Bosch turned his eyes from the woman and looked at the two men. It seemed clear to him that they were speaking Russian, and the words inked on their arms appeared to be Russian as well. Both men had what cops called convict bodies: outsize upper torsos heavily muscled by years of prison workouts—push-ups, sit-ups, chin-ups—and legs neglected in the process. One was clearly older. He was midthirties, with a soldier’s short haircut. Bosch placed the other man at about thirty, with dyed blond hair.
He studied their body sizes and movements and compared them to what he recalled of the videos from the pharmacy shooting and the drop-off and pickup at Whiteman. Could these two be the shooters? It was impossible to know for sure, but Bosch believed that there was a clue in the apparent casualness with which the men in the room had abused the woman. They had most likely drugged her, raped her, and left her unclothed on the couch. Bosch believed any man who did that was capable of the same casualness when it came to murder. His gut told him these were the two men who had gunned down José Esquivel and his son.
And they would lead him to Santos.
Bosch saw a reflection of light on the aluminum skin of the mobile home and turned to see a man with a flashlight approaching. He quickly ducked down and then moved back toward the vans and slipped into the channel between them.
“Hey!”
He had been spotted. He moved to the rear of the vehicles and had to make a decision.
He quickly dropped below the window level of the vans and moved back up on the outside of the van farthest from the mobile home. The man with the flashlight came running up and proceeded down the passage between the vans, the last place he had seen the intruder.
Bosch waited a second and broke for the corner of the trailer. He knew if he could get there, he could use the structure as a blind between him and the flashlight. As he ran, he heard the man talking feverishly and realized he must have a radio. That meant there might be at least one other person in the camp on security patrol.
Bosch made it to the corner of the trailer without drawing another shout. He pressed hard against the wall and looked around the edge. He located the flashlight out near the generator. That gave him an almost fifty-yard lead. He was about to break for the encampment when he saw another flashlight moving down a pathway in his direction. Bosch had no choice. He charged to his left, hoping to get to the cover of an old RV before the second searcher spotted him.
Lungs burning, he passed the back end of the RV before being hit with light. He heard more voices and shouting and realized the commotion had drawn the Russians out of the mobile home to see what was going on.
Bosch kept moving, even as fatigue from the exertion started to grip him. He followed the edge of the camp all the way around until he reached the portable toilets. He thought about hiding inside one but decided against it. He turned and entered the camp and started following the pathway back to the bus. He walked casually after using his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face.
He didn’t make it. In the clearing behind the bus, they were waiting. Bosch was hit with the lights first and then shoved to the ground from behind.
“What the fuck you think you are doing?” a voice said.
Bosch held his hands up off the dirt and sand and splayed his fingers.
“I was just using the toilet,” he called out. “I thought that was okay. Nobody told me I couldn’t leave the—”
“Get him up,” said a Russian.
Bosch was roughly pulled up off the ground and held by both arms by the sheriff and a man he assumed was his deputy.
The two men Bosch had seen playing cards were standing in front of him. The older one came in close enough for Bosch to smell the vodka on his breath.
“You like a Peeping Tom?” he asked.
“What?” Bosch exclaimed. “No, I had to use the shitter.”
“No, you Peeping Tom. Sneaking around, peeping in the window.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Who else, then? You see any Peeping Tom? No, just you.”
“I don’t know but it wasn’t me.”
“Yah, we see about dat. Search him. Who is this guy?”
The sheriff and deputy started going through Bosch’s pockets.
“He’s new,” said the sheriff. “He’s the one who had the gun.”
He pulled Bosch’s wallet out of his pocket and was about to yank it off its chain.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bosch said.
He unsnapped the belt loop so the wallet and chain came free. The sheriff threw it to the Russian.
“Gimme the light,” he said.
The deputy held his light out while the Russian looked through the wallet.
“Reilly,” he said.
He pronounced it really.
The sheriff found the bottle of laxatives and held it up for the Russian to see. The blond Russian said something in their native tongue but the one holding Bosch’s wallet seemed to ignore it.
“Why do you sweat, Reilly?” he asked instead.
“Because I need a hit,” Bosch said. “They only gave me one.”
“He was fighting on the van,” the sheriff said.
“There was no fight,” Bosch said. “Just some pushing. It wasn’t fair. I need the hit.”
The Russian slapped the wallet against his other hand as he contemplated the situation. He then handed it back to Bosch.
Bosch thought he had made it. Returning the wallet meant the Russian would let his trespass go.
But he was wrong.
“On his knees,” the Russian said.
Strong hands gripped Bosch’s shoulders simultaneously and he was pushed down to his knees. The Russian reached behind his back and produced a gun. Bosch immediately recognized it as the one taken from his backpack.
“Is this your piece-of-shit gun, Reilly?”
“Yes. They took it from me at the clinic.”
“Well, it is mine now.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“You know I am Russian, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then how about we play a Russian game and you tell me what you were doing tonight peeping in my window.”
