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hockey team?
    He picked up a bat signed by Shea Hillenbrand, who’d broken into the Bigs with the Sox back in 2001, but got shipped to Arizona before the Sox won the Series last year. He wondered if that stung or if being able to lie out in the Arizona sun in January made up for it.
    He’d guess it didn’t.
    He was putting the bat back against the wall when he heard someone moving through the cellar. Moving fast. Running actually.
    And not away from something, but toward it.

    HARRY HAD WORKED HIS WAY along the back of the cellar finding nothing but wall and rocky, jagged flooring until he reached a tight space where an ancient water heater met a prehistoric oil heater. The space reeked of oil and mold and fossilized vermin. Had Bosch not been searching for an adolescent in possible mortaldanger, he might have missed the corridor on the other side of the heaters. But his penlight picked up the hole in the darkness on the other side of a series of pipes and ducts that were half hanging, half falling from the ceiling.
    Bosch worked his way past the heaters and entered a long thin space barely wide enough to accommodate any mammal with shoulders, never mind a full-grown adult male.
    As soon as you entered a tunnel, the first problem you noticed was that there was no left, no right, and no place to hide. You went into an entrance and you headed toward an exit. And should anyone who wished you ill pop up at either point Alpha or point Zeta, while you were passing between those points, your fate was in their hands.
    When Bosch reached the end of the passageway, he was bathed in sweat. He stepped out into a wide unlit room of dark brick and a stone floor with a drain in the center. He swept the room with his penlight and saw nothing but a metal crate. It was the kind used to house large dogs on family trips. A blue painter’s tarp partially covered it, held to the frame by nine bungee cords.
    And it was moving.
    Bosch got down on his knees and pulled at the tarp but the bungee cords were wrapped tight—three of them crossing the crate lengthwise and six crossing it widthwise. The cords were clasped down at the base of the crate and stretched taut so that separating the clasps with one hand was not an option. Bosch placed his Glock by his foot as the crate continued to rock and he picked up the sound of someone mewling desperately from under all that tarp.
    He pulled apart the clasps on the first of the three lengthwise cords and still couldn’t get a clear view inside. He put the penlight in his mouth and went to work on the second and that’s when the room turned white.
    It was as if someone had hung the sun a foot above his head or lit up a ballpark.
    He was blind. He got his hand on his Glock, but all he could see was white. He couldn’t tell where the wall was. He couldn’t even see the crate anymore and he was kneeling in front of it.
    He heard something scrabble to his left and he turned his gun that way and then the scrabbling broke right, coming around his weak side, and he turned with the Glock crossing his body, his eyes adjusting enough to pick up a shadow. Then he heard the thump of something very hard turn something less hard into something soft.
    Someone let out a dull yelp and fell to the floor in all that blinding light.
    “Bosch,” Patrick said, “it’s me. Close your eyes a sec.”
    Bosch closed his eyes and heard the sound of glass breaking—popping actually—and the heat left his face in degrees.
    “I think we’re good,” Patrick said.
    When Bosch opened his eyes, he blinked several times and saw the lights high on the wall, all the bulbs shattered. Had to be in the seven-hundred-watt range, if not higher. Huge black cones behind them. Eight lights total. Patrick had pulled back the curtain on the small window at the top of the wall, and the soft early-afternoon light entered the room like an answered prayer.
    Bosch looked at Paisley lying on the floor to his right, gurgling, the back of his head