The Black Echo

“Those VA files are old,” Bosch said. “The whole story is old. I’m not going to sit here and present a case for why I should be a suspect. But that VA stuff is old. I haven’t seen a shrink, VA or otherwise, in five years. And as far as that phobia shit goes, I went into a tunnel to look at Meadows yesterday. What do you think your shrinks in Quantico would write about that?”

He could feel his face turn red with embarrassment. He had said too much. But the more he tried to control and hide it, the more blood rushed into his face. The wide-hipped waitress chose that moment to come back and freshen his coffee.

“Ready to order?” she said.

“No,” Wish said without taking her eyes off Bosch. “Not yet.”

“Hon, we have a big lunch crowd come in here, and we’re going to need the table for people what want to eat. I make my living off the hungry ones. Not the ones too angry to eat.”

She walked away with Bosch thinking that waitresses were probably better observers of human behavior than most cops. Wish said, “I am sorry about all of this. You should have let me get up when I first wanted to.”

The embarrassment was gone but the anger was still there. He wasn’t looking out of the booth anymore. He was looking right at her.

“You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don’t know me. Tell me what you know.”

“I don’t know you. I know about you,” she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. “You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another.”

She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. “Hieronymus Bosch… The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you’ve seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider’s job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it.”

She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.

“It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”

Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn’t say anything, and there was a long period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.

“When you get back to the office,” he finally began, “you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on.”

“I can’t do it. He won’t do it.”

“Yes, he’ll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it.”

“Or what? What can you do? I mean, let’s be honest. With your record, you’ll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn’t do it himself.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he’ll be reading a story in theTimes about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau’s nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it’ll make waves all the way to D.C. It’ll be embarrassing and it’ll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You’ll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away.”

She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. “It’s not my call. I’ll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I’d call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that’s what I’ll tell him to do.”

“It’s no bluff. You’ve checked me out, you know I’ll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it’s no bluff. I’ll have nothing to lose by doing it. He’ll have nothing to lose by bringing me in.”

He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.

“You’ve got my file. You know where you can reach me.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, and then, “Hey, Bosch?”

He stopped and looked back at her.