The Overlook - Michael Connelly [66]
Bosch moved the radiation monitor over the capsules in a circular pattern. There was no alarm. He turned the device over in his hand and looked at it. He saw a small switch on its side. With his thumb he pushed it up. A blaring alarm suddenly went off, the frequency of tones so fast that they sounded like one long, eardrum-piercing siren.
Bosch jumped back out of the truck and slammed the door shut. The poster fell to the ground.
“Harry!” Walling yelled. “What?”
She rushed toward him, closing her phone on her hip. Bosch pushed the switch again and turned the monitor off.
“What is it?” she yelled.
Bosch pointed toward the truck’s door.
“The gun’s in the glove box and the cesium’s in the center compartment.”
“What?”
“The cesium is in the compartment under the armrest. He took the capsules out of the pig. That’s why they weren’t in his pocket. They were in the center armrest.”
He touched his right hip, the place where Gonzalves was burned by radiation. The same spot would have been next to the armrest compartment when he was sitting in the truck.
Rachel didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just stared at his face.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked.
Bosch almost laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in about ten years.”
She hesitated as if she knew something but couldn’t share it.
“What?” Bosch asked.
“Nothing. You should be checked out, though.”
“What are they going to be able to do? Look, I wasn’t in the truck that long. It’s not like Gonzalves, who was sitting in there with it. He was practically eating off of it.”
She didn’t answer. Bosch handed her the monitor.
“It was never on. I thought it was on when you gave it to me.”
She took it and looked at it in her hand.
“I thought it was, too.”
Bosch thought about how he had carried the monitor in his pocket rather than clipped to his belt. He had probably switched it off unknowingly when he had twice put it in and removed it. He looked back at the truck and wondered if he had possibly just hurt or killed himself.
“I need a drink of water,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle in the trunk.”
Bosch walked back to the rear of his car. Using the open trunk lid to shield Walling’s view of him, he leaned his hands down on the bumper for support and tried to decipher the messages his body was sending to his brain. He felt something happening but didn’t know if it was something physiological or if the shakes he felt were just an emotional response to what had just happened. He remembered what the ER doctor had said about Gonzalves and how the most serious damage was internal. Was his own immune system shutting down? Was he circling the drain?
He suddenly thought of his daughter, getting a vision of her at the airport the last time he saw her.
He cursed out loud.
“Harry?”
Bosch looked around the trunk lid. Rachel was walking toward him.
“The teams are headed this way. They’ll be here in five minutes. How do you feel?”
“I think I’m okay.”
“Good. I talked to the head of the team. He thinks the exposure was too short to be anything serious. But you still should go to the ER and get checked out.”
“We’ll see.”
He reached into the trunk and got a liter bottle of water out of his kit. It was an emergency bottle he kept for surveillances that dragged on longer than expected. He opened it and took two strong pulls. The water wasn’t cold but it felt good going down. His throat was dry.
Bosch recapped the bottle and put it back in the kit. He stepped around the car to Walling. As he walked toward her he looked past her to the south. He realized that the alley they were in extended several blocks past the back of the Easy Print and ran behind all the storefronts and offices on Cahuenga. All the way down to Barham.
In the alley every twenty yards or so was a green Dumpster positioned perpendicular to the rear of the structures. Bosch realized they had been