"It's too late," she said. "He's gone." I was weak but Backus was weaker. I could tell he didn't have the same strength he'd brought to the confrontation on the river's edge. He had pulled me loose from the bridge because I hadn't seen him coming and he'd hit me with all his weight But now he was grabbing at me like a drowning man, just trying to hold on.

We tumbled through the water, drawing down to the bottom. I tried to open my eyes but the water was too dark to see through. I drove him down hard into the concrete floor and then shifted behind him. I wrapped the cable I still gripped around his neck. I did it again and again until his hands let go of me and went to his own neck. My lungs were burning. I needed air. I pushed off him to move toward the surface. As we separated he made a last grab for my ankles but I was able to kick away and break his grasp.

In the last moments Backus saw his father. Long dead and burned, he appeared alive. He had the stern set of eyes that Backus always remembered. He had one hand behind his back, as if he was hiding something. His other hand beckoned his son to come forward. To come home.

Backus smiled and then he laughed. Water rushed into his mouth and lungs. He didn't panic. He welcomed it He knew he would be reborn. He would return. He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited. I surfaced and gulped down air. I spun in the water to look for Backus but he was gone. I was safe from him but not from the water. I was exhausted. My arms felt so heavy in the water that I could barely bring them to the surface. I thought about the boy again, about how scared he must have been, all alone and the claws grabbing at him.

Up ahead I could see where the wash emptied into the main river channel. I was fifty yards away and I knew the river would be wider and shallower and more violent there. But the concrete walls were sloped in the main channel and I knew I might have a shot at pulling myself out if I could somehow slow my speed and find purchase.

I lowered my eyes and decided to move as close to the wall as I could without getting pushed hard into it. Then I saw a more immediate salvation. The tree I had seen in the channel from the window of Turrentine's house was a hundred yards ahead of me in the river. It must have gotten hung up at the bridge or in the shallows and I had caught up to it.

Using my last reserve of strength I started swimming with the current, picking up speed and heading to the tree. I knew it would be my boat. I'd be able to ride it all the way to the Pacific if I needed to.

Rachel lost the river. The streets took her further away from it and soon she had lost it. She couldn't get back to it. There was a GPS screen in the car but she didn't know how to work it and doubted she'd be able to get a satellite fix in this weather anyway. She pulled over and banged the wheel angrily with the heel of her palm. She felt like she was deserting Harry, that it was going to be her fault if he drowned.

Then she heard the helicopter. It was low flying and moving fast. She leaned forward to see up through the windshield. She didn't see anything. She got out in the rain and turned circles on the street looking. She could still hear it but she couldn't see it.

It had to be the rescue, she thought. In this weather, who else would be flying? She got a bead on the sound and jumped back into the Mercedes. She took the first right she came to and started heading to the sound. She drove with the window down, with the rain coming in but her not caring. She listened to the sound of the helicopter in the distance.

Soon she saw it. It was circling ahead and to the right. She kept going and when she came to Reseda Boulevard she turned right again and could see there were actually two helicopters, one low and the other above it. Both were red with white lettering on the side. Not television or radio call letters. The helicopters were marked LAFD.

There was a bridge ahead and Rachel could see cars stopped and people getting out in the rain to rush to the railing. They were looking down into the river.

She pulled up, stopped in a traffic lane and did the same. She rushed to the railing in time to see the rescue. Bosch was in a yellow safety harness being lifted on a wire out of a fallen tree that was stalled in the shallows where the river widened to fifty yards across.

As he was raised to the helicopter Bosch looked down into the raging current below him. Soon the tree broke free of its catch and tumbled over and over in the cascades. It picked up speed and washed beneath the bridge, its branches crashing into the support pylons and shearing off.

Rachel watched the rescuers bring Bosch into the helicopter. Not until he was inside and safe and the helicopter started to bank away did she look away. And that was only when some of the others on the bridge had started to yell and point down into the river. She looked down and saw what it was. Another man in the water. But for this man there would be no rescue. He floated facedown, his arms loose and his body limp. Red and black jumper cables were tangled around bis body and neck. His shaven skull looked like a child's lost ball bobbing in the current.

The second helicopter followed the body from above, waiting for it to get hung up like the tree had before any extraction was risked. There was no hurry this time.

As the current thickened to move between the pylons of the bridge, the body's fluid travel was disturbed and it turned over in the water. Just before it went under the bridge Rachel caught a glimpse of Backus's face. His eyes were open beneath the glaze of water. But it seemed to her that he was looking right at her before he disappeared under the bridge.

Many years ago, when I served in the army in Vietnam, I was wounded in a tunnel. I was extracted by my comrades and put on a helicopter back to base camp. I remember that as the chopper rose and took me from harm's way, I felt an elation that far obscured the pain of my wound and the exhaustion I had felt.

I felt the same way that day on the river. Deja vu all over again, as they say. I had made it. I had survived. I was out of harm's way. I was smiling as a fireman in a safety helmet wrapped a blanket around me.

"We're taking you to USC to get checked out," he yelled over the roar of the rotor and the rain. "ETA in ten minutes."

He gave me the okay sign and I gave it back to him, noticing that my ringers were a bluish white and that I was shaking with something more than cold.

"I'm sorry about your friend," the fireman yelled.

I saw he was looking down through a glass panel on the lower part of the door he had just slid closed. I leaned over and looked and I could see Backus in the water below. He was faceup and moving languidly in the current*

"I'm not sorry," I said, but not loud enough to be heard.

I leaned back on the jump seat they had put me on. I closed my eyes and nodded to the conjured image of my silent partner, Terry McCaleb, smiling and standing in the stern of his boat.