The Narrows (26 page)

39

R
ACHEL’S PLANE LANDED a half hour late at Burbank because of the rain and wind. It had not let up through the night and the city was cast in a shroud of gray. It was the kind of rain that paralyzed the city. Traffic moved at a crawl on every street and every freeway. The roads weren’t built for it. The city wasn’t either. By dawn the storm water culverts were overflowing, the tunnels were at capacity and the runoff to the Los Angeles River had turned the concrete-lined canal that snaked through the city to the sea into a roaring rapids. It was black water, carrying with it the ash of the fires that had blackened the hills the year before. There was an end-of-the-world gloom about it all. The city had been tested by fire first and now rain. Living in L.A. sometimes felt like you were riding shotgun with the devil to the apocalypse. People I saw that morning carried a what’s-next look in their eyes. Earthquake? Tsunami? Or maybe a disaster of our own making? A dozen years earlier fire and rain had been the harbingers of both tectonic and social upheaval in the City of Angels. I didn’t think there was anybody here who doubted it could happen again. If we are doomed to repeat ourselves in our follies and mistakes, then it is easy to see nature and balance operating on the same cycle.

I thought about this as I waited for Rachel at the curb outside the terminal. The rain pounded the windshield, turning it translucent and murky. The wind rocked the car on its springs. I thought about rejoining the cops, already second-guessing my decision and wondering if I would be repeating myself in folly or if I had a chance this time at grace.

I didn’t see Rachel in the rain until she knocked on the passenger-side window. She then opened the back hatch and threw in her bag. She was wearing a green parka with the hood up. It must have done her well facing the elements in the Dakotas but it looked too large and bulky on her in L.A.

“This better be good, Bosch,” she said as she climbed in and dropped wetly onto the passenger seat. She showed no outward sign of affection and neither did I. It was one of the agreements we’d made on the phone. We were to act as professionals until we played my hunch out.

“Why, you got alternatives?”

“No, it’s just that I put everything on the line last night with Alpert. I’m one fuckup short of a permanent posting in South Dakota, where, by the way, the weather might actually be nicer than this.”

“Well, welcome to L.A.”

“I thought this was Burbank.”

“Technically.”

After we cleared the airport I dropped down to the 134 and took that east to the 5. Between the rain and the morning rush hour our progress was slow as we skirted around Griffith Park and pointed south. I wasn’t ready to begin worrying about time yet but I was getting close.

For a long time we rode silently because the mix of rain and traffic made the drive intense, probably more so for Rachel who had to sit and do nothing while I had control of the wheel. Finally she spoke, if only to siphon off some of the tension in the car.

“So are you going to tell me this grand plan of yours?”

“No plan, just a hunch.”

“No, you said you
knew
his next move, Bosch.”

I noticed that since we had made love on the bed of my efficiency unit she had started calling me by my last name. I wondered if this was part of the agreement to act as professionals or some form of reverse endearment, calling someone you had been most intimate with by his least intimate name.

“I had to get you here, Rachel.”

“Well, all right then, I’m here. Tell it to me.”

“It’s the Poet who has the grand plan. Backus.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“Remember the books I told you about yesterday, the books in the barrel and the one I pulled out?”

“Yes.”

“I think I figured out what it all means.”

I told her about the partially burned receipt I had seen and how I thought Book Car was actually Book Carnival, the bookstore operated by retired police detective Ed Thomas, the last intended target of the Poet eight years before.

“You think because of this book in the fire barrel that he’s here and is going to make good on the killing we took away from him eight years ago.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s a stretch, Bosch. I wish you had told me all of this before I risked my ass flying over here.”

“There’s no such thing as coincidence, especially like this.”

“Okay, run the story out for me, then. Give me the profile. Tell me the Poet’s grand plan.”

“Well, that’s the bureau’s job, to profile crimes. I’m not going to do that. But this is what I think he’s doing. I think the trailer and the explosion were all set up to look like the grand finale. And then, as soon as the director steps in front of the television cameras and says I think we’ve got him, he’s going to take out Ed Thomas. The symbolism would be perfect. It’s the grand gesture, the ultimate fuck-you. It’s checkmate, Rachel. While the bureau is bragging about itself he moves in right under their noses and takes out the guy the bureau was all puffed up about saving the last time.”

“And why the books in the barrel? How does all of that fit in?”

“I think they were books he bought from Ed Thomas. From Book Carnival by mail order or maybe even in person. Maybe they were marked in some way and could be traced back to the store. He didn’t want that so he burned them. He couldn’t risk that they might survive the trailer blast.

