Michael Connelly - The Narrows

My mother had taught me early and often, when it rains…

"Stay out of the narrows."

"What?" Rachel whispered.

"I was thinking about the river. Trapped between those walls. When I was a kid we called it 'the narrows/ When it rains like this the water moves fast. It's deadly. When it rains you stay away from the narrows."

"But we're going to the house."

"Same thing, Rachel. Be careful. Stay out of the narrows."

She looked at me. She seemed to understand what I meant,

"Okay, Bosch,"

"How about you take the front and I take the back?"

"Fine."

"Be ready for anything."

"You, too."

The target house was three properties away. We walked quickly along the wall surrounding the first property and then cut up the driveway of the next. We skirted the fronts of two houses until we came to the home where Thomas's car was parked. Rachel gave me a last nod and we separated then, both of us pulling our weapons in unison. Rachel moved to the front while I started down the driveway toward the rear. The gloom and the sound of the rain and the river channel gave me visual and sound cover. The driveway was also lined with squat bougainvillea trees that had been let go for some time without training or trimming. But the house behind the windows was dark. Someone could be behind any glass watching me and I wouldn't know it.

The rear yard was flooded. In the middle of the big puddle stood the rusted twin A-frames of a swing set with no swings left on it. Behind it was a six-foot fence that separated the property from the river channel. I could see the water was near the top of its concrete siding and was rushing by in a mad torrent. It would flood by day's end. Further upstream, where the channels were shallower, it probably already had stemmed its sides.

I turned my attention back to the house. There was a full porch off the rear. There were no gutters on the roof here and the rain was coming off in sheets, so heavy that it obscured everything within. Backus could' ve been sitting in a rocker on the porch and I wouldn't have seen him. The line of bougainvilleas carried along the porch railing. I ducked below the sight line and moved quickly to the steps. I took the three steps up in one stride and was in out of the rain. My eyes and ears took a moment to adjust and that was when I saw it. There was a white rattan couch on the right side of the porch. On it a blanket covered the unmistakable shape of a human form sitting upright but slumped against the left arm. Dropping to a crouch I moved closer and reached for a corner of the blanket on the floor. I slowly pulled it off the form.

It was an old man. He looked like he had been dead at least a day. The odor was just starting. His eyes were open and bugged, his skin was the color of white paint in a smoker's bedroom. A snap-cuff had been pulled tight-too tight-around his neck. Charles Turrentine, I presumed. I also presumed he was the old man in the photo Backus had taken. He had been killed and then left there on the porch like a stack of old newspapers. He'd had no business with the Poet. He'd just been a means to an end.

I raised my Glock and went to the house's back door. I wanted to get a warning to Rachel but there was no way to do it without revealing my own position and possibly compromising hers. I just had to keep moving, going further into the darkness of this place until I came across her or Backus.

The door was locked. I decided I would go around, catch up to Rachel from the front. But as I turned, my eyes fell back on the body and I was struck with a possibility. I moved to the couch and patted down the old man's pants. And I was rewarded. I heard the jingle of keys.

Rachel was surrounded. Stacks and stacks of books lined every wall in the front hallway. She stood there, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, and looked into the living room to her right. More books-Shelves lined every wall and every shelf was rilled to capacity. Books stacked on the coffee table and the end tables and every horizontal surface. Somehow it made the place seem haunted. It was not a place of life but a place of doom and gloom where bookworms ate through the words of all the authors.

She tried to keep moving without dwelling on her rising fears. She wavered and thought about turning back to the door and leaving before she was discovered. But then she heard the voices and knew she must press on.

"Where is Charles?"

"I said sit down.'"

The words came to her from an unknown direction. The pounding of the rain outside, the rage of the nearby river, and the books stacked everywhere combined to obliquely camouflage the origin of sounds. She heard the voices but could not tell where they came from.

More sounds and voices came to her. Murmurs mostly and every few moments a recognizable word, sculpted in anger or fear.

"You thought…"

She bent down and left the flashlight on the floor. She had not used it yet and couldn't risk it now. She moved into the deeper gloom of the hallway. She had already checked the front rooms and knew the voices were coming from somewhere further into the house.

The hallway led to a foyer from which doors opened in three different directions. As she got there she heard the voices of two men and thought for sure that they came from somewhere to the right.

"Write it!"

"I can't see!"

Then a popping sound. A ripping sound. Curtains being pulled off a window. "There, you see now? Write it or I'll end it right now!"

"All right! All right!"

"Exactly as I say it Once upon a midnight dreary…"

She knew what it was. She recognized the words of Edgar Allan Poe. And she knew it was Backus, though the voice was different. He was using the poetry again, re-creating the crime taken from him so long ago. Bosch had been right.

She moved into the room to the right and found it empty. A billiard table stood in the middle of the room, every inch of its surface taken up by stacks of more books. She understood what Backus had done. He had lured Ed Thomas here because the man who lived here-Charles Turrentine-was a collector. He knew Thomas would come for this collection.

She started to turn in order to retreat, to check the next room off the foyer. But before she had moved more than a few inches she felt the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against her neck.

"Hello, Rachel," Robert Backus said with his surgically changed voice. "What a surprise to see you here."

She froze and in that moment knew that he could not be played in any way, that he knew all the plays and all the angles. She knew she only had one chance. That was Bosch.

"Hello, Bob. It's been a long time."

"Yes, it has. Would you like to leave your weapon here and join me in the library?"

Rachel put her Sig down on one of the stacks on the billiard table.

"I sort of thought the whole place was a library, Bob." Backus didn't respond. She felt him grab the back of her collar, press his gun against her spine and then push her in the direction he wanted her to go. They left the room and went into the next, which was a small room with two high-backed wooden chairs arranged to face a large stone fireplace. There was no fire and Rachel could hear rain dripping down the chimney into the hearth. She saw that it was creating a puddle there. Windows on either side of the fireplace had rain washing down them, turning them translucent.

"We happen to have just enough chairs," Backus said. "Have a seat, won't you?"

He roughly brought her around one of the chairs and pushed her down into it. He made a quick check of her body for other weapons and then stepped back and dropped something onto her lap. Rachel looked into the other chair and saw Ed Thomas. He was still alive. His wrists were held to the arms of the chair by plastic snap-cuffs. Two more cuffs had been joined and then used to hold him by his neck to the back of the chair. He had been gagged with a cloth napkin and his face was overly red with exertion and lack of oxygen.