“Harry, I’m not going to get that shit on my car.”
“Come on, your car has to look like it needs to be washed or it might be a tell. You said yourself, the guy’s a rabbit. Let’s not give him a reason.”
“But we’re not actually going to get the car washed. I splash that shit on there, it stays there.”
“Tell you what, Jerry. If we get this guy, I’ll have Eyman and Leiby drive him in while you get your car washed. I’ll even pay for it.”
“Shit.”
“Come on, just drive through the puddle. We’re wasting time.”
After messing up Edgar’s car they made the drive to the car wash in silence. As they came up on it, Bosch could see the vice car parked at the curb a few car lengths from the car wash entrance. Further down the block past the car wash, the patrol unit was stopped in a lane of parked cars. Bosch went to his rover.
“Okay, everybody set?”
He got two return clicks on the mike from the vice guys. Brasher responded by voice.
“All ready.”
“Okay. We’re going in.”
Edgar pulled into the car wash and drove into the service lane, where customers delivered their cars to the vacuum station and ordered the kind of wash or wax they wanted. Bosch’s eyes immediately started moving among the workers, all of whom were dressed in identical orange jumpsuits and baseball caps. It slowed the identification process but Bosch soon saw the blue wax canopy and picked out Johnny Stokes.
“He’s there,” he said to Edgar. “On the black Beemer.”
Bosch knew that once they stepped out of the car most of the cons on the lot would be able to identify them as cops. In the same way Bosch could spot a con ninety-eight percent of the time, they in turn could spot a cop. He would have to move swiftly in on Stokes.
He looked over at Edgar.
“Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
They cracked the doors at the same time. Bosch got out and turned toward Stokes, who was twenty-five yards away with his back turned. He was crouched down and spraying something on the wheels of a black BMW. Bosch heard Edgar tell someone to skip the vacuum and that he’d be right back.
Bosch and Edgar had covered half the distance to their target when they were made by other workers on the lot. From somewhere behind him, Bosch heard a voice call out, “Five-oh, five-oh, five-oh.”
Immediately alerted, Stokes stood up and started turning. Bosch started running.
He was fifteen feet from Stokes when the ex-con realized he was the target. His obvious escape was to his left and then out through the car wash entrance but the BMW was blocking him. He made a move to his right but then seemed to stop when he realized it was a dead end.
“No, no!” Bosch called out. “We just want to talk, we just want to talk.”
Stokes visibly slumped. Bosch moved directly toward him while Edgar moved out to the right in case the ex-con decided to make a break.
Bosch slowed and opened his hands wide as he got close. One hand held his rover.
“LAPD. We just want to ask you a few questions, nothing else.”
“Man, about what?”
“About-”
Stokes suddenly raised his arm and sprayed Bosch in the face with the tire cleaner. He then bolted to his right, seemingly toward the dead end, where the high rear wall of the car wash joined the side wall of a three-story apartment building.
Bosch instinctively brought his hands up to his eyes. He heard Edgar yell at Stokes and then the scuffling sound of his shoes on concrete as he gave chase. Bosch couldn’t open his eyes. He put his mouth to the radio and yelled, “Red! Red! Red! He’s heading toward the back corner.”
He then dropped the radio to the concrete, using his shoe to break its fall. He used the sleeves of his jacket to wipe at his burning eyes. He finally could open them for brief moments at a time. He spotted a hose coiled on a faucet near the rear of the BMW. He made his way to it, turned it on and doused his face and eyes, not caring how wet his clothes got. His eyes felt like they had been dropped in boiling water.
After a few moments the water eased the burning sensation and he dropped the hose without turning it off and went back to get the radio. His vision was blurred at the edges but he could see well enough to get moving. As he bent down for the radio he heard laughter from some of the other men in orange jumpsuits.
Bosch ignored it. He switched the rover to the Hollywood patrol channel and spoke into it.
“Hollywood units, officers in pursuit of assault suspect, La Brea and Santa Monica. Suspect white male, thirty- five YOA, dark hair, orange jumpsuit. Suspect in the vicinity of Hollywood Washateria.”
He couldn’t remember the exact address of the car wash but wasn’t worried. Every cop on patrol would know it. He switched the rover to the department’s main communication channel and requested that a paramedic unit respond as well to treat an injured officer. He had no idea what had been sprayed into his eyes. They were beginning to feel better but he didn’t want to take a chance on long-term injury.
Lastly, he switched back to the tactical channel and asked for the others’ locations. Only Edgar came back up on the radio.
“There was a hole in the back corner. He went through to the alley. He’s in one of these apartment complexes on the north side of the car wash.”
“Where are the others?”
Edgar’s return was broken up. He was moving into a radio void.
“They’re back… spread out. I think… garage. You… ight, Harry?”
“I’ll make it. Backup’s on the way.”
He didn’t know if Edgar had heard that. He put the rover in his pocket and hustled to the back corner of the car wash lot, where he found the hole Stokes had slipped through. Behind a two-high pallet of fifty-five-gallon drums of liquid soap, the concrete wall was broken in. It appeared that at one time a car in the alley on the other side had struck the wall, creating the hole. Intentionally done or not, it was probably a well-known escape hatch for every wanted man who worked at the car wash.
Bosch crouched down and slipped through, momentarily catching his jacket on a rusty piece of rebar protruding from the broken wall. On the other side he got up in an alley that ran behind rows of apartment buildings on either side for the length of the block.
The patrol car was stopped at an angle forty yards down the alley. It was empty, both doors open. Bosch could hear the sound of the main communications channel playing over the dash radio. Further down, at the end of the block, the vice car was parked across the alley.
He quickly moved down the alley toward the patrol car, looking and listening for anything. When he got to the car he pulled the rover out again and tried to raise someone on tactical. He got no response.
He saw the patrol car was parked in front of a ramp that dipped down into an underground garage beneath the largest of the apartment complexes on the alley. Remembering auto theft was in Edgar’s recitation of Stokes’s criminal record, Bosch suddenly knew that Stokes would go for the garage. His only way out was to get a car.
He trotted down the garage ramp into the dark.
The garage was huge and appeared to follow the imprint of the building above. There were three parking lanes and a ramp leading to an even lower level. Bosch saw no one. The only sound he heard was a dripping from the overhead pipes. He moved swiftly down the middle lane, drawing his weapon for the first time. Stokes had already fashioned a weapon out of a spray bottle. There was no telling what he might find in the garage to also use as a weapon.
As he moved, Bosch checked the few vehicles in the garage-everyone was at work, he guessed-for signs of break-in. He saw nothing. He was raising the rover to his mouth when he heard the sound of running footsteps echo up the ramp from the lower level of the garage. He quickly moved to the ramp and descended, careful to keep the rubber soles of his shoes as quiet as he could.
The lower garage was even darker, with less natural light finding its way down. As the incline leveled, his eyes adjusted. He saw no one, but the ramp structure blocked his view of half of the space. As he began his way around the ramp he suddenly heard a high and taut voice coming from the far end. It was Brasher’s.
