Utterly Compelling: Read an Extract from The Waiting by Michael Connelly

MONDAY: 7:28 A.M.

She liked waiting for the wave more than riding the wave. Facing the cliffs, straddling the board, her hips finding the up-and-down rhythm of the surface. Riding it like a horse, making her think about Kaupo Boy when she was a child. There was a reverence to the moment before the next set came in and it was time to dig down and paddle.

She checked her watch. She could fit in one more. She’d ride it all the way in if she could. But she savoured the moment of just floating, closing her eyes and tilting her head upward. The sun was just over the cliffs now and it warmed her face.

“Haven’t seen you here before.”

Ballard opened her eyes. It was the guy on the One World twelve board. An OG with no wetsuit, no leash, his skin burnished to a dark cherrywood. She braced for what she knew would come next: territorial male posturing.

“I’m usually at Topanga,” she said. “But there was nothing there this morning.”

She didn’t mention that she’d consulted a wave app. The OGs would never look at an app.

He was twenty feet to her left, riding the low rollers sideways so he could keep an eye on her. Women were unusual at Staircases. It was a big boy’s break. Lots of rocks in the short tide. You had to know what you were doing, and Ballard did. She hadn’t crossed anybody’s tube, had not pulled out of a wave too soon. If this guy was going to try to school her, she would shut him down quick.

“I’m Van,” he said.

“Renée,” she said.

“So, you wanna get breakfast at Shoreline after?”

A little forward, but okay.

“Can’t,” she said. “Got one more set and then I got a job. But thanks.”

“Maybe next time,” Van said.

Before the conversation got more awkward, somebody farther down the line began paddling, aligning his board with an incoming wave. It was like a bird startling and jumping the whole flock into flight. Ballard checked over her shoulder and saw the next set coming in tall. She flipped forward and brought her legs up on the board. She started paddling. Deep strokes, fingers together to get speed. Digging down. She didn’t want to miss the wave, not in front of Van.

She glanced to her left and saw him paddling stroke for stroke with her. He was going to press her, show her whose break it was.

Ballard paddled harder, feeling the burn in her shoulders. The board started to rise with the wave, and she made her move, jumping up into a crouch on the center line. She put her left foot behind her and stood just as the wave crested. She pushed the nose down and began slicing down the face of the wave.

She heard Van’s voice in the wake, calling her goofy foot.

She put her hands out for balance, heeled the board into a turn, and went up the wall before cutting it back down and taking it all the way in. For eight seconds everything about the world was gone. It was just her and the ocean. The water. Nothing else.

She was coasting on foam when she remembered Van and looked back for him. He was nowhere in sight and then his head came up in the surf along with his red board. He raised his hand and Ballard nodded her goodbye. She stepped off, lifted her board, and walked out of the surf.

She had her wetsuit stripped down to her hips by the time she rounded the dunes and got to the parking lot. The combination of sun and wind was already drying her skin. She leaned her board against the side of the Defender and reached under the rear wheel well for her key box.

It was gone.

She crouched down and looked at the asphalt around the tire for the magnetic box.

It was not there.

She leaned in, looking up into the well, hoping she had set the box in the wrong spot.

But it was gone.

“Fuck.”

She quickly got up and went to the door. She pulled the handle and the door opened, having been left unlocked.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

There was the key and the magnetic box on the driver’s seat. She saw that the glove compartment was open. She leaned in, reached under the driver’s seat, and swept her hand back and forth on the carpet.

Her phone, gun, wallet, and badge were gone. She swept her hand farther under the seat and pulled out her handcuffs and a seven-shot Ruger boot gun that the thief had apparently missed.

She stood up and looked around the parking lot. No one was there. Just the row of cars and campers belonging to the surfers still out on the water.

“Fuck me,” she said…

Continue reading the extract here.

Buy a copy of The Waiting here.

Synopsis

LAPD Detective Renée Ballard finds herself tracking a terrifying serial rapist while also defending her career, with the help of the newest volunteer to the Open-Unsolved Unit: Patrol Officer Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter.

Renée Ballard and the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit arrest a man in his early twenties and find themselves with a DNA link to a serial rapist and murderer known as the Pillowcase Rapist. Twenty years earlier, after a five-year reign of terror, he had suddenly gone quiet. But when Ballard and her team move in on their suspect, they encounter a baffling web of secrets and legal hurdles.

At the same time, Ballard's badge, gun and ID are stolen—a theft she can't report without giving her enemies in the department the ammunition they need to end her career. Working the burglary leads to unexpected danger and, with no choice but to go outside the department, Ballard knocks on Harry Bosch's door.

Meanwhile, Ballard has taken on Patrol Officer Maddie, Harry's daughter, as a new volunteer to the cold case unit. But Renée soon learns that Maddie has an ulterior motive for getting access to the city's library of lost souls.

Ballard is determined to bring justice—but opening this cold case also opens a Pandora's box…

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing - a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars.In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America.Connelly's books have been translated in 31 languages and have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Dilys, Nero, Barry, Audie, Ridley, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), Grand Prix (France), and Premio Bancarella (Italy) awards.Michael lives with his family in Florida.Michael also makes regular appearances on the TV show Castle .

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