The Black Box

He gave me the gun to do the job and I gave it back after.”
    Bosch nodded. He had gotten what he’d come for.
    “One thing, though,” Coleman said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Tru Story’s dead, man. Least that’s what I heard up here.”
    Bosch had prepared himself on the way up. In the past two decades, the gang body count in South L.A. was in the thousands. He knew that there was a better-than-good chance he was looking for a dead man. But he also knew that the trail didn’t necessarily stop with Tru Story.
    “You still going to send in that letter?” Coleman asked.
    Bosch stood up. He was done. The brutish man in front of him was a stone-cold killer and was in the place he deserved to be. But Bosch had made a deal with him.
    “You’ve probably thought about it a million times,” he said. “What do you do after you get out and hug your daughter?”
    Coleman answered without missing a beat.
    “I find a corner.”
    He waited, knowing Bosch would jump to the wrong conclusion.
    “And I start to preach. I tell everybody what I’ve learned. What I know. Society won’t have no problem with me. I’ll be a soldier still. But I’ll be a soldier for Christ.”
    Bosch nodded. He knew that many who left here had the same plan. To go with God. Few of them made it. It was a system that relied on repeat customers. In his gut he knew Coleman was probably one of them.
    “Then I’ll send the letter,” he said.

3
    I n the morning, Bosch went to the South Bureau on Broadway to meet with Detective Jordy Gant in the Gang Enforcement Detail. Gant was at his desk and on a phone call when Bosch arrived but it didn’t sound important and he quickly got off.
    “How’d it go up there with Rufus?” he said.
    He smiled as a way of showing understanding if Bosch said, as expected, that the trip to San Quentin was a bust.
    “Well, he gave me a name but he also told me the guy was dead, so the whole thing could have been him playing me while I was playing him.”
    “What’s the name?”
    “Trumont Story. Heard of him?”
    Gant just nodded and turned to a short stack of files on the side of his desk. Next to it was a small black box labeled “Rolling 60s—1991–1994.” Bosch recognized it as a box that was used in the old days for holding field interview cards. That was before the department started using computers to store intelligence data.
    “Imagine that,” Gant said. “And I just happen to have Tru Story’s file right here.”
    “Yeah, imagine that,” Bosch said, taking the file.
    He opened it directly to an 8 × 10 shot of a man lying dead on a sidewalk. There was a contact entry wound on his left temple. His right eye had been replaced with a large exit wound. A small amount of blood had oozed onto the concrete and coagulated by the time the photo had been shot.
    “Nice,” Bosch said. “Looks like he let somebody get a little too close. This still an open case?”
    “That’s right.”
    Harry flipped past the photo and checked the date on the incident report. Trumont Story had been dead almost three years. He closed the file and looked at Gant sitting smugly in his desk chair.
    “Tru Story’s been dead since ’oh-nine and you just happen to have his file on your desk?”
    “Nope, I pulled it for you. Pulled two others as well and thought you might even want to look at our shake cards from back in ’ninety-two. Never know, a name in there might mean something to you.”
    “Maybe so. Why’d you pull the files?”
    “Well, after we talked about your case and the ATF matches to the other two—you know, three cases, one gun, three different shooters—I started to—”
    “Actually, it’s a long shot, but it could be just two shooters. The same guy who kills my victim in ’ninety-two comes back around and hits Vaughn in ’oh-three.”
    Gant shook his head.
    “Could be but I’m thinking no. Too long a shot. So I wasthinking for the sake of argument, three victims, three different shooters, one gun. So I went through our Rolling Sixties cases. That is, cases they were involved in on either side of the violence. As killers or the killed. I pulled cases that might be related to this gun and I got three where there were gunshot killings in which no ballistics evidence was recovered. Two were hits on Seven-Treys, and one—you guessed it—was Tru Story.”
    Bosch was still standing. Now he pulled up a chair and sat down.
    “Can I take a quick look at the other two?”
    Gant handed the files