Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(53)

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me. You’re the one who got Perez killed. Don’t look at me now.”

“No, man, it was you. You told Mejia. And the thing is, he’s going to give you up in a heartbeat as soon as they offer him a deal.”

Luzon stared at Bosch as he realized that Mejia wasn’t talking—yet—and that he had fallen for the oldest cop bluff in the book. He turned to Lourdes as if for help. Bosch was an outsider in the department, but Lourdes was not. He looked to her but the cold set of her eyes showed he would get no sympathy from her.

“I want a lawyer,” he said.

“You can call one as soon as you’re booked,” Bosch said.

He came around the desk as Lourdes pulled her handcuffs off her belt. He put his hand on Luzon’s shoulder and directed him toward the hallway where Lourdes was waiting. He walked him through.

“Hands behind your back,” he said. “You know the drill.”

Bosch gripped Luzon by the elbow and turned him to face away from Lourdes. At that moment, Luzon brought his hands up and shoved Bosch into the cell’s bars. He then rushed into the cell and with both hands slid the door shut with a heavy metal clang. He quickly pulled the chain and padlock through the bars into the cell and locked the door.

“Oscar, what are you doing?” Lourdes said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Bosch had lost his balance against the bars. He righted himself and reached into his pocket for his key ring. It had the padlock key on it.

But the key ring wasn’t there and he looked through the bars and could see it on his desk. He looked at Luzon, who was pacing in the cell, a man looking for options where there weren’t any.

“Oscar, come on, settle down,” Lourdes said. “Come out of there.”

“The key’s on the desk, Oscar,” Bosch said. “Unlock the door.”

Luzon acted like he didn’t hear them. He paced back and forth a few times and then abruptly sat down on the end of the bench that ran almost the length of the cell. He bent over, put his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands.

Bosch leaned over to Lourdes and cupped his hands around her ear.

“Go out into the yard and get a bolt cutter,” he whispered.

Lourdes immediately headed down the corridor in front of the cells to the door that led to the Public Works yard. That left Bosch looking through the bars at Luzon.

“Oscar, come on,” he said. “Open the door. We can work this out.”

Luzon was silent, face in his hands.

“Oscar?” Bosch said. “Talk to me. You want me to get the chief in here? I know you two go way back. You want to talk to him?”

Nothing, and then without a word Luzon dropped his hands and stood up. He reached up to his neck and started to pull off his tie. He then climbed up onto the bench and reached up to the cell’s ceiling, where there was a metal grate over an air vent. He pushed the skinny end of his tie up into the grate and worked it back out of the next opening.

“Oscar, come on, don’t do this,” Bosch said. “Oscar!”

Luzon knotted the two ends of the tie together and then twisted the loop into a figure eight. He stood on his toes to get his head through the makeshift noose and then without hesitation stepped off the end of the bench.





24



Bosch and Lourdes waited in the hallway. Only the chief of police and family members were allowed back into the critical care unit. For the most part they sat quietly and drank coffee from paper cups out of a machine. After two hours Chief Valdez emerged with the news.

“They say he only went a couple minutes without oxygen to the brain, so he should be all right,” he said. “It’s a waiting game on that. The bigger concern is the skull fracture from when he hit the ground when the grate gave way.”

Bosch had witnessed and heard the impact when Luzon’s swinging body brought the iron grate down and the back of his head hit the end of the bench. Like a high diver hitting the board after a flip.

“Is he conscious?” Lourdes asked.

“He was but then they went into surgery,” Valdez said. “They say he’s got a subdural hematoma and they had to evacuate it, which means they drilled a fucking hole in his skull to let the blood and pressure out.”

“Shit,” Lourdes said.

“Anyway, I want a full report on what happened in that cell and everything that led up to it,” Valdez said. “How did it go so far sideways, Harry?”

Bosch tried to compose an answer.

“He took me by surprise,” he finally said. “He must have known that that was the way some drunks did it back in the day.”

“Everybody knows that,” Valdez said. “You should have been prepared for it.”

Bosch nodded. He knew Valdez was right.

“It’s on me,” Bosch said. “But are we going to charge him? I have the whole thing on my phone. He tipped Mejia. He put it in terms of a mistake, but he’s responsible.”

“I’m not worried about that right now,” Valdez said. “We’ll look at that later.”

Bosch could see that the chief was having trouble concealing his anger about the whole thing.

“Bella, why don’t you go back to the station and start in on the paper,” Valdez said.