Michael Connelly

“Crackling authenticity…cunningly conceived…Connelly joins the top rank of a new generation of crime writers.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A tight, high-anxiety plot…Connelly sustains the sick-thrill tension…up until the very end.”
— Washington Post Book World

“Masterfully entertaining…Builds suspense surely and steadily, springing more than one or two surprises…Delivers on every level.”
— Houston Chronicle

“Turbo-charged…A darkly gripping tale.”
— Kirkus Reviews

The house on Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man’s eyes. It was an old California Craftsman with a full front porch and two dormer windows set on the long slope of the roof. But no light shone behind the glass, not even from above the doorway. Instead, the house cast a foreboding darkness about it that not even the glow from the streetlight could penetrate.  A man could be standing there on the porch and Bosch knew he probably wouldn’t be able to see him.

“You sure this is it?” he asked her.

“Not the house,” she said. “Behind it. The garage.  Pull up so you can see down the drive.”

Bosch tapped the gas pedal and the Caprice moved forward and crossed the entrance to the driveway.

“There,” she said.

Bosch stopped the car. There was a garage behind the house with an apartment above it.  Wooden staircase up the side, light over the door.  Two windows, lights on inside.

“Okay,” Bosch said.

They stared at the garage for several moments.  Bosch didn’t know what he expected to see.  Maybe nothing.  The whore’s perfume was filling the car and he rolled the window down.  He didn’t know whether to trust her claim or not.  The one thing he knew he couldn’t do was call for backup.  He hadn’t brought a rover with him and the car was not equipped with a phone.

“What are you going—there he goes!” she said urgently.

Bosch had seen it, the shadow of a figure crossing behind the smaller window.  The bathroom, he guessed.

“He’s in the bathroom,” she said.  “That’s where I saw all the stuff.”

Bosch looked away from the window and at her.

“What stuff?”

“I, uh, checked the cabinet.  You know, when I was in there.  Just looking to see what he had.  A girl has to be careful.  And I saw all the stuff.  Makeup shit.  You know, mascara, lipsticks, compacts and stuff.  That’s how I figured it was him.  He used all that stuff to paint ’em when he was done, you know, killing them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that on the phone?’

“You didn’t ask.”

He saw the figure pass behind the curtains of the other window.  Bosch’s mind was racing now, his heart jacking up into its overdrive mode.

“How long ago was this that you ran out of there?”

“Shit, I don’t know.  I hadda walk down to Franklin just to find a fucking ride over to the Boulevard.  I was with the ride ’bout ten minutes.  So I don’t know.”

“Guess.  It’s important.”

“I don’t know.  It’s been more than an hour.”

Shit, Bosch thought.  She stopped to turn a trick before she called the task force numbers.  Showed a lot of genuine concern there.  Now there could be a replacement up there and I’m sitting out here watching.

He gunned the car up the street and found a space in front of a hydrant.  He turned off the engine but left the keys in the ignition.  After he jumped out he stuck his head back in through the open window.

“Listen, I’m going up there.  You stay here.  If you hear shots, or if I’m not back here in ten minutes, you start knocking on doors and get some cops out here.  Tell them an officer needs assistance.  There’s a clock on the dash.  Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes, baby.  You go be the hero now.  But I’m getting that reward.”

Bosch pulled his gun as he hurried down the driveway.  The stairs up the side of the garage were old and warped.  He took them three at a time, as quietly as he could.  But still it felt as if were shouting his arrival to the world.  At the top, he raised the gun and broke the bare bulb that was in place over the door.  Then, he leaned back into the darkness, against the outside railing.  He raised his left leg and put all his weight and momentum into his heel.  He struck the door over the knob.

The door swung open with a loud crack.  In a crouch, Bosch moved through the threshold in the standard combat stance.  Right away he saw the man across the room, standing on the other side of a bed.  The man was naked and not only bald but completely hairless.  His vision locked on the man’s eyes and he saw the look of terror quickly fill them.  Bosch yelled, his voice high and taut.

“COPS! DON”T FUCKING MOVE!”

The man froze, but only for a beat, and then began bending down, his right arm reaching for the pillow.  He hesitated once and then continued the movement.  Bosch couldn’t believe it.  What the fuck was he doing?  Time went into suspension.  The adrenaline pounding through his body gave his vision a slow-motion clarity.  Bosch knew the man was either reaching for the pillow for something to cover himself with, or he was—

The hand swept under the pillow.

“DON’T DO IT!”

The hand was closing on something beneath the pillow.  The man had never taken his eyes off Bosch.  Then Bosch realized it wasn’t terror in his eyes.  It was something else.  Anger?  Hate?  The hand was coming out from beneath the pillow now.

“NO!”

Bosch fired one shot, his gun kicking up in his two-handed grasp.  The naked man jerked upright and backward.  He hit the wood-paneled wall behind him, then bounced forward and fell across the bed thrashing and gagging.  Bosch quickly moved into the room and to the bed.

The man’s left hand was reaching again for the pillow.  Bosch brought his left leg up and knelt on his back, pinning him to the bed.  He pulled the cuffs off his belt and grabbed the groping left hand and cuffed it. Then the right.  Behind the back.  The naked man was gagging and moaning,

“I can’t — I can’t,” he said, but his statement was lost in a bloody coughing fit.

“You can’t do what I told you,” Bosch said.  ” I told you not to move!”

Just die, man, Bosch thought but didn’t say.  It will be easier for all of us.

He moved around the bed to the pillow.  He lifted it, stared at what was beneath it for a few moments and then dropped it.  He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Goddammit!” he called at the back of the naked man’s head. ”What were you doing? I had a fucking gun and you, you reach—I told you not to move!”

