The Black Echo

He drove out of the parking lot and a quarter block down to a pay phone out front of a liquor store. Wish walked back to the Tan Phu Pagoda and Bosch watched until she reached the door of the office. He dropped a quarter in the phone and dialed the number he had written on his pad in front of Binh’s. The line was busy. He looked back at the office door. Wish was gone from view. He dropped the quarter and dialed again. Busy. He did it in quick succession two more times before he got a ring. He was thinking that he had probably dialed the wrong number, when the call was answered.

“Tan Phu,” a male voice said. Young, Asian, probably early twenties, Bosch thought. Not Tran.

“Tan Phu?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, please.”

Bosch could not think of what to do. He whistled into the phone. The comeback was a staccato verbal attack of which Bosch could not understand a single word or sound. Then the phone at the other end was slammed down. Bosch walked back to the car and drove back toward the shopping plaza and into the narrow parking lot. He was cruising through it slowly when Wish appeared at the glass door with a man. An Asian. Like Binh, he had gray hair and had the aura; unspoken power, unflexed muscle. He held the door open for Eleanor and nodded to her as she said thanks. He watched her walk off and then disappeared inside again.

“Harry,” she said as she got in the car, “what did you say to the guy on the phone?”

“Not a word. So it was that office?”

“Yeah. I think that was our Mr. Tran who held the door for me. Nice guy.”

“So what did you do to become such great pals?”

“I told him I was a real estate lady. When I went in I asked to see the boss. Then Mr. Gray Hair came out of a back office. He said his name was Jimmie Bok. I said I represented Japanese investors and asked if he was interested in taking an offer on the shopping center. He said no. He said, in very fine English, ‘I buy, I don’t sell.’ Then he escorted me out. But I think that was Tran. Something about him.”

“Yeah, I saw it,” Bosch said. Then he picked up the radio and asked dispatch to run the name Jimmie Bok on the NCIC and DMV computers.

Eleanor described the inside of the office. A central reception area, a hallway running behind it with four doors, including one at the rear that looked like an exit, judging by the double lock. No women. At least four men other than Bok. Two of them looked like hired muscle. They stood up from the reception room couch when Bok walked out of the middle door in the hallway.

Bosch drove out of the lot and around the block. He cut up the alley that ran behind the shopping plaza. He stopped when he had driven far enough to see a gold stretch Mercedes parked next to a rear door to the complex. There was a double lock on the door.

“That’s got to be his wheels,” Wish said.

They decided they would watch the car. Bosch drove on by it to the end of the alley and parked behind a Dumpster. Then he realized it was full of garbage from the restaurant. He backed out and drove out of the alley completely. He parked on the side street so that by looking out the passenger side of the car, they both could see the rear end of the Mercedes. Bosch could also look at Eleanor at the same time.

“So, I guess we wait,” she said.

“Guess so. No way of telling whether he’ll do anything after Binh’s warning. Maybe he did something after Binh got ripped off last year and we’re just spinning our wheels.”

Bosch got a radio callback from the dispatcher: Jimmie Bok had a clean driving record. He lived in Beverly Hills and he had no criminal record. Nothing else.

“I’m going back to the phone,” Eleanor announced. Bosch looked at her. “I have to check in. I’ll tell Rourke we’re set up on this guy and see if he can’t shake someone loose to maybe call some banks and run his name. To see if he is a customer. I’d also like to run him on the property computer. He said, ‘I buy, I don’t sell.’ I’d like to know what he buys.”

“Fire a shot if you need me,” Bosch said, and she smiled as she opened the door.

“You want something to eat?” she asked. “I’m thinking about getting take-out for lunch from one of those restaurants up front.”

“Just coffee,” he said. He hadn’t eaten Vietnamese food in twenty years. He watched her walk around to the front of the center.

About ten minutes after she was gone, as Bosch watched the Mercedes, he saw a car pass by the other end of the alley. He immediately made it as a police sedan. A white Ford LTD without wheel covers, just the cheap hubcaps that revealed the matching white wheels. It had been too far away for him to see who was in it. He alternately looked at the Mercedes and then at the rearview mirror to see if the LTD was coming around the block. But in five minutes, he never saw it.