The Black Echo

“Some people, the ones down there with the spotlights, gave me a bunch of money once to use my name and my so-called technical advice for a TV show. So I didn’t have anything else to do with it. When I was growing up in the Valley I always wondered what it would be like to live in one of these things. So I bought it. It used to belong to a movie writer. This is where he worked. It’s pretty small, only one bedroom. But that’s all I’ll ever need, I guess.”

She leaned on the railing and looked down the slope into the arroyo. In the dark there was only the dim outline of the live oak grove below. He also leaned over, and absentmindedly peeled bits of the gold foil label off his beer bottle and dropped them. The gold glinted in the darkness as it fluttered down out of sight.

“I have questions,” he said. “I want to go up to Ventura.”

“Can we talk about it tomorrow? I didn’t come up to go over the files. I’ve been reading those files for almost a year now.”

He nodded and stayed quiet, deciding to let her get to whatever it was that brought her. After some time she said, “You must be very angry about what we did to you, the investigation, us checking you out. Then what happened yesterday. I’m sorry.”

She took a small sip from her bottle and Bosch realized he had never asked if she wanted a glass. He let her words hang out there in the dark for a few long moments.

“No,” he finally said. “I’m not angry. The truth is, I don’t really know what I am.”

She turned and looked at him. “We thought you’d drop it when Rourke made trouble for you with your lieutenant. Sure, you knew Meadows, but that was a long time ago. That’s what I don’t get. It’s not just another case for you. But why? There must be something more. Back in Vietnam? Why’s it mean so much to you?”

“I guess I have reasons. Reasons that have nothing to do with the case.”

“I believe you. But whether I believe you is not the point. I’m trying to know what’s going on. I need to know.”

“How’s your beer?”

“It’s fine. Tell me something, Detective Bosch.”

He looked down and watched a little piece of the printed foil disappear in the black.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Actually I do know and I don’t. I guess it goes back to the tunnels. Shared experience. It’s nothing like he saved my life or I saved his. Not that easy. But I feel something is owed. No matter what he did or what kind of fuckup he became after. Maybe if I had done more than make a few calls for him last year. I don’t know.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “When he called you last year he was well into this caper. He was using you then. It’s like he’s using you now, even though he’s dead.”

He’d run out of label to peel. He turned around and leaned his back on the railing. He fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand, put it in his mouth but didn’t light it.

“Meadows,” he said and shook his head at the memory of the man. “Meadows was something else… Back then, we were all just a bunch of kids, afraid of the dark. And those tunnels were so damn dark. But Meadows, he wasn’t afraid. He’d volunteer and volunteer and volunteer. Out of the blue and into the black. That’s what he said going on a tunnel mission was. We called it the black echo. It was like going to hell. You’re down there and you could smell your own fear. It was like you were dead when you were down there.”

They had gradually turned so that they were facing each other. He searched her face and saw what he thought was sympathy. He didn’t know if that’s what he wanted. He was long past that. But he didn’t know what he wanted.

“So all of us scared little kids, we made a promise. Every time anybody went down into one of the tunnels we made a promise. The promise was that no matter what happened down there, nobody would be left behind. Didn’t matter if you died down there, you wouldn’t be left behind. Because they did things to you, you know. Like our own psych-ops. And it worked. Nobody wanted to be left behind, dead or alive. I read once in a book that it doesn’t matter if you’re lying beneath a marble tombstone on a hill or at the bottom of an oil sump, when you’re dead you’re dead.

“But whoever wrote that wasn’t over there. When you’re alive but you’re that close to dying, you think about those things. And then it does matter… And so we made the promise.”

Bosch knew he hadn’t explained a thing. He told her he was going to get another beer. She said she was fine. When he came back out she smiled at him and said nothing.

“Let me tell you a story about Meadows,” he said. “See, the way they worked it was, they’d assign a couple, maybe three of us tunnel rats to go out with a company. So when they’d come across a tunnel, we’d zip on down, check it out, mine it, whatever.”

He took a long pull on the fresh beer.