The plan was simple. Eyman and Leiby would cover the car wash entrance, and Brasher and her partner, Edgewood, would cover the exit. Bosch and Edgar would drive Edgar’s car in as customers and make the move on Stokes. They switched their radios to a tactical unit and worked out a code; red meant Stokes had rabbitted, and green meant he had been taken peaceably.
“Remember something,” Bosch said. “Almost every wiper, rubber, soaper and vacuum guy on that lot is probably running from something—even if it’s just la migra. So even if we take Stokes without a problem, the others may rumble. Cops showing up at a car wash is like yelling fire in a theater. Everybody scatters till they see who’s the one who’s it.”
Everybody nodded and Bosch looked pointedly at Brasher, the rookie. In keeping with the plan agreed to the night before, they made no showing of knowing each other as anything other than fellow cops. But now he wanted to make sure she understood just how fluid a takedown like this could become.
“You got that, boot?” he said.
She smiled.
“Yeah, I got it.”
“All right, then let’s concentrate. Let’s go.”
He thought he saw the smile stay on Brasher’s face as she and Edgewood walked to their patrol car.
He and Edgar walked to Edgar’s Lexus. Bosch stopped when he got to it and realized that it looked like it had just been washed and waxed.
“Shit.”
“What can I say, Harry? I take care of my car.”
Bosch looked around. Behind the fast-food restaurant was an open Dumpster in a concrete alcove that had recently been washed down. There was a puddle of black water pooling on the pavement.
“Drive through that puddle a couple times,” he said. “Get it on your car.”
“Harry, I’m not going to get that shit on my car.”
“Come on, your car has to look like it needs to be washed or it might be a tell. You said yourself, the guy’s a rabbit. Let’s not give him a reason.”
“But we’re not actually going to get the car washed. I splash that shit on there, it stays there.”
“Tell you what, Jerry. If we get this guy, I’ll have Eyman and Leiby drive him in while you get your car washed. I’ll even pay for it.”
“Shit.”
“Come on, just drive through the puddle. We’re wasting time.”
After messing up Edgar’s car they made the drive to the car wash in silence. As they came up on it, Bosch could see the vice car parked at the curb a few car lengths from the car wash entrance. Further down the block past the car wash, the patrol unit was stopped in a lane of parked cars. Bosch went to his rover.
“Okay, everybody set?”
He got two return clicks on the mike from the vice guys. Brasher responded by voice.
“All ready.”
“Okay. We’re going in.”
Edgar pulled into the car wash and drove into the service lane, where customers delivered their cars to the vacuum station and ordered the kind of wash or wax they wanted. Bosch’s eyes immediately started moving among the workers, all of whom were dressed in identical orange jumpsuits and baseball caps. It slowed the identification process but Bosch soon saw the blue wax canopy and picked out Johnny Stokes.
“He’s there,” he said to Edgar. “On the black Beemer.”
Bosch knew that once they stepped out of the car most of the cons on the lot would be able to identify them as cops. In the same way Bosch could spot a con ninety-eight percent of the time, they in turn could spot a cop. He would have to move swiftly in on Stokes.
He looked over at Edgar.
“Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
They cracked the doors at the same time. Bosch got out and turned toward Stokes, who was twenty-five yards away with his back turned. He was crouched down and spraying something on the wheels of a black BMW. Bosch heard Edgar tell someone to skip the vacuum and that he’d be right back.
Bosch and Edgar had covered half the distance to their target when they were made by other workers on the lot. From somewhere behind him, Bosch heard a voice call out, “Five-oh, five-oh, five-oh.”
Immediately alerted, Stokes stood up and started turning. Bosch started running.
He was fifteen feet from Stokes when the ex-con realized he was the target. His obvious escape was to his left and then out through the car wash entrance but the BMW was blocking him. He made a move to his right but then seemed to stop when he realized it was a dead end.
“No, no!” Bosch called out. “We just want to talk, we just want to talk.”
Stokes visibly slumped. Bosch moved directly toward him while Edgar moved out to the right in case the ex-con decided to make a break.
Bosch slowed and opened his hands wide as he got close. One hand held his rover.
“LAPD. We just want to ask you a few questions, nothing else.”
“Man, about what?”
“About—”
Stokes suddenly raised his arm and sprayed Bosch in the face with the tire cleaner. He then bolted to his right, seemingly toward the dead end, where the high rear wall of the car wash joined the side wall of a three-story apartment building.
Bosch instinctively brought his hands up to his eyes. He heard Edgar yell at Stokes and then the scuffling sound of his shoes on concrete as he gave chase. Bosch couldn’t open his eyes. He put his mouth to the radio and yelled, “Red! Red! Red! He’s heading toward the back corner.”
