The Closers by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online

light from the room up ahead of him. It was candlelight licking at the ceiling and walls. He pushed himself against the side wall and took the last three steps up.
    The room was large and crowded. He could see the makeshift beds lined against the two long walls. Still figures, like heaps of rummage sale clothes, slept on each. At the end of the room a single candle burned and a girl, a few years older and dirtier, heated a bottle cap over the flame. The boy studied her face in the uneven light. He could see that it wasn't Isabelle.
    He started moving down the center of the room, between the sleeping bags and the newspaper pallets. From side to side he looked, searching for the familiar face. It was dar\ but he could tell. He'd know her when he saw her.
    He got to the end, by the girl with the bottle cap. And Isabelle wasn't there.
    "Who are you looking for?" asked the girl.
    She was drawing back^ the plunger on the hypodermic, sucking the brown-black^ liquid through a cigarette butt filter from the bottle cap. In the murky light the boy could see the needle scarring on her nec/^.
    "Just somebody," he said.
    She looked away from her work^ and up to his face, surprised by his voice. She saw the young face in the camouflage of oversized and dirty
    clothes.
    "You're a young one," she said. "You better get out of here before the houseman comes back^."
    The boy knew what she meant. All the squats in Hollywood had somebody in charge. The houseman. He exacted a fee in money or drugs or flesh
    "He finds you, he'll bust your cherry ass and put you out on-"
    She suddenly stopped and blew out the candle, leaving him in the dark. He turned bac\ to the door and the stairs, and all his fears seized up in him like a fist closing on a flower. A silhouette of a man stood at the top of the steps. A big man. Wild hair. The houseman. The boy involuntarily too\ a step back^ and tripped over someone's leg. He fell, the flashlight clattering on the floor next to him and going out.
    The man in the doorway moved and started coming at him.
    "Hanky boy I" the man yelled. "Come here, Hank!"
    Pierce awoke at dawn, the sun rescuing him from the dream of running from a man whose face he could not see. He had no curtains in the apartment yet and the light streamed through the windows and burned through his eyelids. He crawled out of the sleeping bag, looked at the photo of Lilly he had left on the floor and went into the shower. When he was finished he had to dry off with two T-shirts he'd dug out of one of the clothing boxes. He'd forgotten to buy towels.
    He walked over to Main Street to get coffee, a citrus smoothie and the newspaper. He read and drank slowly, almost feeling guilty about it. Most Saturdays he was in the lab by dawn.
    When he was finished with the paper it was almost nine. He walked back to the Sands and got into his car, but he didn't go to the lab as usual.
    Fifteen minutes before ten o'clock Pierce got to the Hollywood address he had written down for L.A. Darlings. The location was a multi-level office complex that looked as legitimate as a McDonald's. L.A. Darlings was located in Suite 310. On the glazed glass door the largest lettering read entrepreneurial concepts unlimited. Beneath this was a listing in smaller letters of ten different websites, including L.A. Darlings, that apparently fell under the Entrepreneurial Concepts umbrella. Pierce could tell by the titling of the site addresses that they were all sexually oriented and part of the Internet's dark universe of adult entertainment.
    The door was locked but Pierce was a few minutes early. He decided to use the time by taking a walk and thinking about what he was going to say and how he was going to play this.
    "Here, I'll open it."
    He turned as a woman approached the door with a key. She was about twenty-five and had crazy blonde hair that seemed to point in all directions. She wore cutoff jeans and sandals and a short shirt that exposed her pierced navel. She had looped over