“I told you, I wasn’t. I was taking a shit. I’m old. It takes me a long time.”
The deputy laughed but then cut it off when he was hit by a grim stare from the sheriff. The Russian opened the gun’s cylinder and dumped the six bullets into his palm. He then held one bullet up into the light and made a show of loading it into the cylinder, snapping it closed and spinning it.
“Now we play Russian roulette, yes?”
He held the gun out and pressed the barrel against Bosch’s left temple.
Bosch had confidence in the DEA’s saying they had tricked the weapon, but there was nothing like the barrel of a gun being pressed against the temple to make one contemplate fate. Bosch closed his eyes.
The Russian pulled the trigger and Bosch jerked at the sound of the metal snap. In that moment he knew the two Russians were the pharmacy killers. He opened his eyes and looked directly at the man in front of him.
“Ah, you are lucky man,” said the Russian.
He spun the gun’s cylinder again and laughed.
“We try for two now, lucky man? Why were you looking in my window tonight?”
“No, please, it wasn’t me. I don’t even know where your window is. I just got here. I even had to ask where the bathrooms were.”
This time the Russian pressed the gun’s muzzle to Bosch’s forehead. His partner spoke to him in an urgent tone. Bosch guessed that he was reminding the man with the gun of what the impact would be on pill production if Bosch was killed.
The Russian withdrew the gun without pulling the trigger. He started reloading it. When he was finished, he snapped the barrel closed and pointed to the spot where the missing grip should be.
“I will fix your gun and keep it,” he said. “I want your luck. Do you agree, Reilly?”
“Sure,” Bosch said. “Keep it.”
The Russian reached behind his back and tucked the gun into his pants.
“Thank you, Reilly,” he said. “You go back to sleep now. No more Peeping Tom shit.”
26
The Santos air fleet left the ground early Saturday after a morning distribution of pills, power bars, and burritos. Bosch was in a group on the same plane he had come in on, but this time the passenger count was higher and there were more than a few new faces, men and women, on the plane’s benches. He did see Brody, a stripe of purple bruising on the right side of his face, and the woman with the stars on her hand. They were both on the bench opposite him. Maybe it was the shaved head, which gave the false impression that she was ill from something other than addiction, but Bosch felt a sympathetic need to watch over her. At the same time, he knew never to turn his back on Brody.
This time Bosch was smart enough to muscle his way to a seat at the end of the bench near the jump door and the uncovered window. He’d now have a shot at tracking where the plane was going.
They took off in a northerly direction and stayed on that course, the plane maintaining an altitude of only a few thousand feet. Looking over his shoulder and down through the glass, he could see the Salton Sea below. And then he saw the bright colors painted on the man-made monument known as Salvation Mountain. From high above he saw the warning: JESUS IS THE WAY.
Next it was Joshua Tree National Park and then the Mojave, the land below beautiful in its untouched starkness.
They were in the air almost two hours before the plane landed hard on a strip used by crop dusters. As it made its final descent, Bosch had seen a wind farm in the distance set against hills dotted with cattle, and he knew where they were. In the Central Valley, near Modesto, where Bosch had worked a case a few years before and had seen a helicopter hit one of the windmills and go down.
There were two vans waiting, and the group was split up seven and seven. Bosch was separated from both Brody and the woman with the stars. His van had two men from the organization in the front seats, a driver and a handler, both with Russian accents. They stopped first in Tulare, where they started working a series of mom-and-pop pharmacies for pills. At each stop, the handler gave each of the shills, including Bosch, a new ID—driver’s license and Medicare card—as well as a prescription and cash for the co-pay. The ID cards were crudely manufactured fakes that any bouncer in his first week on the job would’ve alerted to in any club in L.A. But that didn’t matter. The pharmacists—like José Esquivel Sr.—were part of the game, profiting from the seemingly legitimate fulfillment of seemingly valid prescriptions. The ripple effects of the Santos corruption went on endlessly from there to the halls of government and industry.
Despite there seemingly being no need for him to pose as an injured man, Bosch kept up the pretense of wearing the knee brace and carrying the cane. He did it because he did not want to be separated from the cane, his only weapon.
At each stop, the group spent close to an hour, the handler usually breaking the shills into singles and couples at each pharmacy so that seven bedraggled addicts standing in line together would not cause concern among the legitimate customers in the store. From Tulare they moved up into Modesto and then Fresno, a steady supply of amber vials of pills going into the handler’s backpack.
The plane had moved and was waiting at another unrestricted airstrip outside a pecan farm in Fresno. The other van was already there, and when Bosch climbed on board, the spots on the benches in front of the windows were already taken. He did get a seat next to the woman with the stars. As previously instructed, he said nothing to her.
Before the plane took off, Bosch saw the capper from his van hand his backpack through the cockpit window to the pilot. The pilot actually signed some sort of receipt or accounting statement on a clipboard and handed it to the capper. The plane then rumbled down the unpaved strip and took off to the south. They stayed on course without banking or taking any antisurveillance measures.
