The Black Echo

“He wasn’t in bed. I had to track him down at the Parrot up in North Hollywood. It’s one of them private bottle clubs. Porter gives me the number when we’re first introduced as partners and tells me that’s where he’ll be most nights. Tells me he works a security detail there. But I called the off-duty assignments office at Parker Center to check it out and they got no record. I know the only thing he does there is booze. He must’ve been practically passed out when I called. The bartender said the pager on his belt went off but he didn’t even hear it. Harry, I think the guy could blow a point two right now if we put a Breathalyzer on him.”

Bosch nodded and frowned the required three seconds and then put Jerry Edgar’s troubles aside. He felt Eleanor step down beside him and he introduced her to Edgar. They shook hands and smiled and Bosch said, “So, what have we got?”

“Well, we got these on the body,” Edgar said, and he held up a clear plastic bag. There was a short stack of Polaroids in it. More nude shots of Sharkey. He hadn’t wasted any time resupplying. Edgar turned the bag and there was Bosch’s business card.

“It looks like the kid was a hustler down in Boytown,” Edgar said, “but if you already pulled him in once you already know that. Anyway, I saw the card and figured he might be the kid from the nine one one call. If you want to come down and take a look, be my guest. We already processed the scene, so touch whatever you want. You can’t hear yourself think in there, though. Sombody went through and knocked out every light in the tunnel. Haven’t figured out whether that was the perp or the lights were knocked out before.

“Anyway, we had to set up our own. And our cables weren’t long enough to put the generator up here. It’s in there screaming like a five-horsepower baby.”

He turned to head back into the tunnel but Bosch reached out and touched his shoulder.

“Jed, how’d you get the call on this?”

“Anonymous. It wasn’t a nine one one line, so there’s no tape or trace. Came in right to the Hollywood desk. Caller was a male, that’s all the dipshit, one of those fat Explorer kids who took it, could tell us.”

Edgar turned back into the subway. Bosch and Wish followed. It was a long hallway that curved to the right. The floor was dirty concrete, its walls were white stucco with a heavy overlay of graffiti. Nothing like a dose of urban reality as you are leaving the symphony at the bowl, Bosch thought. The tunnel was dark except for the bright splash of light that bathed the crime scene about halfway in. There Bosch could see a human form sprawled on its back. Sharkey. He could see men standing and working in the light. Bosch walked with the fingers of his right hand trailing along the stuccoed wall. It steadied him. There was an old, damp smell in the tunnel that was mixed with the new odor of gasoline and exhaust from the generator. Bosch felt beads of sweat start to form on his scalp and under his shirt. His breathing was fast and shallow. They passed the generator thirty feet in and in another thirty feet or so Sharkey was lying on the tunnel floor under the brutal light of the strobes.

The boy’s head was propped against the tunnel wall at an unnatural angle. He seemed smaller and younger than Bosch remembered him. His eyes were half open and had the familiar glaze of the unseeing on them. He wore a black T-shirt that said Guns N Roses on it, and it was matted with his blood. The pockets of his faded jeans were pulled out and empty. At his side stood a can of spray paint in a plastic evidence bag. On the wall above his head a painted inscription read RIP Sharkey. The paint had been applied with an inexperienced hand and too much had been used. Black paint had run down the wall in thin lines, some of them into Sharkey’s hair.

When Edgar yelled, “You want to see it?” above the din of the generator Bosch knew that he meant the wound. Because Sharkey’s head was angled forward, the throat wound was not visible. Only the blood. Bosch shook his head no.

Bosch noticed the blood splatter on the wall and floor about three feet from the body. Porter the lush was comparing the shapes of the drops with those on splatter cards on a steel ring. A crime scene tech named Roberge was also photographing the spots. The blood on the floor was in round spots. The wall splatter drops were elliptical. You didn’t need splatter cards to know the kid had been killed right here in the tunnel.

“The way it’s looking,” Porter said loudly to no one in particular, “somebody comes up behind him here, cuts him and pushes him down against the wall there.”

“You only got it half right, Porter,” Edgar said. “How’s somebody come up behind somebody in a tunnel like this? He was with somebody and they did him. It was no sneak job, Porter.”

Porter put the splatter cards in his pocket and said, “Sorry, partner.”