He then dropped the radio to the concrete, using his shoe to break its fall. He used the sleeves of his jacket to wipe at his burning eyes. He finally could open them for brief moments at a time. He spotted a hose coiled on a faucet near the rear of the BMW. He made his way to it, turned it on and doused his face and eyes, not caring how wet his clothes got. His eyes felt like they had been dropped in boiling water.
After a few moments the water eased the burning sensation and he dropped the hose without turning it off and went back to get the radio. His vision was blurred at the edges but he could see well enough to get moving. As he bent down for the radio he heard laughter from some of the other men in orange jumpsuits.
Bosch ignored it. He switched the rover to the Hollywood patrol channel and spoke into it.
“Hollywood units, officers in pursuit of assault suspect, La Brea and Santa Monica. Suspect white male, thirty-five YOA, dark hair, orange jumpsuit. Suspect in the vicinity of Hollywood Washateria.”
He couldn’t remember the exact address of the car wash but wasn’t worried. Every cop on patrol would know it. He switched the rover to the department’s main communication channel and requested that a paramedic unit respond as well to treat an injured officer. He had no idea what had been sprayed into his eyes. They were beginning to feel better but he didn’t want to take a chance on long-term injury.
Lastly, he switched back to the tactical channel and asked for the others’ locations. Only Edgar came back up on the radio.
“There was a hole in the back corner. He went through to the alley. He’s in one of these apartment complexes on the north side of the car wash.”
“Where are the others?”
Edgar’s return was broken up. He was moving into a radio void.
“They’re back . . . spread out. I think . . . garage. You . . . ight, Harry?”
“I’ll make it. Backup’s on the way.”
He didn’t know if Edgar had heard that. He put the rover in his pocket and hustled to the back corner of the car wash lot, where he found the hole Stokes had slipped through. Behind a two-high pallet of fifty-five-gallon drums of liquid soap, the concrete wall was broken in. It appeared that at one time a car in the alley on the other side had struck the wall, creating the hole. Intentionally done or not, it was probably a well-known escape hatch for every wanted man who worked at the car wash.
Bosch crouched down and slipped through, momentarily catching his jacket on a rusty piece of rebar protruding from the broken wall. On the other side he got up in an alley that ran b
ehind rows of apartment buildings on either side for the length of the block.
The patrol car was stopped at an angle forty yards down the alley. It was empty, both doors open. Bosch could hear the sound of the main communications channel playing over the dash radio. Further down, at the end of the block, the vice car was parked across the alley.
He quickly moved down the alley toward the patrol car, looking and listening for anything. When he got to the car he pulled the rover out again and tried to raise someone on tactical. He got no response.
He saw the patrol car was parked in front of a ramp that dipped down into an underground garage beneath the largest of the apartment complexes on the alley. Remembering auto theft was in Edgar’s recitation of Stokes’s criminal record, Bosch suddenly knew that Stokes would go for the garage. His only way out was to get a car.
He trotted down the garage ramp into the dark.
The garage was huge and appeared to follow the imprint of the building above. There were three parking lanes and a ramp leading to an even lower level. Bosch saw no one. The only sound he heard was a dripping from the overhead pipes. He moved swiftly down the middle lane, drawing his weapon for the first time. Stokes had already fashioned a weapon out of a spray bottle. There was no telling what he might find in the garage to also use as a weapon.
As he moved, Bosch checked the few vehicles in the garage—everyone was at work, he guessed—for signs of break-in. He saw nothing. He was raising the rover to his mouth when he heard the sound of running footsteps echo up the ramp from the lower level of the garage. He quickly moved to the ramp and descended, careful to keep the rubber soles of his shoes as quiet as he could.
The lower garage was even darker, with less natural light finding its way down. As the incline leveled, his eyes adjusted. He saw no one, but the ramp structure blocked his view of half of the space. As he began his way around the ramp he suddenly heard a high and taut voice coming from the far end. It was Brasher’s.
“Right there! Right there! Don’t move!”
Bosch followed the sound, moving in tight to the side of the ramp and holding his weapon up. His training told him to call out, to alert the other officer to his presence. But he knew that if Brasher was alone with Stokes his calling might distract her and give Stokes another chance to break or make a move on her.
As he cut beneath the underside of the ramp, Bosch saw them at the far wall, no more than fifty feet away. Brasher had Stokes up against the wall, legs and arms spread. She held him there with one hand pressed against his back. Her flashlight was on the ground next to her right foot, its beam lighting the wall on which Stokes leaned.
It was perfect. Bosch felt relief flood his body and almost immediately he understood it was relief that she had not been hurt. He came out of the semi-crouch he was in and started toward them, lowering his weapon.