Bosch kept his counsel for a half hour before finally leaning toward the woman next to him and speaking in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the engine noise.
“You were right,” he said. “He came last night. I was ready.”
“I can tell,” she said, referring to the bruise running the length of Brody’s face.
“Thank you.”
“Forget it.”
“How long have you been trapped in this?”
She turned her body on the bench to literally give him the cold shoulder. Then, as if thinking better of it, she turned her head back to him and spoke.
“Just leave me alone.”
“I thought maybe we could help each other out, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about? You just got here. You’re not a woman, you don’t know what it’s like.”
Bosch flashed on the image of the woman lying discarded on the couch while the Russians gambled for the pills that were the source of all this degradation and disaster.
“I know,” he said. “But I’ve seen enough to know this is like being a slave.”
She didn’t respond and kept her shoulder turned to Bosch.
“When I make a move, I’ll let you know,” he tried.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re just going to get yourself killed. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to be saved, okay? Like I said from the beginning, leave me alone.”
“Why’d you warn me about Brody if you want to be left alone?”
“Because he’s an animal, and one doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”
“Got it.”
She tried to turn even further away from Bosch, but the lower edge of the pale yellow jacket she wore was trapped under his leg. The move pulled the jacket down over her shoulder, exposing the tank top below it and part of a tattoo.
ISY
–2009
She angrily jerked her jacket out from under his leg and back into place, but Bosch had seen enough to know it was part of an RIP tattoo on the back of her shoulder. She had lost someone important eight years before. Important enough to always carry the reminder. He wondered if it was that loss that ultimately put her on the plane.
Bosch leaned away from her and caught Brody watching them from the bench on the other side of the plane. He gave Bosch a knowing smile and Bosch realized he had made a mistake. Brody had recognized Bosch’s attempt to connect to the woman. He would now realize that he could get to him through her.
The plane landed an hour later with an easier glide pattern and touchdown. Bosch couldn’t tell where they were until he climbed out the jump door and recognized that he was inside the hangar at Whiteman. There were two vans waiting and this time he tried to stick close to the woman with the stars. When the group was split, he ended up in a van with her as well as Brody.
From Whiteman the van turned right on San Fernando Road but then took Van Nuys Boulevard to the first pharmacy stop. They were in Pacoima and apparently staying clear of San Fernando.
The driver, who was the same Russian who had punched Bosch while in the clinic the day before, broke his seven shills into two groups and sent Bosch and two others into the pharmacy first. Brody and the woman with the stars were left in the second group. Bosch went through the process of providing a prescription and bogus ID to the pharmacist and then waited for the pills to be put into the bottle. In most of the previous stops, the pills were already bottled and ready, the pharmacists wanting to limit the time the shills spent in the drugstore. But in this store Bosch was told to either wait outside or come back in thirty minutes.
Bosch went outside and told the Russian. He was not happy. He told Bosch and the two other shills to go back and wait inside the drugstore in order to hurry the pharmacist along. Bosch did as instructed and was milling about in the foot-care aisle, within full view of the pharmacist, when he turned around and saw another shopper looking at the Dr. Scholl’s insole cushions. It was Bella Lourdes. She spoke in a low voice without looking at Bosch.
“How are you doing, Harry?”
Bosch checked the location of the other two shills before responding. They had separated and one was looking in the Mexican apothecary aisle and the other was maintaining a vigil at the prescription counter.
“I’m good. What are you doing in here?”
“Needed to check. We lost contact with you last night. Didn’t pick you up till you landed at Whiteman.”
“Are you shitting me? Hovan said they were the eye in the sky. They lost the plane?”
“They did. Hovan claimed upper atmospheric interference. Valdez hit the ceiling about it. Where’d they take you?”
“Jerry Edgar’s intel was on the button. It’s an encampment near Slab City, southeast of the Salton Sea.”
“And you’re okay?”
“I am but I almost wasn’t. I think I met the two shooters. One of them played Russian roulette on me with that revolver the DEA gave me.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Lucky it was tricked out.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want out? I give the word and we’ll swarm this place and pull you out, make it look like a bust.”
“No, but I want you to do something else. Where’s Jerry?”
“He’s out there watching. We obviously freaked last night when they lost you, but now we’re on you and won’t drop the ball.”
Bosch checked the shills again. They were not paying attention to him. He checked the front door of the drugstore and saw no sign of the Russian driver.
“Okay, as soon as we get our scrips filled and are out of here, they’re going to send in four more. A woman and three men.”
“Okay.”
“Have Jerry swing in on random enforcement and bust them for fraudulent IDs, prescriptions, the whole works.”
“All right, we can do that. Why?”
“The guy named Brody is causing me a problem. I need him gone. He’s got a line of purple down the right side of his face.”
Two Kinds of Truth (A Harry Bosch Novel) Page 20