Michael Connelly - The Crossing

“Come on, come on, come on, pick up,” he said.

Once the curtain closed off direct light, the room dropped into shadow. Bosch then pointed at the bathroom door.

“Go in there,” he commanded. “Lock the door and stay low.”

Schubert didn’t move.

“You dialed nine-one-one,” he said. “Can’t you just call for backup?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a cop. Now go in there.”

Schubert looked puzzled.

“I thought—”

“I said GO!”

There was nothing whispered about the command this time. It propelled Schubert backwards toward the bathroom door. He went inside and closed the door. Bosch heard the click of the lock. He knew it wouldn’t stop Ellis and Long if it came to that. But it might buy a few more seconds.

The 911 operator finally answered and Bosch spoke in a loud and exaggeratedly panicked voice. He wanted Ellis and Long to know he was calling for help. They were probably in the hallway outside at that moment and Bosch thought there was a chance they would retreat if they heard him making the call.

“Yes, hello, I need help. There are two armed men in my office and they’re going to kill everybody,” he said loudly. “Their names are Ellis and Long, Ellis and Long, and they came here to kill us.”

“Hold on, sir,” the operator said. “Your location is fifteen-fifteen West Third Street?”

“Yes, that’s it. Hurry!”

“What is your name, sir?”

“What does that matter? Just send help.”

“I need your name, sir.”

“Harry Bosch.”

“Okay, sir, we are sending help. Please stay on the line for me.”

Bosch moved directly behind the desk. He put the phone in the crook of his neck and used his thigh and his free hand to lift the edge of the desk and tip it over on its side, its aluminum top now a barricade facing the door. Everything on the desk, including the desk phone, his own phone, and the cup full of pens slid off and loudly crashed to the floor. The phone’s handset was yanked from his neck when the cord reached its maximum extension. Bosch knew there was no time to go back around to retrieve it. He had to hope the call wasn’t disconnected and that the operator didn’t decide it was a prank.

Bosch crouched down behind the barricade. He knocked a fist on the underside of the desktop and felt and heard wood. The double layer of wood and metal might actually stop bullets — if he was lucky.

He squatted down further behind the blind and pointed his Glock at the door. He had brought the gun as part of the show to trick Schubert into believing he was a cop. Now it might be the only thing that kept them alive. The gun was maxed with thirteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. He hoped it would be enough.

He heard a slight metallic sound from the far side of the room and knew Ellis and Long were outside the door and trying the knob. They were about to come in. Bosch realized at that very moment that he was in the wrong spot. He was positioned dead center in the room exactly where they would expect him to be.

Ellis signaled to Long that the door was locked and that he should kick it in. Long tossed him the flashlight and then backed off a few feet. He raised his leg, aiming his heel at a spot just above the doorknob. He had done this a lot over the years and was good at it.

The door flew open and slammed back on the inside wall of the office, revealing a darkened room lit only by the dim light leaking around the edges of a window curtain on the far wall. Long was left in a vulnerable position as the momentum from his kick carried him into the office. Ellis moved in behind him, following his left flank and holding his gun and the flashlight in the standard crossed-wrists configuration.

“Police!” he called out. “Nobody move!”

The light fell on a desk that had been tipped onto its side to create a barricade. He put the aim of his weapon on the top edge of the desk, ready for Bosch or Schubert to show himself.

“Wait!”

The voice called out from behind the door to the left of the desk. Ellis recalibrated the aim of both his light and gun.

“It’s me!” Schubert called. “He told me he was a cop!”

The door opened and there stood Schubert, his hands raised.

“Don’t shoot. I thought he—”

Ellis opened fire, sending three quick shots toward Schubert. In his peripheral vision he saw Long on his right, turning and raising his gun to fire as well.

“No!”

The shout came from behind him and to the right. Ellis turned and saw Bosch moving laterally out from behind a folding partition that split the room. He had a gun up and opened fire as Ellis realized the overturned desk had been a decoy and Bosch had the superior position.

Ellis lurched forward to put Long’s larger body between Bosch and himself. He saw his partner react as the bullets struck him. The impacts redirected Long’s momentum into a spin. He was going to go down. Ellis shifted his weight and drove his shoulder into Long’s upper body, holding his partner up and swinging his own gun hand around his torso at the same time. Ellis fired wildly, shooting blindly in the direction he had last seen Bosch. He then reversed his footing and started back toward the door, dragging Long with him as a shield.

There was more gunfire, and Ellis felt the impacts through his partner’s body. At the doorway he dropped Long and fired two more shots in the direction of where Bosch’s fire had come from. He backed into the hallway and then turned and ran toward a door marked with an exit sign.

As he raced down the stairway to the garage, Ellis had one question bouncing through the impulses of his brain.

Fight or flight?

Was it all over or was there still a chance he could contain this, somehow turn it all on Bosch? Tell them Bosch was the one. Bosch opened fire. Bosch had some kind of crazy vendetta going. Bosch—

He knew he was kidding himself. It couldn’t work. If Bosch was still alive up there, then it wouldn’t work.

Ellis ran across the garage to his car. He could hear an approaching siren — Sheriff’s deputies responding to Bosch’s 911 call. He judged it to be two or three blocks away. He had to get out before they got here. That was priority one. After that, he knew it was time to fly.

He was prepared. He had known it might someday come to this and he had planned for it.

His gun braced in two hands, Bosch moved in on Long, who was collapsed in the doorway. He was writhing in pain and gasping for breath. Bosch saw the last two bullets he had fired embedded in Long’s shirt, held in place by the bulletproof vest underneath. Bosch yanked the gun out of Long’s hand and slid it across the floor behind him. He put his weight down on Long and leaned forward to cautiously look into the hallway and make sure Ellis wasn’t waiting out there.

Satisfied that Ellis was gone, Bosch pulled back into the room and turned Long over onto his chest. He took the vice cop’s cuffs off his belt and used them to bind his wrists behind his back. He then saw the blood on Long’s right side. One of Bosch’s shots had found skin below the vest. Long was bleeding from a wound just above his right hip. Bosch knew that a.45 slug fired from ten feet was going to do major internal damage. Long might be mortally wounded.

“You motherfucker,” Long finally managed to get out. “You’re going to die.”

“Everybody dies, Long,” Bosch said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Bosch heard multiple sirens now and wondered if the Sheriff’s had gotten Ellis on his way out.

“Your partner abandoned you, Long,” he said. “First, he uses you as a human shield and then he drops you like a bag of oranges. That’s some partner.”