“But then on the other end, after Ed Thomas is gone and Backus has split, the agents would find his connection to the store and would begin to see how long and how hard Backus was planning this. It would help show his genius. That’s what he wants, right? I mean, you are the profiler. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

“I
was
the profiler. Right now I handle reservation crimes in the Dakotas.”

The traffic was starting to open up as we passed by downtown, the spires of the financial district disappearing in the upper mist of the storm. The city always looked haunting in the rain to me. There was a foreboding sense about it that always depressed me, that always made me feel like something had broken loose in the world and was wrong.

“There is only one thing wrong with all of that, Bosch.”

“What?”

“The director is holding a press conference today but he isn’t going to say we caught the Poet. Just like you, we don’t think that was Backus in that trailer.”

“So, Backus doesn’t know that. He’ll watch it on CNN like everybody else. But it won’t change his plan. Either way, I say he hits Ed Thomas today. Either way, he makes his point. ‘
I am better and smarter than you
.’”

She nodded and thought about that for a long moment.

“Okay,” she finally said. “What if I’m buying it? What is our play? Have you called Ed Thomas?”

“I don’t know what our play is yet and I haven’t called Ed Thomas. We’re heading toward his store now. It’s down in Orange and he opens up at eleven. I called and got his hours off the answering machine.”

“Why his store? All the other cops Backus killed were in their homes, one in his car.”

“Because at the moment I don’t know where Ed Thomas lives and because of the book. My guess is Backus will make his move at the bookstore. If I’m wrong and Ed doesn’t show up at the store, then we find out where he lives and go there.”

Rachel nodded in agreement with the plan.

“There were three different books written on the Poet case. I read them all and they all had postscripts on the players. They said Thomas retired and opened a bookstore. I think one even named the store.”

“There you go.”

She looked at her watch.

“Are we going to make it there before he opens?”

“We’ll make it. Did they set a time for the director’s press conference?”

“Three o’clock D.C. time.”

I checked the dash clock. It was ten a.m. We had an hour before Ed Thomas opened for business and two hours before the press conference. If my theory and hunch were correct we would be in the presence of the Poet very soon. I was ready and I was juiced. I felt the high octane moving in my blood. By old habit I dropped my hand off the wheel and checked my hip. I had a Glock 27 holstered there. It was illegal for me to be carrying a weapon and if I ended up using it, there could be trouble—the kind that could prevent me from rejoining the police department.

But sometimes the risks you face dictate the other risks you must take. And my guess was that this was going to be one of those times.

40

T
HE RAIN MADE IT HARD to watch the store. If we had left the windshield wipers on, it would have been a dead giveaway. So we watched at first through the murk of water on glass.

We were parked in the lot of a strip shopping center on Tustin Boulevard in the city of Orange. Book Carnival was a small business between a rock shop and what looked like a vacant slot. Three doors down was a gun store.

There was a single public entrance. Before taking our position in the front lot we had driven behind the shopping center and seen a rear door with the store’s name on it. There was a doorbell and a sign that said RING BELL FOR DELIVERIES.

In a perfect world we’d have been on the front and back of the store with a minimum of four sets of eyes. Backus could come in either way, posing as a customer through the front or as a deliveryman through the back. But nothing was perfect about the world on this day. It was raining and it was just the two of us. We parked the Mercedes at a distance from the front of the store but still close enough to see and act if necessary.

The front counter and cash register were just behind the front window of Book Carnival. This worked in our favor. Shortly after we watched him open the store for business, we watched Ed Thomas take a position behind the counter. He put a cash drawer into the register and made some phone calls. Even with the rain and the blurring of the windshield we could keep him in view as long as he stayed at the register. It was the recesses of the store behind him that disappeared in the gloom. On the occasions that he left his post and walked back toward the shelves and displays in the rear, we lost sight of him and the tingling sense of panic took hold.

On the way down Rachel had told me about the discovery of the GPS tag on her car and the confirmation that she had been used by fellow agents as bait for Backus. And now here we sat watching a former colleague of mine, in a way using him as the new bait. It didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to go in and tell Ed the crosshairs were on him, that he should take a vacation, get out of town. But I didn’t because I knew if Backus was watching Thomas and saw any deviation in the norm, then we might lose our only chance at him. So Rachel and I got selfish with Ed Thomas’s life and I knew in the days ahead I would deal with the guilt from that. The only question was, depending on how things turned out, how much guilt there would be.

The first two customers of the day were women. They arrived shortly after Thomas had unlocked the front door. And while they were browsing in the store a man pulled up, parked in front and went in as well. He was too young to be Backus so we didn’t go to full alert. He left in a hurry and without purchasing a book. Then, when the two women left, clutching their bags of books, I got out of the Mercedes and ran across the lot to the overhang in front of the gun shop.

