With his arms cuffed behind him, Coleman could do nothing about the tear that dripped down his left cheek. He bowed his head.

“True story,” Bosch heard him say.

Bosch waited. Coleman said nothing else.

“Tell it,” Bosch finally said.

“Tell what?” Coleman asked.

“The true story. Tell it.”

Coleman shook his head.

“No, man, that’s the name. Trumont Story. They call him Tru, like T-R-U. He gave me the gun to do the job and I gave it back after.”

Bosch nodded. He had gotten what he’d come for.

“One thing, though,” Coleman said.

“What’s that?”

“Tru Story’s dead, man. Least that’s what I heard up here.”

Bosch had prepared himself on the way up. In the past two decades, the gang body count in South L.A. was in the thousands. He knew that there was a better-than-good chance he was looking for a dead man. But he also knew that the trail didn’t necessarily stop with Tru Story.

“You still going to send in that letter?” Coleman asked.

Bosch stood up. He was done. The brutish man in front of him was a stone-cold killer and was in the place he deserved to be. But Bosch had made a deal with him.

“You’ve probably thought about it a million times,” he said. “What do you do after you get out and hug your daughter?”

Coleman answered without missing a beat.

“I find a corner.”

He waited, knowing Bosch would jump to the wrong conclusion.

“And I start to preach. I tell everybody what I’ve learned. What I know. Society won’t have no problem with me. I’ll be a soldier still. But I’ll be a soldier for Christ.”

Bosch nodded. He knew that many who left here had the same plan. To go with God. Few of them made it. It was a system that relied on repeat customers. In his gut he knew Coleman was probably one of them.

“Then I’ll send the letter,” he said.

3

In the morning, Bosch went to the South Bureau on Broadway to meet with Detective Jordy Gant in the Gang Enforcement Detail. Gant was at his desk and on a phone call when Bosch arrived but it didn’t sound important and he quickly got off.

“How’d it go up there with Rufus?” he said.

He smiled as a way of showing understanding if Bosch said, as expected, that the trip to San Quentin was a bust.

“Well, he gave me a name but he also told me the guy was dead, so the whole thing could have been him playing me while I was playing him.”

“What’s the name?”

“Trumont Story. Heard of him?”

Gant just nodded and turned to a short stack of files on the side of his desk. Next to it was a small black box labeled “Rolling 60s—1991–1994.” Bosch recognized it as a box that was used in the old days for holding field interview cards. That was before the department started using computers to store intelligence data.