Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“Right. It’s what I think. But two of us don’t need to waste the time. You can leave me here if you want. I’ll go in the beanery, order a pitcher of Henry’s and a bowl of chili and watch from the window.”

“That’s all right. I’m staying.”

Bosch settled back for a wait. He took out his cigarettes but she nailed him before he got one out of the pack.

“Have you heard of the draft risk assessment?” she asked.

“The what?”

“Secondhand cigarette smoke. It’s deadly, Bosch. The EPA came out last month, officially. Said it’s a carcinogen. Three thousand people are getting lung cancer a year from passive smoking, they call it. You are killing yourself and me. Please don’t.”

He put the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. They were quiet as they watched the bike, which was chain-locked to the parking meter. Bosch took a few glances at the side-view mirror but didn’t see the IAD car. He glanced over at Wish, too, whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. Santa Monica Boulevard steadily got crowded with cars as the apex of rush hour approached. Wish kept her window closed to cut down on the carbon monoxide. It made the car very hot.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked about an hour into the surveillance.

“At you? I didn’t know that I was.”

“You were. You are. You ever have a female partner before?”

“Nope. But that’s not why I would be staring. If I was.”

“Why then? If you were.”

“I’d be trying to figure you out. You know, why you are here, doing this. I always thought, I mean at least I heard, that the bank squad over at the FBI was for dinosaurs and fuckups, the agents too old or too dumb to use a computer or trace some white-collar scumbag’s assets through a paper trail. Then, here you are. On the heavy squad. You’re no dinosaur, and something tells me you’re no fuckup. Something tells me you’re a prize, Eleanor.”

She was quiet a moment, and Bosch thought he saw the trace of a smile play on her lips. Then it was gone, if it had been there at all.

“I guess that is a backhanded compliment,” she said. “If it is, thank you. I have my reasons for choosing where I am with the bureau. And believe me, I do get to choose. As far as the others in the squad, I would not characterize any of them as you do. I think that attitude, which, by the way, seems to be shared by many of your fellow-”

“There’s Sharkey,” he said.

A boy with blond dreadlocks had come through a side alley between the pancake shop and a mini-mall. An older man stood with him. He wore a T-shirt that said The Gay 90s Are Back! Bosch and Wish stayed in the car and watched. Sharkey and the man exchanged a few words and then Sharkey took something from his pocket and handed it over. The man shuffled through what looked like a stack of playing cards. He took a couple of cards and gave the rest back. He then gave Sharkey a single green bill.

“What’s he doing?” Wish asked.

“Buying baby pictures.”

“What?”

“A pedophile.”

The older man headed off down the sidewalk and Sharkey walked to his motorbike. He hunched over the chain and lock.

“Okay,” Bosch said, and they got out of the car.

That would be enough for today, Sharkey thought. Time to kick. He lit a cigarette and bent over the seat of his motorbike to work the combination on the Master lock. His dreads flopped down past his eyes and he could smell some of the coconut stuff he had put in his hair the night before at the Jaguar guy’s house. That was after Arson had broken the guy’s nose and the blood got everywhere. He stood up and was about to wrap the chain around his waist when he saw them coming. Cops. They were too close. Too late to run. Trying to act like he hadn’t yet seen them, he quickly made a mental list of everything in his pockets. The credit cards were gone, already sold. The money could have come from anywhere, some of it did. He was cool. The only thing they’d have would be the queer guy’s identification if they had a lineup. Sharkey was surprised the guy had made a report. No one ever had before.

Sharkey smiled at the two approaching cops, and the man held up a tape recorder. A tape recorder? What was this? The man hit the play button and after a few seconds Sharkey recognized his own voice. Then he recognized where it had come from. This wasn’t about the Jaguar guy. This was about the pipe.

Sharkey said, “So?”

“So,” said the man, “we want you to tell us about it.”

“Man, I didn’t have anything to do with it. You ain’t going to put that-Hey! You’re the guy from the police station. Yeah, I saw you there the next night. Well, you ain’t going to get me to say I did that shit up there.”

“Take it down a notch, Sharkey,” the man said. “We know you didn’t do it. We just want to know what you saw, is all. Lock your bike up again. We’ll bring you back.”

The man gave his name and the woman’s. Bosch and Wish. He said she was FBI, which really confused things. The boy hesitated, then stooped and locked the bike again.

Bosch said, “We just want to take a ride over to Wilcox to ask you some questions, maybe draw a picture.”

“Of what?” Sharkey asked.

Bosch didn’t answer; he just gestured with his hand to come along and then pointed up the block at a gray Caprice. It was the car Sharkey had seen in front of the Chateau. As they walked, Bosch kept his hand on Sharkey’s shoulder. Sharkey wasn’t as tall as Bosch yet, but they shared the same wiry build. The boy wore a tie-dyed shirt of purple and yellow shades. Black sunglasses hung around his neck on orange string. The boy put them on as they approached the Caprice.

“Okay, Sharkey,” Bosch said at the car. “You know the procedure. We’ve got to search you before you go in the car. That way we won’t have to cuff you for the ride. Put everything on the hood.”

“Man, you said I was no suspect,” Sharkey protested. “I don’t have to do this.”

“I told you, procedure. You get it all back. Except the pictures. We can’t do that.”

Sharkey looked first at Bosch and then Wish, then he started putting his hands in the pockets of his frayed jeans.

“Yeah, we know about the pictures,” Bosch said.

The boy put $46.55 on the hood along with a pack of cigarettes and book of matches, a small penknife on a key chain and a deck of Polaroid photos. They were photos of Sharkey and the other guys in the crew. In each, the model was naked and in various stages of sexual arousal. As Bosch shuffled through them, Wish looked over his shoulder and then quickly looked away. She picked up the pack of cigarettes and looked through it, finding a single joint among the Kools.

“I guess we have to keep that, too,” Bosch said.

They drove to the police station on Wilcox because it was rush hour and it would have taken them an hour to get to the Federal Building in Westwood. It was after six by the time they got into the detective bureau, and the place was deserted, everybody having gone home. Bosch took Sharkey into one of the eight-by-eight interview rooms. There was a small, cigarette-scarred table and three chairs in the room. A handmade sign on one wall said No Sniveling! He sat Sharkey down in the Slider-a wooden chair with its seat heavily waxed and a quarter-inch of wood cut off the bottom of the front two legs. The incline was not enough to notice, but enough that the people who sat in the chair could not get comfortable. They would lean back like most hard cases and slowly slide off the front. The only thing they could do was lean forward, right into the face of their interrogator. Bosch told the boy not to move, then stepped outside to plan a strategy with Wish, shutting the door. She opened the door after he closed it.