The Black Box

that.”

Bosch realized he had been wrong. This was the end. He brought his knees up and pressed his back against the beam. He braced himself.

He then dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. He conjured up an image of his daughter. It was from a memory of a good day. It was a Sunday and he had taken her to the empty parking lot of a nearby high school for a driving lesson. It had started rough with her foot heavy on the brake. But by the time they were finished, she was operating the car smoothly and with more skill than most drivers Bosch encountered on the real streets of L.A. He was proud of her, and more important, she was proud of herself. At the end of the lesson, when they had switched seats and Bosch was driving them home, she told him she wanted to be a cop, that she wanted to carry on his mission. It had come out of the blue, just something that had developed out of their closeness that day.

Bosch thought about that now and felt a calmness overtake him. It would be his last memory, what he took with him into the black box.

“Don’t go anywhere, Detective. I’m going to need you later.”

It was Drummond. Bosch opened his eyes and looked up. Drummond nodded and started heading back toward the door. Bosch saw him slide the gun he had given Banks under his jacket and into his back waistband. The ease with which he had put Banks down and the practiced motion of slipping the gun behind his back suddenly made things click into place for Bosch. You didn’t coldly dispatch someone like that unless you had done it before. And of the five conspirators, only one had a job in 1992 in which a throw-down gun—one without a serial number —might be useful. To Drummond, his IRG gun wasn’t a souvenir of Desert Storm. It was a working gun. That was why he brought it to L.A.

“It was you,” Bosch said.

Drummond stopped and looked back at him.

“Did you say something?”

Bosch stared at him.

“I said I know it was you. Not Cosgrove. You killed her.”

Drummond stepped back toward Bosch. His eyes roamed the dark edges of the barn and then he shrugged. He knew he held all the cards. He was talking to a dead man and dead men tell no tales.

“Well,” he said. “She was becoming a nuisance.”

He smirked and seemed delighted to share confirmation of his crime with Bosch after twenty years. Bosch worked it.

“How did you get her into the alley?” he asked.

“That was the easy part. I went right up to her and told her I knew who and what she was looking for. I said I was on the boat and I heard about it. I said I would be her source but I was scared and couldn’t talk. I told her I’d meet her at oh-five-hundred in the alley. And she was dumb enough to be there.”

He nodded as if to say done deal.

“What about her cameras?”

“Same as the gun. I threw all that stuff over the fences back there. I took the film out first, of course.”

Bosch envisioned it. A camera landing in somebody’s backyard and being kept or pawned instead of turned in to police.

“Anything else, Detective?” asked Drummond, clearly relishing his chance to flaunt his cleverness to Bosch.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “If it was you who did it, how did you keep Cosgrove and the others in line for twenty years?”

“That was easy. Carl Junior would’ve been disowned if the old man had learned of his involvement in any of this. The others just followed along and got put down if they didn’t.”

With that he turned and headed toward the door. He pushed it open but then hesitated. He looked back at Bosch with a grim smile as he reached over and turned out the overhead light.

“Get some sleep, Detective.”

He then stepped out and closed the door behind him. Bosch heard the steel slide bar strike home as Drummond locked him in.

Bosch was left in a perfect darkness. But he was alive—for now.

33

Bosch had been left in darkness before. And many of those times he was scared and knew that death was near. He also knew that if he waited, somehow he would see, that there was lost light in all places of darkness, and if he found it, it would save him.

He knew he had to try to understand what had just happened and why. He shouldn’t be alive. All his theories ended with him in a box. With Drummond putting a bullet in his head in the same callous manner he had executed Reggie Banks. Drummond was the ultimate fixer, the cleaner, and Bosch was part of the mess. It made no sense that he was spared, even temporarily. Bosch had to figure that out if he was to survive.

The first step was to free himself. He put all of the case questions aside and concentrated on escape. He brought his ankles in underneath him and pushed up, slowly rising into a standing position so that he could better assess his surroundings and possibilities.

He started with the column. It was a 6 ? 6 solid piece of timber. Hitting it with his back caused no shudder or shimmy. It only caused him pain. The beam wasn’t going anywhere, so he had to work with it as a given.

He looked up into the darkness and could just make out the shapes and forms of tie beams overhead. He knew from before the light went out that there was no way for him to reach the top, no way for him to climb up to free himself.

He looked down but his feet were obscured in the dark. He knew the floor was straw on dirt and he kicked at the bottom of the beam with his heel. It felt solidly anchored but he could not tell how.

He knew he had a choice: wait for Drummond to come back or make an effort to escape. He remembered the image he had conjured up earlier of his daughter and decided he would not go easily. He would fight with his last strength. He used his feet to sweep the straw away and then started kicking at the dirt with his heel, slowly digging down beneath the surface.

Knowing it was a last desperate effort, he kicked with ferocity, as if he were kicking back at anyone and anything that had ever held him back. His heels were damaged by the effort and screaming in pain. His wrists were pulled tight into the cuffs to the point that he could feel numbness taking his fingers. But he didn’t care. He wanted to kick at everything that had ever stopped him in life.

His effort was futile. He finally dug down to what he believed was the concrete mooring the column had been set in. The connection was solid. It wasn’t going anywhere and neither was he. He finally stopped his efforts and leaned forward, head down. He was exhausted and feeling close to defeated.

He settled into the knowledge that his only shot, his only chance, would be to make his move when Drummond came back. If Bosch could come up with a reason for Drummond to uncuff him, he would have a fighting chance. He could go for the gun or he could make a run for it. Either way, it would be his only shot.

But what did he have, what could he say to make Drummond give up his one strategic advantage? Bosch straightened up against the beam. He had to be alert. He had to be ready for all possibilities. He started reviewing what Banks had told him back in the motel room, looking for a piece of the story that Bosch could use. He needed something he could threaten Drummond with, something hidden and that only Bosch could lead him to.

He held fast to his conviction that he could not give up the email he had sent to Chu. He could not put his partner in potential danger, nor could he allow Drummond to erase the solution to the case. Banks’s confession was too important to barter with.

Bosch had no doubt that Drummond had already examined his phone, but it was password protected. The phone was set to lock after three failed attempts to enter the code. If Drummond kept trying after that he would eventually trigger a data purge. That gave Bosch high confidence in the recording safely getting to Chu without Drummond knowing. Harry decided that he must do nothing that would change that.

He needed something else now. He needed a play, a script, something that he could work with.

What?

His mind grew desperate. There had to be something. He started with the fact that Drummond had shot