“I can wait.”
“ID.”
Bosch pulled the worn leather wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. It was connected by a chain to a loop on his belt. He unsnapped the flap and pulled out the driver’s license and the Medicare card and dropped them on the counter. The Russian reached up, took them both, and then leaned back in his chair as he looked them over. Bosch hoped that his distancing himself was a reaction to Bosch’s body odor. He had actually made the long walk over from the shelter as part of his dropping into character. He was wearing three shirts and the walk had soaked the first layer in sweat and dampened the next two.
“Dominic H. Reilly?”
“That’s right.”
“Where is this Oceanside place?”
“Down near San Diego.”
“Take off glasses.”
Bosch raised his sunglasses up over his brow and looked at the Russian. It was the first big test. He needed to show the eyes of a drug addict. Just before being dropped at the shelter, he had spread peppermint oil provided by his DEA handler on the skin below his eyes. Now the cornea of each was irritated and red.
The Russian looked for a long moment and then tossed the plastic cards back on the counter. Bosch dropped his sunglasses back into place.
“You can wait,” the Russian said. “Maybe doctor have time.”
Bosch had passed. He tried not to show any relief.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
Bosch picked his backpack up off the floor and limped over to the waiting area. He picked a chair closest to the clinic’s front door and sat down, using the backpack as a stool for his braced leg. He put the cane on the floor and slid it under the chair, then folded his arms, rested his head against the wall behind him, and closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyes he reviewed what had just transpired and wondered if he had given any sort of tell to the Russian. He felt he had handled his initial interaction as a UC well and knew the wallet-and-ID package put together by the DEA team was perfect.
He had spent several hours the day before with the DEA handler, being trained in the art of going undercover. The first half of the all-day session dealt with the nuts and bolts of the operation: who would be watching and from where, what his cover was, what would be at his disposal in his wallet and backpack, how and when to call for an extraction. The second half was largely role-playing, with his handler teaching him the look of an oxycodone addict and putting him through different scenarios that could come up while he was under.
The interaction he had just had with the Russian behind the counter had been one of those scenarios, and Bosch had played it the way he had several times the previous day. The key point of the one-day UC school was to help Bosch conceal fear and anxiety and channel them into the persona he would be taking on.
The handler, who claimed his name was Joe Smith, also drilled Bosch on court credibility — being able to testify in court or privately before a judge that he had not committed crimes or moral transgressions while acting in an undercover capacity. This would be vital to winning over juries should a prosecution arise from the operation. The cornerstone of court credibility was to avoid taking the drug he was posing as being addicted to. Short of that, he carried two doses of Narcan secreted in the hem of one of his pant legs. Each yellow pill was a fast-acting opioid antagonist that would counteract the effect of the drug if he was forced physically or by circumstances to ingest it.
A few minutes went by and Bosch heard the Russian get up. He opened his eyes and tracked him as he disappeared into the hallway behind the counter. Soon afterward, he heard him speaking. It was a one-sided conversation and in Russian. A phone call, Bosch assumed. He picked up an urgent tone to the Russian’s words. He guessed that word was coming in that some of their shills had been taken down by the DEA and the state medical board. This was part of the UC insertion plan. Thin the herd, so to speak, and increase the need to recruit replacements, Dominic H. Reilly among them.
Bosch checked the walls and ceiling. He saw no cameras. He knew it would be unlikely that members of a criminal operation would set up cameras that could document their transgressions. He slid the brace down over his knee so he could walk normally and moved quickly to the counter. While the Russian continued to talk in the rear area of the clinic, Bosch looked over the counter to see what was there. There were several Russian-language and English-language newspapers, including the L.A. Times and the San Fernando Sun, scattered haphazardly, most of them folded open to stories about the past election and the investigation of the Russian connection. The counterman seemed to be as captured by the story as Legal Siegel had been.
Bosch moved a stack of menus from food-delivery services and found a spiral notebook. Bosch quickly opened it and found several pages of notes in Russian. There were tables with dates and numbers but he could decipher none of it.
The Russian abruptly stopped talking and Bosch quickly closed and replaced the notebook and went back to his chair. He pulled the brace back into place and was just leaning back again when the Russian returned to his position behind the counter. Bosch watched him through squinted eyes. The Russian showed no sign that he had noticed anything out of place at the counter.
Forty minutes of inactivity went by before Bosch heard a vehicle come to a stop out front. Soon the door opened and several bedraggled men and women entered the clinic. Bosch recognized some of them from his surveillance of the van earlier in the week. They followed the Russian down the hallway and out of sight. The van’s driver, the same one Bosch had seen before, stayed behind at the counter and soon approached Bosch, his hands on his hips.
“What do you want here?” he asked, his accent easily as thick as the counterman’s.
“I want to see the doctor,” Bosch said.
He raised his leg off the backpack in case the knee brace had not been noticed. The driver proceeded to ask Bosch many of the same questions the counterman had. He kept his hands on his hips. After the last question was answered, there was a long moment of silence while the driver decided something.
“Okay, you come back,” he finally said.
He started walking toward the hallway. Bosch got up, grabbed his cane and backpack, and hobbled after him. The hallway was wide and led to an unused nursing station and then branched to the right and left. The driver took Bosch to the left into a hallway where there were four doors of what Bosch assumed were examination rooms from a time when there was a legitimate clinic operating here.
“In here,” the driver said.
He pushed open a door and held his arm out, gesturing for Bosch to go in. As Bosch stepped across the threshold, he saw that the room was furnished only with a single chair. He was suddenly and violently shoved forward and across the room. He dropped both backpack and cane so he could raise his hands and stop himself from crashing face-first into the opposite wall.
He immediately spun around.
“What the fuck was that, man?”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I told you and I told that other guy. You know what? Forget it, I’m out of here. I’ll find another doctor.”
Bosch reached down to the backpack.
“Leave it there,” the driver ordered. “You want pills, you leave it there.”
Bosch straightened up and the man came forward, put his hands on his chest, and pushed him back against the wall.
“You want pills, take your clothes off.”
“Where’s the doctor?”
“The doctor will come. Take off clothes for examine.”
“No, fuck this. I know other places to go.”
He slid the brace down off his knee so he could bend it. He reached down for the cane, knowing it would be more useful than the backpack as a weapon. But the driver quickly took a step forward and put his foot on it. He then grabbed Bosch by the collar of his denim jacket. He pulled him up and shoved him back against the wall, bouncing his head hard off the drywall.