Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(41)

“There’s that, too.”

“So we stay?”

“I’m staying. If you’ve got stuff to do, you can walk down the street and call an Uber. I’ll let you know if he makes a move.”

“No, I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“Not a big deal. This is a long shot anyway.”

“Not what partners do.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “But one of us might have to Uber over to Route 66 to pick up dinner. Haven’t eaten all day.”

“Not a problem,” Lourdes said. “If you like that stuff.”

Bosch didn’t take the bait. They’d had good-natured disputes about surveillance food in the past.

They were parked a half block from the doctor’s house in the driveway of a home that was empty while under full renovation. Bosch had positioned his old Jeep Cherokee in front of a flatbed used for towing construction materials, and the old beater fit in. The windows were smoked, and as long as they didn’t light themselves with phone screens, they would go unnoticed by the doctor or others in the neighborhood.

“Do you remember the music group Seals and Crofts?” Lourdes asked.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Seventies, right? They were big.”

“Before my time but I heard this is where they lived. The Estates.”

“Hmm.”

The small talk continued for almost two hours, until the discussion of food came up again in earnest. Lourdes wasn’t interested in Bosch’s hamburger-and-hot-dog joint and Bosch had long ago OD’d on all the Mexican restaurants in town. They were about to flip for it, when a car came down the street and killed its lights as it pulled into the driveway of the Henriquez house. It was full dark now but Bosch had identified the make of the car as it drove by the construction site. It was a white Chrysler 300.

“This is it,” Bosch said.

No one got out of the car. It sat and idled, exhaust puffing from its twin pipes.

None of the house’s exterior lights came on when a figure emerged from the side and got into the Chrysler.

“Is that the doctor?” Lourdes asked.

“Can’t tell, but I’m betting it is,” Bosch said.

The car took off from the Henriquez house and passed in front of Bosch’s Jeep without slowing down. Bosch waited until it had turned a corner and then he pulled out.

The trick was following the Chrysler out of the residential neighborhood without being made. Once the surveillance was in the commercial district, it was easier to use other cars on the road as camouflage. Bosch and Lourdes followed it to San Fernando Road and then north into the Sylmar region of Los Angeles. At Roxford the Chrysler turned right and entered a neighborhood of middle-class ranch homes on quarter-acre properties.

Just past Herrick Street the Chrysler turned right into a driveway and parked. Bosch drove on by. Lourdes reported what she saw.

“Several men,” she said. “They met the car and hurried him inside.”

“Must’ve taken a turn for the worse,” Bosch said.

“So, what do we do?”

“For now we wait.”

“For what? This is L.A. We should call in LAPD SWAT and scoop them all up.”

“We will. But let’s wait till they get the doctor out of there. Now that we can prove he does work for the SanFers, I think your cousin might want to flip him and keep him on the hook the rest of his days.”

Lourdes nodded. It was a good plan. Henriquez would more than likely be willing to trade information with the gang intel unit in exchange for avoiding the humiliation of being exposed as a gang doctor.

“Except we still don’t know who snitched off Perez,” Lourdes said. “That could make things very dangerous for the doctor if he turns informant too.”

Bosch nodded.

“That we need to keep working on,” he said. “But once we know who the shooter is, that might become clearer.”





19



When Bosch entered his house, he was met with Elizabeth’s suitcase sitting on the floor just inside the front door. It was actually his suitcase but he had brought it to her on the last day of rehab so she could pack her meager belongings. There had still been room in it for items they would shop for.

Through the back sliders he saw her on the deck on one of the lounges. He watched her for a moment, thinking she had not heard him come in. She was not reading or listening to music. She was not looking at her phone. She was simply staring into the pass, the never-ending movement of vehicles down on the freeway, like blood through the veins of the city. It was an aspect of the view that was always changing but always the same. In recent years, the only addition was the fireworks shot on special occasions from the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios.

He crossed the living room, slid open one of the doors, and stepped out.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” she said.

She smiled. He crossed the deck to the railing and leaned his back to it so he could look at her.

“You’re limping,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Guess I gotta go see Dr. Zhang.”

The previous year Bosch had met Elizabeth while he briefly worked undercover on a case. He’d adopted a cane and a limp as a part of a pose as an opioid addict scamming shady pharmacies for prescriptions. The irony was that during a struggle with a murder suspect on a plane, he had strained a ligament in his already arthritic knee, and now he made monthly visits to Dr. Zhang, an acupuncturist he had met many years earlier on a case.