The Night Fire: A Ballard and Bosch thriller (Harry Bosch 22) by Michael Connelly

thirty years old. Now sixty-two, he was one of the lucky few who had made it out alive.
    Nathan Brazil was another story. Ballard found two bankruptcies on his record and a string of eviction actions taken against him over the prior twenty-five years. She also found a rental application online that listed him as working in the food service industry, which she took to mean he was most likely a waiter, a bartender, or maybe a chef. A reference on the application—which was from 2012—was the general manager of a Tex-Mex restaurant in West Hollywood called Marix. Ballard had dined there frequently when, years earlier, she had lived in the area. It was the place to go for margaritas and fajitas. She wondered if she had ever been served by Brazil, even though she did not recognize him in the driver’s license photo she had pulled up.
    The Google Maps photo Ballard found for what she believed was Brazil’s current address was of a ’50s postmodern apartment house on Sweetzer. A single level of apartments over an open parking garage, the place looked worn and long out of style, its facade blemished by tenant-only parking signs slapped on the yellowed plaster.
    As she was printing out screenshots of her search, Ballard’s cell phone buzzed. The screen said UNKNOWN CALLER . She took the call.
    “This is Max Talis. You left me a message.”
    Ballard checked the wall clock and was surprised. She had left the message for Talis four hours earlier. She wasn’t sure if there was a time difference between L.A. and Idaho, but his calling back after midnight seemed strange for a retired man.
    “Yes, Detective, thank you for calling me back.”
    “Let me guess, this is about Biggie?”
    “Biggie? No, it’s not. I—”
    “That’s what I get called about most of the time. I only had the case twenty minutes and then the big boys took over. But I still get calls ’cause I’m in the files.”
    Ballard assumed he was talking about Biggie Smalls, the rapper whose murder in the ’90s was still officially unsolved but had been the subject of countless media reports, documentaries, and based-on-a-true-story movies. It was one of a long line of L.A. murders that captured the public imagination, when in reality it had been a street killing not that much different from the killing of John Hilton: a man shot to death in the front seat of his car.
    In her message, Ballard had not mentioned the case she wanted to talk to Talis about because it might have given him a reason not to call.
    “Actually, I want to talk to you about John Hilton,” she said now.
    There was a pause before Talis replied.
    “John Hilton,” he said. “You need to help me out with that one.”
    Ballard gave the date of the murder.
    “White male, twenty-four, shot once in his Toyota Corolla in a drug alley off of Melrose,” she added. “One behind the ear. You and Hunter caught it. I just inherited it.”
    “Wow, yeah, ‘Hilton’ like the hotel. I remember now we got that ID and thought,
I hope this guy isn’t related
, you know? Then we’d have a media firestorm on our hands.”
    “So you remember the case?”
    “I don’t remember everything but I remember that we never got anywhere with it. Just a street robbery gone bad, you know? Drug-related, gang-related—hard to clear.”
    “There are aspects of it that make it look different to me. Are you okay to talk now? I know it’s late.”
    “Yeah, I’m at work. I got plenty of time.”
    “Really? What do you do?”
    “You said on the message you work the midnight shift. We used to call that the late show. Anyway, I’m the same. Night watchman. The late show.”
    “Really. What kind of place is it?”
    “It’s just a truck stop. I got bored, you know? So I’m out here three nights a week, keepin’ the peace—and keeping the piece, if you know what I mean.”
    He was an armed security guard. To Ballard it seemed like a steep fall from LAPD homicide detective.
    “Well, I hope you stay safe,” she