Michael Connelly (71 page)

Inside, the place was a black hole with a long, warped bar and no tables. Poe’s wasn’t a place to sit in a booth with friends.
It was a place to drink alone. A place for executive suicides who needed courage, broken cops who couldn’t cope with the loneliness
they built into their lives, writers who could no longer write and priests who could no longer forgive even their own sins.
It was a place to drink mean, as long as you still had the green. It cost you five bucks for a stool at the bar and a dollar
for a glass of ice to go with your bottle of whiskey. A soda setup was three bucks but most of these people took their medicine
straight up. It was cheaper that way and more to the point. It was said that Poe’s was not named after the writer but for
the general philosophy of its clientele: Piss On Everything.

Even though it was dark outside, stepping into Poe’s was like walking into a cave. For a moment, Bosch was reminded of that
first moment after dropping into a VC tunnel in Vietnam. He stood utterly still by the door until his eyes focused in the
dim light and he saw the red leather padding on the bar. The place smelled worse than Porter’s trailer. The bartender, in
a wrinkled white shirt and unbuttoned black vest, stood to the right, backed by the rows of liquor bottles, each with the
bottle owner’s name attached on a piece of masking tape. A red stem of neon ran along the booze shelf, behind the bottles,
and gave them an eerie glow.

From the darkness to Bosch’s left, he heard, “Shit, Harry, whaddaya doing? You looking for me?”

He turned and there was Porter at the other end of the bar, sitting so he could see whoever came in before they could see
him. Harry walked over. He saw a shot glass in front of Porter along with a half-filled water glass and a third-filled bottle
of bourbon. There was a twenty and three ones fanned out on the bar as well and a package of Camels. Bosch felt anger rising
in his throat as he approached and came up on Porter’s back.

“Yeah, I’m looking for you.”

“Whassup?”

Bosch knew he had to do what he had to do before any sympathy could crack through his anger. He yanked Porter’s sport coat
down over his shoulders so his arms were caught at his sides. A cigarette dropped out of his hand to the floor. Bosch reached
around and pulled the gun out of his shoulder holster and put it on the bar.

“What’re you still carrying for, Lou? You pulled the pin, remember? What, you scared of something?”

“Harry, what’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

The bartender started walking down behind the bar to the aid of his club member but Bosch fixed him with a cold stare, held
up his hand like a traffic cop and said, “Cool it. It’s private.”

“Damned right. It’s a private club and you ain’t a member.”

“It’s okay, Tommy,” Porter spoke up. “I know him. I’ll take care of it.”

A couple of men who had been sitting a few stools from Porter got up and moved to the other end of the bar with their bottles
and drinks. A couple of other drunks were already down there watching. But nobody left, not with booze still in their jars
and it not quite being six o’clock yet. There would be no place else to go. Bars wouldn’t open until seven and the hour or
so until then could last a lifetime. No, they weren’t going anywhere. This crew would sit there and watch a man murdered if
they had to.

“Harry, c’mon,” Porter said. “Cool it yourself. We can talk.”

#8220;Can we? Can we? Why didn’t you talk when I called the other day? How about Moore? Did you have a talk with Cal Moore?”

“Look, Harry —”

Bosch spun him around off the stool and face first into the wood-paneled wall. He came easier than Harry had thought he would
and hit the wall hard. His nose made a sound like an ice-cream cone hitting the sidewalk. Bosch leaned his back against Porter’s
back, pinning him face first against the wall.

“Don’t ‘Look, Harry’ me, Porter. I stood up for you, man, ’cause I thought you were …I thought you were worth it. Now I know,
Porter. I was wrong. You quit on the Juan Doe. I want to know why. I want to know what’s going on.”

Porter’s voice was muffled by the wall and his own blood. He said, “Harry, shit, I think you broke my nose. I’m bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about it. What about Moore? I know he reported the body.”

Porter made some kind of wet snorting sound but Bosch just pushed him harder. The man stunk of sour body odor, booze and cigarettes,
and Bosch wondered how long he had been sitting in Poe’s, watching the door.

