Bosch jumped from cover and fired repeatedly at the helicopter. After four shots his gun was dry and he ran back to the front door. He crouched next to Mendenhall as he ejected his gun’s magazine.

“Detective, are you hit?”

He slapped the second magazine into the gun and racked one bullet into the chamber.

“Mendenhall! Are you hit?”

“No! I mean, I don’t know. Something hit my eye.”

He grasped her arm to pull her hand from her eye. She resisted.

“Let me look.”

She gave way and he pulled her hand back. He looked closely into her eye but could not see anything.

“You’re not hit, Mendenhall. You must’ve caught a splinter or some of the plaster dust.”

She pulled her hand back over the eye. Outside, the revving turbine hit critical speed, and Bosch knew Drummond was taking off. He got up and started back toward the front door.

“Just let him go,” Mendenhall called. “He won’t be able to hide.”

Bosch ignored her and ran back out, moving into the middle of the turnaround just as the helicopter started to rise from the pad.

Bosch was two hundred feet away, with the helicopter moving right to left along the tree line as it rose. He extended the gun in a two-armed grip and aimed for the turbine housing. He knew he had seven shots to bring the chopper down.

“Bosch, you can’t shoot at him!”

Mendenhall had come out of the house and was behind him.

“The hell I can’t! He shot at us!”

“It’s not in policy!”

She had now come up next to him. She still held a hand over her injured eye.

“It’s in my policy!”

“Listen to me! There is no longer a threat to you! He’s flying away! You are not defending life.”

“Bullshit!”

But Bosch raised his aim high and fired three quick shots into the sky, hoping Drummond would hear them or see the muzzle flashes.

“What are you doing?”

“Making him think I’m shooting at him.”

Bosch raised the gun and shot three more times into the air, keeping one bullet just in case. It worked. The helicopter changed directions, banking sharply away from Bosch’s position and flying behind the house as Drummond tried to use the structure as a shield.

Bosch held still and waited, and then he heard it. A loud metallic snap followed by the whirring sound of a broken rotor spinning wildly into the almond grove, slashing through branches like a scythe.

There was a millisecond of time suspension, when it seemed as though the turbine had gone silent and that there was no sound in the world at all. And then they heard the helicopter crash into the hillside behind the château. They saw a ball of flame rotate up over the roofline and disappear into the sky.

“What?” Mendenhall yelled. “What happened? You didn’t shoot anywhere near him!”