Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

“Hey, Bosch, we get a call, we’ve got to check it out. Okay? You want for us to transfer all our body calls directly to the homicide table to check out? You guys’d go nuts inside a week.”

Bosch crushed the cigarette butt in the stainless steel sink and looked out the kitchen window. Looking down the hill he could see one of the tourist trams moving between the huge beige sound studios in Universal City. A side of one of the block-long buildings was painted sky blue with wisps of white clouds; for filming exteriors when the natural L.A. exterior turned brown as wheat.

Bosch said, “How’d we get the call?”

“Anonymous to nine one one. A little after oh four hundred. Dispatcher said it came from a pay phone on the boulevard. Somebody out screwin’ around, found the thing in the pipe. Wouldn’t give a name. Said there was a stiff in the pipe, that’s all. They’ll have the tape down at the com center.”

Bosch felt himself getting angry. He pulled the bottle of aspirin out of the cabinet and put it in his pocket. While thinking about the 0400 call, he opened the refrigerator and bent in. He saw nothing that interested him. He looked at his watch.

“Crowley, if the report came in at fourA.M. why are you just getting to me now, nearly five hours later?”

“Look, Bosch, all we had was an anonymous call. That’s it. Dispatcher said it was a kid, no less. I wasn’t going to send one of my guys up that pipe in the middle of the night on information like that. Coulda been a prank. Coulda been an ambush. Coulda been anything, fer crissake. I waited till it got light out and things slowed down around here. Sent some of my guys over there at the end of shift. Speaking of end of shifts, I’m outta here. I’ve been waiting to hear from them and then from you. Anything else?”

Bosch felt like asking if it ever occurred to him that it would be dark in the pipe whether they went poking around at 0400 or 0800, but let it go. What was the use?

“Anything else?” Crowley said again.

Bosch couldn’t think of anything, but Crowley filled the empty space.

“It’s probly just some hype who croaked himself, Harry. No righteous one eighty-seven case. Happens all the time. Hell, you remember we pulled one out of that same pipe last year… Er, well, that was before you came out to Hollywood… So, see, what I’m saying is some guy, he goes into this same pipe-these transients, they sleep up there all the time-and he’s a slammer but he shoots himself with a hot load and that’s it. Checks out. ’Cept we didn’t find him so fast that time, and with the sun and all beating on the pipe a couple days, he gets cooked in there. Roasted like a tom turkey. But it didn’t smell as good.”

Crowley laughed at his own joke. Bosch didn’t. The watch sergeant continued.

“When we pulled this guy out, the spike was still in his arm. Same thing here. Just a bullshit job, a no-count case. You go out there, you’ll be back home by noon, take a nap, maybe go catch the Dodgers. And then next weekend? Somebody else’s turn in the barrel. You’re off watch. And that’s a three-day pass. You got Memorial Day weekend coming next week. So do me a favor. Just go out and see what they’ve got.”

Bosch thought a moment and was about to hang up, then said, “Crowley, what did you mean you didn’t find that other one so fast? What makes you think we found this one fast?”

“My guys out there, they say they can’t smell a thing off this stiff other than a little piss. It must be fresh.”

“Tell your guys I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell them not to fuck anymore with anything at my scene.”

“They-”

Bosch knew Crowley was going to defend his men again but hung up before he had to hear it. He lit another cigarette as he went to the front door to get the Times off the step. He spread the twelve pounds of Sunday paper out on the kitchen counter, wondering how many trees died. He found the real estate supplement and paged through it until he saw a large display ad for Valley Pride Properties. He ran his finger down a list of Open Houses until he found one address and description marked CALLJERRY. He dialed the number.

“Valley Pride Properties, can I help you?”

“Jerry Edgar, please.”

A few seconds passed and Bosch heard a couple of transfer clicks before his partner got on the line.

“This is Jerry, may I help you?”

“Jed, we just got another call. Up at the Mulholland Dam. And you aren’t wearing your pager.”

“Shit,” Edgar said, and there was silence. Bosch could almost hear him thinking, I’ve got three showings today. There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown. “What’s the call?”

Bosch told him what little he knew.

“If you want me to take this one solo, I will,” Bosch said. “If anything comes up with Ninety-eight, I’ll be able to cover it. I’ll tell him you’re taking the TV thing and I’m doing the stiff in the pipe.”

“Yeah, I know you would, but it’s okay, I’m on my way. I’m just going to have to find someone to cover for my ass first.”

They agreed to meet at the body, and Bosch hung up. He turned the answering machine on, took two packs of cigarettes from the cabinet and put them in his sport coat pocket. He reached into another cabinet and took out the nylon holster that held his gun, a Smith & Wesson 9mm-satin finished, stainless steel and loaded with eight rounds of XTPs. Bosch thought about the ad he had seen once in a police magazine. Extreme Terminal Performance. A bullet that expanded on impact to 1.5 times its width, reaching terminal depth in the body and leaving maximum wound channels. Whoever had written it had been right. Bosch had killed a man a year earlier with one shot from twenty feet. Went in under the right armpit, exited below the left nipple, shattering heart and lungs on its way. XTP. Maximum wound channels. He clipped the holster to his belt on the right side so he could reach across his body and take it with his left hand.

He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth without toothpaste: he was out and had forgotten to go by the store. He dragged a wet comb through his hair and stared at his red-rimmed, forty-year-old eyes for a long moment. Then he studied the gray hairs that were steadily crowding out the brown in his curly hair. Even the mustache was going gray. He had begun seeing flecks of gray in the sink when he shaved. He touched a hand to his chin but decided not to shave. He left his house then without changing even his tie. He knew his client wouldn’t mind.

Bosch found a space where there were no pigeon droppings and leaned his elbows on the railing that ran along the top of the Mulholland Dam. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he looked through the cleft of the hills to the city below. The sky was gunpowder gray and the smog was a form-fitted shroud over Hollywood. A few of the far-off towers in downtown poked up through the poison, but the rest of the city was under the blanket. It looked like a ghost town.

There was a slight chemical odor on the warm breeze and after a while he pegged it. Malathion. He’d heard on the radio that the fruit fly helicopters had been up the night before spraying North Hollywood down through the Cahuenga Pass. He thought of his dream and remembered the chopper that did not land.

To his back was the blue-green expanse of the Hollywood reservoir, 60 million gallons of the city’s drinking water trapped by the venerable old dam in a canyon between two of the Hollywood Hills. A six-foot band of dried clay ran the length of the shoreline, a reminder that L.A. was in its fourth year of drought. Farther up the reservoir bank was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence that girded the entire shoreline. Bosch had studied this barrier when he first arrived and wondered if the protection was for the people on one side of the fence or the water on the other.