been asleep only about an hour. It had seemed like days.
The number had an 818 area code and he didn’t recognize it. Jerry Edgar picked up after a half ring.
“Harry?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry to bother you, man, especially since you’re not home.”
“It’s okay. What’s up?”
“I’m on Sepulveda just south of Roscoe. I got her, man.”
Bosch knew he was talking about the survivor.
“What’d she say? She look at Mora’s picture?”
“No. No, man, I don’t really have her. I’m watching her. She’s on the stroll here.”
“Well, why don’t you pick her up?”
“Because I’m alone. I think I could use some backup. I try to take her alone she might bite or something. You know, she’s got AIDS.”
Bosch was silent. Through the phone he could hear cars passing Edgar.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve called. I thought you might want to get in on this. I’ll call the Van Nuys watch commander and get a couple uniforms out here. Have a good-”
“Forget it, I’ll be there. Give me half an hour. You been out there all night?”
“Yeah. Went home for dinner. I’ve been looking all over. Didn’t see her till now.”
Bosch hung up wondering if Edgar had really missed her until now or if he was just filling his overtime envelope. He walked back into the living room. The light was on and Sylvia was not on the blanket.
She was in her bed, under the covers.
“I gotta go out,” he said.
“I thought that’s what it sounded like, so I decided to come in here. Nothing romantic about sleeping on the floor in front of a dead fireplace by yourself.”
“Are you mad?”
“Of course not, Harry.”
He leaned over the bed and kissed her and she put her hand on the back of his neck.
“I’ll try to get back.”
“Okay. Can you turn the thermostat back up on your way out? I forgot.”
Edgar was parked in front of a Winchell’s Donuts store, apparently not realizing the comic implications of this. Bosch parked behind him and then got in his car.
“Whereyat, Harry?”
“Where’s she at?”
Edgar pointed across the street and up a block and a half. At the intersection of Roscoe and Sepulveda there was a bus bench with two women sitting on it and three standing nearby.
“She’s the one in red shorts.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I drove up to the light and eyeballed her. It’s her. Problem is, we might have a cat fight if we go over there and try to take her. All them girls are working. The Sepulveda bus line stops running at one.”
Bosch saw the one in the red shorts and tank top lift her shirt as a car drove by on Sepulveda. The car braked but then, after a moment of driver hesitation, went on.
“She had any business?”
“A few hours ago she had one guy. Walked him into that alley behind the mini-mall, did him there. Other than that it’s been dry. She’s too skaggy for your discerning john.”
Edgar laughed. Bosch thought about how Edgar had just slipped up by saying he had been watching her for a few hours. Well, he thought, at least he didn’t beep me while the fire was going.
“So if you don’t want a cat fight, what’s the plan?”
“I was thinking you’d drive up to Roscoe and take a left. Then come into the alley from the back way. You wait there and get down low. I’ll walk over and tell her I want the nasty and she’ll walk me back. Then we take her. But watch her mouth. She might be a spitter, too.”
“Okay, let’s get it over with.”
Ten minutes later Bosch was slouched behind the wheel and parked in the alley, when Edgar came walking in from the street. Alone.
“What?”
“She made me.”
“Well, shit, why didn’t you just take her? If she made you there’s nothing else we can do, she’ll know I’m a cop if I try her again five minutes later.”
“All right, she didn’t make me.”
“What’s going on?”
“She wouldn’t go with me. She asked if I had some brown sugar to trade and when I said no, no drugs, she said she doesn’t do colored dick. You believe that shit? I haven’t been called colored since I grew up in Chicago.”
“Don’t worry about it. Wait here and I’ll go.”
“Goddam whore.”
Bosch got out of the car and over the roof said, “Edgar, cool it. She’s a whore and a hype, for Chrissake. You care about that?”
“Harry, you have no idea what it’s like. You see the way Rollenberger looks at me? I bet he counts the rovers every time I walk out of the room. German fuck.”
“Hey, you’re right, I don’t know what it’s like.”
He took his jacket off and threw it in the car. Then he unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt and walked off toward the street.
“Be right back. You better hide. If she sees a colored guy she might not come into the alley with me.”
They borrowed an interview room in the Van Nuys detective bureau. Bosch knew his way around the place because he had worked on the robbery table here after first getting his detective’s badge.
What became immediately clear from the start was that the man Edgar had seen Georgia Stern go into the alley with earlier was not a john. He was a dealer and she had probably fixed in the alley. She might have paid for the shot with sex, but that still didn’t make the dealer a john.
Regardless of who he was and what she did, she was on the nod when Bosch and Edgar brought her in and, therefore, was almost totally useless. Her eyes were droopy and dilated and would become fixed on objects in the distance. Even in the ten-by-ten interview room she looked as though she was staring at something a mile away.
Her hair was rumpled and the black roots were longer than in the photo Edgar had. She had a sore on the skin below her left ear, the kind of sore addicts get from nervously rubbing the same spot over and over. Her upper arms were as thin as the legs of the chair she sat on. Her deteriorated state was heightened by the T- shirt, which was several sizes too big. The neckline drooped to expose her upper chest and Bosch could see that she used the veins in her neck when she was banging heroin from a needle. Bosch could also see that despite her emaciated condition, she still had large, full breasts. Implants, he guessed, and for a moment a vision of the concrete blonde’s desiccated body flashed to him.
“Miss Stern?” Bosch began. “Georgia? Do you know why you’re here? Do you remember what I told you in the car?”
