“Kids were sneaking in here, leaving their beer cans and shit all over,” Cosgrove said, as if he had to explain why the barn was locked.
“Unlock it,” Drummond said.
Cosgrove got out and headed to the barn doors with a key already in his hand.
“You sure about this, Drummer?” Banks asked.
“Don’t call me that, Reggie. People stopped calling me that a long time ago.”
“Sorry. I won’t. But are you sure we have to do this?”
“There you go with that we stuff again. When was it ever we, Reg? Don’t you mean me? Me always cleaning up after what you guys did?”
Banks didn’t answer. Cosgrove had gotten the doors unlocked and was pulling the right side open.
“Let’s do this thing,” Drummond said.
He got out of the car, slamming the door behind him. Banks was slow to do likewise, and Bosch seized the moment, locking eyes with him in the rearview.
“Don’t be a part of this, Reggie. He gave you a gun, you can stop this.”
Bosch’s door opened then and Drummond reached in to pull him out.
“Reggie, what are you waiting for? Let’s go, man.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you wanted me, too.”
Banks got out as Bosch was pulled out.
“In the barn, Bosch,” Drummond said.
Bosch looked up at the black sky again as he was pushed toward the open door of the barn. Once they were inside, Cosgrove turned on an overhead light that was so high up in the crossbeams that it threw only a dim glow down to where they stood below.
Drummond went to a center column that helped support the hayloft and pushed against it to test its strength. It felt solid.
“Here,” he said. “Bring him over.”
Banks pushed Bosch forward and Drummond grabbed him by the arm again and turned him, so his back came to the column. He brought the gun up and pointed it at Bosch’s face.
“Hold still,” Drummond commanded. “Reggie, cuff him to the beam.”
Banks pulled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked one of Bosch’s cuffs, then locked his arms around the column. Bosch realized that this meant they were not going to kill him. Not yet, at least. They needed him alive for some reason.
Once Bosch was secured, Cosgrove got brave and came up close to him.
“You know what I should’ve done? I should’ve unloaded my sixteen on you back in that alley. It would have saved me all of this. But I guess I aimed too high.”
“Carl, enough,” Drummond said. “Why don’t you go back to the house and wait for Frank. We’ll take care of this and I’ll be right behind you.”
Cosgrove gave Bosch a long look that ended with an evil smile.
“Have a seat,” he said.
He then kicked Bosch’s left foot out from beneath him and shoved him down by the shoulder. Bosch slid down the column to the ground, landing hard on his tailbone.
“Carl! Come on, man, let us handle it.”
Cosgrove finally backed away at the same time Bosch realized what he had meant about aiming high. Cosgrove had been the soldier who had opened fire that night at the crime scene, the gunfire that sent everyone to the ground for cover. And now Bosch knew that he had not seen anyone on a roof. He had only wanted to set nerves on edge and cause a distraction from the investigation of the crime he had committed.
“I’ll be in the car,” Cosgrove said.
“No, we leave the car up here. I don’t want Frank to see it when he’s coming in. It might make him nervous. His wife told him about Bosch driving by.”
“Whatever. I’ll walk back.”
Cosgrove left the barn, and Drummond stood in front of Bosch and looked down on him in the dim light. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the gun he had taken away from Bosch.
“Hey, Drummer,” Banks said nervously. “What did you mean about Frank not seeing the car? Why is Frank—”
“Reggie, I told you not to call me that.”
Drummond raised his arm and put the muzzle of Bosch’s gun to the side of Reggie Banks’s head. He was still looking down at Bosch when he pulled the trigger. The sound was deafening and Bosch was hit by the blowback of blood and brain matter a split second before Banks’s body dropped to the hay-strewn floor next to him.
Drummond looked down at the body. The heart’s last few contractions sent blood gushing from the bullet entrance point into the dirty straw. Drummond pocketed Bosch’s gun again and then reached down to the gun he had given Banks earlier. He picked it up.
“Back in the car, when you were alone with him, you told him to use it on me, didn’t you?”
Bosch didn’t answer and Drummond didn’t wait long before moving on.
“You’d think he would’ve checked to see if it was loaded.”
He popped out the magazine and wiggled it empty in front of Bosch.
“You were right, Detective,” he said. “You attacked the weak link and Reggie was the weakest link. Bravo on that.”
Bosch realized he had been wrong. This was the end. He brought his knees up and pressed his back against the beam. He braced himself.
He then dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. He conjured up an image of his daughter. It was from a memory of a good day. It was a Sunday and he had taken her to the empty parking lot of a nearby high school for a driving lesson. It had started rough with her foot heavy on the brake. But by the time they were finished, she was operating the car smoothly and with more skill than most drivers Bosch encountered on the real streets of L.A. He was proud of her, and more important, she was proud of herself. At the end of the lesson, when they had switched seats and Bosch was driving them home, she told him she wanted to be a cop, that she wanted to carry on his mission. It had come out of the blue, just something that had developed out of their closeness that day.
Bosch thought about that now and felt a calmness overtake him. It would be his last memory, what he took with him into the black box.
“Don’t go anywhere, Detective. I’m going to need you later.”
It was Drummond. Bosch opened his eyes and looked up. Drummond nodded and started heading back toward the door. Bosch saw him slide the gun he had given Banks under his jacket and into his back waistband. The ease with which he had put Banks down and the practiced motion of slipping the gun behind his back suddenly made things click into place for Bosch. You didn’t coldly dispatch someone like that unless you had done it before. And of the five conspirators, only one had a job in 1992 in which a throw-down gun—one without a serial number—might be useful. To Drummond, his IRG gun wasn’t a souvenir of Desert Storm. It was a working gun. That was why he brought it to L.A.
“It was you,” Bosch said.
Drummond stopped and looked back at him.
“Did you say something?”
Bosch stared at him.
“I said I know it was you. Not Cosgrove. You killed her.”
Drummond stepped back toward Bosch. His eyes roamed the dark edges of the barn and then he shrugged. He knew he held all the cards. He was talking to a dead man and dead men tell no tales.
“Well,” he said. “She was becoming a nuisance.”
He smirked and seemed delighted to share confirmation of his crime with Bosch after twenty years. Bosch worked it.
“How did you get her into the alley?” he asked.
“That was the easy part. I went right up to her and told her I knew who and what she was looking for. I said I was on the boat and I heard about it. I said I would be her source but I was scared and couldn’t talk. I told her I’d meet her at oh-five-hundred in the alley. And she was dumb enough to be there.”
He nodded as if to say done deal.
“What about her cameras?”
“Same as the gun. I threw all that stuff over the fences back there. I took the film out first, of course.”