The Wrong Side of Goodbye(80)

“I can’t keep debating it, Harry. I have to go in. You stay out of the house.”

Valdez turned and went back in through the front door. Bosch stood there for a long moment, thinking and trying to get a read on the look he had seen on Dockweiler’s face.

After a few moments he decided to move around to the back of the house to try to see what was going on in the kitchen. Valdez had instructed him to stay outside the house. He didn’t say where outside.

Bosch quickly moved down the side and into the backyard. The kitchen was at the opposite corner and the table where Dockweiler and Trevino sat facing each other was in an eating nook located in the glass sunroom. The blinds were three-quarters open and the room glowed with the interior lights. Bosch knew that the men inside would only see their own reflections in the glass and not him standing outside.

He could hear what was being said in the room because of the open window over the sink. And almost all of it was coming from Dockweiler. One of his hands had now been uncuffed so that he could use a pencil to draw a map on a large piece of paper spread on the table.

“They call this section the John Ford Forty,” he said. “I think he filmed part of one of his John Wayne epics there and it’s mostly used for westerns and horror stuff—the cabin-in-the-woods screamers they make all the time and go straight to streaming. There’s like sixteen different cabins back in there that can be used for filming.”

“So where is Bella?” Trevino pressed.

“She’s in this one here,” Dockweiler said.

He used the pencil to draw something on the map but his upper torso blocked Bosch’s view from behind him. Dockweiler then put the pencil down on the table and did some tracing on the map with his finger.

“You go in here, tell whoever’s at the gate that you need to get to the Bonney house. They’ll take you up there and that’s where you’ll find her. Everything’s breakaway in these houses. Walls, windows, floors. You know, for filming. Your girl’s in a camera trench under the flooring. It lifts up in one piece.”

“This better not be bullshit, Dockweiler,” Valdez said.

“No bullshit,” Dockweiler said. “I can lead you there if you want.”

Dockweiler gestured as if to say, Why not give me a chance? And when he did so, his elbow hit the pencil and it rolled off the table, bouncing off his thigh to the floor.

“Oops,” he said.

He leaned down and reached to the floor to retrieve the pencil, a maneuver made difficult because his left wrist was still handcuffed behind his back to one of the rungs of the chair.

Through the window behind Dockweiler, Bosch had a unique vantage point on what happened next. It seemed to unfold before him in slow motion. Dockweiler took a swipe at the fallen pencil on the floor, but couldn’t quite reach it because he was bound to the chair in which he sat. However, the momentum of the swing carried his arm up and under the table. He gripped something attached to the underside of the table, then swung his arm out and above it.

He was now pointing a semiautomatic pistol directly across the table at Trevino.

“Nobody fucking move!”

The three men facing Dockweiler froze.

Bosch slowly and quietly pulled his weapon from its holster and put a two-handed aim on Dockweiler’s back. He knew in a legal sense he was clear to shoot and it would be a righteous kill, but he didn’t have a clean shot, with Trevino sitting on the other side of the target.

Dockweiler used the barrel of his gun to point Valdez farther into the kitchen. The police chief complied, holding his hands up in front of his chest.

In front of Dockweiler the kitchen counters created a U where he corralled the three cops. He told Trevino to stand up and back into the U with Valdez and Sisto.

“Easy now,” Trevino said as he backed up. “I thought we were talking and that we were going to figure this thing out.”

“You were talking,” Dockweiler said. “And now it’s time to shut the fuck up.”

“Okay, okay, no problem.”

Dockweiler then ordered them one at a time to unholster their weapons, put them on the floor, and kick them across the floor toward him. Dockweiler rose from the chair and brought his left arm around, the chair dangling by the handcuffs. He brought his hand down on the table and ordered Sisto to come over and remove the cuffs from his wrist. Sisto complied and then moved back into the confines of the kitchen counters.

With Dockweiler now standing, Bosch had a bigger target but he still didn’t have a safe shot. He didn’t know enough about the science of ballistics to guess how much a shot through glass would deviate from aim. He just knew that if he fired multiple shots, those that followed the first should be clean.

Additionally, there was the risk that Dockweiler might be able to squeeze off a shot if the first bullet through the glass did not hit its mark.

Bosch looked down to be sure of his footing on the concrete patio and took a step closer to the glass. Dockweiler was less than eight feet away with a plate of glass of unknown thickness between them. Bosch was resigned to hold off until he had to fire.

“Where’s Bosch?” Dockweiler asked.

“He’s out front going through your truck,” Valdez said.

“I want him in here.”

“I can get him.”

Valdez made a move toward the archway, which immediately drew Dockweiler’s aim.