“Where’s the radio?” Bosch said. “We’ve got to get help out here.”
Ramos stuck his upper body back through the cockpit window and came back out with the hand-held radio.
“Corvo, Corvo, come up, we’ve got an emergency here.” While waiting for a response, Ramos said to Bosch, “Do you believe this shit? That fucking monster comes outta nowhere. I didn’t know what the-”
“What’s happening?” Corvo’s voice came back on the radio.
“We’ve got a situation here. We need a medevac out here. Tools. The Lynx is wrecked. Corcoran is pinned inside. Has injuries.”
“-cation of the crash?”
“It’s not a crash, man. A goddamn bull attacked it on the ground. It’s wrecked and we can’t get Corcoran out. Our location is one hundred yards northeast of the breeding center, the barn.”
“Stay there. Help’s on the way.”
Ramos clipped the radio to his belt, held the flashlight under his arm and reloaded his handgun.
“Let’s each take a side of a triangle, the chopper in the middle and watch for this thing. I know I hit it but it didn’t show a thing.”
“No,” Bosch said. “Ramos, you and Aguila take sides of it and wait for help. I’m going to clear the barn. Zorrillo’s getting-”
“No, no, no, we don’t do it like that, Bosch. You aren’t calling any of the shots here. We wait here and when help-”
He stopped in midsentence and made a full turn. Then Bosch realized he heard it, too. Or, rather, felt it. A rhythmic vibration in the ground, growing stronger. It was impossible to place the direction. He watched Ramos turn in circles with the flashlight. He heard Aguila say, “El Temblar.”
“What?” Ramos yelled. “What?”
And then the bull appeared at the edge of vision. A huge black beast, it came at them undeterred by their number. This was his turf to defend. The bull seemed to Bosch in that moment to have come from within the darkness, an apparition of death, its head down and jagged horns up. It was less than thirty feet away when it locked on a specific target. Bosch.
In one hand he held the Smith. In the other the vest, with the wordPOLICE on it in reflective yellow tape. In the seconds he had left he realized the tape had caught the beast’s attention and singled him out. He also came to the conclusion that his gun was useless. He could not fell the animal with bullets. It was too big and powerful. It would take a perfect shot on a moving target. Wounding it, as Ramos had, would not stop it.
He dropped the gun and held the vest up.
Bosch heard yelling and shooting from his right side. It was Ramos. But the bull stayed on him. As it came closer he swept the vest to his right, its yellow letters catching the light of the moon. He let it go as the animal closed in. The bull, like a blur of black in darkness, hit the vest before it left his hand. Bosch tried to jump out of the way but one of the massive shoulders of the animal brushed him and sent him tumbling.
From the ground he looked up to see the animal cut to its left like a gifted athlete and close in on Ramos. The agent was still firing and Bosch could see the reflection of the moon off the shells as they were ejected from his gun. But the bullets did not stop the beast’s charge. They did not even slow it. Bosch heard the gun’s ejector go dry and Ramos was pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. His last cry was unintelligible. The bull hit him low in the legs and then raised its brutish and bloodied neck up, ejecting him into the air. Ramos seemed to tumble in slow motion before coming down headfirst and unmoving.
The bull tried to stop its charge but momentum and damage from bullets finally left it unable to control its huge weight. Its head dipped and it cartwheeled onto its back. It righted itself and prepared for another charge. Bosch crawled to his gun, picked it up and aimed. But the animal’s front legs faltered and it went down. Then it slowly turned onto its side and lay unmoving, save for the hesitant rise and fall of its chest. Then that stopped, too.
Aguila and Bosch took off for Ramos at the same time. They huddled over him but did not move him. He was on his back and his eyes were still open and caked with dirt. His head lolled at an unnatural angle. His neck appeared to have been cleanly broken in the fall. In the distance they could hear the sound of one of the Hueys flying their way. Bosch stood up and could see its spotlight sweeping over the scrubland, looking for them.
“I’m going to the tunnel,” Bosch said. “When they land, come in with backup.”
“No,” Aguila said. “I’m going with you.”
He said it in a way that invited no debate. He leaned down and took the radio off Ramos’s belt and picked up the flashlight. He gave the radio to Bosch.
“Tell them we are both going.”
Bosch radioed Corvo.
“Where’s Ramos?”
“We just lost Ramos. Me and Aguila are going to the tunnel. Alert the militia at EnviroBreed that we are coming through. We don’t want to get shot.”
He turned the radio off before Corvo could reply and dropped it on the ground next to the dead DEA agent. The other helicopter was almost on them now. They ran to the barn, their weapons held up and ready, and moved slowly around the outside until they were at the front and could see the bay door had been slid open. Wide enough for a man to pass through.
They went through and crouched in the darkness. Aguila began to sweep the flashlight’s beam around. It was a cavernous barn with stalls running along both sides to the back. There were crates used for trucking bulls to arenas stacked in the back along with towers made of bales of hay. Bosch saw a line of overhead lights running down the center of the building. He looked around and found the switch near the bay door.
Once the interior was lighted they moved down the aisle between the rows of stalls, Bosch taking the right and Aguila the left. The stalls were all empty, the bulls set free to roam the ranch. It was when they reached the back that they saw the opening to the tunnel.
A forklift was parked in the corner, holding a pallet of hay bales four feet off the ground. There was a four-foot-wide hole in the concrete floor where the pallet had sat. Zorrillo, or whoever the runner had been, had used the forklift to lift the pallet but there had been no one to drop it back down to hide his escape.
Bosch crouched down and moved to the edge of the hole and looked down. He saw a ladder leading about twelve feet down to a lighted passageway. He looked up at Aguila.
“Ready?”
The Mexican nodded.
Bosch went first. He climbed a few steps down the ladder and then dropped the rest of the way, bringing up his gun and ready to shoot. But there was no one in the tunnel as far as he could see. It wasn’t even like a tunnel. It was more of a hallway. It was tall enough to stand in and an electrical conduit ran along the ceiling feeding lights in steel cages every twenty feet. There was a slight curve to the left and so he could not see where it ended. He moved into the passageway and Aguila dropped down behind him.
“Okay,” Bosch whispered. “Let’s stay to the right. If there is shooting, I’ll go low and you go high.”
Aguila nodded and they began to move quickly through the tunnel. Bosch, trying to figure his bearings, believed they were heading east and slightly north. They covered the ground to the curve quickly and then pressed themselves hard against the wall as they moved into the second leg of the passage.
Bosch realized that the bend in the passage was too wide for them to still be on line with EnviroBreed. He stared down the last segment of the tunnel and saw that it was clear. He could see the exit ladder maybe fifty yards ahead. And he knew they were going somewhere other than EnviroBreed. He wished he hadn’t left the radio with Ramos’s body.