The Black Echo

He’s looking down into the water.”
    “Crisis of conscience time. Maybe he’ll jump and we can forget this whole damned thing.”
    Clarke giggled at his feeble joke. Lewis didn’t.
    “Yeah, right. I’m sure that’s going to happen.”
    “Give me the glasses and go call in. See what Irving wants to do.”
    Lewis handed over the binoculars and got out. First, he went to the trunk, opened it and got out the Nikon. He attached a long lens and then took it around to the driver’s window and handed it to Clarke.
    “Get a picture of him out there, so we’ll have something to show Irving.”
    Then Lewis trotted over to the restaurant to find a phone. He was back in less than three minutes. Bosch was still leaning on the rail at the end of the pier.
    “Chief says under no circumstances are we to break off the tail,” Lewis said. “He also said our reports sucked ass. He wants more detail, and more pictures. Did you get him?”
    Clarke was too busy watching through the camera to answer. Lewis picked up the binoculars and looked. Bosch remained unmoving. Lewis couldn’t figure it. What is he doing? Thinking? Why come all the way out here to think?
    “Fucking Irving, that figures,” Clarke suddenly said, dropping the camera into his lap to look at his partner. “And yeah, I got a few pictures of him. Enough to make Irving happy. But he’s not doing anything. Just leaning there.”
    “Not anymore,” Lewis said, still looking through the binoculars. “Start her up. It’s showtime.”

    ***

    Bosch walked off the pier after dropping the crumpled hypnotism memo into the water. Like a flower cast on a spoiled sea, it held its own on the surface for a few brief moments and then sank out of sight. His resolve to find Meadows’s killer was now stronger: now he sought justice for Sharkey as well. As he made his way on the old planking of the pier he saw the Plymouth that had been following him pull out of the restaurant lot. It’s them, he thought. But no matter. He didn’t care what they had seen, or thought they had seen. There were new rules now, and Bosch had plans for Lewis and Clarke.
    He drove east on the 10 into downtown. He never bothered to check his mirror for the black car because he knew it would be there. He wanted it to be there.
    When he got to Los Angeles Street, he parked in a no-parking zone in front of the U.S. Administration Building. On the third floor Bosch walked through one of the crowded waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The place smelled like a jail-sweat, fear and desperation. A bored woman was sitting behind a sliding glass window working on the
Times
crossword. The window was closed. On the sill was a plastic paper-ticket dispenser like they use at a meat-market counter. After a few moments she looked up at Bosch. He was holding his badge up.
    “Do you know a six-letter word for a man of constant sorrow and loneliness?” she asked after sliding the window open and then checking her nail for damage.
    “Bosch.”
    “What?”
    “Detective Harry Bosch. Buzz me in. I want to see Hector V.”
    “Have to check first,” she said in a pouty way. She whispered something into the phone, then reached to Bosch’s badge case and put her finger on the name on the ID card. Then she hung up.
    “He says go on back.” She buzzed the lock on the door next to the window. “He says you know the way.”
    Bosch shook Hector Villabona’s hand in a cramped squad room much smaller than Bosch’s own.
    “I need a favor. I need some computer time.”
    “Let’s do it.”
    That’s what Bosch liked about Hector V. He never asked what or why before deciding. He was a let’s-do-it type of guy. He didn’t play bullshit games that Bosch had come to believe everybody in his profession played. Hector rolled his chair over to an IBM on a desk against the wall and entered his password. “You want to run names, right? How many?”
    Bosch wasn’t going to bullshit him, either. He showed him the list of thirty-four names. Hector whistled lowly and said, “Okay, we’ll run them through, but these are Vietnamese. If their cases were not worked out of this office their files won’t be here. I’ll only have what’s on the computer. Dates of entry, documentation, citizenship, whatever is on the computer. You know how it is, Harry.”
    Bosch did. But he also knew that Southern California was where most of the Vietnamese refugees made their homes after making the trip. Hector