The Last Coyote

Pounds was doing.
    Because of the approach the man he thought was Pounds had made at the party, Mittel had probably concluded he was being set upon by a chiseler, an extortionist. And he knew how to eliminate the problem. Like Johnny Fox had been eliminated.
    That was the reason Pounds had been tortured, Bosch knew. For Mittel to make sure the problem went no further than Pounds, he had to know who else knew what Pounds knew. The problem was that Pounds didn’t know anything himself. He had nothing to give. He was tormented until his heart could take it no longer.
    A question that remained unanswered in Bosch’s mind was what Arno Conklin knew of all this. He had not yet been contacted by Bosch. Did he know of the man who approached Mittel? Did he order the hit on Pounds or was it solely Mittel’s reaction?
    Then Bosch saw a bump in his theory that needed refining. Mittel had come face to face with him posing as Harvey Pounds at the fund-raiser. The fact that Pounds was tortured before he died indicated that Mittel was not present at the time, or he would have seen that they were brutalizing the wrong man. Bosch wondered now if they understood that they had, in fact, killed the wrong man, and if they would be looking for the right one.
    He mulled over the point that Mittel could not have been there and decided that it fit. Mittel was not the type to get involved in the blood work. He’d have no problem calling the shots, he just wouldn’t want to see them fired. Bosch realized the surfer in a suit had also seen him at the party and, therefore, could not have been directly involved in the killing of Harvey Pounds, either. That left the man Bosch had seen through the French doors at the house. The man with the wide body and thick neck whom he had seen Mittel show the newspaper clip to. The man who had slipped and fallen while coming down the driveway for Bosch.
    Bosch realized that he didn’t know how close he had come to being where Pounds was now. He reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and started to light one.
    “Do you mind not smoking?” Toliver asked, his first words of the thirty-minute journey.
    “Yeah, I do mind.”
    Bosch finished lighting the smoke and put his Bic away. He lowered the window.
    “There. You happy? The exhaust fumes are worse than the smoke.”
    “It’s a nonsmoking vehicle.”
    Toliver tapped his finger on a plastic magnet that was on the dashboard ashtray cover. It was one of the little doodads that were distributed when the city passed a widespread antismoking law that forbade the practice in all city buildings and allowed for half of the department’s fleet to be declared nonsmoking vehicles. The magnet showed a cigarette in the middle of a red circle with a slash through it. Beneath the circle it said THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. Bosch reached over, peeled the magnet off and threw it out the open window. He saw it bounce once on the pavement and stick on the door of a car one lane over.
    “Now it’s not. Now it’s a smoking car.”
    “Bosch, you’re really fucked, you know that?”
    “Write me up, kid. Add it to the association beef your boss is working on. I don’t care.”
    They were silent for a few moments and the car crept further away from Hollywood.
    “He’s bluffing you, Bosch. I thought you knew that.”
    “How so?”
    He was surprised that Toliver was turning.
    “He’s just bluffing, that’s all. He’s still hot about what you did with that table. But he knows it won’t stick. It’s an old case. Voluntary manslaughter. A domestic violence case. She walked on five years probation. All you have to do is say you didn’t know and it gets shitcanned.”
    Bosch could almost guess what the case was about. She had practically told him during true confessions. She stayed too long with someone. That was what she had said. He thought of the painting he had seen in her studio. The gray portrait with the highlights red like blood. He tried to pull his mind away from it.
    “Why’re you telling me this, Toliver? Why are you going against your own?”
    “Because they’re not my own. Because I want to know what you meant by what you said to me in the hallway.”
    Bosch couldn’t even remember what he said.
    “You told me it wasn’t too late. Too late for what?”
    “Too late to get out,” Bosch said, recalling the words he had thrown as a taunt. “You’re still a young guy. You better get yourself out of IAD before it’s too late. You stay