City of Bones Page 7

  “I can tell by your face it was bad.”

  Bosch nodded. He felt strange. He was still sitting and she was still standing.

  “I can tell by the way you look that you had a tough one, too.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Before Bosch could say anything two cops, fresh from showers and in street clothes, came out of the station and headed toward their personal cars.

  “Cheer up, Julia,” one of them said. “We’ll see you over there.”

  “Okay, Kiko,” she said back.

  She turned and looked back down at Bosch. She smiled.

  “Some people from the shift are getting together over at Boardner’s,” she said. “You want to come?”

  “Um . . .”

  “That’s okay. I just thought maybe you could use a drink or something.”

  “I could. I need one. Actually, that’s why I was waiting here for you. I just don’t know if I want to get into a group thing at a bar.”

  “Well, what were you thinking, then?”

  Bosch checked his watch. It was now eleven-thirty.

  “Depending on how long you take in the locker room, we could probably catch the last martini call at Musso’s.”

  She smiled broadly now.

  “I love that place. Give me fifteen minutes.”

  She headed toward the station door without waiting for a reply from him.

  “I’ll be here,” he called after her.

  10

  MUSSO and Frank’s was an institution that had been serving martinis to the denizens of Hollywood—both famous and infamous—for a century. The front room was all red leather booths and quiet conversation with ancient waiters in red half-coats moving slowly about. The back room contained the long bar, where most nights it was standing room only while patrons vied for the attention of bartenders who could have been the fathers of the waiters. As Bosch and Brasher came into the bar two patrons slipped off their stools to leave. Bosch and Brasher quickly moved in, beating two black-clad studio types to the choice spots. A bartender who recognized Bosch came over and they both ordered vodka martinis, slightly dirty.

  Bosch was already feeling at ease with her. They had spent lunch together at the crime scene picnic tables the last two days and she had never been far from his sight during the hillside searches. They had ridden over to Musso’s together in his car and it seemed like a third or fourth date already. They small-talked about the division and the details Bosch was willing to part with about his case. By the time the bartender put down their martini glasses along with the sidecar carafes, he was ready to forget about bones and blood and baseball bats for a while.

  They clinked glasses and Brasher said, “To life.”

  “Yeah,” Bosch said. “Getting through another day.”

  “Just barely.”

  Bosch knew that now was the time to talk to her about what was troubling her. If she didn’t want to talk, he wouldn’t press it.

  “That guy you called Kiko in the back lot, why’d he tell you to cheer up?”

  She slumped a little and didn’t answer at first.

  “If you don’t want to talk about—”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s more like I don’t want to think about it.”

  “I know the feeling. Forget I asked.”

  “No, it’s okay. My partner’s going to write me up and since I’m on probation, it could cost me.”

  “Write you up for what?”

  “Crossing the tube.”

  It was a tactical expression, meaning to walk in front of the barrel of a shotgun or other weapon held by a fellow officer.

  “What happened? I mean, if you want to talk about it.”

  She shrugged and they both took long drinks from their glasses.

  “Oh, it was a domestic—I hate domestics—and the guy locked himself in the bedroom with a gun. We didn’t know if he was going to use it on himself, his wife or us. We waited for backup and then we were going to go in.”

  She took another drink. Bosch watched her. Her inner turmoil showed clearly in her eyes.

  “Edgewood had shotgun. Kiko had the kick. Fennel, Kiko’s partner, and I had the door. So we did the deed. Kiko’s big. He opened the door with one kick. Fennel and I went in. The guy was passed out on the bed. Seemed like no problem but Edgewood had a big problem with me. He said I crossed the tube.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t think so. But if I did, then so did Fennel, and he didn’t say jack to him.”

  “You’re the rookie. You’re the one on probation.”

  “Yeah, and I’m getting tired of it, that’s for sure. I mean, how did you make it through, Harry? Right now you’ve got a job that makes a difference. What I do, just chasing the radio all day and night, going from dirtbag to dirtbag, it’s like spitting on a house fire. We’re not making any headway out there and on top of that I’ve got this uptight male asshole telling me every two minutes how I fucked up.”

  Bosch knew what she was feeling. Every cop in a uniform went through it. You wade through the cesspool every day and soon it seems that that is all there is. An abyss. It was why he could never go back to working patrol. Patrol was a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.

