Bosch thought about the terror José Jr. must have felt as he tried to make it down the hallway to the exit door. The horror of knowing he had left his father behind.
Bosch couldn’t be sure, because there was no sound on the video and the shooting of José Jr. was off camera, but he guessed that the father had been shot first, and in the hallway his son had heard it as he tried to escape. Just before he too was shot and his killer came up on him to commit a final indignity and finish the job.
They took Truman south to where it merged with San Fernando Road and soon they crossed the city limits and into Pacoima. There was no “Welcome to Los Angeles” sign and the difference between the two communities was stark. The streets here were trash-strewn, the walls marked with graffiti. The medians were brown and weed-filled. Plastic bags were snagged on the fence line that guarded the Metro tracks that paralleled the road. To Bosch it was depressing. Though Pacoima had the same ethnic makeup as San Fernando, there was a visible disparity in the economic levels of the side-by-side communities.
Soon they were driving along the south perimeter of Whiteman Airport, a small general-aviation field ironically named, considering that it was surrounded by a community that was overwhelmingly brown and black. Lourdes slowed the car as they approached Terra Bella. Bosch could see a white one-story building on the corner. It stood out because its paint was fresh and shining in the sun and because there was no door or any signage announcing it as a clinic or anything else.
Lourdes made the turn on Terra Bella so they could check the side of the building. They spotted the double-door entrance on the side but there was no indication that the clinic was in operation. The new paint and lack of signage made it appear to be a clinic not quite open for business.
Lourdes kept driving south.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “You want to watch for a while, see if we can tell if it’s even open for business? Or you could just pull over and I could go try that door.”
Lourdes pondered what to do, while the car continued down the street.
“I don’t like barging in there when we don’t know what we’ve got,” she finally said.
She turned into the entrance drive of a company that manufactured fire sprinkler systems, then backed out to turn the car around.
“Let’s watch for a while,” she said. “See what happens.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Bosch said.
She drove a half block back up Terra Bella and then parked at the curb behind a sedan. It gave them a blind but still allowed them to keep eyes on the clinic’s door. They sat in comfortable silence for almost fifteen minutes before Lourdes spoke.
“You still tight with Lucy Soto?” she asked.
Bosch had forgotten that Lourdes and Soto knew each other at least casually through a Latina law enforcement organization.
“We talk now and then but I think yesterday was the first time I’d seen her in a couple years,” Bosch said.
He knew that Lourdes was angling to find out what the visit from downtown the day before was all about, but he wasn’t interested in talking about it. He changed the subject.
“Your son excited about the Dodgers this year?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Lourdes said. “He picked his games and I need to get the tickets. He thinks they are going to win it all this year.”
“About time.”
“Yeah.”
“You know that Soto’s never been to a Dodgers game? Her grandparents and her father were kicked out of Chavez Ravine back in the fifties and she’ll never set foot in that place. She doesn’t even like going to the academy.”
Bosch was talking about the forced relocation of an entire Latino neighborhood to make way for the baseball stadium near downtown. The bitterness of the move — including many tearful and violent evictions recorded on news cameras — still blemished the history of the much-loved team. The LAPD academy was on the edge of one of the stadium’s vast parking lots.
“I guess I understand all of that,” Lourdes said. “But it was a long time ago. Baseball is baseball. Like I’m going to deny a little boy his love of baseball because of something that happened before his mother was even born?”
“His mother’s love of baseball too,” Bosch said.
He smiled. Before Lourdes could formulate a comeback, they both saw a van turn the corner from San Fernando onto Terra Bella. Bosch at first thought it was heading to the sprinkler manufacturer, but it stopped directly in front of the door to the clinic. Bosch and Lourdes watched silently as the side door of the van slid open and people started climbing out and heading to the door of the clinic.
Bosch counted eleven people, not including the driver, who remained in the van. They disappeared into the clinic.
“So what was that?” Lourdes asked.
“Got me,” Bosch said. “Maybe they picked people up at an old folks home or something.”
“They weren’t all old.”
“Mostly old.”
“And they looked more like they were homeless than from a home.”
Bosch nodded and they dropped back into silence as they continued to watch. The van’s driver remained in place behind the wheel and the side door remained open.
About twenty minutes after they disembarked from the van, the passengers started coming out of the clinic and getting in line to get back in the van. Bosch looked more closely this time. They were diverse in gender and race but consistent in the scruffy clothing that hung loose on their bony frames. To Bosch it looked like a line for a soup kitchen on 5th Street in downtown.
“What do you think?” Lourdes asked.
“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “What kind of clinic doesn’t have a sign out front?”
“The illegitimate kind.”
“And those are patients?”
“Maybe pill shills. Jerry, the medical board investigator, called them that. They go to the so-called clinic, get a prescription, and then go collect the pills at the pharmacy. They’re paid a dollar a pill. I guess it’s not bad if you’re picking up sixty pills a pop.”
“But then what do the pills sell for on the street?”
“He said that depends on dosage and what you’re buying. Generally, a dollar a milligram. Oxycodone scrips usually come in thirty-milligram pills. But he said the holy grail of hillbilly heroin these days is the eighty-meg dose. Also something called oxymorphone. It’s the next big thing. The high is supposedly ten times as powerful as you get with oxycodone.”
Bosch took out his phone and opened up the camera app. Steadying the phone on the dashboard, he started taking photos of the clinic and the van. He used the zoom to get a closer look at the people waiting to climb in but their features blurred.
“You think the van’s going to start taking them around to pharmacies now?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Lourdes said. “Jerry said old people make the best shills. They’re prized.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because they want people who look old enough to be on Medicare. They give them counterfeit Medicare D cards — they buy the names of legit cardholders — and then they don’t have to pay full price for the prescriptions they fill.”
Bosch shook his head in disbelief.
“So Medicare pays the pharmacy back for the drugs,” he said. “In other words, the federal government finances the operation.”
“A lot of it,” Lourdes said. “According to Jerry.”
One last man came out of the clinic’s door and headed toward the van. By Bosch’s count, twelve men and women were now crammed into the back. They were white, black, and brown, the one unifying factor being that they all looked like they had been down rough roads. They had gaunt faces and a shabbiness about them that unmistakably came from the hard life. The driver, wearing sunglasses and a black golf shirt, got out and went around the front of the van to slide the door closed. By the time Bosch had zoomed in his camera, it was too late to get the shot. The driver was in the van and hidden behind reflections on the windshield.