Lost Light (2003)

by Michael Connelly

  I had been in Nat’s on numerous occasions in its former incarnation as a dive bar populated by a clientele as devoted to alcohol as any other aspect of life. It wasn’t a pickup spot—unless you counted the prostitutes who cooled their heels at the bar. It wasn’t a celebrity-watching spot. It was a drinking spot and that was the sum of its entire purpose, and as such it had an honest character. As I walked in and saw all the polished brass and rich woods I realized that what it had now was glamour and that was never the same or as long-lasting as character. It didn’t matter how many people lined up on opening night. The place wasn’t going to go the distance. I knew that within fifteen seconds. The place was doomed before the first citron martini was poured shaken not stirred into its frosted glass and placed on a black napkin.

  I went right to the bar where there were three patrons who looked like tourists in from Florida after a dose of much needed California Cool. The bartender was tall and thin and wore the requisite black jeans and tight body shirt that allowed her nipples to introduce themselves to the customers. She had a black-ink snake wrapped around one bicep, its forked red tongue licking the crook of her elbow, where the needle scars were evident. Her hair was shorter than mine and on the nape of her neck a bar code was tattooed. It made me think of how much I enjoyed discovering Eleanor Wish’s neck the night before.

  “There’s a ten-dollar cover,” the bartender said. “What can I get you?”

  I remembered from the magazine article that it used to be $20.

  “What does it cover? This place is dead.”

  “Stick around. That’s ten dollars.”

  I made no move to give her the money. I leaned on the bar and spoke quietly.

  “Where’s Linus?”

  “He’s not here tonight.”

  “Then where is he? I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s probably at Chet’s. That’s where he keeps his office. He doesn’t usually start bopping around to the places until after midnight. Are you going to pay the ten?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m leaving.”

  She frowned.

  “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

  I smiled proudly.

  “Going on twenty-eight years.”

  I left off the part about the twenty-eight years coming before I retired. I figured she’d get on the phone and send the word a cop was coming. That might work in my favor. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a ten. I tossed it onto the bar.

  “That’s not the cover. That’s for you. Get a haircut.”

  She put an exaggerated smile on her face, one that showed she had a nice set of dimples. She snatched the ten.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I smiled as I walked out.

  It took me fifteen minutes to get over to Chet’s on Santa Monica near LaBrea. I had the address thanks to Los Angeles Magazine, which had conveniently put a listing of all of the Four Kings establishments in a box on the last page of the story.

  Again there was no line and few customers. I was beginning to think that once you are declared cool in the tourist books and magazines, then you’re dead in the water. Chet’s was almost a carbon copy of Nat’s, right down to the sullen bartender with the not-so-subtle nipples and tattoos. The one thing I liked about the place was the music. Chet Baker’s “Cool Burnin’” was playing when I walked in and I thought maybe the kings might have some taste after all.

  The bartender was déjà vu all over again—tall, thin and in black, except her bicep tattoo was Marilyn Monroe’s face circa “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

  “You the cop?” she asked before I said a word.

  “You’ve been talking to your sister. I guess she told you I don’t pay cover.”

  “She said something about that.”

  “Where’s Linus?”

  “He’s in his office. I told him you were coming.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  I stepped away from the bar but pointed at her tattoo.

  “Your mom?”

  “Hey, come here, take a look.”

  I leaned back over the bar. She bent her elbow and flexed her muscles repeatedly. Marilyn’s cheeks puffed up and then down as the bicep beneath expanded and contracted.

  “Kind of looks like she’s giving a blow job, doesn’t it?” the bartender said.

  “That’s real cute,” I said. “I bet you show that to all the boys.”

  “Is it worth ten bucks?”

  I almost told her I knew places where I could get the real thing for a ten but let it go. I left her there and found my way to a hallway behind the bar. There were doors for the rest rooms and then a door marked “Management Only.” I didn’t knock. I just went through and it only led to a continuation of the hallway and more doors. The third door down said “Linus” on it. I opened that one without knocking, too.

  Linus Simonson was sitting behind a cluttered desk. I recognized him from the magazine photo. He had a bottle of Scotch whiskey and a snifter on the desk. There was a black leather couch in the office and on it sat a man I also recognized from the magazine as one of the partners. His name was James Oliphant. He had his feet up on a coffee table and looked like he wasn’t the least bit concerned by a visit from a man he’d been told was a cop.

  “Hey, man, you the cop,” Simonson said as he waved me in. “Close the door.”

  I stepped in and introduced myself. I didn’t say I was a cop.

  “Well, I’m Linus and that there’s Jim. What’s up? What can we do for you?”

  I held my hands out as though I had nothing to hide.

