Echo Park

around the bend.
    Bosch leaned closer and realized he could hear a sound from the tunnel. It was a low whimpering. It was a terrible sound but it was beautiful just the same. It meant that no matter what horrors she had experienced through the night, the woman Waits had abducted was still alive.
    Bosch reached back over to the workbench and picked up the shiniest flashlight he saw. He turned it on. It was dead. He tried another and got a weak beam of light. It would have to do.
    He flashed the beam into the tunnel and confirmed that the first leg was clear. He took a step toward the tunnel.
    “Harry, wait!”
    He turned and saw Rachel in the doorway.
    “Backup’s on the way!” she whispered.
    Bosch shook his head.
    “She’s in there. She’s alive.”
    He turned back to the tunnel and flashed the light in once more. It was still clear up to the turn. He turned the light off to conserve it. He glanced back at Rachel and then stepped into the darkness.

29

    BOSCH HESITATED A MOMENT in the mouth of the tunnel to let his eyes adjust. He then started moving. He didn’t have to crawl. The tunnel was large enough for him to move through in a crouch. Flashlight in his right hand and gun up in his left, he kept his eyes on the dim light ahead. The sound of the woman crying grew louder as he moved forward.
    Ten feet into the tunnel the musty smell that he had noticed outside turned into the deeper stench of decay. As rancid as it was, it was not something new to him. Almost forty years before, he had been a tunnel rat with the U.S. Army, taking part in more than a hundred missions in the tunnels of Vietnam. The enemy sometimes buried their dead in the clay walls of their tunnels. That hid them from sight but the odor of decay was impossible to hide. Once it got into your nose it was equally impossible to forget.
    Bosch knew that he was headed toward something horrific, that the missing victims of Raynard Waits were ahead somewhere in the tunnel. This had been the destination on the night Waits was pulled over in his work van. But Bosch couldn’t help but think that maybe it was his own destination as well. He had come many years and many miles but it seemed to him that he had never really left the tunnels behind, that his life had always been a slow movement through darkness and tight spaces on the way to a flickering light. He knew he was then, now, and forever a tunnel rat.
    His thigh muscles burned from the strain of moving in a crouched position. Sweat began to sting his eyes. And as he got closer to the turn in the tunnel Bosch saw the light changing and rechanging and knew that this was caused by the undulation of a flame. Candlelight.
    Five feet from the turn Bosch slowed to a stop and rested on his heels as he listened. Behind him, he thought he could hear sirens. Backup on the way. He tried to concentrate on what could be heard from the tunnel ahead but there was only the intermittent sound of the woman crying.
    He raised himself up and started forward again. Almost immediately the light ahead went out and the whimpering took on a new energy and urgency.
    Bosch froze. He then heard nervous laughter from ahead, followed by the familiar voice of Raynard Waits.
    “Is that you, Detective Bosch? Welcome to my foxhole.”
    There was more laughter and then it stopped. Bosch let ten seconds go by. Waits said nothing else.
    “Waits? Let her go. Send her out to me.”
    “No, Bosch. She’s with me now. Anybody comes in here, I’ll kill her on the spot. I’ll save the last bullet for myself.”
    “Waits, no. Listen. Just let her come out and I will come in. We’ll trade.”
    “No, Bosch. I like the situation the way it is.”
    “Then what are we doing? We need to talk and you need to save yourself. There’s not a lot of time. Send the girl out.”
    A few seconds went by and then the voice came out of the darkness.
    “Save myself from what? For what?”
    Bosch’s muscles were on the verge of cramping. He carefully lowered himself to a seated position against the right side of the tunnel. He was sure that the candlelight had been coming ahead from the left. The tunnel turned to the left. He kept his gun up but was now employing a cross-wrists bracing with the flashlight up and ready as well.
    “There’s no way out,” he said. “Give it up and come out. Your deal is still in play. You don’t have to die. Neither does the girl.”
    “I don’t care about dying, Bosch. That’s why I’m here. Because I