The Black Echo

“Reason to believe the two subjects in suits are Los Angeles police officers. Stand by.”

“There they are,” Bosch said, as three figures moved into the glare in the vault room. He opened the glove compartment and grabbed a pair of binoculars.

“What are they doing?” Wish asked as he focused.

“Avery is at the keypad next to the vault. I think he is opening the damned thing.”

Through the binoculars, Bosch saw Avery step away from the computer board and move to the chrome wheel on the vault door. He saw Lewis turn slightly and glance up the street in the direction of the parking garage. Was there a slight trace of a smile there? Bosch thought he saw it. Then through the binoculars he saw Lewis draw his weapon from an underarm holster. Clarke did likewise and Avery started turning the wheel, the captain steering the Titanic.

“Those dumb assholes, they are opening it!”

Bosch leapt out of the car and started running down the ramp. He unholstered his gun and held it up as he ran. He glanced along Wilshire and saw an opening in the sporadic traffic. He bounded across the street, Wish just a short distance behind him.

Bosch was still twenty-five yards away and knew he would be too late. Avery had stopped turning the vault wheel, and Bosch could see him pull back with all his weight. The door began slowly to move open. Bosch heard Eleanor’s voice behind him.

“No!” she yelled. “Avery, no!”

But Bosch knew the double glass made the vault room silent. Avery couldn’t hear her, and Lewis and Clarke wouldn’t have stopped what they were doing even if they could hear.

What happened was like a movie to Bosch. An old movie on a TV set with the sound turned down. The slowly opening vault door, with its widening band of blackness inside, gave the picture an ethereal, almost underwater quality, a slow-motion inevitability. Bosch felt as if he were on a moving sidewalk going the wrong way, running but getting no closer. He kept his eyes on the vault door. The black margin opening wider. Then Lewis’s body moved into Bosch’s line of sight and toward the opening vault. Almost immediately, propelled by some unseen force, Lewis jerked backward. His hands flew up and his gun hit the ceiling and then fell soundlessly to the floor. As he backpedaled from the vault, his back and head ripped open and blood and brain spattered the glass wall behind him. As Lewis was hurled away from the vault door, Bosch could see the muzzle flash from the darkness inside. And then spiderwebs of cracks crazed the double glass as bullets struck silently. Lewis backstepped into a panel of the weakened glass and crashed through onto the sidewalk three feet below.

The vault was half open now and the shooter had freer range. The barrage of machine-gun fire turned toward Clarke, who stood unprotected, his mouth open in shock. Bosch could hear the shots now. He saw Clarke attempt to jump away from the line of fire. But it wasn’t worth the effort. He, too, was thrown backward by the force of bullets impacting. His body slammed into Avery and both men fell to the polished marble floor in a heap.

The gunfire from the vault ended.

Bosch jumped through the opening where the wall of glass had been and slid on his chest across the marble and glass dust. In the same instant he looked into the vault and saw the blur of a man dropping through the floor. The movement made a swirl in the concrete dust and smoke that hung inside the vault. Like a magician, the man just disappeared in the mist. Then, from the darkness farther inside, a second man moved into the view framed by the doorway. He sidestepped to the hole, swinging an M-16 assault rifle in a covering, side-to-side sweep. Bosch recognized him as Art Franklin, one of the Charlie Company graduates.

When the black hole of the M-16 came his way, Bosch leveled his gun with both hands, wrists on the cold floor, and fired. Franklin fired at the same time. His shots went high, and Bosch heard more glass shattering behind him. Bosch fired two more rounds into the vault. He heard one ping off the steel door. The other caught Franklin in the upper right chest, knocking him to the floor on his back. But in one quick motion, the injured man rolled and went headfirst through the floor. Bosch kept his gun on the doorway to the vault, waiting for anybody else. But there was nothing, only the sound of Clarke and Avery, gagging and moaning on the floor to his left. Bosch stood up but kept the gun trained on the vault. Eleanor climbed into the room then, her Beretta in hand. In marksman crouches, Bosch and Wish approached the vault from either side of the door. There was a light control next to the computer keypad on the steel wall right of the door. Bosch hit the switch and the interior vault was flooded with light. He nodded to her and Wish went in first. Then he followed. It was empty.