The Black Echo

“Boytown. He’s probably taking care of business with Arson and Mojo.”

“Those the other guys in the crew?”

“Right.”

“Where in Boytown did they say they were going?”

“They didn’t. They just go where the queers are, I guess. You know.”

The girl either couldn’t be more specific or wouldn’t be. Bosch knew it didn’t matter. He had the addresses from the shake cards and knew he’d find Sharkey somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Thank you,” he said to the girl and started heading toward the door. He was halfway down the hall before Wish came out of the room, walking after him at a brisk, angry pace. Before she said anything he stopped at a pay phone in the hallway by the office. He took out a small phone book he always carried, looked up the number for DYS and dialed. He was put on hold for two minutes before an operator transferred him to an automated tape line on which he reported the date and time and the location of Bettijane Felker, suspected runaway. He hung up wondering how many days it would be before they got the message and how many days after that it would be before they got to Bettijane.

***

They were all the way into West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard and she was still hot. Bosch had tried to defend himself but realized there was no chance. So he sat there quietly and listened.

“It’s a matter of trust, that’s all,” Wish said. “I don’t care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed.”

He stared at the mirror on the passenger’s side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis’s huge neck and crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn’t tell Wish they were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn’t said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.

Finally he said, “Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood, of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I’m sorry. I did not think it would help us to waste a day booking some asshole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty. I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people’s jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It’s one of the spots I got off the shake cards.”

“We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don’t be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along for the ride. We are both on it. Don’t forget it.”

She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking ice tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn’t see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.

They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.

Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren’t just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie’s Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay phone near the old bar’s screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer, answered the phone.

“Is Lewis or Clarke there?”

“No, sir, they’re not. Can I take a message?”

“No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point with them.”

“I believe they are code seven tillP.M. watch.”