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She put the phone down next to her knee so she could put everything back into the box. She had to carefully refold some of the clothes so they would look the way she had found them. She closed the lid and started screwing the hinges back into place.
She had just moved to the second hinge when she heard Bosch’s voice in her earbud.
“Renée, listen to me. He’s coming to the van. He and another guy. It’s too late to get out. You need to hide.”
“Hide? It’s a van, Harry.”
“I know, but they’re right there. Hide.Now.”
Ballard abandoned the hinge and flipped the mattress back down. She grabbed her phone and killed the light, then climbed onto the mattress, bunched an insulated blanket into a ball, and propped the two pillows on either side of it. She slid down between the pile and the back doors of the van. In the darkness she looked for a handle she could use to open the back doors if she needed to escape, but she saw nothing. The handle was beneath the level of the built-in storage box.
She reached down, slid the left leg of her jeans up, and pulled her Ruger out of her ankle holster.
She heard the voices of two men outside the van. The front doors opened and the men got in.
17
IF THE TWOmen in the front of the van knew that Ballard was hiding in the back, they didn’t give any sign of it. Neither opened the curtain to look. The engine started, and Ballard felt the van jerk into motion. The driver pulled out onto the coast highway and started heading north. Ballard heard Bosch’s panicked voice in her ears.
“Renée, I’m right behind you in the Defender,” he said. “Can you speak? Probably not. What about text—can you text? I need some kind of a signal from you or I gotta stop this. I’ll figure out how to do it. If I don’t get something from you in three minutes, I’m going to stop the van, even if I have to run it off the road.”
Ballard raised her head slightly and looked over the pile of bedding to the front of the van. The curtains were still closed, and judging from the banter between the driver and passenger, they didn’t know of her presence. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked that it was set to silent mode, then texted Bosch an all-clear message.
Code 4. Don’t stop the van.
She waited for Bosch to acknowledge.
“Okay, I got your text,” he said. “But if you say my name, that will be the signal for me to make a move. Anything goes sideways, just say my name. I don’t know if you can see where they’re going, but right now it’s north—actually, I guess it’s more west now—on PCH through Malibu.”
Ballard knew what he meant. Most of Malibu’s coast had a southern exposure as the coastline jutted out. It was what made several of its beaches good surfing breaks.
She thought of something and sent Bosch another text.
I can hear them when they talk. Send him a text about the SIGs, get them talking.
Bosch acknowledged verbally and she waited for his text to land. Soon she heard a phone ping, and the men up front started talking.
“Read this, I’m driving. It’s from the gun guy.”
“He says, ‘I’ve got another offer. You still need four?’ Fucking guy, just trying to jack up the price.”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re not going to pay for them. Tell him, yeah, we need four, and we can make the deal tomorrow. Tell him we also need shoulder slings and reload mags.”
There was silence; Ballard presumed the passenger was typing the text. Soon Bosch told her that they had responded and wanted to make the deal for four mini machine guns the next day.
“They want slings and extra magazines,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re up to but it sounds like they’re going to be carrying multiple weapons and lots of ammo.”
The van stopped and Ballard froze, wondering if they had heard something from the back.
“You’re at a traffic light,” Bosch said. “Las Flores Canyon.”
Ballard could picture it. She drove this road every day to and fromwork and when heading south to surf. They were at La Costa Beach and then it would be Carbon followed by the pier and then Malibu Lagoon.
The van took off again. Ballard thought about what she had heard and understood that if they were not going to pay for the mini machine guns, that meant they were going to either rob or kill the seller. But with the integrity of their plan—whatever it was—at stake, it seemed unlikely that they would only rob him.
Soon the van slowed and then jogged to the right and stopped. Ballard guessed that they had slipped into a parking space.
“It’ll be nice and crowded Monday,” the driver said.
