“One last thing,” he said, and she turned at the door and looked back at him. “How’d you find me, Eleanor? You know, in the tunnels with Rourke.”
She hesitated and her eyebrows went up again.
“Well, I went down with Hanlon. But when we got out of the hand-dug tunnel we split up. He went one way in that first line and I went the other. I picked the winner. I found the blood. Then I found Franklin. Dead. And after that I was a little lucky. I heard the shots and then the voices. Mostly Rourke’s voice. I followed that. Why did you think of that now?”
“I don’t know. It just sort of came up. You saved my life.”
They looked at each other. Her hand was on the door handle and it was open just enough so that Bosch could look past her and see Galvin Junior still there, sitting in a chair in the hallway.
“All I can say is thanks.”
She made a shushing sound, dismissing his gratitude.
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“Don’t quit.”
He saw the crack in the door disappear, Junior with it. She stood there silently.
“Don’t leave.”
“I must. I’ll see you, Harry.”
She pulled the door all the way open now.
“Good-bye,” she said, and then she was gone.
Bosch remained motionless on the hospital bed for the better part of an hour. He was thinking about two people: Eleanor Wish and John Rourke. For a long time he closed his eyes and dwelt on the look on Rourke’s face as he crumpled and went down into the black water. I’d be surprised, too, Bosch thought, but there was also something else there, something he couldn’t exactly identify. Some kind of knowing look of recognition and resolution-not of his dying, but of another, secret knowledge.
After a while he got up and took a few tentative steps alongside his bed. His body felt weak, yet all the sleep in the last thirty-six hours had made him restless. After he got his bearings and his shoulder made a slightly painful adjustment to gravity, he began to pace back and forth alongside the bed. He was wearing pale green hospital pajamas, not one of the opened-back smocks that he would have found humiliating. He padded around the room in bare feet, stopping to read the cards that had come with the flowers. The protective league had sent one of the vases. The others came from a couple of cops he knew but wasn’t particularly close to, the widow of an old partner, his union lawyer and another old partner who lived in Ensenada.
He walked away from the flowers and went to the door. He opened it a crack and saw Galvin Junior still sitting there, reading a police equipment catalog. Bosch pulled the door all the way open. Galvin’s head jerked up and he slapped the magazine closed and slipped it into a briefcase at his feet. He didn’t say anything.
“So, Clifford-I hope I can call you that-what are you doing here? Am I supposed to be in danger?”
The younger cop didn’t say anything. Bosch glanced up and down the hall and saw that it was empty all the way down to the nurses’ station about fifty feet away. He looked at his door and noticed he was in room 313.
“Detective, please go back in your room,” Galvin finally said. “I am only here to keep the press out of your room. The deputy chief thinks they will probably try to get in to get an interview with you, and my job is to prevent that, to prevent you from being disturbed.”
“What if they use the sneaky method of just”-Bosch made a show of looking up and down the hall to make sure no one would hear-“using the telephone?”
Galvin exhaled loudly and continued not to look at Bosch. “The nurses are screening incoming calls. Only family, and I am told you don’t have family, so no calls.”
“How’d that lady FBI agent get by you?”
“She was cleared by Irving. Go back into your room, please.”
“Certainly.”
Bosch sat on his bed and tried to go over the case again in his mind. But the more he turned the parts of it over the more he got an anxious feeling that sitting on a bed in a hospital room was wasting time. He felt he was onto something, a breakthrough in the logic of the case. A detective’s job was to walk down the trail of evidence, examine each piece and take it with him. At the end of the trail, what he had in his basket made or lost the case. Bosch had a full basket, but he began to believe there were pieces missing. What had he missed? What had Rourke told him at the end? Not so much in his words but his meaning. And the look on his face. Surprise. But surprise at what? Was he shocked at the bullet? Or shocked by where, and who, it came from? It could have been both, Bosch decided, and either way, what did it mean?
Rourke’s reference to his share growing larger because of the deaths of Meadows, Franklin and Delgado continued to bother him. He tried to put himself in Rourke’s position. If all his partners were dead and he was suddenly the sole beneficiary of the first vault caper, would he say, “My share has gone up,” or would he simply say, “It’s all mine”? Bosch’s gut feeling was he would say the latter, unless there was still someone else sharing in the pot.
He decided he had to do something. He had to get out of this room. He was not under house arrest, but he knew that if he left Galvin was there to follow and report to Irving. He checked the phone and found that it had been turned on as Irving promised. No calls in, but Harry could call out.
He got up and checked the closet. His clothes were there, what was left of them. Shoes, socks and pants, that was it. The pants had abrasion marks on the knees but had been cleaned and pressed by the hospital. His sport coat and shirt had probably been taken off with scissors in the ER and either thrown away or put in an evidence bag. He grabbed all the clothing and got dressed, tucking his pajama top into his pants when he was done. He looked cloddish, but it would do until he got some clothes on the outside.
The pain in his shoulder was least when he held his arm up in front of his chest, so he began to put his belt around his shoulders to use it as a sling. But deciding that would make him too noticeable going out of the hospital, he put the belt back through the loops of his pants. He checked the drawer of the nightstand and found his wallet and badge, but no gun.
When he was ready, he picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialed the operator and asked for the third-floor nursing station. A woman’s voice said hello and Bosch identified himself as Deputy Chief Irvin Irving. “Can you get Detective Galvin, my man on the chair down the hall, to come to the phone? I need to speak with him.”
Bosch put the phone down on the bed and walked softly to the door. He opened it just wide enough to see Galvin sitting on the chair reading the catalog again. Bosch heard the nurse’s voice calling him to the phone, and Galvin got up. Bosch waited about ten seconds before looking down the hall. Galvin was still walking toward the nurses’ station. Bosch stepped out of the room and began walking quietly the opposite way.
After ten yards there was an intersection of hallways and Bosch took a left. He came to an elevator with a sign above it that said Hospital Personnel Only and he punched the button. When it came, it was a stainless steel and fake wood-grain affair with another set of doors at the back, big enough for at least two beds to be wheeled in. He pushed the first-floor button and the door closed. His treatment for the bullet wound had ended.
The elevator dropped Bosch off in the emergency room. He walked through and out into the night. On the way to Hollywood Station in a cab, he had the driver stop at his bank, where he got money out of an ATM, and then at a Sav-On drugstore, where he bought a cheap sport shirt, a carton of cigarettes, a lighter since he couldn’t handle matches, and some cotton, fresh bandages and a sling. The sling was navy blue. It would be perfect for a funeral.