Michael Connelly by The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo the Black Ice the Concrete Blonde

Author:The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo, the Black Ice, the Concrete Blonde [The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo, the Black Ice, the Concrete Blonde]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC031000
ISBN: 0316154970
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2001-10-22T05:00:00+00:00

17

Bosch dragged deeply on a cigarette and then dropped the butt into the gutter. He hesitated before pulling the billy club that was the door handle of the Code Seven. He stared across First Street to the grass square that flanked City Hall and was called Freedom Park. Beneath the sodium lights he saw the bodies of homeless men and women sprawled asleep in the grass around the war memorial. They looked like casualties on a battlefield, the unburied dead.

He went inside, walked through the front restaurant and then parted the black curtains that hid the entrance to the bar like a judge’s robes. The place was crowded with lawyers and cops and blue with cigarette smoke. They had all come to wait out the rush hour and either gotten too comfortable or too drunk. Harry went down to the end of the bar where the stools were empty and ordered a beer and a shot. It was seven on the dot according to the Miller clock over the bar. He scanned the room in the mirror behind the bar but saw nobody he could assume was the DEA agent Corvo. He lit another cigarette and decided he would give it until eight.

The moment he decided that he looked back in the mirror and saw a short, dark man with a full black beard split the curtain and hesitate as his eyes focused in the dim bar. He wore blue jeans and a pullover shirt. Bosch saw the pager on his belt and the bulge the gun made under his shirt. The man looked around until their eyes met in the mirror and Harry nodded once. Corvo came over and took the stool next to him.

“So you made me,” Corvo said.

“And you made me. I guess we both need to go back to the academy. You want a beer?”

“Look, Bosch, before you start getting friendly on me, I gotta tell you I don’t know about this. I don’t know what this is about. I haven’t decided whether to talk to you.”

Harry took his cigarette from the ashtray and looked at Corvo in the mirror.

“I haven’t decided if Certs is a breath mint or a candy.”

Corvo slid back off his stool.

“Have a good one.”

“C’mon Corvo, have a beer, why don’t you? Relax, man.”

“I checked you out before I came over. The line on you is that you’re just another head case. You’re on the fast track to nowhere. RHD to Hollywood, the next stop probably riding shotgun in a Wells Fargo truck.”

“No, the next stop is Mexicali. And I can go down there blind, maybe walk in on whatever you got going with Zorrillo, or you can help me and yourself by telling me what’s what.”

“What’s what is that you aren’t going to do anything down there. I leave here I pick up the phone and your trip is over.”

“I leave here and I’m gone, on my way. Too late to stop. Have a seat. If I’ve been an asshole, I’m sorry.