Rachel and I had decided not to bring Thomas into our investigation, but that wasn’t going to stop me from going into the store on a reconnaissance mission. We decided that I would go into the store with a cover story, nonchalantly reacquaint myself with Thomas and see if he might already be alert to the idea that he was being watched. So once the first customers of the day had come and gone, I made the move.

I first ducked into the gun store since it was the store closest to where we had parked and it would have looked odd to anyone watching the shopping plaza for me to park on one end and go directly to the bookstore at the other end. I took a cursory look at the gleaming firearms displayed in the glass counter and then up at the paper shooting targets on the back wall. They had the usual silhouettes but they also had versions featuring the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. I guessed that these were the big sellers.

When a man behind the counter asked if I needed help I told him I was just browsing and then walked out of the store. I walked down toward Book Carnival, stopping first to check out the empty storefront next door. Through the soaped glass I could see boxes marked with what I guessed were the titles of books. I realized Thomas was using the slot for storing books. There was a FOR LEASE sign and a phone number, which I committed to memory in case it played into an angle we would work later.

I entered Book Carnival and Ed Thomas was behind the counter. I smiled and he smiled in recognition but I could tell that it took a few seconds for him to place the face he recognized.

“Harry Bosch,” he said once he had it.

“Hey, Ed, how are you doing?”

We shook hands and his eyes behind the glasses had a warmth to them I liked. I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen him since his retirement dinner at the Sportsman’s Lodge up in the Valley six or seven years before. There was more white than not in his hair. But he was still tall and thin like I remembered him from the job. He had a tendency at crime scenes to hold his notebook up high and close to his face when he was writing. This was because his glasses were always a prescription or two behind his eyes. The arms-high pose got him the nickname of the Praying Mantis around the homicide table. I suddenly remembered that now. I remembered the flyer for his retirement party showed a caricature of Ed as a superhero with a cape and a mask and a large P on his chest.

“How’s the book business doing?”

“It’s doing good, Harry. What brings you down here from the big bad city? I heard you retired a couple years ago.”

“Yeah, I did. But I’m thinking about going back.”

“You miss it?”

“Yeah, I sort of do. We’ll see what happens.”

He seemed surprised and I knew then that he didn’t miss a thing about the job. He’d always been a reader, always had a box of paperbacks in the trunk for surveillances and while sitting on wiretaps. Now he had his pension and his bookstore. He was doing well without all of the nastiness of the job.

“You just passing by?”

“No, actually, I came here for a real reason. You remember my old partner, Kiz Rider?”

“Yeah, sure, she’s been in here before.”

“That’s what I mean. She’s been helping me with something and I want to get her a little gift. I remember she told me once that your store was like the only place around where you could get a book signed by a writer named Dean Koontz. So I was wondering if you got any of those around. I’d like to get her one.”

“I think I might have something left in the back. Let me go check. Those things go fast but I usually keep a stash.”

He left me at the counter and walked through the store to a door at the back that appeared to lead to a stockroom. I assumed the rear delivery door was back there. When he was out of sight I leaned over the counter and looked at the shelves beneath. I saw a small video display tube with its screen cut into four segments. There were four interior camera angles showing the cash register area, with me leaning over the counter; a long view of the entire store; a tighter view of a group of shelves; and the rear stockroom, where I could see Thomas looking at a similar VDT tube on a shelf.

I realized he was looking at me leaning over his counter. I straightened up, my mind quickly trying to come up with an explanation. A few moments later Thomas came back to the counter carrying a book.

“Find what you were looking for, Harry?”

“What? Oh, you mean me looking over the counter? I was just sort of wondering if you, you know, had any protection back there. You being a former cop and all. You ever worry about somebody coming in here who you knew from back when?”

“I take precautions, Harry. Don’t worry about that.”

I nodded.

“Good to hear. Is that the book?”

“Yeah, does she have this one? It came out last year.”

He showed me a book called
The Face
. I didn’t know if Kiz had it or not but I was going to buy it.

“I don’t know. Did he sign it?”

“Yeah, signed and dated.”

“Okay, I’ll take it.”

While he rang up the sale I tried some small talk which really wasn’t small talk.

“I saw you have the camera set up underneath there. Seems like a little much for a bookstore.”

“You’d be surprised. People like to steal books. I got a collectibles section back there—expensive stuff from the collections I buy and sell. I keep a camera right on it and I caught a kid in there just this morning trying to shove a copy of
Nick’s Trip
down his pants. Early Pelecanos is tough to find. That would’ve been about a seven-hundred-dollar loss for me.”

That seemed like an inordinate amount of money for a single book. I had never heard of the book but guessed that it must have been fifty or a hundred years old.

“You call the cops?”

“No, I just kicked him in the pants and told him if he came back again I would call the law.”