  “Did you think it would be different? When you were in the academy, I mean.”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I just don’t know if I can make it through to a point where I think I’m making any difference.”

  “I think you can. The first couple years are tough. But you dig in and you start seeing the long view. You pick your battles and you pick your path. You’ll do all right.”

  He didn’t feel confident giving her the rah-rah speech. He had gone through long stretches of indecision about himself and his choices. Telling her to stick it out made him feel a little false.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

  “Fine with me,” he said.

  He took a long drink from his glass, trying to think of how to turn the conversation in another direction. He put his glass down, turned and smiled at her.

  “So there you were, hiking in the Andes and you said to yourself, ‘Gee, I wanna be a cop.’ ”

  She laughed, seemingly shaking off the blues of her earlier comments.

  “Not quite like that. And I’ve never been in the Andes.”

  “Well, what about the rich, full life you lived before putting on the badge? You said you were a world traveler.”

  “Never made it to South America.”

  “Is that where the Andes are? All this time I thought they were in Florida.”

  She laughed again and Bosch felt good about successfully changing the subject. He liked looking at her teeth when she laughed. They were just a little bit crooked and in a way that made them perfect.

  “So seriously, what did you do?”

  She turned in the stool so they were shoulder to shoulder, looking at each other in the mirror behind all the colored bottles lined along the back wall of the bar.

  “Oh, I was a lawyer for a while—not a defense lawyer, so don’t get excited. Civil law. Then I realized that was bullshit and quit and just started traveling. I worked along the way. I made pottery in Venice, Italy. I was a horse guide in the Swiss Alps for a while. I was cook on a day-trip tourist boat in Hawaii. I did other things and I just saw a lot of the world—except for the Andes. Then I came home.”

  “To L.A.?”

  “Born and raised. You?”

  “Same. Queen of Angels.”

  “Cedars.”

  She held out her glass and they clinked.

  “To the few, the proud, the brave,” she said.

  Bosch finished off his glass and poured in the contents of his sidecar. He was way ahead of Brasher but didn’t care. He was feeling relaxed. It was good to forget about things for a while. It was good to be with somebody not directly related to the case.

  “Born at Cedars, huh?” he asked. “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Don’t laugh. Bel
Air.”

  “Bel Air? I guess somebody’s daddy isn’t too happy about her joining the cops.”

  “Especially since his was the law firm she walked out of one day and wasn’t heard from for two years.”

  Bosch smiled and raised his glass. She clicked hers off it.

  “Brave girl.”

  After they put their glasses down, she said, “Let’s stop all the questions.”

  “Okay,” Bosch said. “And do what?”

  “Just take me home, Harry. To your place.”

  He paused for a moment, looking at her shiny blue eyes. Things were moving lightning fast, greased on the smooth runners of alcohol. But that was often the way it was between cops, between people who felt they were part of a closed society, who lived by their instincts and went to work each day knowing that how they made their living could kill them.

  “Yeah,” he finally said, “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

  11

  JULIA Brasher stood in the living room of Bosch’s house and looked at the CDs stored in the racks next to the stereo.

  “I love jazz.”

  Bosch was in the kitchen. He smiled when he heard her say it. He finished pouring the two martinis out of a shaker and came out to the living room and handed her a glass.

  “Who do you like?”

  “Ummm, lately Bill Evans.”

  Bosch nodded, went to the rack and came up with Kind of Blue. He loaded it into the stereo.

  “Bill and Miles,” he said. “Not to mention Coltrane and a few other guys. Nothing better.”

  As the music began he picked up his martini and she came over and tapped it with her glass. Rather than drink, they kissed each other. She started laughing halfway through the kiss.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. I’m just feeling reckless. And happy.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I think it was you giving me the flashlight.”

  Bosch was puzzled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, it’s so phallic.”

  The look on Bosch’s face made her laugh again and she spilled some of her drink on the floor.

  Later, when she was lying face down on his bed, Bosch was tracing the outline of the flaming sun tattooed on the small of her back and thinking about how comfortable and yet strange she felt to him. He knew almost nothing about her. Like the tattoo, there seemed to be a surprise from every angle of view he had on her.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just wondering about the guy who got to put this on your back. I wish it had been me, I guess.”

