“On his knees,” the Russian said.
Strong hands gripped Bosch’s shoulders simultaneously and he was pushed down to his knees. The Russian reached behind his back and produced a gun. Bosch immediately recognized it as the one taken from his backpack.
“Is this your piece-of-shit gun, Reilly?”
“Yes. They took it from me at the clinic.”
“Well, it is mine now.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“You know I am Russian, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then how about we play a Russian game and you tell me what you were doing tonight peeping in my window.”
“I told you, I wasn’t. I was taking a shit. I’m old. It takes me a long time.”
The deputy laughed but then cut it off when he was hit by a grim stare from the sheriff. The Russian opened the gun’s cylinder and dumped the six bullets into his palm. He then held one bullet up into the light and made a show of loading it into the cylinder, snapping it closed and spinning it.
“Now we play Russian roulette, yes?”
He held the gun out and pressed the barrel against Bosch’s left temple.
Bosch had confidence in the DEA’s saying they had tricked the weapon, but there was nothing like the barrel of a gun being pressed against the temple to make one contemplate fate. Bosch closed his eyes.
The Russian pulled the trigger and Bosch jerked at the sound of the metal snap. In that moment he knew the two Russians were the pharmacy killers. He opened his eyes and looked directly at the man in front of him.
“Ah, you are lucky man,” said the Russian.
He spun the gun’s cylinder again and laughed.
“We try for two now, lucky man? Why were you looking in my window tonight?”
“No, please, it wasn’t me. I don’t even know where your window is. I just got here. I even had to ask where the bathrooms were.”
This time the Russian pressed the gun’s muzzle to Bosch’s forehead. His partner spoke to him in an urgent tone. Bosch guessed that he was reminding the man with the gun of what the impact would be on pill production if Bosch was killed.
The Russian withdrew the gun without pulling the trigger. He started reloading it. When he was finished, he snapped the barrel closed and pointed to the spot where the missing grip should be.
“I will fix your gun and keep it,” he said. “I want your luck. Do you agree, Reilly?”
“Sure,” Bosch said. “Keep it.”
The Russian reached behind his back and tucked the gun into his pants.
“Thank you, Reilly,” he said. “You go back to sleep now. No more Peeping Tom shit.”
26
The Santos air fleet left the ground early Saturday after a morning distribution of pills, power bars, and burritos. Bosch was in a group on the same plane he had come in on, but this time the passenger count was higher and there were more than a few new faces, men and women, on the plane’s benches. He did see Brody, a stripe of purple bruising on the right side of his face, and the woman with the stars on her hand. They were both on the bench opposite him. Maybe it was the shaved head, which gave the false impression that she was ill from something other than addiction, but Bosch felt a sympathetic need to watch over her. At the same time, he knew never to turn his back on Brody.
This time Bosch was smart enough to muscle his way to a seat at the end of the bench near the jump door and the uncovered window. He’d now have a shot at tracking where the plane was going.
They took off in a northerly direction and stayed on that course, the plane maintaining an altitude of only a few thousand feet. Looking over his shoulder and down through the glass, he could see the Salton Sea below. And then he saw the bright colors painted on the man-made monument known as Salvation Mountain. From high above he saw the warning: JESUS IS THE WAY.
Next it was Joshua Tree National Park and then the Mojave, the land below beautiful in its untouched starkness.
They were in the air almost two hours before the plane landed hard on a strip used by crop dusters. As it made its final descent, Bosch had seen a wind farm in the distance set against hills dotted with cattle, and he knew where they were. In the Central Valley, near Modesto, where Bosch had worked a case a few years before and had seen a helicopter hit one of the windmills and go down.
There were two vans waiting, and the group was split up seven and seven. Bosch was separated from both Brody and the woman with the stars. His van had two men from the organization in the front seats, a driver and a handler, both with Russian accents. They stopped first in Tulare, where they started working a series of mom-and-pop pharmacies for pills. At each stop, the handler gave each of the shills, including Bosch, a new ID — driver’s license and Medicare card — as well as a prescription and cash for the co-pay. The ID cards were crudely manufactured fakes that any bouncer in his first week on the job would’ve alerted to in any club in L.A. But that didn’t matter. The pharmacists — like José Esquivel Sr. — were part of the game, profiting from the seemingly legitimate fulfillment of seemingly valid prescriptions. The ripple effects of the Santos corruption went on endlessly from there to the halls of government and industry.
Despite there seemingly being no need for him to pose as an injured man, Bosch kept up the pretense of wearing the knee brace and carrying the cane. He did it because he did not want to be separated from the cane, his only weapon.
At each stop, the group spent close to an hour, the handler usually breaking the shills into singles and couples at each pharmacy so that seven bedraggled addicts standing in line together would not cause concern among the legitimate customers in the store. From Tulare they moved up into Modesto and then Fresno, a steady supply of amber vials of pills going into the handler’s backpack.
The plane had moved and was waiting at another unrestricted airstrip outside a pecan farm in Fresno. The other van was already there, and when Bosch climbed on board, the spots on the benches in front of the windows were already taken. He did get a seat next to the woman with the stars. As previously instructed, he said nothing to her.
Before the plane took off, Bosch saw the capper from his van hand his backpack through the cockpit window to the pilot. The pilot actually signed some sort of receipt or accounting statement on a clipboard and handed it to the capper. The plane then rumbled down the unpaved strip and took off to the south. They stayed on course without banking or taking any antisurveillance measures.
Bosch kept his counsel for a half hour before finally leaning toward the woman next to him and speaking in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the engine noise.
“You were right,” he said. “He came last night. I was ready.”
“I can tell,” she said, referring to the bruise running the length of Brody’s face.
“Thank you.”
“Forget it.”
“How long have you been trapped in this?”
She turned her body on the bench to literally give him the cold shoulder. Then, as if thinking better of it, she turned her head back to him and spoke.
“Just leave me alone.”
“I thought maybe we could help each other out, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about? You just got here. You’re not a woman, you don’t know what it’s like.”
Bosch flashed on the image of the woman lying discarded on the couch while the Russians gambled for the pills that were the source of all this degradation and disaster.
“I know,” he said. “But I’ve seen enough to know this is like being a slave.”
She didn’t respond and kept her shoulder turned to Bosch.
“When I make a move, I’ll let you know,” he tried.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re just going to get yourself killed. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to be saved, okay? Like I said from the beginning, leave me alone.”