“I’m calling the police now,” the bartender yelled. He stood holding the phone out so Bosch would see it was a real threat,
which of course it wasn’t. The bartender knew if he dialed that phone every stool in the bar would be left spinning as the
drunks filed out. There would be no one left to scam on the change or to leave quarters for his cup.

Using his body to keep Porter pinned to the wall, Bosch pulled out his badge wallet and held it up. “I am the police. Mind
your own fucking business.”

The bartender shook his head as if to say what is this fine business coming to, and put the phone back next to the cash register.
The announcement that Bosch was a police officer resulted in about half the other customers jerking their drinks down and
leaving. There were probably warrants out for everybody in the place, Bosch thought.

Porter was starting to mumble and Bosch thought he might be crying again, like on the phone Thursday morning.

“Harry, I — I didn’t think I was doing …I had —”

Bosch bounced harder against his back and heard Porter’s forehead hit the wall.

“Don’t start that shit with me, Porter. You were takin’ care of yourself. That’s what you were doing. And —”

“I’m sick. I’m gonna be sick.”

“— and right now, believe it or not, right now the only one that really cares about you is me. You fuck, you just tell me
what you did. Just tell me what you did and we’re square. It goes nowhere else. You go for your stress out and I never see
your face again.”

Bosch could hear his wet breathing against the wall. It was almost as if he could hear him thinking.

“You sure, Harry?”

“You don’t have a choice. You don’t start talking, you end up with no job, no pension.”

“He, uh — I just …there’s blood on my shirt. It’s roon.”

Bosch pushed harder against him.

“Okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell ya, I’ll tell …I just did him a favor, thas all, and he ended up deader’n shit. When I heard,
I, uh, I couldn’t come back in, see. I didn’t know what happened. I mean, I mean, they — somebody could be looking for me.
I got scared, Harry. I’m scared. I been sitting in bars since I talked to you yesterday. I stink like shit. And now all this
blood. I need a napkin. I think they’re after me.”

Bosch took his weight off him but held one hand pressed against his back so he would not go anywhere. He reached back to the
bar and took a handful of cocktail napkins off a stack near a bowl of matches. He held them over Porter’s shoulder and the
broken cop worked his hand loose from his jacket and took them. He turned his head away from the wall to press the napkin
to his swelling nose. Harry saw tears on his face and looked away.

The door to the bar opened then and dawn’s early gray light shot into the bar. A man stood there, apparently adjusting to
the darkness of the bar as Bosch had done. Bosch saw he was dark complexioned with ink-black hair. Three tattooed tears dripped
down his cheek from the corner of his left eye. Harry knew he was no banker or lawyer who needed a double-scotch breakfast
to start the day. He was some kind of player, maybe finishing a night collecting for the Italians or Mexicans and needing
something to smooth out the edges. The man’s eyes finally fell on Bosch and Porter, then to Porter’s gun, which was still
on the bar. The man sized up the situation and calmly and wordlessly backed out through the door.

“Fucking great,” the bartender yelled. “Would you get the hell out of here. I’m losing customers. The both of you, get the
fuck out.”

There was a sign that said Toilet and an arrow pointing down a darkened hallway to Bosch’s left. He pushed Porter that way.
They turned a corner and went into the men’s room, which smelled worse than Porter. There was a mop in a bucket of gray water
in the corner, but the cracked tile floor was dirtier than the water. He pushed Porter toward the sink.

“Clean yourself up,” Bosch said. “What was the favor? You said you did something for Moore. Tell me about it.”

Porter was looking at his blurred reflection in a piece of stainless steel that was probably put in when the management got
tired of replacing broken mirrors.

“It won’t stop bleeding, Harry. I think it’s broke.”

“Forget your nose. Tell me what you did.”

“I, uh — look, all he did was tell me that he knew some people that would appreciate it if the stiff behind the restaurant
didn’t get ID’d for a while. Just string it out, he said, for a week or two. Christ, there was no ID on the body, anyway.
He said I could do the computer runs on the prints cause he knew they wouldn’t bring a match. He said just take my time with
it and that these people, the ones he knew, would take care of me. He said I’d get a nice Christmas present. So, I, you know,
I went through the motions last week. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with it, anyway. You know, you saw the file. No ID,
no wits, no nothing. The guy’d been dead at least six hours before he got dumped there.”

