David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

When Bosch reached the end of the passageway, he was bathed in sweat. He stepped out into a wide unlit room of dark brick and a stone floor with a drain in the center. He swept the room with his penlight and saw nothing but a metal crate. It was the kind used to house large dogs on family trips. A blue painter’s tarp partially covered it, held to the frame by nine bungee cords.

And it was moving.

Bosch got down on his knees and pulled at the tarp but the bungee cords were wrapped tight—three of them crossing the crate lengthwise and six crossing it widthwise. The cords were clasped down at the base of the crate and stretched taut so that separating the clasps with one hand was not an option. Bosch placed his Glock by his foot as the crate continued to rock and he picked up the sound of someone mewling desperately from under all that tarp.

He pulled apart the clasps on the first of the three lengthwise cords and still couldn’t get a clear view inside. He put the penlight in his mouth and went to work on the second and that’s when the room turned white.

It was as if someone had hung the sun a foot above his head or lit up a ballpark.

He was blind. He got his hand on his Glock, but all he could see was white. He couldn’t tell where the wall was. He couldn’t even see the crate anymore and he was kneeling in front of it.

He heard something scrabble to his left and he turned his gun that way and then the scrabbling broke right, coming around his weak side, and he turned with the Glock crossing his body, his eyes adjusting enough to pick up a shadow. Then he heard the thump of something very hard turn something less hard into something soft.

Someone let out a dull yelp and fell to the floor in all that blinding light.

“Bosch,” Patrick said, “it’s me. Close your eyes a sec.”

Bosch closed his eyes and heard the sound of glass breaking—popping actually—and the heat left his face in degrees.

“I think we’re good,” Patrick said.

When Bosch opened his eyes, he blinked several times and saw the lights high on the wall, all the bulbs shattered. Had to be in the seven-hundred-watt range, if not higher. Huge black cones behind them. Eight lights total. Patrick had pulled back the curtain on the small window at the top of the wall, and the soft early-afternoon light entered the room like an answered prayer.

Bosch looked at Paisley lying on the floor to his right, gurgling, the back of his head sporting a fresh dent, pink blood leaking from his nose, red blood streaming from his mouth, a carving knife lying beneath his twitching right hand.

Patrick Kenzie brandished a baseball bat. He raised his eyebrows up and down and twirled it. “Signed by Shea Hillenbrand.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“Right,” Patrick said. “Dodgers fan.”

Bosch went to work on the bungee cords and Patrick joined him and they pulled back the tarp and there she was, Chiffon Henderson. She was curled fetal in the crate because there was no room to stretch into any other position. Patrick struggled with the door until Bosch just took the roof off the crate.

Chiffon Henderson had electrical tape wrapped around her mouth, wrists, and ankles. They could tell it hurt her to stretch her limbs, but Bosch took that as a good sign—Paisley had kept her caged but possibly unmolested. Bosch guessed that was supposed to commence today, an appetizer to the murder.

They bickered as they removed the tape from her mouth, Bosch telling Patrick to be careful of her hair, Patrick telling him to watch he didn’t tear at her lips.

When the tape came free and they went to work on her wrists, Bosch asked, “What’s your name?”

“Chiffon Henderson. Who’re you?”

“I’m Patrick Kenzie. And this other guy? He was never here, okay, Chiffon?”

Bosch cocked his head.

Patrick said, “You’re a cop. From out of town. I can barely get away with this shit, but you? They’ll take your badge, man. Unless you got a no-knock warrant in your pocket I can’t see.”

Bosch worked through it in his head.

“He touch you, Chiffon?”

She was weeping, shaking, and she gave that a half nod, half head shake. “A little, but not, you know. He said that was coming. He told me all sorts of things were coming.”

Patrick looked at Paisley huffing into the cement, eyes rolled back into his head, blood beginning to pool.

“Only thing coming for this shithead is the strokes that follow the coma.”

When her hands were free, Patrick knelt to get at the tape on her ankles and Bosch was surprised when the girl hugged him tight, her tears finding his shirt. He surprised himself when he kissed the top of her head.

“No more monster,” he said. “Not tonight.”

Patrick finished with the tape. He tossed the wad of it behind him and produced his cell. “I gotta call this in. I’d rather be bullshitting my way free of an attempted murder charge than an actual homicide rap, if you know what I mean, and he’s turning a funny shade.”

Bosch looked at the man lying at his feet. Looked like an aging nerd. Kinda guy did your taxes out of a strip mall storefront. Another little man with soiled desires and furious nightmares. Funny how the monsters always turned out to be little more than men. But Patrick was right—he’d die soon without attention.

Patrick dialed 911 but didn’t hit SEND. Instead he held out his hand to Bosch. “If I’m ever in LA.”

Bosch shook his hand. “Funny. I can’t picture you in LA.”

Patrick said, “And I can’t picture you out of it, even though you’re standing right here. Take care, Harry.”

“You, too. And thanks”—Bosch looked down at Paisley, on his way to critical care, minimum—“for, um, that.”

“Pleasure.”

Bosch headed toward the door, a door only accessible from the front of the cellar, not the back. Beat the hell out of the way he’d entered the room. He was reaching for the doorknob when he turned back.

“One last thing.”

Patrick had the phone to his ear and his free arm wrapped tight around Chiffon’s shoulders. “What’s that?”

“Is there a way to get back to the airport without going through that tunnel?”

IAN RANKIN

VS. PETER JAMES

Combing characters from different fictional universes into the same story is something writers often contemplate, usually after one drink too many late in the evening at a conference or convention. The technical difficulties of that endeavor quickly intrude, and the “good idea of the night before” ends up in a drawer, never to see the light of day. So Peter James and Ian Rankin knew the challenges that lay in arranging a meeting between their two respective heroes.

For one thing Roy Grace and John Rebus are of different generations and backgrounds. They have vastly different ideas about law enforcement. For another, they operate five hundred miles apart—Grace in Brighton, a resort city on the south coast of England—Rebus in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Both countries, while constituents of the United Kingdom, have different legal systems, different rules and regulations.

Night and day to each other actually.

So how, realistically, could these two men meet and do business together?

Fans of John Rebus know he’s a big music fan, growing up in the early 1960s with The Who as his heroes. One of The Who’s best-known albums, Quadrophenia, is set partially in Brighton, at a time when rival gangs (the Mods and the Rockers) would battle on its waterfront. For many people in the United Kingdom the pitched and brutal wars between the clean-cut, smartly dressed Mods and the long-haired, leather-jacketed Rockers are what Brighton is all about.

So here was the germ of an idea.