Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

After maybe a hundred feet Bosch stopped and put on the beam, still holding it out to the side of his body and ready with the gun in his other hand. There was more blood on the curving wall ahead. When he switched off the flashlight, he noticed that the darkness changed farther ahead. There was light with a gray-dawn quality to it. He could tell that the pipeline ended, or rather, connected with a passageway where there was dim light. He realized then that he could hear water. A lot of water compared to what was running between his knees. It sounded like there was a river channel up ahead.

He moved slowly and quietly to the edge of the dim light. The pipeline he crouched in was a porthole on the side of a long hallway. He was in the tributary. Across the floor of the huge hallway, silvery black water moved. It was an underground canal. Looking at it, Bosch could not tell if the water was three inches or three feet deep.

Squatting at the edge, he first listened for sounds other than lapping water. Hearing nothing, he slowly extended his upper body forward to look down the hallway. The water was flowing to his left. He first looked that way and could see the dim outline of the concrete passageway curving gradually to the right. There was shadowy light filtering down at intervals from holes in the ceiling. He guessed that this light came from drain holes drilled in manholes thirty feet above. This was a main line, as Ed Gearson would say. Which one it was Bosch didn’t know and no longer cared. There was no blueprint for him to follow, to tell him what to do.

He turned to look upstream and immediately pulled his head back into his pipe like a turtle. There was a dark form against the inside wall of the passage. And Bosch had seen two orange eyes glowing in the darkness, looking right at him.

Bosch didn’t move and barely breathed for a whole minute. Stinging sweat dripped into his eyes. He closed them but heard nothing but the sound of the black water. Then slowly he moved back to the edge until he could see the dark form again. It hadn’t moved. Two eyes, like the alien eyes of someone who looks into the flash in a snapshot, stared back at Bosch. He edged the flashlight around the corner and hit the switch. In the beam he saw Franklin slumped against the wall; his M-16 was strapped around his chest, but his hands had fallen away from it into the water. The end of the barrel dipped to the water also. Franklin wore a mask that Bosch took a few seconds to realize was not a mask. He wore NVGs-night-vision goggles.

“Franklin, it’s over,” Bosch called. “I’m police. Give it up.”

There was no reply and Bosch didn’t expect one. He glanced up and down the main line one more time and then jumped down into the water. The water just covered his ankles. He kept his gun and the light on the still figure but didn’t believe he would need the weapon. Franklin was dead. Bosch saw that blood still seeped from a chest wound and down the front of his black T-shirt. Then it mixed into the water and was carried away. Bosch checked the man’s neck for a pulse and found none. He holstered his gun and lifted the M-16 over the dead man’s head. Then he pulled the night goggles off the corpse and put them on.

He looked one way down the long hallway and then the other. It was like looking at an old black-and-white TV. But the whites and grays had an amber tint. It would take some getting used to, but he could see his way better with the goggles and he kept them on.

Next he checked the supply pockets on the thighs of Franklin’s black fatigue pants. He found a sopping wet package of cigarettes and matches. There was an extra clip of bullets, which Bosch put in his jacket pocket, and a folded piece of wet paper on which blue ink was bleeding through and blurring. He carefully unfolded it and could tell that it had been a hand-drawn map. No names identifying anything. Just smeared blue lines. There was a square box near the center, which Bosch took to represent the vault. The blue lines were the drainage tunnels. He turned the map around in his hand, but the pattern did not seem familiar. A line running along the front of the box was the heaviest drawn. He figured that might be Wilshire or Olympic. Lines that intersected this were the cross streets, Robertson, Doheny, Rexford and others. There was a crosshatching of more lines continuing to the side of the page. Then a circle with an X through it. The exit point.

Bosch decided the map was useless, for he didn’t know where he was or what direction he had taken. He dropped it into the water and watched it float off. In that moment he decided that he would follow the current. As good a choice as any.

Bosch splashed through the water, moving with the current, in a direction he thought was west. The black water curled against the wall in orange-tinted eddies. The water was above his ankles and filled his shoes, making his steps plodding and unsteady.

He thought about how Rourke had played it so well. It didn’t matter if the Jeep and the ATVs had been found down by the freeway. That was all a decoy, a setup. Rourke and his bandits had shown the obvious, then done the opposite. Rourke had talked everybody into believing it while setting the battle plans the night before. The SWAT team was waiting down there with a reception no one would attend.

He looked for signs of a trail in the passageway but found nothing. The water took all chance of that away with it. There were painted markings on the walls, even gang graffiti, but each scribble could have been there for years. He looked at it all but recognized none as a signal or direction. This time, Hansel and Gretel didn’t leave a trail.

The traffic sounds grew louder now, and there was more light. Bosch flipped up the NVGs and saw shadowy cones of bluish light filtering down every hundred feet or so from manholes and drains. After a while he came to an underground intersection, and as the water from his line collided and splashed with water moving in the other channel, Bosch crept along the side wall and slowly looked around the corner. He saw and heard no one. He had no clue as to which way to go. Delgado could have gone in any of three different directions. Bosch decided to follow the new passageway to the right because it would take him, he believed, farther away from the SWAT setup.

He had taken no more than three steps into the new tunnel when he heard a loud whisper from ahead.

“Artie, you going to make it? Come on, hurry. Artie!”

Bosch froze. It came from about twenty yards dead ahead. But he couldn’t see anyone. He knew that it had been the NVGs he wore-the orange eyes-that had prevented him from walking into an ambush. But the cover wouldn’t last long. If he got much closer, Delgado would know that he wasn’t Franklin.

“Artie!” the voice called hoarsely again. “Come on!”

“Coming,” Bosch whispered. He took one step forward and felt instinctively that it hadn’t worked. Delgado would know. He dove forward, bringing the M-16 up as he went down.

Bosch saw a whirl of movement ahead and to the left, then saw a muzzle flash. The sound of gunfire was deafening in the concrete tunnel. Bosch returned fire and kept his finger tight on the trigger until he heard the injector go dry of bullets. His ears were ringing, but he could tell that Delgado, or whoever was up there, had stopped also. Bosch heard him snap a new clip into his weapon, then running footsteps on a dry floor. Delgado was moving away, in another passageway ahead. Harry jumped up and followed, pulling the empty clip out of his borrowed gun and replacing it with the backup as he went.

In twenty-five yards he came to a tributary pipeline. It was about five feet in diameter and Bosch had to take a step up to move into it. There was black algae rimming the bottom but no running water. Lying in the scum was the empty clip from an M-16.