He was directly behind them. After he had taken only a few steps he saw Brasher take her hand off Stokes and step back from him, glancing to either side as she did it. This immediately registered with Bosch as the wrong thing to do. It was completely out of training. It would allow Stokes to make another run if he wanted to.
Things seemed to slow down then. Bosch started to yell to her but the garage suddenly filled with the flash and shattering blast of a gunshot. Brasher went down, Stokes remained up. The blast echo reverberated through the concrete structure, obscuring its origin.
All Bosch could think was, where is the gun?
He raised his weapon while lowering his body into a combat crouch. He started to turn his head to look for the gun. But he saw Stokes start turning from the wall. He then saw Brasher’s arm rising up from the ground, her gun pointed at Stokes’s turning body.
Bosch aimed his Glock at Stokes.
“Freeze!” he yelled. “Freeze! Freeze! Freeze!”
In a second he was on them.
“Don’t shoot, man,” Stokes yelled. “Don’t shoot!”
Bosch kept his eyes unwavering on Stokes. They still burned and needed relief but he knew even one blink now could be a fatal mistake.
“Down! Get on the ground. Now!”
Stokes dropped onto his stomach and spread his arms at ninety-degree angles to his body. Bosch stepped over him and with a move performed a thousand times before quickly cuffed his wrists behind his back.
He then holstered his weapon and turned to Brasher. Her eyes were wide and moving in a back-and-forth pattern. Blood had spattered onto her neck and had already soaked the front of her uniform shirt. He knelt over her and ripped open her shirt. Still, there was so much blood it took him a moment to find the wound. The bullet had entered her left shoulder, just an inch or so from the Velcro shoulder strap of her Kevlar vest.
The blood was flowing freely from the wound, and Bosch could see Brasher’s face was losing color quickly. Her lips were moving but not making any sound. He looked around for something and saw a car wash rag poking out of Stokes’s back pocket. He yanked it out and pressed it down on the wound. Brasher moaned in pain.
“Julia, this is going to hurt but I have to stop the bleeding.”
With one hand he stripped off his tie and pushed it under her shoulder and then over the top. He tied a knot that was just tight enough to keep the rag compress in place.
“Okay, hang on, Julia.”
He grabbed his rover off the ground and quickly switched the frequency knob to the main channel.
“CDC, officer down, lower-level garage at the La Brea Park apartments, La Brea and Santa Monica. We need paramedics right NOW! Suspect in custody. Confirm CDC.”
He waited for what seemed to be an interminable time before a CDC dispatcher came on the air to say he was breaking up and needed to repeat his call. Bosch clicked the call button and yelled, “Where’s my paramedics? Officer DOWN!”
He switched to tactical.
“Edgar, Edgewood, we’re in the lower level of the garage. Brasher is down. I’ve got Stokes controlled. Repeat, Brasher is down.”
He dropped the radio and yelled Edgar’s name as loud as he could. He took off his jacket and balled it together.
“Man, I didn’t do it,” Stokes yelled. “I don’t know what—”
“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
Bosch put his jacket under Brasher’s head. Her teeth were clenched in pain, her chin jutting upward. Her lips were almost white.
“Paramedics are coming, Julia. I called ’em before this even went down. I must be psychic or something. You just gotta hold on, Julia. Hold on.”
She opened her mouth, though it looked like a terrible struggle. But before she could say anything Stokes yelled out again in a voice now tinged with fear bordering on hysteria.
“I did not do that, man. Don’t let them kill me, man. I didn’t DO it!”
Bosch leaned over, putting his weight on Stokes’s back. He bent down and spoke in a loud voice directly into his ear.
“Shut the fuck up or I’ll kill you myself!”
He turned his attention back to Brasher. Her eyes were still open. Tears were going down her cheeks.
“Julia, just a few more minutes. You’ve got to hang on.”
He pulled the gun out of her right hand and put it on the ground, far away from Stokes. He then held her hand in both of his.
“What happened? What the hell happened?”
She opened and then closed her mouth again. Bosch could hear running feet on the ramp. He heard Edgar call his name.
“Over here!”
In a moment both Edgar and Edgewood were there.
“Julia!” Edgewood cried out. “Oh, shit!”
Without a moment’s hesitation Edgewood stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick to Stokes’s side.
“You motherfucker!”
He readied himself to do it again when Bosch yelled.
“No! Get back! Get away from him!”
Edgar grabbed Edgewood and pulled him away from Stokes, who had let out a hurt animal cry at the impact of the kick and was now
murmuring and moaning in fear.
“Take Edgewood up and get the paramedics down here,” Bosch said to Edgar. “The rovers aren’t for shit down here.”
Both of them seemed frozen.
“Go! Now!”
As if on cue, the sound of sirens could be heard in the distance.