Michael Connelly - EchoPark

“Check the van,” he said. “See if there is any sign of the girl.”

Rachel crossed behind him to the van, and Bosch went to the pedestrian door to check for the flaws in his belief that someone had to be in the garage.

He had to be right. There was a dead bolt on the door, meaning it could only have been locked from the inside. He moved over to the garage doors and stooped down to look at their locking mechanisms. He was right again. Both had padlocks on interior slide locks.

He tried to puzzle it out. All three doors had been locked from the inside. It meant that either someone was inside the garage or there was an exit point he hadn’t identified yet. But this seemed impossible. The garage was dug directly into the hillside embankment. There was no possibility of a rear exit.

He was checking the ceiling, wondering if it was possible that there was a passageway up to the house, when Rachel called from inside the van.

“I’ve got a roll of duct tape,” she said. “I’ve got used strips on the floor with hair.”

It boosted Bosch’s belief that they had the right place. He stepped over to the open side door of the van. He looked in at Rachel while he pulled out his phone. He noticed the wheelchair lift in the van.

“I’ll call for backup and Forensics,” he said. “We missed him.”

He had to turn the phone back on, and while he waited for it to boot up he realized something. The stand-up fan in the back room wasn’t pointed toward the garage doors. If you were going to air the room out, you would point the fan toward the door.

His phone buzzed in his hand and it distracted him. He looked down at the screen. It told him he had a message waiting. He clicked a button to check the call record and saw that he had just missed a call from Jerry Edgar. He’d get to it later. He punched in a number for Communications and told the dispatcher to connect him with the Raynard Waits Fugitive Task Force. An officer identifying himself as Freeman picked up.

“This is Detective Harry Bosch. I have-”

“Harry! Gun!”

It was Rachel who had yelled. Time slowed down. All in a second Bosch looked at her in the van’s doorway, her eyes focused over his shoulder at the back of the garage. Without thinking, he jumped forward and into her, pulling his arms around her and taking her to the floor of the van in a crushing tackle. Four shots came from behind him followed by the instantaneous sound of bullets striking metal and glass breaking. Bosch rolled off Rachel and came up with his gun in hand. He caught a glimpse of a figure ducking into the rear storage room. He fired six shots through the doorway and raking across the wall to its right.

“Rachel, okay?”

“I’m okay. Are you hit?”

“I don’t think so!”

“It was him! Waits!”

They paused and watched the door to the rear room. No one came back through.

“Did you hit him?” Rachel whispered.

“I don’t think so.”

“I thought we cleared that room.”

“I thought we did, too.”

Bosch stood up, keeping his aim on the doorway. He noticed that the light from within was now off.

“I dropped my phone,” he said. “Call for backup.”

He started moving toward the door.

“Harry, wait. He could-”

“Call for backup! And remember to tell them I’m in there.”

He cut to his left and approached the door from an angle that would give him the widest vision of the interior space. But without the overhead light the room was cast in shadows and he could see no movement. He started taking small steps using his right foot first and maintaining a firing position. Behind him he heard Rachel on her phone identifying herself and asking for a transfer to LAPD dispatch.

Bosch got to the threshold and swung the gun across his body to cover the part of the room he had not had an angle on. He stepped in and sidestepped to the right. There was no movement, no sign of Waits. The room was empty.

He looked at the fan and confirmed his mistake. It was pointed toward the flag hanging on the back wall. It had not been used to blow damp air out. The fan had been used to blow air in.

Bosch took two steps toward the flag. He reached forward, grabbed it by the edge and ripped it down.

In the wall, three feet off the ground, was a tunnel entrance. About a dozen concrete blocks had been removed to create an opening four feet square and the excavation into the hillside continued from there.

Bosch crouched to look into the opening from the safety of the right side. The tunnel was deep and dark, but he saw a glimmer of light thirty feet in. He realized that the tunnel made a turn and that there was a source of light around the bend.

Bosch leaned closer and realized he could hear a sound from the tunnel. It was a low whimpering. It was a terrible sound but it was beautiful just the same. It meant that no matter what horrors she had experienced through the night, the woman Waits had abducted was still alive.

Bosch reached back over to the workbench and picked up the shiniest flashlight he saw. He turned it on. It was dead. He tried another and got a weak beam of light. It would have to do.

He flashed the beam into the tunnel and confirmed that the first leg was clear. He took a step toward the tunnel.

“Harry, wait!”

He turned and saw Rachel in the doorway.

“Backup’s on the way!” she whispered.

Bosch shook his head.

“She’s in there. She’s alive.”

He turned back to the tunnel and flashed the light in once more. It was still clear up to the turn. He turned the light off to conserve it. He glanced back at Rachel and then stepped into the darkness.

BOSCH HESITATED A MOMENT in the mouth of the tunnel to let his eyes adjust. He then started moving. He didn’t have to crawl. The tunnel was large enough for him to move through in a crouch. Flashlight in his right hand and gun up in his left, he kept his eyes on the dim light ahead. The sound of the woman crying grew louder as he moved forward.

Ten feet into the tunnel the musty smell that he had noticed outside turned into the deeper stench of decay. As rancid as it was, it was not something new to him. Almost forty years before, he had been a tunnel rat with the U.S. Army, taking part in more than a hundred missions in the tunnels of Vietnam. The enemy sometimes buried their dead in the clay walls of their tunnels. That hid them from sight but the odor of decay was impossible to hide. Once it got into your nose it was equally impossible to forget.

Bosch knew that he was headed toward something horrific, that the missing victims of Raynard Waits were ahead somewhere in the tunnel. This had been the destination on the night Waits was pulled over in his work van. But Bosch couldn’t help but think that maybe it was his own destination as well. He had come many years and many miles but it seemed to him that he had never really left the tunnels behind, that his life had always been a slow movement through darkness and tight spaces on the way to a flickering light. He knew he was then, now, and forever a tunnel rat.

His thigh muscles burned from the strain of moving in a crouched position. Sweat began to sting his eyes. And as he got closer to the turn in the tunnel Bosch saw the light changing and rechanging and knew that this was caused by the undulation of a flame. Candlelight.

Five feet from the turn Bosch slowed to a stop and rested on his heels as he listened. Behind him, he thought he could hear sirens. Backup on the way. He tried to concentrate on what could be heard from the tunnel ahead but there was only the intermittent sound of the woman crying.

He raised himself up and started forward again. Almost immediately the light ahead went out and the whimpering took on a new energy and urgency.