know he’s not going to say a word to us and the case will die right there.”
The captain wiggled his pen.
“Bosch, you know what the alternative is. You work the case until something breaks. You work the witnesses. You work the evidence. There’s always a link. I spent fifteen years doing what you’re doing and you know there is always something. Find it. A wiretap is a long shot and you know it. Legwork is always the better bet. Now, is there anything else?”
Harry felt his face growing red. The captain was dismissing him. What burned was that deep down Bosch knew Dodds was right.
“Thanks, Captain,” he said curtly and stood up.
The detectives left the captain and the lieutenant in the conference room and convened in Bosch’s cubicle. Bosch threw a pen he was carrying down on his desk.
“Guy’s an ass,” Chu said.
“No, he’s not,” Bosch quickly said. “He’s right and that’s why he’s the captain.”
“Then, what do we do?”
“We stay with Chang. I don’t care about overtime and what the captain doesn’t know won’t hurt him. We watch Chang and we wait for him to make a mistake. I don’t care how long it takes. I can make a hobby of it if I have to.”
Bosch looked at the other two, expecting them to decline to participate in a surveillance that would likely go beyond the bounds of the eight-hour day.
To his surprise, Chu nodded.
“I already talked to my lieutenant. I’m detached to this case. I can do it.” Bosch nodded and at first considered that he had been wrong to be so suspicious of Chu. His next thought, however, was that the suspicion was valid and that Chu’s commitment to stay with the case was just a means of remaining close to the investigation and monitoring Bosch.
Harry turned to his partner.
“What about you?”
Ferras reluctantly nodded and gestured toward the conference room across the squad room. Through the glass wall, Dodds could be seen still talking with Gandle.
“You know they know this is what we’re doing,” he said. “They’re not going to pay us and they leave it to us to either step up or let it go. It’s not fucking fair.”
“Yeah, so?” Bosch said. “Life isn’t fair. Are you in or out?”
“I’m in, but with a limit. I’ve got a family, man. I’m not sitting on surveillance all night. I can’t do it-especially for nothing.”
“All right, fine,” Bosch said, even though his tone communicated his disappointment with Ferras. “You do what you can. You handle the inside work and Chu and I will stay with Chang.”
Noting Bosch’s tone, Ferras put a mild protest in his own tone.
“Look, Harry, you don’t know what it’s like. Three kids…you try selling it at home. That you’re going to sit in a car all night watching some triad guy and your paycheck is going to look the same no matter how many hours you’re gone.”
Bosch put his hands up as if to say enough said.
“You’re right. I don’t have to sell it. I just have to do it. That’s the job.”
14
From behind the wheel of his own car, Bosch watched Chang as he performed menial chores at Tsing Motors in Monterey Park. The car lot had formerly been a 1950s-style gas station with two garage bays and an attached office. Bosch was parked a half block away on busy Garvey Avenue and was in no danger of being made. Chu was in his own car half a block past the car lot in the other direction. Using their personal cars for the surveillance was a violation of departmental policy but Bosch had checked with the motor pool and there were no undercover vehicles available. The choice was to use their unmarked detective cruisers, which might as well have been painted black and white for all the camouflage they offered, or to break policy. Bosch didn’t mind breaking policy because he had a six-CD stack in his car. Today he had it loaded with music from his latest discovery. Tomasz Stan′ko was a Polish trumpeter who sounded like the ghost of Miles Davis. His horn was sharp and soulful. It was good surveillance music. It kept Bosch alert.
For almost three hours they had watched their suspect handle his mundane duties on the lot. He had washed cars, greased tires to make them look new, even taken the one prospective customer on a test drive of a 1989 Mustang. And for the past half hour he had been systematically moving each of the three