Bosch awoke in a little over an hour. The room was darker, as the light from outside was no longer directly on the windows. He looked around and saw Eleanor was gone from the bed. He sat up and called her name, his voice reminding him of how he had answered the phone that morning.
“I’m here,” she called from the living room.
Bosch pulled on his clothes and left the bedroom. Eleanor was sitting on the couch, wearing the bathrobe he had bought for her at the hotel in Hawaii where they had gone after getting married in Las Vegas.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought… I don’t know.”
“You were talking in your sleep. I came out here.”
“What did I say?”
“My name, a few other things that didn’t make sense. Something about a fight. Angels fighting.”
He smiled and nodded and sat down in the chair on the other side of the coffee table.
“Flight, not fight. You ever been on Angels Flight in downtown?”
“No.”
“It’s two train cars. When one goes up the hill, the other goes down. They pass in the middle. I dreamed I was going up and you were in the car going down. We passed in the middle but you wouldn’t look at me… What do you think it means, that we’re going different ways?”
She smiled sadly.
“I guess it means you’re the angel. You were going up.”
He didn’t smile.
“I have to go back in,” he said. “This one’s going to take up my life for a while. I think.”
“You want to talk about it? Why were you called out?”
He ran the case down for her in about ten minutes. He always liked telling her about his cases. He knew it was a form of ego gratification, but sometimes she made a suggestion that helped or a comment that let him see something he had missed. It was many years since she had been an FBI agent. It was a part of her life that was a distant memory. But he still respected her investigative logic and skills.
“Oh, Harry,” she said when he was done telling the story. “Why is it always you?”
“It’s not always me.”
“Seems like it is. What are you going to do?”
“Same as I always do. I’m going to work the case. All of us are. There’s a lot there to work with – they just have to give us the time with it. It’s not going to be a quick turn.”
“I know you, they’ll throw every roadblock they can think of in front of you. It does no one any good to hook somebody up and bring them in on this. But you’ll be the one to do it. You’ll bring somebody in no matter if it makes every cop in every division despise you.”
“Every case counts, Eleanor. Every person. I despise people like Elias. He was a suckerfish – making his life off bullshit cases against cops just trying to do their jobs. For the most part, at least. Every now and then he had a legitimate case, I guess. But the point is nobody should get away with what they did. Even if it’s a cop who did it. It’s not right.”
“I know, Harry.”
She looked away from him, out through the glass doors and past the deck. The sky was turning red. The lights of the city were coming on.
“What’s your cigarette count?” he asked just to be saying something.
“I had a couple. You?”
“Still at zero.”
He had smelled the smoke in her hair earlier. He was glad she hadn’t lied.
“What happened over at Stocks and Bonds?”
He’d been hesitant about asking. He knew that whatever had happened during the interview had been what sent her to the poker room.
“Same as the others. They’ll call if something comes up.”
“I’ll go over and talk to Charlie next time I’m at the station.”
Stocks and Bonds was a storefront bail bond agency across from the Hollywood station on Wilcox. Bosch had heard they were looking for a skip tracer, preferably female because a good portion of the bail jumpers out of Hollywood station were prostitutes and a female tracer stood a better chance of running them down. He had gone over and talked to the owner, Charlie Scott, about it and he had agreed to consider Eleanor for the job. Bosch was honest about her background, both good and bad. Former FBI agent on the plus side, convicted felon being the minus. Scott said he didn’t believe the criminal record would be a problem – the position did not require a state private investigator’s license, which Eleanor could not qualify for with a record. The problem was that he liked his tracers to be armed – especially a woman – when they went looking for bail jumpers. Bosch didn’t share the concern. He knew that most skip tracers were unlicensed to carry weapons but did so anyway. The true art of the craft, though, was never to get close enough to your quarry to make having or not having a weapon a question. The best tracers located their quarry from a safe distance and then called the cops in to make the pickup.
“Don’t talk to him, Harry. I think he was just trying to do you a favor but reality hit him between when he told you to send me in and when I arrived. Just let it go.”
“But you’d be good at that.”
“That’s beside the point.”
Bosch stood up.
“I’ve got to get ready.”
He went into the bedroom and stripped off his clothes, took another shower and then dressed in a fresh suit. Eleanor was in the same position on the couch when he came back out to the living room.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said, not looking at her. “We’ve got a lot to do. Plus the bureau’s coming in tomorrow.”
“The bureau?”
“Civil rights. The chief made the call.”
“He thinks it will keep things calm down south.”
“He hopes.”
“Do you have a name of who is coming over?”
“Not really. There was an assistant SAC at the press conference today.”
“What was his name?”
“Gilbert Spencer. But I doubt he’ll be involved anymore.”
Eleanor shook her head.
“He’s after my time. He probably just came for the show.”
“Yeah. He’s supposed to send a team over tomorrow morning.”
“Good luck.”
He looked at her and nodded.
“I don’t have the number yet. If you need me just use the pager.”
“Okay, Harry.”
He stood there for a few moments before finally asking her what he wanted to ask all along.
“Are you going to go back?”
She looked back out through the doors.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Eleanor…”
“Harry, you have your addiction. I have mine.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know that feeling you get when you pull up on a new case? That little thrill you get when you’re back in the hunt? You know what I’m talking about. Well, I don’t have that anymore. And the closest thing I’ve found to it is when I pick those five cards up off the felt and see what I’ve got. It is hard to explain and even harder to understand, but I feel like I’m alive again then, Harry. We’re all junkies. It’s just different drugs. I wish I had yours, but I don’t.”
Bosch just stared at her a moment. He wasn’t sure he could say anything without his voice betraying him. He moved to the door, looking back at her once he had it open. He moved through it but then stepped back.
“You break my heart, Eleanor. I always hoped that I could make you feel alive again.”
Eleanor closed her eyes. She looked as though she might cry.
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” she whispered. “I should never have said that.”
Bosch stepped silently through the door and closed it behind him.
Chapter 17
BOSCH was still feeling emotionally bruised when he got to Howard Elias’s office a half hour later. The door was locked and he knocked. He was about to use the keys to open it when he saw movement behind the glazed glass. Carla Entrenkin opened the door and allowed him in. He could tell by the way she appraised him that she noticed he was wearing a different suit.