City Of Bones

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