The Narrows - Michael Connelly [98]
“It didn’t get caught. I just—what’s your point?”
“Nothing. I was just going to say that I always carried my extra in my jacket pocket. It gave it some weight, you know. So when you had to flip it back the extra weight carried it all the way back and out of the way.”
“Thanks for the tip,” she said evenly. “Can we concentrate on this now?”
“Sure, Rachel. You going to take the lead here?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
He followed her up the ramp. She thought she saw a smile on his face in the reflection on the glass of the trailer’s door. She opened it, engaging an overhead bell that announced their arrival.
They stepped into a small and empty barroom. To their right was a pool table, its green felt faded by time and stained by drink spills. It was a small table but still did not have enough clearance in the small space. Even breaking a rack would probably require holding a cue at a forty-degree angle.
To the left of the door was a six-stool bar with three shelves of glasses and take-your-pick poison behind it. There was no one in the bar but before Rachel or Bosch could call out a hello, a set of black curtains to the left of the bar split and a man stepped out, his eyes creased with sleep even though it was almost noon.
“Can I he’p you? Kind a’ early, idn’t it?”
Rachel hit him with the credentials and that seemed to crack his eyes open a little wider. He was in his early sixties, she guessed, though his unkempt bed hair and the unshaven white stubble on his cheeks may have skewed her estimate.
He nodded as though he had just solved some sort of internal mystery.
“So you’re the sister, right?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re Tom’s sister, right? He said you might come.”
“Tom who?”
“Tom Walling. Who do you think?”
“We’re looking for a man named Tom who drives customers from the brothels. Is that Tom Walling?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Tom Walling was my driver. He told me that one day his sister might come here looking for him. He never said she was no FBI agent.”
Rachel nodded, trying to cover the jolt. It wasn’t necessarily the surprise that buzzed her. It was the audacity and the deeper meaning, the magnitude of Backus’s plan.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Billings Rett. I own this place and I’m also the mayor around here.”
“The mayor of Clear.”
“That’s right.”
Rachel felt something tap her arm and looked down to see the file containing the photos. Bosch was giving it to her but staying back. He seemed to know things had suddenly swung. This was now more about her than Terry McCaleb, or even Bosch. She took the file and removed one of the photographs McCaleb had taken of the fishing client known to him as Jordan Shandy. She showed it to Billings Rett.
“Is that the man you knew of as Tom Walling?”
Rett spent only a few seconds looking at the photo.
“That’s it. Right down to that Dodgers hat. We get all the games here on the dish and Tom was Dodger blue through and through.”
“He drove a car for you?”
“The only car. I’m not that big of an operation.”
“And he told you his sister would come here?”
“No, he said she might. And he gave me something.”
He turned and looked at the shelves behind the bar. He saw what he was looking for and reached up to the top shelf. He pulled down an envelope and handed it to Rachel. The envelope left a rectangle in the dust on the glass shelf. It had been up there awhile.
The envelope had her full name on it. She turned her body slightly as if to shield it from Bosch and started to open it.
“Rachel,” Bosch said. “Should you process it first?”
“It doesn’t matter. I know it’s from him.”
She tore the envelope open and pulled out a three-by-five card. She started to read the handwritten note on it.
Dear Rachel,
If as I hope you are the first to read this, then I have taught you well. I hope this finds you in good health and spirits. Most of all, I hope this means you have survived your interment within the bureau and are back on top. I hope he who taketh away can also giveth back. It was never my intention,