The Night Fire (Harry Bosch #22) - Michael Connelly Page 0,63

it back to the gang.”

“I thought about that, but then I put the risk on Dennard Dorsey. He’s in the Rolling 60s module at Men’s Central. If Kidd gets the word to somebody in there, Dorsey’s toast.”

“We need to scheme it some other way. Don’t use Dorsey.”

“There was another guy in the murder book who worked the street with Dorsey: Vincent Pilkey. But he died a few years back.”

“That was after Kidd left South Central, right? Think he’d know that Pilkey’s dead?”

Ballard shrugged and attacked the garlic toast.

“Hard to say,” she answered. “It could be risky using his name. Kidd might see right through the scam.”

“He might,” Bosch conceded.

He watched her eat the toast. She looked worn down, like a homeless person who had found a pizza crust in a trash can.

“I assume you’re going out there without backup,” he said.

“There is none,” she said. “This is you and me, and I need you on the phones.”

“What if I’m nearby? Someplace with Wi-Fi. There’s gotta be a Starbucks near whatever place you’re going. Or you can show me how to make my phone a hot spot. Maddie does that.”

“It’s too risky. You lose signal and you lose any calls that get made. I’ll be fine. It’s an in-and-out operation. I go in, light the fire, I get out. He—hopefully—starts making calls. Maybe texts.”

“We still need to figure out how you light the fire.”

“I think I just tell him I work cold cases, was assigned this one, and saw that he was never interviewed back in the day. I let it drop that back then there was a witness who described a shooter that looked a lot like him. He’ll deny, deny, I’ll leave, and my bet is he gets on the phone to try to find out who this witness is.”

Bosch thought about that and decided it could work.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

But he knew that if that was the plan, he needed to say something about Ballard’s readiness.

“Look, I know we made a deal and all that, but we’re talking about a high-risk move here and you need to be ready,” he said. “So, I have to say it: you look tired—and you can’t be tired when you do this. I think you should put it off until you’re ready.”

“I am ready,” Ballard protested. “And I can’t put it off. It’s a seventy-two-hour tap. That’s all the judge would give me. It starts as soon as the service providers begin sending the signal—which is supposed to be end of day today. So, we have three days to get this going. We can’t put it off.”

“Okay, okay. Then you take a sick day tonight so you can sleep.”

“I’m not doing that either. I’m needed on the late show and I’m not going to leave them high and dry.”

“Okay, then we go back to my house. I have a spare room you can use. You sleep on a bed, not sand, until it’s time to go to work tonight.”

“No. I have too much to do.”

“Then that’s too bad. You think this guy is safe because he’s supposedly not in the gang anymore. Well, he’s not safe—he’s dangerous. And I’m not going to monitor anything if I think there’s something wrong with the setup.”

“Harry, you’re overreacting.”

“No, I’m not. And right now, the thing I think is wrong is you. Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, and I’m not going to be part of that.”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not your daughter.”

“I know you’re not, and that has nothing to do with this. But what I said holds. You use the guest room or you can get Olivas to monitor the tap for you.”

“Fine. I’ll sleep. But I want to take this garlic toast to go.”

“Not a problem.”

Bosch looked around for the waiter so he could get the check.

28

While Ballard slept, Bosch went back to the Montgomery case. He kept the music off so as not to disturb her. Not knowing when she might get up, he decided to dive into the shortest stack of documents relating to the three remaining cases he needed to review. These emanated from Judge Montgomery’s service in civil court during the last two years of his life.

The shortest stack was actually a hybrid case: it involved the judge in both criminal and civil courts. It started with a murder case in which a man named John Proctor was convicted in an intentional hit-and-run of a woman who had been struck while walking to