“You’re a nice guy, Ed. You must have mellowed out since you left. I don’t think the Praying Mantis would’ve just let the kid slide.”

I handed him two twenties and he gave me the change.

“The Praying Mantis was a long time ago. And my wife doesn’t think I’m so mellow. Thanks, Harry. And tell Kiz I said hello.”

“Yeah, I will. You ever run into anybody else from the table?”

I didn’t want to leave yet. I wanted more information so I continued the banter. I looked up over his head and spotted a small two-camera dome. It was mounted up near the ceiling, one lens angled down on the register and one taking in the long view of the store. There was a small red light glowing and I could see a small black cable snaking from the camera housing and up into the drop ceiling. While Thomas answered my question I was thinking about the possibility that Backus had been in the store and was captured on a surveillance tape.

“Not really,” Thomas said. “I sort of left all of that behind. You say you miss it, Harry, but I don’t miss a thing about it. Not really.”

I nodded like I understood but I didn’t. Thomas had been a good cop and a good detective. He took the work to heart. That was one reason why the Poet had put him in the sights. He was paying lip service to something I didn’t think he really believed.

“That’s good,” I said. “Hey, do you have that kid you kicked out of here on tape from this morning? I’d like to see how he tried to rip you off.”

“Nah, I just have live feeds. I got the cameras out in the open and a sticker on the door. It’s supposed to be a deterrent but some people are dumb. A setup with a recorder would be too expensive and a pain in the ass in maintenance. I just have the live setup.”

“I see.”

“Listen, if Kiz already has that book I’ll take it back. I can sell it.”

“No, that’s cool. If she already has it I’ll keep it and read it myself.”

“Harry, when’s the last time you read a book?”

“I read a book about Art Pepper a couple months ago,” I said indignantly. “He and his wife wrote it before he died.”

“Nonfiction?”

“Yeah, it was real stuff.”

“I’m talking about a novel. When was the last time you read one?”

I shrugged. I didn’t remember.

“That’s what I thought,” Thomas said. “If she doesn’t want the book bring it back and I’ll get it to somebody who’ll read it.”

“Okay, Ed. Thanks.”

“Be careful out there, Harry.”

“I will be. You, too.”

I was heading to the door when things came together—what Thomas had told me and what I knew about the case. I snapped my fingers and acted like I just remembered something. I turned back to Thomas.

“Hey, I got a friend lives all the way in Nevada but he says he’s a customer of yours. Mail order probably. You do mail order?”

“Sure. What’s his name?”

“Tom Walling. Lives all the way up in Clear.”

Thomas nodded but not in any happy sort of way.

“He’s your friend?”

I realized I might have stepped in it.

“Well, an acquaintance, you could say.”

“Well, he owes me some money.”

“Really? What happened?”

“It’s a long story. But I sold him some books out of a collection I was handling and he paid very promptly. Paid with a money order and everything was fine. So when he wanted more books I sent them before I got his money order. Big mistake. That was three months ago and I haven’t gotten a dime from him. If you see this acquaintance of yours again, tell him I want my money.”

“I will, Ed. That’s too bad. I didn’t know the guy was a rip-off artist. What books did he buy?”

“He’s into Poe, so I sold him some books out of the Rodway collection. Some old ones. Pretty nice books. Then he ordered more when I got another collection in. He didn’t pay for them.”

My heart rate was kicking into an upper gear. What Thomas was telling me was confirmation that Backus was somehow in play here. I wanted to stop the charade at that moment and tell Thomas what was happening and that he was in danger. But I held back. I needed to talk to Rachel first and form the right plan.

“I think I saw those books in his place,” I said. “Was it poetry?”

“Mostly, yeah. He didn’t really care for the short stories.”

“Did these books have the original collector’s name in them? Rodman?”

“No, Rodway. And yes, they had his library seal embossed in them. That hurt the price but your friend wanted the books.”

I nodded. I saw my theory coming together. It was more than theory now.

“Harry, what are you really up to?”

I looked at Thomas.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. You’re asking a lot of —”

A loud ring sounded from the back of the store, cutting Thomas off.

“Never mind, Harry,” he said. “It’s more books. I need to go take a delivery.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah.”

I watched him leave the counter area and head to the back. I checked my watch. It was noon. The director was stepping before the cameras to talk about the explosion in the desert and say that it was the work of the killer known as the Poet. Could this be the moment Backus chose to strike Thomas? My throat and chest tightened as though the air had been sucked out of the room. As soon as Thomas slipped through the doorway to the stockroom, I moved back to the counter and leaned over to look at the security monitor. I knew if Thomas checked the backroom monitor he would see that I hadn’t left the store, but I was counting on him going right to the door.