“Valley Pride Properties, can I help you?”
“Jerry Edgar, please.”
A few seconds passed and Bosch heard a couple of transfer clicks before his partner got on the line.
“This is Jerry, may I help you?”
“Jed, we just got another call. Up at the Mulholland Dam. And you aren’t wearing your pager.”
“Shit,” Edgar said, and there was silence. Bosch could almost hear him thinking, I’ve got three showings today. There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown. “What’s the call?”
Bosch told him what little he knew.
“If you want me to take this one solo, I will,” Bosch said. “If anything comes up with Ninety-eight, I’ll be able to cover it. I’ll tell him you’re taking the TV thing and I’m doing the stiff in the pipe.”
“Yeah, I know you would, but it’s okay, I’m on my way. I’m just going to have to find someone to cover for my ass first.”
They agreed to meet at the body, and Bosch hung up. He turned the answering machine on, took two packs of cigarettes from the cabinet and put them in his sport coat pocket. He reached into another cabinet and took out the nylon holster that held his gun, a Smith amp; Wesson 9mm-satin finished, stainless steel and loaded with eight rounds of XTPs. Bosch thought about the ad he had seen once in a police magazine. Extreme Terminal Performance. A bullet that expanded on impact to 1.5 times its width, reaching terminal depth in the body and leaving maximum wound channels. Whoever had written it had been right. Bosch had killed a man a year earlier with one shot from twenty feet. Went in under the right armpit, exited below the left nipple, shattering heart and lungs on its way. XTP. Maximum wound channels. He clipped the holster to his belt on the right side so he could reach across his body and take it with his left hand.