“You cleared this floor? How long were you planning to leave me out on the front porch?”
“I figured another half an hour before you snapped and kicked in the door. I didn’t have that kinda time.”
“LA sarcasm,” Patrick said as they headed down the hallway. “Who knew?”
Halfway down the hall, on the right, was a door the same dark brown as the wainscoting. Patrick exchanged a look with Bosch and the cop nodded — now would be the time.
Patrick drew the .45 Colt Commander off his hip and flicked the safety off. “You see a bulkhead around back?”
Bosch looked puzzled. “A bulkhead?”
“You know, an entrance to the basement. Double doors, steps down.”
Bosch nodded. “Locked from the inside.” And then, as though further explanation were needed, he said, “We generally don’t have basements in LA.”
“You don’t have snow or a wind chill factor, either, so, you know, fuck you.” He tossed Bosch a bright, tight smile. “Any basement windows out back?”
Another nod. “Black curtains over them.”
“Well that’s bad,” Patrick said.
“Why?”
“No one puts curtains over their basement windows around here unless they got a home theater or they’re playing Dead Hooker Storage.” He looked around the apartment. “Edward does not strike me as the home theater type.”
Bosch nodded, his pupils adrenalized to twice their size. “Let’s go back out, call it in legit.”
“What if he’s down there with her right now?”
That was the dilemma, wasn’t it?
Bosch exhaled a long breath. Patrick did the same. Bosch held his hand over the doorknob and said, “On three?”
Patrick nodded. He wiped his right palm on his jeans and readjusted a two-handed grip on his gun.
“One. Two. Three.”
Bosch opened the door.
The first thing they noticed was the padding on the inside of the door — at least six inches of premium leather soundproofing. The kind one found only in recording studios. The next thing they noticed was the dark. The scant light to find the stairs came from the hall behind them. The rest of the cellar was pitch black. Patrick pointed at the light switch just past Bosch’s ear, raised his eyebrows.
Bosch shrugged.
Patrick shrugged.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Bosch flicked on the lights.
The staircase split the cellar like a spine, straight down the center, and they went down it fast. A black heating-oil tank stood at the bottom, quite old, rust fringing the bottom of it.
Without a word, Bosch went left and Patrick went right.
The element of surprise was no longer an option for them.
Only for him.
On the side of the cellar that Patrick chose — the front — the framing was old and mostly unfinished. The first “room” he came upon contained a washer, a dryer, and a sink with a cake of grimy brown soap stuck to the top of it. The next room had once been a workshop. A long wood table abutted the wall, an old vise still fastened to the table. Nothing else in there but dust and mice droppings. The last room along the wall was finished, however. The framing was filled in with drywall on one side and brick on the other, a door in the middle. Heavy door. And thick. The frame around it was solid, too. Try and kick in a door like that and you’d finish your day getting fitted for an ankle cast.
Patrick removed his left hand from his .45 and rubbed it on his jeans. He flexed the fingers and reached for the doorknob, holding the .45 cocked awkwardly at about mid-chest level. It didn’t look pretty, he was sure, but if he had to pull the trigger, he had a fair chance of hitting center mass on anyone but a dwarf or a giant.
The doorknob squeaked when it turned, proving something a cop had told him years ago — you always made the most noise when you were trying to be quiet. He threw open the door and dropped to his knees at the same time, gun pointing up a bit now, left hand coming back on the grip, sweeping the room from left to right, sweeping back right to left even as he processed what he saw—
Edward Paisley’s man cave.
Patrick edged his way through the doorway onto an Arizona Cardinals rug, drew a bead on a BarcaLounger trimmed in Sun Devils colors. A Phoenix Suns pennant shared space with one from the Phoenix Coyotes and Patrick had to peer at the latter to realize the Coyotes played in the NHL.
If he learned nothing else from this day, he now knew Arizona had a professional hockey team.
He found baseball bats signed by Troy Glaus, Carlos Baerga, and Tony Womack. Baseballs signed by Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, framed photos of Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner, Shawn Marion and Joe Johnson, Plexiglas-encased footballs, basketballs, and pucks, Patrick again thinking, They have a hockey team?
He picked up a bat signed by Shea Hillenbrand, who’d broken into the Bigs with the Sox back in 2001, but got shipped to Arizona before the Sox won the Series last year. He wondered if that stung or if being able to lie out in the Arizona sun in January made up for it.
He’d guess it didn’t.
He was putting the bat back against the wall when he heard someone moving through the cellar. Moving fast. Running actually.
And not away from something, but toward it.
Harry had worked his way along the back of the cellar finding nothing but wall and rocky, jagged flooring until he reached a tight space where an ancient water heater met a prehistoric oil heater. The space reeked of oil and mold and fossilized vermin. Had Bosch not been searching for an adolescent in possible mortal danger, he might have missed the corridor on the other side of the heaters. But his penlight picked up the hole in the darkness on the other side of a series of pipes and ducts that were half hanging, half falling from the ceiling.
Bosch worked his way past the heaters and entered a long thin space barely wide enough to accommodate any mammal with shoulders, never mind a full-grown adult male.
As soon as you entered a tunnel, the first problem you noticed was that there was no left, no right, and no place to hide. You went into an entrance and you headed toward an exit. And should anyone who wished you ill pop up at either point Alpha or point Zeta, while you were passing between those points, your fate was in their hands.
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.