“What’d he say?” Clarke asked.

“We go in,” Lewis said. He started the car.

The police radio keyed twice and then Hanlon’s voice came on.

“Hey, Broadway, we have visitors over here on First.”

Bosch grabbed up the radio.

“What have you got, First? Nothing showing on Broadway.”

“We’ve got three white males going in on our side. Using a key. Looks like one is the man that was here earlier with you. Old guy. Plaid pants.”

Avery. Bosch held the microphone up to his mouth and hesitated, not sure what to say. “Now what?” he said to Eleanor. Like Bosch, she was staring down the street at the vault room, but there was no sign of the visitors. She said nothing.

“Uh, First,” Bosch said into the mike. “Did you see any vehicle?”

“None seen,” Hanlon’s voice came back. “They just walked out of the alley on our side. Must have parked there. Want us to take a look?”

“No, hold there a minute.”

“They are now inside, no longer in visual contact. Advise, please.”

He turned to Wish and raised his eyebrows. Who could it be?

“Ask for descriptions of the two with Avery,” she said.

He did.

“White males,” Hanlon began. “Number one and two in suits, worn and wrinkled. White shirts. Both early thirties. One with red hair, stocky build, five-eight, one-eighty. The other, dark-brown hair, thinner. I don’t know, I’d say these guys were cops.”

“Heckle and Jeckle?” Eleanor said.

“Lewis and Clarke. It’s gotta be them.”

“What are they doing in there?”

Bosch didn’t know. Wish took the radio from him.

“First?”

The radio clicked.

“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.

Bosch came out and quickly went to Clarke and Avery, who were still tangled on the floor. Avery was saying, “Dear God, Dear God.” Clarke had both hands clamped to his own throat and was gasping for air, his face turning so red that for one bizarre moment it looked to Bosch as if he were strangling himself. He was lying across Avery’s midsection and his blood was over both of them.

“Eleanor,” Bosch shouted. “Get backup and ambulances. Tell SWAT that they’re coming. At least two. Automatic weapons.”

He pulled Clarke off Avery and by grabbing the shoulders of his jacket, dragged him out of the line of fire from the vault. The IAD detective had taken a round in the lower neck. Blood was seeping from between his fingers and there were small blood-tinted bubbles at the corners of his mouth. He had blood in his chest cavity. He was shaking and going into shock. He was dying. Harry turned back to Avery, who had blood on his chest and neck and a brownish-yellow piece of wet sponge on his cheek. A piece of Lewis’s brain.

“Avery, you hit?”

“Yes, uh… uh, uh, I think… I don’t know,” he managed in a strangled voice.

Bosch knelt next to him and quickly scanned his body and bloody clothes. He wasn’t hit and Harry told him so. Bosch went back to where the double-glazed window had been and looked down at Lewis on his back on the sidewalk. He was dead. The bullets, having caught him in a rising arc, had stitched their way up his body. There were entry wounds on his right hip, stomach, left chest, and left of center of his forehead. He had been dead before he hit the glass. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.