Bosch came around the bed so he could see the man’s face.  Blood was emptying from his mouth onto the dingy white sheet.  Bosch knew his bullet had hit the lungs.  The naked man was the dying man now.

“You didn’t have to die,” Bosch said to him.

Then the man was dead.

Bosch looked around the room. There was no one else. No replacement for the whore who had run.  He had been wrong on that guess.  He went into the bathroom and opened the cabinet beneath the sink.  The makeup was there, as the whore had said.  Bosch recognized some of the brand names. Max Factor, L’Oreal, Cover Girl, Revlon. It all seemed to fit.

He looked back through the bathroom door at the corpse on the bed. There was still the smell of gunpowder in the air. He lit a cigarette and it was so quiet in the place that he could hear the crisp tobacco burn as he dragged the soothing smoke into his lungs.

There was no phone in the apartment. Bosch sat on a chair in the kitchenette and waited. Staring across the room at the body, he realized that his heart was still pounding rapidly and that he felt lightheaded.  He also realized that he felt nothing — not sympathy or guilt or sorrow — for the man on the bed. Nothing at all.

Instead, he tried to concentrate on the sound of the siren that was now sounding in the distance and coming closer. After a while, he was able to discern that it was more than one siren.  It was many.

“Connelly knows crime, cops and criminals…Plan ahead before you read this buzz-saw of a novel…Once you start, you will finish.”
— Booklist

“A writer with a superior talent for storytelling.”
— Publishers Weekly

“It’s a terrific yarn, extending the boundaries of the police procedural in the ingenuity of the plot and the creation of a character.”
— Los Angeles Times

“Connelly’s Bosch could partner with John Sanford’s Lucas Davenport. As fictional  heroes, these ‘90’s tough guys are a joy.”
— Kansas City Star

Michael Connelly received the Maltese Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for The Black Ice, which was judged the best private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.

Sleep was not a possibility.  Bosch knew this.  He stood on the porch looking down on the carpet of lights and let the chill air harden his skin and his resolve.  For the first time in months he felt invigorated.  He was in the hunt again.  He let everything about the cases pass through his mind and made a mental list of people he had to see and things he had to do.

On top was Lucius Porter, the broken-down detective whose pullout was too timely, too coincidental to be coincidental.  Harry realized he was becoming angry just thinking about Porter.  And embarrassed.  Embarrassed at having stuck his neck out for him with Pounds.

He went to his notebook and then dialed Porter’s number one more time.  He was not expecting an answer and he wasn’t disappointed.  Porter had at least been reliable in that respect.  He checked the address he had written down earlier and headed out.

Driving down out of the hills he did not pass another car until he reached Cahuenga.  He headed north and got on the Hollywood Freeway at Barham.  The freeway was crowded but not so that traffic was slow.  The cars moved northward at a steady clip, a sleekly moving ribbon of lights.  Out over Studio City, Bosch could see a police helicopter circling, a shaft of white light cast downward on a crime scene somewhere.  It almost seemed as if the beam was a leash that held the circling craft from flying high and away.

He loved the city most at night.  The night hid many of the sorrows.  It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface.  It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely.  Behind the cover of shadows.  Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon night.  So many ways to live.  And to die.  You could be riding in the back of a studio’s black limo, or just as easily the back of the coroner’s blue van.  The sound of applause was the same as the buzz of a bullet spinning past your ear in the dark.  That randomness.  That was L.A.

There was flash fire and flash flood, earthquake, mudslide.  There was the drive-by shooter and the crack-stoked burglar.  The drunk driver and the always curving road ahead.  There were killer cops and cop killers.  There was the husband of the woman you were sleeping with.  And there was the woman.  At any moment on any night there were people being raped, violated, maimed.  Murdered and loved.  There was always a baby at his mother’s breast.  And, sometimes, a baby alone in a dumpster.

Somewhere.

“One of those books you read with your knuckles — just hanging on until it’s over…good and thrilling.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Connelly…transcends the standard L.A. police procedural with this original and eminently authentic first novel.”
— Publisher’s Weekly

“Don’t miss this one. ..a really wonderful, readable book, and I’m hoping he’s working fast on a follow-up.”
— The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

“It is a wonderfully written tale that not only deals with putting old nightmares to rest but also with an outsider struggling to be allowed to succeed within a bureaucratic maze.”
— The Orlando Sentinel

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits.  It was  beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home.   Sunsets did that here.  Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

The sun hung like a ball of copper in the driver’s-side window.  He had the car radio tuned to a jazz station and Coltrane was playing “Soul Eyes.”  On the seat next to him was a file containing the newspaper clippings from Bremmer.  The file was weighted down by a six-pack of Henry’s.  Bosch got off at Barham and then took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills above Studio City.  His home was a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage.  It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its midpoint.  It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled.  But the view was the trade-off.  From the back porch Bosch could look northeast across Burbank and Glendale.  He could see the purple-hued mountains past Pasadena and Altadena.  Sometimes he could see the smoky loom-up and orange blaze of brush fires in the hills.  At night the sound of the freeway below softened and the search lights at Universal City swept the sky.  Looking out on the valley never failed to give Bosch a sense of power which he could not explain to himself.  But he did know that it was one reason — the main reason — he bought the place and would never want to leave it.

Bosch had bought it eight years earlier, before the real estate boom got seriously endemic, with a down payment of $50,000.  That left a mortgage of $1,400 a month, which he could easily afford because the only things he spent money on were food, booze, and jazz.

The down payment money had come from a studio that gave it to him for the rights to use his name in a TV miniseries based on a string of murders of beauty shop owners in Los Angeles.  Bosch and his partner during the investigation were portrayed by two midlevel TV actors.  His partner took his fifty grand and his pension and moved to Ensenada.  Bosch put his down on a house he wasn’t sure could survive the next earthquake but that made him feel as though he were prince of the city.