  “I’m not sure what you can do for me. I just wanted to drop by and sort of introduce myself. I’m working on the Angella Benton case and of course that includes the BankLA case so . . . here I am.”

  “Oh, man, BankLA. That’s some serious ancient history there.”

  He looked at his partner and laughed.

  “That was like another lifetime ago. I don’t want to go there, man. That’s a bad memory.”

  “Yeah, well, not as bad for you as it was for Angella Benton.”

  Simonson suddenly got serious and leaned forward on his desk.

  “I don’t get this, man. What are you doing here? You’re not a cop. Cops come in twos. If you are a cop, then you aren’t legit. What do you want? Let me see a badge.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody I had a badge. I was a cop, but not now. In fact, I thought maybe you’d recognize me from that other lifetime you were talking about.”

  Simonson looked at Oliphant and smirked.

  “Recognize you from what?”

  “I was there that day you took it in the ass. I’m talking about the bullet. But then again, you were rolling around and screaming so much you probably didn’t have time to look at me.”

  But Simonson’s eyes widened in recognition. Maybe not physical recognition but recognition of who I was and what I had done.

  “Shit, you’re the guy. You’re the cop that was there. You’re the one who shot —”

  He stopped himself from saying a name. He looked at Oliphant.

  “He’s the one who hit one of the robbers.”

  I looked at Oliphant and I saw recognition—physical recognition—and maybe something like hate or anger in his eyes.

  “That’s not known for sure because we never got the robber. But, yeah, I think I hit him. That was me.”

  I said it with a smile of pride. I kept it on my face as I turned back to Simonson.

  “Who are you working for?” Simonson asked.

  “Me? I’m working for somebody who isn’t going to stop, who isn’t going to let up. Not for a minute. He’s going to find out who put Angella Benton down on the tile and he’ll go at it until he either dies or he knows.”

  Simonson smirked again arrogantly.

  “Well, good luck to you and him, Mr. Bosch. I think you ought to go now. We’re kind of busy here.”

  I nodded to him and then looked at Oliphant, giving him the best deadeye in my repe
rtoire.

  “Then I guess I’ll see you boys around.”

  I went through the door and down the hallway back to the bar. Chet Baker was now singing “My Funny Valentine.” As I headed for the main door I noticed the bartender flexing her bicep for two men sitting at the bar where I had stood. They were laughing. I recognized them as the remaining two kings from the magazine photo.

  They stopped laughing when they saw me and I felt their eyes on me all the way out the door.

  39

  On the way home I stopped at the twenty-four-hour Ralph’s on Sunset and bought a bag of coffee. I didn’t expect that I’d be getting much sleep between the night and the multi-agency confab the following morning.

  On the drive up the hill to my house there are too many curves to use the rearview mirror to check for a tail. But there is one sweeping curve halfway up that allows you to look to your right out the passenger window and across the drop-off to the road you just covered. It’s always been my habit to slow at this spot and check for a trailer.

  This night I slowed more than usual and watched a little longer. I didn’t expect my visit to Chet’s to be taken as anything other than a threat and I wasn’t wrong. As I looked across the drop-off I saw a car with no lights on round the hill and move into the sweeping curve. I eased the gas pedal down and slowly picked up speed again. After the next curve I punched it and put a little more distance between us. I pulled all the way into the carport next to my house and quickly got out with the bag from the store. I moved into the darkest corner of the carport and waited. I heard the trail car before I saw it. Then I watched it glide by. A long Jaguar. Someone was lighting a cigarette in the backseat, and in the glow from the flame I saw the car was full. The four kings were coming for me.

  After the Jag had gone by I saw the bushes across the street glow red and I knew they were stopping just past my house. I moved to the door that led into the kitchen and went inside, making sure to lock the door afterward.

  This was the moment when people without badges called the police for help. It’s when they desperately whispered, “Hurry, please! They are coming!” But badge or no badge, I knew that was not an option for me now. This was my play and I didn’t care in that moment about what authority I had or didn’t have.

  I had not carried a gun since the night I left my badge and service pistol in a drawer at Hollywood Division and walked out. But I had a weapon. I’d bought a Glock P7 for personal protection. It was wrapped in an oil rag and in a box on the shelf of the walk-in closet in the bedroom. I put the bag from Ralph’s down on the counter and moved into the hallway and down to the bedroom without turning on any lights.

  When I opened the closet door I was suddenly shoved backwards with great force by a man who had been waiting in there for me. I hit the opposite wall and slid to the floor. He was on me immediately, straddling and pushing the barrel of a pistol up under my jaw. I managed to look up and in the pale light coming in through the French door leading to the deck I could see who it was.

