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“Perfect. I gotta go.”
He walked off, carrying the box with both hands.
“Wait, what do you want me to do?” Ballard said.
“Just stay there,” Bosch said. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?”
Bosch didn’t answer. He picked up his pace and followed behind the man pushing the dolly toward the glass doors. Ballard watched as the man raised his hand and held a fob to an electronic reader at the side of the entrance.
The double doors split and slid open. The man started pushing the dolly again, and Bosch fell into step behind him.
“Hold the doors,” he said. He raised the box up so it blocked the lower half of his face when the man turned to see who had spoken.
The man showed no alarm. He even took one hand off the dolly’s push bar and signaled Bosch in.
Ballard smiled. It reminded her of her move to get into the lab earlier. “Fucking A,” she said to herself.
The automatic doors closed and Bosch disappeared inside. Ballard saw the interior lights of the facility, most likely on motion-activated circuits, illuminate.
Ballard closed the back of the car and walked to the front, leaned against the fender, and waited. Several minutes went by. When she saw the automatic doors open again, it was the man from the pickup who came out. She watched him get in his truck and drive out of the storage facility’s parking lot. That left only Bosch inside, and Ballard began to worry. She pulled her phone and called him but got no answer.
She called twice more with the same outcome and started to worry that the physical exertion of the day had caught up with Bosch. She knew she couldn’t leave him there but she wasn’t sure what to do. On the fourth call she even left a message: “Harry, what is going on? Call me back.”
She was no longer leaning nonchalantly on the fender. She began pacing, head down, thinking about how to call in the emergency to the Santa Monica police. No matter how she played it out, bringing the cops in didn’t end well for her or Bosch.
She had her back to the automatic doors when she finally heardBosch calling her. She whipped around to see him standing in the open doorway, waving her in.
Ballard walked briskly toward the entrance but slowed as she got close.
“It’s clear,” he said. “You can come in.”
She entered slowly. “What about—”
“The cameras are taken care of.”
He pointed overhead as he stepped into a central hallway that fronted several tributary aisles of storage rooms. Ballard looked up and saw her Dodgers cap draped over a mounted camera at the top of the wall.
“This way,” Bosch said.
She followed him until he turned left and headed down an aisle without hesitation. Ballard entered behind him and saw the hood of her hoodie draped over another camera.
“Twenty-two and twenty-three are down at the end,” Bosch said.
As she followed, Ballard noted that each of the storage units they passed had a roll-down steel door that was locked with a padlock through a hasp bolted to the concrete floor. When she caught up to Bosch at the end of the aisle, he was standing by two side-by-side open doors. The tire iron was on the ground next to one of two broken hasps that had been pried out of their concrete moorings.
“Harry, what did you do?”
“We wanted to see what the guy had. Now we can.”
“But whoever runs this place will probably call him tomorrow and then he’ll know somebody’s onto him.”
“No, because they’ll tell him his was one of several units that got hit.”
He pointed to the other side of the aisle. Ballard saw that three other units’ padlocks and corresponding hasps had been pried out of the concrete. She turned back to Bosch and noticed the sweat on hisforehead and cheeks. It had taken some muscle to break the security of the storage rooms.
“We probably shouldn’t waste time,” he said.
