after him. The hallway was wide and led to an unused nursing station and then branched to the right and left. The driver took Bosch to the left into a hallway where there were four doors of what Bosch assumed were examination rooms from a time when there was a legitimate clinic operating here.
“In here,” the driver said.
He pushed open a door and held his arm out, gesturing for Bosch to go in. As Bosch stepped across the threshold, he saw that the room was furnished only with a single chair. He was suddenly and violently shoved forward and across the room. He dropped both backpack and cane so he could raise his hands and stop himself from crashing face-first into the opposite wall.
He immediately spun around.
“What the fuck was that, man?”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I told you and I told that other guy. You know what? Forget it, I’m out of here. I’ll find another doctor.”
Bosch reached down to the backpack.
“Leave it there,” the driver ordered. “You want pills, you leave it there.”
Bosch straightened up and the man came forward, put his hands on his chest, and pushed him back against the wall.
“You want pills, take your clothes off.”
“Where’s the doctor?”
“The doctor will come. Take off clothes for examine.”
“No, fuck this. I know other places to go.”
He slid the brace down off his knee so he could bend it. He reached down for the cane, knowing it would be more useful than the backpack as a weapon. But the driver quickly took a step forward and put his foot on it. He then grabbed Bosch by the collar of his denim jacket. He pulled him up and shoved him back against the wall, bouncing his head hard off the drywall.
He leaned in close, his breath sour in Bosch’s face.
“Take off clothes, old man. Now.”
Bosch raised his hands up until his knuckles were against the wall.
“Okay, okay. No problem.”
The driver stepped back. Bosch started by pulling off his jacket.
“And then I see the doctor, right?” he asked.
The driver ignored the question.
“Put clothes on the floor,” he said.
“No problem,” Bosch said. “And then the doctor, right?”
“The doctor will come.”
Bosch sat on the chair to unstrap the brace and remove it. Then his work boots and dirty socks. He started peeling off the three layers of shirts. The DEA code name given to his UC personality and the whole operation was Dirty Denim and it fit. His DEA handler had at first objected to the knee brace and cane but eventually gave in to Bosch’s wish to put a little bit of his own spin on the character. The handler of course wasn’t aware of the weapon hidden in the cane.
Soon Bosch had peeled away the layers and was down to his boxer shorts and one dirty and sweat-stained T-shirt. He dropped his jeans on the pile of clothes after disconnecting the chain and keeping the wallet in his hand.
“No,” the driver said. “Everything.”
“When I see the doctor,” Bosch said.
He stood his ground. The driver stepped closer. Bosch was expecting more words but instead the man’s right fist shot out, and Bosch took a hard punch into his lower stomach. He immediately doubled over and brought his arms in for protection, expecting more. His wallet fell to the floor, its chain rattling on the dirty linoleum. Instead, the driver grabbed Bosch by the hair and leaned down to speak directly into his right ear.
“No, clothes off now. Or we kill you.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. Clothes off.”
Bosch tried to straighten up but needed to put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He
pulled off the T-shirt and threw it onto the pile, then dropped the boxers and kicked them to the pile as well. He spread his arms, displaying himself.
“Okay?” he said.
The driver was looking at the tattoo on Bosch’s upper arm. It was barely recognizable after nearly fifty years—a tunnel rat holding a pistol, a Latin slogan above it, “Cu Chi” below it.
“What is Cu Chi?” he asked.
“A place,” Bosch said. “Vietnam.”
“You were in the war?”
“That’s right.”
Bosch felt bile rising in his throat from the punch.
“They shot you, the communists?” the driver asked.
He pointed to the scar from a gunshot wound on Bosch’s shoulder. Bosch decided to stick to the script that he had been given for the character.
“No,” he said. “The police did that. Back here.”
“Sit,” the driver said.
He pointed to the chair. Keeping one hand on the wall for balance, Bosch made his way over and sat down, the plastic cold against his skin.
The driver crouched down, grabbed the backpack and slung it over one shoulder. He then started gathering the pile of Bosch’s clothes. He left the cane on the floor.
“You wait,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Bosch said. “Don’t take my—”
He didn’t finish. The driver was heading for the door.
“You wait,” he said again.
He opened the door and was gone. Bosch sat naked on the chair. He leaned forward and gathered his arms in close. Not for modesty or warmth. The position eased the pain in his gut. He wondered if the punch from the driver had torn muscle tissue or damaged internal organs. It had been a long time since he had taken a punch unguarded like that. He chastised himself for not having been ready for it.
He knew, however, that except for the punch, things had gone exactly as planned. Bosch guessed that the driver and the other Russian were probably going through the clothes he had been wearing and the contents of the wallet and backpack.
In addition to the very valid-looking driver’s license, the wallet had various pieces of identification with a variety of names on them, all exemplars of things a drifter addict might carry in order to help him scam the next hit and next prescription. There was also a worn photo of a woman long out of Dominic Reilly’s life as well as cards and notes about other clinics scattered across Southern California.
Two Kinds of Truth (A Harry Bosch Novel) Page 17