  “How come?”

  “Because there will always be a piece of him with you.”

  She turned on her side, revealing her breasts and her smile. Her hair was out of its braid and down around her shoulders. He liked that, too. She reached up and pulled him down into a long kiss. Then she said, “That’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me in a long time.”

  He put his head down on her pillow. He could smell the sweet scent of perfume and sex and sweat.

  “You don’t have any pictures on your walls,” she said. “Photos, I mean.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  She turned over so her back was to him. He reached under her arm and cupped one of her breasts and pulled her back into him.

  “Can you stay till the morning?” he asked.

  “Well . . . my husband will probably wonder where I am, but I guess I could call him.”

  Bosch froze. Then she started laughing.

  “Don’t scare me like that.”

  “Well, you never even asked me if I was involved with anyone.”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “You were obvious. The lone detective type.” And then in a deep male voice: “Just the facts, ma’am. No time for dames. Murder is my business. I have a job to do and I am—”

  He ran his thumb down her side, over the indentations of her ribs. She cut off her words with laughter.

  “You lent me your flashlight,” he said. “I didn’t think an ‘involved’ woman would have done that.”

  “And I’ve got news for you, tough guy. I saw the Mag in your trunk. In the box before you covered it up. You weren’t fooling anybody.”

  Bosch rolled back on the other pillow, embarrassed. He could feel his face getting red. He brought his hands up to hide it.

  “Oh, God . . . Mr. Obvious.”

  She rolled over to him and peeled back his hands. She kissed him on the chin.

  “I thought it was nice. Kinda made my day and gave me something to maybe look forward to.”

  She turned his hands back and looked at the scarring across the knuckles. They were old marks and not very noticeable anymore.

  “Hey, what is this?”

  “Just scars.”

  “I know that. From what?”

  “I had tattoos. I took them off. It was a long time ago.”

  “How come?”

  “They made me take them off when I went into the army.”

  She started to laugh.

  “Why, what did it say, Fuck the army or something?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Then what? Come on, I want to know.”

  “It said H-O-L-D on one hand and F-A-S-T on the other.”

  “Hold fast? What does ‘hold fast’ mean?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story . . .”

  “I have time. My husband doesn’t mind.”

  She smiled.

  “Come on, I want to know.”

  “It’s not a big deal. When I was a kid, one of the times I ran away I ended up down in San Pedro. Down around the fishing docks. And a lot of those guys down there, the fishermen, the tuna guys, I saw they had this on their hands. Hold fast. And I asked one of them about it and he told me it was like their motto, their philosophy. It’s like when they were out there in those boats, way out there for weeks, and the waves got huge and it got scary, you just had to grab on and hold fast.”

  Bosch made two fists and held them up.

  “Hold fast to life . . . to everything that you have.”

  “So you had it done. How old were you?”

  “I don’t know, sixteen, thereabouts.”

  He nodded and then he smiled.

  “What I didn’t know was that those tuna guys got it from some navy guys. So a year later I go waltzing into the army with ‘Hold Fast’ on my hands and the first thing my sergeant told me was to get rid of it. He wasn’t going to have any squid tattoo on one of his guys’ hands.”

  She grabbed his hands and looked closely at the knuckles.

  “This doesn’t look like laser work.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “They didn’t have lasers back then.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “My sergeant, his name was Rosser, took me out of the barracks and over to the back of the administration building. There was a brick wall. He made me punch it. Until every one of my knuckles was cut up. Then after they were scabbed up in about a week he made me do it again.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s barbaric.”

  “No, that’s the army.”

  He smiled at the memory. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He looked down at his hands. The music stopped and he got up and walked through the house naked to change it. When he came back to the bedroom, she recognized the music.

  “Clifford Brown?”

  He nodded and came toward the bed. He didn’t think he had ever known a woman who could identify jazz music like that.

  “Stand there.”

  “What?”

  “Let me look at you. Tell me about those other scars.”

  The room was dimly lit by a light from the bathroom but Bosch became conscious of his nakedness. He was in good shape but he was more than fifteen years older than her. He wondered if she had ever been with a man
so old.

  “Harry, you look great. You totally turn me on, okay? What about the other scars?”