Rickard had the undivided attention of the people standing outside the warehouse door. A couple of the stoned girls cheered his singing. The distraction allowed Bosch to move within four cars of the door and about three cars from the spot where Tyge had his dip.

As he passed the spot, Rickard stopped his song in mid-chorus and acted as if he had just spotted a treasure. He ducked between the two parked cars and came up with the beer bottle in hand. He was about to place it in his bag when the boy moved quickly between the cars and grabbed the bottle. Rickard refused to let go and spun so that the boy’s back was now to Bosch. Harry started moving.

“It’s mine, man,” Rickard yelled.

“I put it there, bro. Let it go before it spills.”

“Go get your own, man. This here’s mine.”

“Let it go!”

“You sure it’s yours?”

“It’s mine!”

Bosch hit the boy forcefully from behind. He let go of the bottle and doubled over the trunk of the car. Bosch kept him pinned there, pushing his forearm against the boy’s neck. The bottle stayed in Rickard’s hand. None of it spilled.

“Well, if you say so, I guess it’s yours,” the narc said. “And I guess that makes you under arrest.”

Bosch pulled his cuffs off his belt and hooked the boy up and then pulled him off the trunk. Some of the others were gathering around now.

“Fuck off, people,” Rickard said loudly. “Go back inside and sniff your laughing gas. Go get deaf. This here don’t concern you unless you want to go along with this boy to the shit can.”

He bent down to Tyge’s ear and said, “Right,bro? ”

When nobody in the crowd moved, Rickard took a menacing step toward them and they scattered. A couple of the girls ran back into the warehouse. The music drowned out Rickard’s laugh. He then turned around and grabbed Tyge by the arm.

“Let’s go. Harry, let’s take your wheels.”

They drove in silence for a while toward the station on Wilcox. They hadn’t discussed it earlier but Harry was going to let Rickard make the play. Rickard was riding in the back with the boy. In the mirror, Harry saw he had greasy, unkempt brown hair that fell to his shoulders. About five years earlier he should have had braces put on his teeth but one look at him and Bosch could tell he came from a home where things like that were not a consideration. He had a gold earring and an uninterested look on his face. But the teeth were what got to Bosch. Crooked and protruding, they more than anything else showed the desperation of his life.

“How old are you now, Kerwin?” Rickard said. “And don’t bother lying. We got a file on you at the station. I can check.”

“Eighteen. And you can wipe your ass with the file. I don’t give a shit.”

“Wooo!” Rickard yelped. “Eighteen. Looks like we got ourselves an A-dult here, Harry. No holding hands all the way to the juvie hall. We’ll go put this kid in seven thousand, see how quick he starts keeping house with one of the heavies.”

Seven thousand was what most cops and criminals called the county adult detention center, on account of the phone number for inmate information, 555-7000. The jail was downtown and it was four floors of noise and hate and violence sitting atop the county sheriff’s headquarters. Somebody was stabbed there every day. Somebody raped every hour. And nothing was ever done about it. Nobody cared, unless you were the one getting raped or stabbed. The sheriff’s deputies who ran the place called it an NHI detail. No Humans Involved. Bosch knew if they were going to squeeze this kid that Rickard had picked the right way to go.

“We got you bagged and tagged, Kerwin,” Rickard said. “There’s at least two ounces in here. Got you cold for possession with intent to sell, dude. You’re gone.”

“Fuck you.”

The kid drew each word out with sarcasm. He was going to go down fighting. Bosch noticed that Rickard was holding the green beer bottle outside the window so the fumes wouldn’t fill the car and give them headaches.

“That’s not nice, Kerwin. Especially, when the man driving here is willing to do a deal… Now if it was me, I’d just let you make your deals with the brothers in seven thousand. Couple days in there and you’ll be shaving your legs and walking ’round in pink underwear they dipped in the Hawaiian Punch.”

“Fuck off, pig. Just get me to a phone.”

They were on Sunset, coming up to Wilcox. Almost there and Rickard hadn’t even gotten around to what they wanted. It didn’t look as if the kid was going to deal, no matter what they wanted.

“You’ll get a phone when we feel like giving you a phone. You’re tough now, white boy, but it don’t last. Everybody gets broken down inside. You’ll see. Unless you want to help us out. We just want to talk to your pal Dance.”

Bosch turned onto Wilcox. The station was two blocks away. The kid said nothing and Rickard let the silence go for a block before giving another try.

“What do you say, kid? Give an address. I’ll dump this shit right now. Don’t be one of those fools who think seven thousand makes them the man. Like it’s some fucking rite of passage. It ain’t, kid. It’s just the end of the line. That what you want?”

“I want you to die.”

Bosch pulled into the driveway that led to the station’s rear parking lot. They would have to process the arrest here first, book the evidence, then take the kid downtown. Harry knew they would have to go through with it. The kid wasn’t talking. They had to show him that they weren’t bluffing.

Bosch didn’t get back to his search for Porter until four in the morning. By then he had had two cups of coffee in the station and was holding his third. He was back in the Caprice, alone and roaming the city.

Rickard had agreed to ferry Kerwin Tyge downtown. The kid had never talked. His shell of hardened rejection, cop hate and misguided pride never cracked. At the station, it had become a mission for Rickard to break the kid. He renewed the threats, the questions, with a zeal that Bosch found disturbing. He finally told Rickard that it was over. He told the narc to book the kid and they’d try again later. After stepping out of the interview room, the two decided to meet at seven thousand at 2P.M. That would give the kid about a ten-hour taste of the big house, enough time to make a decision.

Now Bosch was cruising the bottle clubs, the after-hour joints where “members” brought their own bottles and were charged for the setups. The setups, of course, were a ripoff, and some clubs even charged a membership fee. But some people just couldn’t drink at home alone. And some people didn’t have much of a home.

At a stoplight on Sunset at Western, a blur passed the car on the right and a figure lunged over the passenger side of the hood. Bosch instinctively drew his left hand up to his belt and almost dropped his coffee but then realized the man had begun to rub a newspaper on the windshield. Half past four in the morning and a homeless man was cleaning his windshield. Badly. The man’s efforts only smudged the glass. Bosch pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it out the window to the man when he came around to do the driver’s side. He waved him away.

“Don’t worry about it, partner,” he said and the man silently walked away.

Bosch headed off, hitting bottle clubs in Echo Park near the police academy and then Chinatown. No sign of Porter. He crossed over the Hollywood Freeway into downtown, thinking of the kid as he passed the county lockup. He’d be on seven, the narco module, where the inhabitants were generally less hostile. He’d probably be okay.

He saw the big blue trucks pulling out of the garage on the Spring Street side of theTimes building, heading off with another morning’s cargo of news. He tried a couple of bottle clubs near Parker Center, then one near skid row. He was scratching bottom now, getting near the end of the line and running out of places to check.