“So what spooked you? What happened Christmas?”

Porter blew his nose into a bouquet of paper towels and this brought more tears to his eyes.

“Yeah, it’s broke. I’m not getting any air through. I gotta go to a clinic, get it set. Anyway …well, nothing happened Christmas.
That’s the thing. I mean, Moore’d been missing for almost a week and I was getting pretty nervous about the whole thing. On
Christmas Moore didn’t come, nobody did. Then when I’m walking home from the Lucky my neighbor in the trailer next door says
to me about how real sorry she was about that dead cop they found. I said thanks and went inside and put on the radio. I hear
it’s Moore and that scares me shitless, Harry. It did.”

Porter soaked a handful of towels and began stroking his bloodstained shirt in a manner that Bosch thought made him look more
pathetic than he was. Bosch saw his empty shoulder holder and remembered he had left the gun on the bar. He was reluctant
to go back and get it while Porter was talking.

“See, I knew Moore wasn’t no suicide. I don’t care what they’re putting out at Parker. I know he didn’t do himself like that.
He was into something. So, I decided, that was enough. I called the union and got a lawyer. I’m outta here, Harry. I’m gonna
get cleaned up and go to Vegas, maybe get in with casino security. Millie’s out there with my boy. I wanna be close by.”

Right, Bosch thought. And always be looking over your shoulder. He said, “You’re bleeding again. Wash your face. I’m going
to get some coffee. I’m taking you out of here.”

Bosch moved through the door but Porter stopped him.

“Harry, you going to take care of me on this?”

Bosch looked at his damaged face a long moment before saying, “Yeah, I’ll do what I can.”

He walked back out to the bar and signaled the bartender, who was standing all the way down at the other end smoking a cigarette.
The man, about fifty, with faded blue tattoos webbing both forearms like extra veins, took his time coming over. By then Bosch
had a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

“Give me a couple coffees to go. Black. Put a lot of sugar in one of them.”

“’Bout time you got outta here.” The bartender nodded at the ten-dollar bill. “And I’m taking out for the napkins, too. They’re
not for cops who go round beat’n’ on people. That oughta ’bout cover it. You can just leave that on the bar.”

He poured coffee that looked like it had been sitting in the glass pot since Christmas into foam cups. Bosch went to Porter’s
spot at the bar and gathered up the Smith thirty-eight and the twenty-three dollars. He moved back to his ten-dollar bill
and lit a cigarette.

Not realizing Bosch was now watching, the bartender poured a gagging amount of sugar into both coffees. Bosch let it slide.
After snapping plastic covers on the cups, the bartender brought them over to Bosch and tapped one of the tops, a smile that
would make a woman frigid on his face.

“This is the one with no — hey, what is this shit?”

The ten Bosch had put down on the bar was now a one. Bosch blew smoke in the bartender’s face as he took the coffees and said,
“That’s for the coffee. You can shove the napkins.”

“Just get the fuck out of here,” the bartender said. Then he turned and started walking down to the other end of the bar,
where several of the patrons were impatiently holding their empty glasses up. They needed more ice to chill their plasma.

Bosch pushed the door to the restroom open with his foot but didn’t see Porter. He pushed the door to the only stall open
and he wasn’t there either. Harry left the room and quickly pushed through the women’s restroom door. No Porter. He followed
the hallway around another corner and saw a door marked Exit. He saw drops of blood on the floor. Regretting his play with
the bartender and wondering if he’d be able to track Porter by calling hospitals and clinics, he hit the door’s push bar with
his hip. It opened only an inch or so. There was something on the other side holding it closed.

Bosch put the coffees down on the floor and put his whole weight on the door. It slowly moved open as the blockage gave way.
He squeezed through and saw a Dumpster had been shoved against the door. He was standing in an alley behind Poe’s and the
morning light, flowing down the alley from the east, was blinding.

There was an abandoned Toyota, its wheels, hood and one door gone, sitting dead in the alley. There were more Dumpsters and
the wind was blowing trash around in a swirl. And there was no sign of Porter.