“Shit,” Bosch said. “Okay. Don’t come up till I say it’s clear, okay?”

“Got it,” she said.

Bosch had to throw his weight hard against the door to open it. He came out of the car, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other. He held the light out away from his body and trained its beam on the driver of the car ahead. The roar of passing traffic in his ears, Bosch started to shout, but a diesel horn drowned him out and a blast of wind from the passing semi shoved him forward. Bosch tried again, shouting for the driver to stick both hands out the side window where Bosch could see them. Nothing. Bosch shouted the order again. After a long moment, with Bosch poised off the left rear fender of the maroon car, the driver finally complied. Bosch ran the flash beam through the back window and saw no other occupants. He ran up and put the light on the driver and ordered him to step out slowly.

“What is this?” the man protested. He was small, with pale skin, reddish hair and a transparent mustache. He opened the car door and stepped out with his hands up. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and beige pants held up by suspenders. He looked out into the passing field of cars, almost as if beckoning for a witness to this commuter’s nightmare.

“Can I see a badge?” he stammered. Bosch rushed forward, spun him around and slammed his body into the side of his car, his head and shoulders over its roof. With one hand on the back of the man’s neck, holding him down, and the other holding the gun to his ear, Bosch shouted to Eleanor that it was clear.

“Check the front side.”

The man beneath Bosch let out a moaning sound, like a scared animal, and Bosch could feel him shaking. His neck felt clammy. Bosch never took his eyes off him to see where Eleanor was. Suddenly her voice was right behind him.

“Let him go,” she said. “It’s not him. There’s no damage. We’ve got the wrong car.”

PART VI

They were interviewed by the Santa Monica police, the California Highway Patrol, LAPD and the FBI. A DUI unit had been called to give Bosch a sobriety test. He passed. And by 2A.M. he sat in an interview room at the West Los Angeles bureau, bone-tired and wondering if the Coast Guard or IRS would be next. He and Eleanor had been separated and he hadn’t seen her since they had arrived three hours earlier. It bothered him that he could not be with her to protect her from the interrogators. Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds came into the room then and told Bosch they were finished for the night. Bosch could tell that Ninety-eight was angry, and it wasn’t just because he had been rousted from home.

“What kind of cop doesn’t get the make of the car that tries to run him down?” he asked.

Bosch was used to the second-guessing tone to the questions. It had been that way all night.

“Like I told every one of those guys before you, I was a little busy at the time. I was trying to save my ass.”

“And this guy you pull over,” Pounds cut in. “Jesus, Bosch, you rough him up on the side of the freeway. Every asshole with a car phone is dialing nine one one reporting kidnap, murder, who knows what else. Couldn’t you have tried to get a look at the right side of his car before you pulled him over?”

“It was impossible. All of this is covered in the report we typed up, Lieutenant. I’ve gone over it, seems like ten times already.”

Pounds acted as though he didn’t hear. “And he’s a lawyer no less.”

“So what?” Bosch said, now losing his patience. “We apologized. It was a mistake. The car looked the same. And if he is going to sue anybody it will be the FBI. They’ve got deeper pockets. So don’t worry about it.”

“No, he’ll sue us both. He’s already talking about it, fer crissake. And this is not the time to try to be funny, Bosch.”

“It’s also not the time to be worried about what we did or didn’t do right. None of the suits that have come in here to interview me have seemed to care that somebody might be trying to kill us. They just want to know how far away I was when I fired and whether I endangered bystanders and why I pulled that car over without probable cause. Well, fuck it, man. Somebody is out to kill my partner and me. Excuse me if I’m not feeling particularly sorry for the lawyer who got his suspenders twisted.”

Pounds was ready for that argument.

“Bosch, for all we have evidence of, it could have just been a drunk. And what do you mean ‘partner’? You are on a day-to-day loan to this investigation. And after tonight, I think the loan is going to be withdrawn. You’ve spent five solid days on this case, and from what I understand from Rourke, you’ve got nothing.”

“It was no drunk, Pounds. We were a target. And I don’t care what Rourke says we have, I’m going to clear this one. And if you’d quit undermining the effort, believe in your own people for once and maybe get those Internal Affairs assholes off me, you might be in line for a piece of the honors when it happens.”

Pounds’s eyebrows arched like roller coasters.

“Yeah, I know about Lewis and Clarke,” Bosch said. “And I know their paper was being copied to you. I guess they didn’t tell you about the little talk we had? I caught ’em snoozing outside my house.”

It was clear from his expression that Pounds had not heard. Lewis and Clarke were staying low and Bosch would not get jammed up over what he had done to them. He began to wonder where the two IAD detectives had been when he and Eleanor had almost been run down.

Meanwhile, Pounds remained silent for a long time. He was a fish swimming around the bait Bosch had cast, seeming to know there was a hook in it but thinking there might be a way to get the bait without the hook. Finally he told Bosch to give him a rundown on the week’s investigation. He was on the hook now. Bosch ran the case down for him, and though Pounds never spoke once during the next twenty minutes Bosch could tell by his roller-coasting eyebrows whenever he heard something that Rourke had neglected to bring up.

When the story was finished, there was no more talk from Pounds of Bosch’s being withdrawn from the case. Nevertheless, Bosch felt very tired of the whole thing. He wanted to sleep, but Pounds still had questions.

“If the FBI isn’t putting people into the tunnels, should we?” he asked.

Bosch could see he was thinking in terms of being in on the bust, if there was one. If he put LAPD people into the drainage tunnels, the FBI wouldn’t be able to crowd the department out when the credit for the bust came. Pounds would receive a slap on the back from the chief if he could defend against such a maneuver.

But Bosch had come to believe that Rourke’s reasoning was sound and correct. A tunnel crew would stand a good chance of stumbling into the thieves and maybe getting killed.

“No,” Bosch told Pounds. “Let’s first see if we can get a fix on Tran and where he keeps his stash. For all we know, it might not even be a bank.”

Pounds stood up, having heard enough. He said Bosch was free to go. As the lieutenant headed to the interview room door he said, “Bosch, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with this incident tonight. It sounds to me like you did what you could. The lawyer got his feathers ruffled but he’ll settle down. Or just settle.”

Bosch didn’t say anything or smile at his meager joke.

“One thing,” Pounds continued. “The fact that this happened in front of Agent Wish’s home is a bit troubling because it has the appearance of impropriety. Just a hint, no? You were just walking her to the door, weren’t you?”

“I don’t really care how it appeared, Lieutenant,” Bosch answered. “I was off duty.”

Pounds looked at Bosch a moment, shook his head as if Bosch had ignored his outstretched hand, and then went through the door of the small room.