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.
“Stay there, don’t fuckin’ move. You think I’m going to take you out of here? I figure you cost us five, maybe six million, from what Tran had in his box. Had to be that much. But I’ll never know now. You fucked up the perfect crime. You aren’t getting out of here.”
Bosch dropped his head until his chin was on his chest. His eyes were rolling up into their lids. He wanted to sleep now but he was fighting it. He groaned but said nothing.
“You were the only thing left to chance in the whole goddam plan. And what happens? The one chance something will happen, it does. You’re Murphy’s fuckin’ Law, man, in the flesh.”
Bosch managed to look up at Rourke. It was a terrible struggle. After, his good arm fell away from the shoulder wound. There was no more strength left to hold it there.
“What?” he managed to say. “Wh-wha . . . do you mean? . . . Chance?”
“What I mean is coincidence. You getting the callout on Meadows. That wasn’t part of the plan, Bosch. You believe that shit? I wonder what the odds are. I mean, Meadows is put in a pipe we knew he had crashed in before. We’re hoping maybe he won’t be found for a couple of days and then maybe it takes two, three days for somebody to make the ID off the prints. Meantime, he gets written off as an OD, a no-count. The guy’s got a hype card in the files. Why not?
“But what happens? This kid reports the body right off the fucking bat”—he shook his head, the persecuted man—“and who gets the call, a dipshit dick who actually knew the fucking stiff and ID’s him in about two seconds. An asshole buddy from the tunnels of Viet-fucking-nam. I don’t believe this shit myself.
“You messed everything up with that, Bosch. Even your own miserable life . . . Hey, still with me?”
Bosch felt his head raise, the gun barrel under his chin.
“Still with me?” Rourke said again, and then he poked the barrel into Bosch’s right shoulder. It sent a shock wave of red neon pain searing down his arm and through his chest, right down to his balls. He groaned and gasped for air, then took a slow-motion swing with his left hand at the gun. It wasn’t enough. He only got air. He swallowed back vomit and felt beads of sweat running through his damp hair.
“You don’t look so good, buddy,” Rourke said. “I’m thinking maybe I won’t have to do this after all. Maybe my man Delgado did it right with the first shot.”
The pain had brought Bosch back. It pulsed through him, leaving him alert, albeit temporarily. He could already feel himself fading. Rourke continued to lean over him, and he looked up and noticed the flaps hanging from the chest and waist of the FBI agent’s jumpsuit. Pockets. He was wearing the jumpsuit inside out. Something clicked in Bosch’s brain. He remembered Sharkey saying he saw an empty tool belt around the waist of the man who pulled the body into the pipe at the reservoir. That was Rourke. He wore the jumpsuit inside out that night, too. Because it said FBI on the back. He didn’t want to risk that that would be seen. It was a bit of information that was useless now, but for some reason it pleased Bosch to be able to put it in place in the puzzle.
&nb
sp; “What are you smiling at, dead man?” Rourke asked.
“Fuck you.”
Rourke raised his foot and kicked at Bosch’s shoulder but Bosch was ready for it. He grabbed the heel with his left hand and pushed upward and out. Rourke’s other foot gave way on the slick bed of algae and slipped out from under him. He went down on his back with a splash. But he didn’t drop the gun as Bosch had hoped. That was it. That was all there was. Bosch made a halfhearted effort to grab the weapon, but Rourke easily peeled his fingers off the barrel and pushed him back against the wall. Bosch leaned to his side and vomited into the water. He felt a new flow of blood coming from his shoulder, running down his arm. That had been his play. There was nothing else.
Rourke got up out of the water. He moved in close and put the barrel of the gun against Bosch’s forehead. “You know, Meadows used to tell me about all that black echo stuff. All that bullshit. Well, Harry, here you are. This is it.”
“Why’d he die?” Bosch whispered. “Meadows. Why?”
Rourke stepped back and looked up and down the tunnel before speaking.
“You know why. He was a fuckup over there, he was a fuckup here. That’s why he died.” Rourke seemed to be reviewing a memory in his mind and he shook his head disgustedly. “It was all perfect except for him. He held back the bracelet. Little jade dolphins on gold.”
Rourke stared off into the darkness of the tunnel. A wistful look played on his face. “That’s all it took,” he said. “See, the plan relied on complete adherence for success. Meadows, goddammit—he didn’t do that.”
He shook his head, still angry at the dead man, and was quiet. It was at that moment that Bosch thought he could hear the sound of steps somewhere off in the distance. He wasn’t sure if he had heard it or if it was what he hoped to hear. He moved his left leg in the water. Not enough to cause Rourke to pull the trigger, but enough to make the water slosh and to cover the sound of the steps. If they were even there.
“He kept the bracelet,” Bosch said. “That was it?”
“That was enough,” Rourke said angrily. “Nothing was to turn up. Don’t you see? That was the beauty of the thing. Nothing would turn up. We’d get rid of everything except the diamonds. And those we’d keep until we were done with both jobs. But that fool couldn’t wait until the second job was completed. He palms that cheap bracelet and pawns it to score dope.
“I saw it on the pawn reports. Yeah, after the WestLand job, we went to LAPD and asked them to send over their monthly pawn lists so we could check ’em out, too. We started to get ’em at the bureau. The only reason I made the bracelet and your pawn guys didn’t was I was looking for it. The pawn detail has to look for a thousand things. I only looked for that one thing.
