Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

After she grabbed up some clothes from the floor next to the bed and walked to the bathroom, letting the sheet fall to the ground, Bosch turned to Wish.

“We’ve got too much else to do,” he began. “You would have spent the rest of the afternoon getting her statement and booking that guy. In fact, it’s a state beef, so I would’ve had to book him. And it’s a flopper; can go felony or misdemeanor. And one look at that girl and the DA would have gone misdee if he filed it at all. It wasn’t worth it. It’s the life down here, Agent Wish.”

She looked at him with smoldering eyes, the same eyes he had seen when he had gripped her wrist to keep her from leaving the restaurant.

“Bosch, I had decided it was worth it. Don’t ever do that again.”

They stood there trying to outstare each other until the girl came out of the bathroom. She wore faded jeans that were split at the knees and a black tank top. No shoes, and Bosch noticed her toenails were painted red. She sat on the bed without saying anything.

“We need to find Sharkey,” Bosch said.

“About what? You got a cigarette?”

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out for her. He gave her a match and she lit it herself.

“About what?” she said again.

“About Saturday night,” Wish said curtly. “We do not want to arrest him. We do not want to hassle him. We only want to ask him a few questions.”

“What about me?” the girl said.

“What about you?” Wish said.

“Are you going to hassle me?”

“You mean are we going to turn you over to Division of Youth Services, don’t you?” Bosch looked at Wish to try to gauge a reaction. He got no reading. He said, “No, we won’t call DYS if you help us. What’s your name? Your real name.”

“Bettijane Felker.”

“All right, Bettijane, you don’t know where Sharkey is? All we want to do is talk to him.”

“All I know is that he’s working.”

“What do you mean? Where?”

“Boytown. He’s probably taking care of business with Arson and Mojo.”

“Those the other guys in the crew?”

“Right.”

“Where in Boytown did they say they were going?”

“They didn’t. They just go where the queers are, I guess. You know.”

The girl either couldn’t be more specific or wouldn’t be. Bosch knew it didn’t matter. He had the addresses from the shake cards and knew he’d find Sharkey somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Thank you,” he said to the girl and started heading toward the door. He was halfway down the hall before Wish came out of the room, walking after him at a brisk, angry pace. Before she said anything he stopped at a pay phone in the hallway by the office. He took out a small phone book he always carried, looked up the number for DYS and dialed. He was put on hold for two minutes before an operator transferred him to an automated tape line on which he reported the date and time and the location of Bettijane Felker, suspected runaway. He hung up wondering how many days it would be before they got the message and how many days after that it would be before they got to Bettijane.

They were all the way into West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard and she was still hot. Bosch had tried to defend himself but realized there was no chance. So he sat there quietly and listened.

“It’s a matter of trust, that’s all,” Wish said. “I don’t care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed.”

He stared at the mirror on the passenger’s side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis’s huge neck and crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn’t tell Wish they were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn’t said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.

Finally he said, “Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood, of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I’m sorry. I did not think it would help us to waste a day booking some asshole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty. I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people’s jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It’s one of the spots I got off the shake cards.”

“We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don’t be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along for the ride. We are both on it. Don’t forget it.”

She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking ice tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn’t see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.

They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.

Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren’t just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie’s Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay phone near the old bar’s screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer, answered the phone.

“Is Lewis or Clarke there?”

“No, sir, they’re not. Can I take a message?”

“No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point with them.”

“I believe they are code seven tillP.M. watch.”

He hung up. They were off duty until four. They were scamming, or Bosch had simply kicked them too hard in the balls this time and now they were going after him on their own time. He got back in the car and told Wish he had checked his office for messages. It was as she merged the car back into traffic that he saw the yellow motorbike leaning on a parking meter about a half block from Barnie’s. It was parked in front of a pancake restaurant.

“There,” he said and pointed. “Go on by and I’ll get the number. If it’s his, we’ll sit on it.”

It was Sharkey’s bike. Bosch matched the plate to his notes from the kid’s CRASH file. But there was no sign of the boy. Wish drove around the block and parked in the same spot in front of Barnie’s that they had been in before.

“So, we wait,” she said. “For this kid you think might be a witness.”