Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“You wanna smoke, Agent Wish?” Bosch said.

She shook her head no.

Bosch looked at Sharkey and a knowing look passed between them. It said, You and me, sport. The boy smiled. Bosch nodded for him to start his story and he did. And it was a story.

“I go up there to crash sometimes,” Sharkey said. “You know? When I don’t find anybody to help me out with some motel money or nothing. Sometimes the room at my crew’s motel is too crowded. I gotta get out. So I go up there, sleep in the pipe. It stays warm most the night. Not bad. So anyway, it was one of those nights. So I went up there-”

“What time was this?” Wish asked.

Bosch gave her a look that said, Cool it, ask the questions after the story is out. The kid had been going pretty good.

“Musta been pretty late,” Sharkey answered. “Three, maybe four o’clock. I don’t have a watch. And so I went up there. And I went in the pipe and I saw the guy that was dead. Just laying there. I climbed out and split. I wasn’t going to stay in there with a dead guy. When I got down the hill I called you guys, nine one one.”

He looked back from Wish to Bosch.

“That’s it,” he said. “Can I get a ride back to my bike?”

No one answered, so Sharkey lit another cigarette and pulled himself up in the chair.

“That’s a nice story, Edward, but we need the whole thing,” Bosch said. “We also need it right.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I mean it sounds like it was made up by a moron, is what I mean. How’d you see the body in there?”

“I had a flashlight,” he explained to Wish.

“No you didn’t. You had matches, we found one.” Bosch leaned forward until his face was only a foot from the boy’s. “Sharkey, how do you think we knew it was you that called? You think the operator just recognized your voice? ‘Oh, that’s old Sharkey. He’s a good kid, calling us about the body.’ Think, Sharkey. You signed your name-or at least half of it on the pipe up there. We got your prints off a half a can of paint. And we know you only crawled halfway in the pipe. That’s when you got scared and got out. You left tracks.”

Sharkey stared forward, his eyes slightly lifted toward the mirrored window on the door.

“You knew the body was there before you went in. You saw somebody drag it into the pipe, Sharkey. Look at me now and tell me the real story.”

“Look, I didn’t see nobody’s face. It was too dark, man,” the boy said to Bosch. Eleanor let out a breath. Bosch felt like telling her that if she thought the boy was a waste of time she could leave.

“I was hiding,” Sharkey said. “ ’Cause, see, at first I thought they were after me or something. I had nothin’ to do with this. Why you dragging me down, man?”

“We got a man dead, Edward. We’ve got to find out why. We don’t care about faces. That’s fine. Tell us what you did see, and then you’re no longer in it.”

“That’ll be it?”

“That’ll be it.”

Bosch leaned back then and lit his second cigarette.

“Well, yeah, I was up there and I wasn’t too tired yet so I was doing my paint thing and I heard a car coming. Like holy shit. And what was weird was that I heard it before I saw it. ’Cause the guy has no lights on. So, man, I hauled ass and hid in the bushes on the hill right by there, you know, right by the pipe, right by where I hide my bike, you know, while I’m sleeping.”

The boy was becoming more animated, using his hands and nodding his head and looking mostly at Bosch now.

“Shit, I thought those guys were coming for me, like somebody had called the cops on account of me being up there spraying a scrip or something. So like I hid. In fact, when they got there a guy gets out and says to the other guy he smells paint. But it turns out they didn’t even see me. They just stopped by the pipe ’cause of the body. And only it wasn’t a car, either. It was a Jeep.”

“You get a license plate number?” Wish said.

“Let him tell it,” Bosch said without looking at her.

“No, I didn’t get a fuckin’ plate. Shit, their lights were off and it was too dark. So anyway, there was three of them, if you count the dead guy. One guy gets out, he was the driver, and he pulls the dead guy right out of the back, from underneath a blanket or something. Opened a little back door those Jeeps got and drug the guy onto the ground. It was total horror, man. I could tell it was real, you know, a real dead body, just kinda by the way it fell on the ground. Like a dead guy. It made a noise like a body. Not like on TV. But what you’d expect, like, ‘Oh no, that’s a body he drug out of there,’ or something. Then he drug it into the pipe. The other guy wouldn’t help him. He stayed in the Jeep. So the first dude, he did it by hisself.”

Sharkey took a deep drag on his cigarette and then killed it in the tin ashtray, which was already full of ash and old butts. He exhaled through his nose and looked at Bosch, who just nodded for him to continue. The boy pulled himself up in the seat.

“Um, I stayed there and the guy came out of the pipe after a minute. No longer than that. He looked around when he came out but didn’t see me. He went over to a bush near where I was hiding and tore off a branch. Then he went back inside the pipe for a while. And I could hear him in there sweeping or something with the branch. Then he came out and they left. Oh, and uh, he started to back up and the reverse light went on, you know. He took it out of gear like real quick. Then I heard him say something about they couldn’t go backward ’cause of the light. They might get seen. So then they went forward, you know, without lights. They drove down the road and across the dam and around the other side of the lake. When they went by that little house on the dam they bashed the light bulb. I saw it go out. I stayed hidden till I couldn’t hear the engine anymore. Then I come out.”

Sharkey stopped the story for a beat and Wish said, “I’m sorry, can we open the door, get some of this smoke out of here?”

Bosch reached over and pulled the door open without getting up or trying to hide his annoyance. “Go on, Sharkey,” was all he said.

“So when they were gone I went over to the pipe and yelled in to the guy. You know, ‘Hey, in there’ and ‘Are you all right,’ stuff like that. But nobody answered. So I leaned my bike down on the ground so the light would go in there and I crawled in a little bit. I also lighted a match like you say. And I could see him in there and he looked dead and all. I was going to check but it was too creepy. I got out. I went down the hill and I called the cops. That’s all I did, and that’s the whole thing.”

Bosch figured the boy was going to rob the body but got scared halfway in. That was okay though. The boy could keep that as his secret. Then he thought of the branch taken from the bush and used by the man Sharkey had seen to obliterate the tracks and drag marks in the pipe. He wondered why the uniform cops hadn’t come across either the discarded branch or the broken bush during the crime scene search. But he didn’t dwell on it long, because he knew the answer. Sloppiness. Laziness. It wasn’t the first time things had been missed and wouldn’t be the last.

“We’re going to go check on that pizza,” Bosch said, and he stood up. “We’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

Outside the interview room Bosch checked his anger and said, “My fault. We should have talked more about how we wanted to do it before we heard his story. I like to hear what they have to say first, then ask questions. It was my fault.”

“No problem,” Wish said curtly. “He doesn’t seem that valuable anyway.”