  “Milton. What the —”

  “Shut up, asshole. You surprised to see me? Did you think I was going to let them wash me down the toilet without doing something about it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Listen, there are people —”

  “I said, shut the fuck up. I want the disks, you understand? I want the original data chip.”

  “Listen to me! There are people about to come in here for me. They want —”

  He shoved the barrel in so deep under my jaw that I had to stop talking. The pain sent shards of red glass across my vision. Milton held the gun there and leaned down, his breath in my face as he spoke.

  “I’ve got your gun right here, Bosch. And I’m going to turn you into another suicide statistic if you don’t —”

  There was a sudden crashing sound from the hallway and I knew it was the front door coming in off its hinges. Then there were footsteps. Milton jumped up off of me and stepped through the bedroom door into the hallway. Almost immediately, there was the booming thunder of a shotgun blast and Milton was slammed back against the wall, his eyes wide with the terror of knowing he was dying. He then slid down the wall, his heels pushing back the hallway rug to reveal the handle of the trapdoor that led beneath the house.

  I knew they had mistaken him for me. It was a break worth a few seconds at the most. I rolled over and quickly moved to the French door. As I opened it I heard someone’s panicked voice call out from the hallway.

  “It’s not him!”

  The door squealed when I opened it, its hinges protesting from lack of use. I quickly crossed the deck and went over the railing like a cowboy mounting a stolen horse. I went down the railing until I was hanging from the deck, twenty feet above the sharply sloping ground below. In the dim moonlight I looked for one of the iron support beams that held the deck and house to the side of the hill. I was intimately familiar with the design of the house from having supervised its reconstruction from the ground up after the ’ninety-four earthquake.

  I had to move six feet along the edge of the deck before I could reach in and grab hold of one of the support beams. I wrapped my arms and legs around it and slid down to the ground. As I went down I heard their footsteps on the deck above me.

  “He went down there! He went down there!”

  “Where? I don’t see —”

  “He went down there! You two go. We’ll take the street.”

  I was on the ground beneath the shelter of the deck. I knew if I stepped out and tried to make my way down the steep slope to one of the streets or houses in the canyon below I would be exposed to my armed pursuers. Instead I turned and climbed up the hill under the house and further into the shelter of the structure. I knew there was a trench dug into the ground up there, where the sewer main had to be replaced after the quake. Above me there would also be the trapdoor that opened in the hallway. But I had designed it during the rebuilding of the house as an escape route, not a means of ingress. It was locked from inside and no use to me at the moment.

  I moved up the hill, found the trench and rolled into it. I blindly moved my hands around at the bottom, looking for a weapon. All I found were cracked pieces of the old sewer main. I found one shard that was triangular and might work as a weapon. It would have to do.

  Two men moved like shadows down the support beams to the ground below the deck. The moonlight reflected off the steel of their pistols. The reflections also showed me that one had on eyeglasses and I remembered him from the magazine story and photo. His name was Bernard Banks, known as B.B. King among the night crawlers. He had been at the bar at Chet’s when I had left.

  The two shadows exchanged whispers and then split up, one moving down the hill and to the left, the other—Banks—maintaining his position. It was some kind of tactical strategy in which one would hopefully chase me into the waiting pistol of the other.

  From my angle above him Banks was a hard target silhouetted by the lights from the canyon below. He was fifteen feet from me but I had nothing to use as a weapon except a shard of old iron pipe. Still, it was enough. I had survived more missions into the tunnels of Vietnam than I could remember. I’d once spent a whole night in the elephant grass with the enemy moving all around me. And I had lived and worked for twenty-five-plus years on the streets of this city with a badge. This kid was going to be no match for me. I knew none of them would be.

  When Banks turned to look down the canyon slope, I rose up in the trench and threw the pipe shard into the brush out to his right. It made a sound like an animal moving through high grass. As he turned, tensed and raised his weapon I slid over the top of the trench and started moving down the slope toward him, all the while keeping one of the iron beams between us as a sound and visual blind.

  I got to the beam and he still had not turned from the direction of the sounds in the brush. He was just putting the misdirection together and finally turning back when I got to him. My left fist hit him squarely between the eyes
while my right closed over the gun and I put a finger through the trigger guard. I had actually been aiming for his mouth but the punch broke his glasses in half at the bridge and staggered him just the same. I pivoted and swung him in a 180-degree arc, gathering momentum and putting him headfirst into one of the support beams. His skull made a sound like a water balloon breaking and the iron beam hummed like a tuning fork. He dropped to the ground like a bag of wet laundry.

  I put his gun into the waistband of my pants and then turned him over. The blood on his face looked black in the moonlight. I quickly propped his back against the beam, brought his knees up and folded his arms on top of them. I leaned his face down on his arms.