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“Please,” Bosch said. “He’s coming back to kill me. I’m a cop.”
He reached to his belt but realized his badge was gone. The woman took half a second to decide, then turned the gun around and held it out, butt first. Bosch sprang from his position and took it.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now lock the door.”
35
STAYING CLOSE TO the houses, Bosch made his way down the block to the river. It was fenced off, but there was a gate that led to a pedestrian path running alongside the concrete channel. The gate was open and Bosch went through. He looked down into the riverbed. There was only a three-foot-wide ribbon of water at the bottom. The concrete sides were marked sporadically with El Monte Flores graffiti, and all manner of debris was at the bottom. In the moonlight, Bosch could make out the shape of a shopping cart standing in the shallow stream of water.
He saw no sign of Slow or Zed. He stopped moving to listen for running steps but heard only the trickle of the water in the concrete riverbed. Then a sound of glass breaking echoed from the darkness beneath the bridge that carried the 10 across the river, three blocks away. Bosch heard sirens in the distance and guessed that the woman who’d given him her gun or her neighbors had called 911. The sheriffs were on the way.
Bosch headed down the pedestrian path to the overpass, knowing he was fully exposed in the ambient light from the moon and the houses that backed up to the river. When he had escaped this way so many years ago, there were no houses or fences or pedestrian paths.
As he got close to the overpass, his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw the blue tarps and cardboard walls of an encampment of homeless people under the concrete bridge. If Slow was there waiting, he had multiple places from which to ambush Bosch. Maybe he’d broken something glass in an attempt to lure Bosch into a deadly trap. He stopped. The sirens were getting closer, and he knew the safe thing to do would be to wait for reinforcements. Just as he was about to turn back, a voice called from the darkness:
“Bosch, I’m unarmed.”
It was Zed.
Bosch pointed the gun toward where the voice had come from.
“I’m not,” he said. “Come out here with your hands on top of your head.”
“Okay,” Zed said. “Hold your fire.”
“You drop your hands and I will drop you. Understand?”
“I understand. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot.”
Bosch saw Zed emerging from the darkness. He backed up a few steps on the path, never taking his eyes off him.
“Okay, get up against the fence,” Bosch ordered. “Grab it up high.”
Zed complied, and Bosch moved in and searched with one hand while pressing the barrel of the gun against Zed’s spine with the other.
“Keep your hands up,” he said. “Where did your partner Slow go?”
“I hid and he went by. I saw him climb up when the sirens were coming. I think he’s gone.”
Bosch finished the search. He found a phone and two sets of keys, one with his house and car keys. But Zed had told the truth about being unarmed.
“Where did you get the gun?” Zed asked. “I made sure you didn’t have a weapon.”
“Never mind that,” Bosch said. “Just know that I could pop you right here and it would be justified. Doesn’t matter whether you’re an informant or not, I’d get a pass. You people abducted me, and after that, all bets are off.”
“I understand.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tomas Novotny.”
“How did they get Zed out of that?”
“My cover name is Ivanec Zednik.”
“Where are you from?”
“Prague.”
