The Last Coyote

coffee and a box of doughnuts in the convenience store next door and then returned to the Mustang to wait in the day’s growing heat. It wasn’t even May yet. He couldn’t imagine what a summer must be like here.
    Bored with watching the post office door after an hour, Bosch turned on the radio and found it tuned to a channel featuring a southern evangelical ranter. It took several seconds before Harry realized that the speaker’s subject was the Los Angeles earthquake. He decided not to change the station.
    “And ah ask, is it a coincidence that this cata-clysmic calamity was centered in the very heart of the ind’stry that poe-loots this entarh nation with the smut of pone-ography? I think not! I believe the Lahd struck a mighty blow to the infidels engaged in this vile and mul-tie-billyon-dollah trade when he cracked the uth asundah. It is a sign, mah frens, a sign of things that ah to come. A sign that all is not right in-”
    Bosch turned it off. A woman had just come out of the post office holding a red envelope among other pieces of mail. Bosch watched her cross the parking lot to a silver Lincoln Town Car. Bosch instinctively jotted the plate number down, though he had no law enforcement contact in this part of the state who would run it for him. The woman was in her mid-sixties, Bosch guessed. He had been waiting for a man, but her age made her fit. He started the Mustang and waited for her to pull out.
    She drove north on the main highway toward Sarasota. Traffic moved slowly. After about fifteen minutes and maybe two miles, the Town Car took a left on Vamo Road and then almost immediately took a right on a private road camouflaged by tall trees and green growth. Bosch was only ten seconds behind her. As he came up to the drive, he slowed but didn’t turn in. He saw a sign set back in the trees.

    Welcome To
    PELICAN COVE
    Condominium Homes, Dockage

    The Town Car passed by a guard shack with a red-and-white-striped gate arm coming down behind it.
    “Shit!”
    Bosch hadn’t anticipated anything like a gated community. He assumed that such things were rare outside of Los Angeles. He looked at the sign again, then turned around and headed out to the main road. He remembered seeing another shopping plaza right before he had turned on to Vamo.
    There were eight homes in Pelican Cove listed in the For Sale section of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but only three were for sale by owner. Bosch went to a pay phone in the plaza and called the first one. He got a tape. On the second call the woman who answered said her husband was golfing for the day and she felt uncomfortable showing the property without him. On the third call, the woman who answered invited Bosch to come over right away and even said she’d have fresh lemonade prepared when he got there.
    Bosch felt a momentary pang of guilt about taking advantage of a stranger who was just trying to sell her home. But it passed quickly as he considered that the woman would never know she had been used in such a way, and he had no other alternative for getting to McKittrick.
    After he was cleared at the gate and got directions to the lemonade lady’s unit, Bosch drove through the densely wooded complex, looking for the silver Town Car. It didn’t take him long to see that the complex was mostly a retirement community. He passed several elderly people in cars or on walks, almost all of them with white hair and skin browned by the sun. He quickly found the Town Car, checked his location against the map given to him at the guard shack and was about to make a cursory visit to the lemonade lady to avoid suspicion. But then he saw another silver Town Car. It was a popular car with the older set, he guessed. He took out his notebook and checked the plate number he had written down. Neither car had been the one he had followed earlier.
    He drove on and finally found the right Town Car in a secluded spot in the far reaches of the complex. It was parked in front of a two-story building of dark wood siding surrounded by oak and paper trees. It looked to Bosch as if there were six units in the building. Easy enough, he thought. He consulted the map and got back on course to the lemonade lady. She was on the second floor of a building on the other side of the complex.
    “You’re young,” she said when she answered the door.
    Bosch wanted to say the same thing back to her but held his tongue. She looked like she was in her mid- to late thirties, which put her three