“I knew somebody had held it back. There was a lot reported stolen from that first vault that wasn’t in the shit we took out of there. Insurance scammers. But the dolphin bracelet I knew was legit. That old lady . . . crying. The story behind it with her husband and all that sentimental value shit. Interviewed her myself. And I knew she wasn’t scamming. So I knew one of my tunnel people had held the bracelet back.”
Keep him talking, Bosch thought. He keeps talking and you’ll end up walking. Out of here. Out of here. Someone’s coming, my arm’s humming. He laughed in his delirium and that made him vomit again. Rourke just went on.
“I bet on Meadows right from the start. Once on the needle . . . you know how that goes. So when the bracelet turned up he was the first one I went to.”
Rourke drifted off then, and Bosch made more water noise with his legs. The water now seemed warm to him and it was the blood that ran down his side that was cold.
Rourke finally said, “You know, I really don’t know whether to kiss you or kill you, Bosch. You cost us millions on this job, but then again my share of the first one sure has gone up now that three of my guys are dead. Probably even out in the end.”
Bosch did not think he could stay awake much longer. He felt tired, helpless and resigned. The alertness had run out of him. Even now when he managed to reach his hand up and throw it against his torn shoulder, there was no pain. He couldn’t get it back. He lapsed into contemplation of the water moving slowly around his legs. It felt so warm and he felt so cold. He wanted to lie down and pull it over him like a blanket. He wanted to sleep in it. But from somewhere a voice told him to hang in. He thought of Clarke clutching his throat. The blood. He looked at the beam of light in Rourke’s hand and tried one more time.
“Why so long?” he asked in a voice no louder than a whisper. “All these years. Tran and Binh. Why now?”
“No answer, Bosch. Things just come together sometimes. Like Halley’s comet. It comes around every seventy-two or whatever years. Things come together. I helped them bring their diamonds across. Set the whole thing up for them. I was paid well and never thought otherwise. And then one day the seed planted all those years ago came out of the ground, man. It was there for the taking and, man, we took it. I took it! That’s why now.”
A gloating smile played across Rourke’s face. He brought the muzzle of the weapon back to a point in front of Bosch’s face. All Bosch could do was watch.
“I’m out of time, Bosch, and so are you.”
Rourke braced the gun with both hands and spread his feet to the width of his shoulders. At that final moment Bosch closed his eyes. He cleared his mind of all thought but of the water. So warm, like a blanket. He heard two gunshots, echoing like thunder through the concrete tunnel. He fought to open his eyes and saw Rourke leaning against the other wall, both his hands up in the air. One held the M-16, the other the penlight. The gun dropped and clattered into the water, then the penlight. It bobbed on the surface, its bulb still on. It cast a swirling pattern on the roof and walls of the tunnel as it slowly moved away with the current.
Rourke never said a word. He slowly sagged down the wall, staring off to his right—the direction Bosch thought the shots had come from—and leaving a smear of blood that followed him down. In the dimming light, Bosch could see surprise on his face and then a look of resolve in his eyes. Pretty soon he sat like Bosch against the wall, the water moving around his legs, his dead eyes no longer staring at anything.
Things went out of focus for Bosch then. He wanted to ask a question but couldn’t form the words. There was another light in the tunnel and he thought he heard a voice, a woman’s voice, telling him everything was okay. Then he thought he saw Eleanor Wish’s face, floating in and out of focus. And then it sank away into inky blackness. That blackness was finally all he saw.
PART VIII
SUNDAY, MAY 27
Bosch dreamed of the jungle. Meadows was there, and all the soldiers from Harry’s photo album. They stood around the hole at the bottom of a leaf-covered trench. Above them a gray mist clung to the top of the jungle canopy. The air was still and warm. Bosch took photographs of the other rats with his camera. Meadows was going into the ground, he said. Out of the blue and into the black. He looked at Bosch through the camera and said, “Remember the promise, Hieronymus.”
“Rhymes with anonymous,” Bosch said.
But before he could tell him not to go, Meadows promptly jumped feet first into the hole and disappeared. Bosch rushed to the edge and looked down but saw nothing, just darkness like ink. Faces came into focus, then slipped back into the blackness. There was Meadows and Rourke and Lewis and Clarke. From behind him, he heard a voice he recognized but couldn’t place with a face.
“Harry, c’mon, man. I need to talk to you.”
Then Bosch became aware of a deep pain in his shoulder, throbbing from elbow to neck. Someone was tapping his left hand, lightly patting it. He opened his eyes. It was Jerry Edgar.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Edgar said. “I don’t have much time. This guy on the door says they’ll be here anytime now. Plus he’s due to go off watch. I wanted to try to talk to you before the brass did. Would’ve been by yesterday but this place was crawling with silk. Besides, I heard you were o
ut most of the day. Too delirious.”
Bosch just stared at him.
“On these things,” Edgar said, “I’ve always heard it’s best to say you can’t remember a thing. Let them put it whatever way they want. I mean, when you catch a round, there’s no way they can say you’re lying about remembering. The mind shuts down, man, when there is traumatic insult to the body. I’ve read that.”
By now Bosch realized he was in a hospital room and he began to look about. He noticed five or six vases of flowers, and the room smelled putridly sweet. He also noticed he had restraining belts across his chest and waist.
“You’re at MLK, Harry. Um, doctors say you’ll be all right. They still have some work to do on your arm, though.” Edgar lowered his voice to a whisper. “I snuck in. Think the nurses have a change of shift or something. Cop on the door, he’s over from Wilshire patrol, let me in ’cause he’s selling and he musta heard that’s my gig. I told him I’d take his listing for two points if he gave me five minutes in here.”
The Concrete Blonde (1994) Page 40