He heard a slight metallic sound from the far side of the room and knew Ellis and Long were outside the door and trying the knob. They were about to come in. Bosch realized at that very moment that he was in the wrong spot. He was positioned dead center in the room exactly where they would expect him to be.
46
Ellis signaled to Long that the door was locked and that he should kick it in. Long tossed him the flashlight and then backed off a few feet. He raised his leg, aiming his heel at a spot just above the doorknob. He had done this a lot over the years and was good at it.
The door flew open and slammed back on the inside wall of the office, revealing a darkened room lit only by the dim light leaking around the edges of a window curtain on the far wall. Long was left in a vulnerable position as the momentum from his kick carried him into the office. Ellis moved in behind him, following his left flank and holding his gun and the flashlight in the standard crossed-wrists configuration.
“Police!” he called out. “Nobody move!”
The light fell on a desk that had been tipped onto its side to create a barricade. He put the aim of his weapon on the top edge of the desk, ready for Bosch or Schubert to show himself.
“Wait!”
The voice called out from behind the door to the left of the desk. Ellis recalibrated the aim of both his light and gun.
“It’s me!” Schubert called. “He told me he was a cop!”
The door opened and there stood Schubert, his hands raised.
“Don’t shoot. I thought he—”
Ellis opened fire, sending three quick shots toward Schubert. In his peripheral vision he saw Long on his right, turning and raising his gun to fire as well.
“No!”
The shout came from behind him and to the right. Ellis turned and saw Bosch moving laterally out from behind a folding partition that split the room. He had a gun up and opened fire as Ellis realized the overturned desk had been a decoy and Bosch had the superior position.
Ellis lurched forward to put Long’s larger body between Bosch and himself. He saw his partner react as the bullets struck him. The impacts redirected Long’s momentum into a spin. He was going to go down. Ellis shifted his weight and drove his shoulder into Long’s upper body, holding his partner up and swinging his own gun hand around his torso at the same time. Ellis fired wildly, shooting blindly in the direction he had last seen Bosch. He then reversed his footing and started back toward the door, dragging Long with him as a shield.
There was more gunfire, and Ellis felt the impacts through his partner’s body. At the doorway he dropped Long and fired two more shots in the direction of where Bosch’s fire had come from. He backed into the hallway and then turned and ran toward a door marked with an exit sign.
As he raced down the stairway to the garage, Ellis had one question bouncing through the impulses of his brain.
Fight or flight?
Was it all over or was there still a chance he could contain this, somehow turn it all on Bosch? Tell them Bosch was the one. Bosch opened fire. Bosch had some kind of crazy vendetta going. Bosch—
He knew he was kidding himself. It couldn’t work. If Bosch was still alive up there, then it wouldn’t work.
Ellis ran across the garage to his car. He could hear an approaching siren — Sheriff’s deputies responding to Bosch’s 911 call. He judged it to be two or three blocks away. He had to get out before they got here. That was priority one. After that, he knew it was time to fly.
He was prepared. He had known it might someday come to this and he had planned for it.
47
His gun braced in two hands, Bosch moved in on Long, who was collapsed in the doorway. He was writhing in pain and gasping for breath. Bosch saw the last two bullets he had fired embedded in Long’s shirt, held in place by the bulletproof vest underneath. Bosch yanked the gun out of Long’s hand and slid it across the floor behind him. He put his weight down on Long and leaned forward to cautiously look into the hallway and make sure Ellis wasn’t waiting out there.
Satisfied that Ellis was gone, Bosch pulled back into the room and turned Long over onto his chest. He took the vice cop’s cuffs off his belt and used them to bind his wrists behind his back. He then saw the blood on Long’s right side. One of Bosch’s shots had found skin below the vest. Long was bleeding from a wound just above his right hip. Bosch knew that a.45 slug fired from ten feet was going to do major internal damage. Long might be mortally wounded.
“You motherfucker,” Long finally managed to get out. “You’re going to die.”
“Everybody dies, Long,” Bosch said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Bosch heard multiple sirens now and wondered if the Sheriff’s had gotten Ellis on his way out.
“Your partner abandoned you, Long,” he said. “First, he uses you as a human shield and then he drops you like a bag of oranges. That’s some partner.”
Bosch patted him on the back and then moved away. He went to the other doorway to check on Schubert. The doctor was lying on his back, his head under the bathroom sink and his left leg folded awkwardly underneath his body. There were two impact wounds in his upper chest and one in the center of his neck. One of them had clipped his spine, causing him to drop the way he had. His eyes were open and he wasn’t breathing. There was nothing Bosch could do. He couldn’t fathom why Schubert thought that if he gave himself up to Ellis and Long, he would be spared. He wondered if he should feel remorse for leading him on, convincing him he was a cop on a case.
He didn’t.
As Bosch knelt next to Schubert, he became aware of a pulsing tone from the desk phone on the floor behind him. It had disconnected from the call to the Sheriff’s communication center when Bosch had tipped over the desk. He turned from the body, found the handset, and reunited it with the base, leaving it on the floor. He also saw a shattered frame that had fallen from the desk. It contained a photo of Schubert and his wife sitting in the cockpit of a sailboat and smiling at the camera.
The desk phone started to ring, one of the buttons flashing. Bosch picked up the handset and pushed the button.
“Harry Bosch.”
“This is Sheriff’s Deputy Maywood, who am I speaking with?”
“I just told you, Harry Bosch.”
“We are outside the Center for Cosmetic Creation. What is the situation in there?”
“We’ve got one dead and one wounded. And then me — I made the nine-one-one call. One gunman escaped. Did you get him?”
Maywood ignored Bosch’s question.
“Okay, sir, I want you to listen closely. I need you and the wounded man to come out of the building with your hands behind your head, fingers laced. If you have any weapons, leave them inside the building.”
“I don’t think the wounded man’s going to be walking anytime soon.”
“Is he armed?”
“Not anymore.”
“Okay, then, sir, I need you to come out now — hands laced behind your head. Leave all weapons inside.”
“You got it.”
“If we see a weapon, we will consider it a provocative action. Are we clear, sir?”
“Crystal. I’m coming down in the elevator.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
Bosch disconnected and stood up. He looked around for a place to leave his Glock and saw Long’s gun on the floor next to the right side of the desk. He went over and picked it up, careful not to touch the trigger and obliterate a fingerprint with his own. He put both weapons on top of a glass display cabinet that contained a collection of antique surgical instruments.