The Black Echo

Bosch pays extra attention to his appearance on his way to meet Agent Wish for coffee. Wish tells Bosch the story of the bank heist; the suspects used an industrial drill and shovels to dig a tunnel to WestLand National. They used ATVs to power the drill and camouflaged the hole with a piece of plywood so as not to raise the suspicion of Department of Water and Power inspectors. Every few days, they opened fire hydrants on the street to wash away the dirt. The digging caused the vault’s sensor alarm to go off multiple times, but these were treated as false alarms. After they blew the vault, they spent Labor Day weekend camped out with automatic weapons, drilling safe-deposit boxes. It was a near-perfect crime.

The FBI suspected Vietnam War veterans because the robbers used C-4 explosives, set up tripwires in the tunnel, and used knife marks to keep from getting lost—all features of tunnel rat tactics. The FBI looked into nine such suspects, including Bosch.

As Wish and Bosch try to find Sharkey, they enter Sharkey’s motel room and catch a man soliciting sex from a teenage girl. Wish wants to arrest the man; Bosch lets him go, which makes her angry.