“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Somebody has to take care of them.”
She nodded and carefully put the lid back on. She took the box from Bosch and walked it back to her car. She put it on the backseat and then went to the open front door. She looked at Bosch before getting in. She looked like she was about to say something but then she stopped. She got in the car and drove away. Bosch closed the trunk of his car and watched her go.
Chapter 54
THE edict of the chief of police was once again being ignored. Bosch turned on the squad room lights and went to his spot at the homicide table. He put down two empty cardboard boxes.
It was late Sunday, near midnight. He’d decided to come in and clear out his desk and files when no one else would be around to watch. He still had one more day in Hollywood Division but he didn’t want to spend it packing boxes and exchanging insincere good-byes with anyone. His plan was to have a clean desk at the start of the day and a three-hour lunch at Musso amp; Frank’s to end it. He’d say a few good-byes to those who mattered and then slip out the back door before anyone even knew he was gone. It was the only way to do it.
He started with his file cabinet, taking the murder books of the open cases that still kept him awake some nights. He wasn’t giving up on them just yet. His plan was to work the cases during the downtimes in RHD. Or to work them at home alone.
With one box full he turned to his desk and started emptying the file drawers. When he pulled out the mason jar full of bullet shells, he paused. He had not yet put the shell collected at Julia Brasher’s funeral into the jar. Instead he had put that one on a shelf in his home. Next to the picture of the shark he would always keep there as a reminder of the perils of leaving the safety cage. Her father had allowed him to take it.
He carefully put the jar into the corner of the second box and made sure it was held secure by the other contents. He then opened the middle drawer and started collecting all the pens and pads and other office supplies.
Old phone messages and business cards from people he had met on cases were scattered throughout the drawer. Bosch checked each one before deciding whether to keep it or drop it into the trash can. After he had a stack of keepers he put a rubber band around it and dropped it into the box.
When the drawer was almost clear, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and opened it. There was a message on it.
Where are you, tough guy?
Bosch studied it for a long time. Soon it made him think about all that had happened since he had pulled his car to a stop on Wonderland Avenue just thirteen days before. It made him think about what he was doing and where he was going. It made him think of Trent and Stokes and most of all Arthur Delacroix and Julia Brasher. It made him think about what Golliher had said while studying the bones of the murder victims from millenniums ago. And it made him know the answer to the question on the piece of paper.
“Nowhere,” he said out loud.
He folded the paper and put it in the box. He looked down at his hands, at the scars across the knuckles. He ran the fingers of one hand across the markings on the other. He thought about the interior scars left from punching all of the brick walls he couldn’t see.
He had always known that he would be lost without his job and his badge and his mission. In that moment he came to realize that he could be just as lost with it all. In fact, he could be lost because of it. The very thing he thought he needed the most was the thing that drew the shroud of futility around him.
He made a decision.
He reached into his back pocket and took out his badge wallet. He slid the ID card out from behind the plastic window and then unclipped the badge. He ran his thumb along the indentations where it said Detective. It felt like the scars on his knuckles.
He put the badge and the ID card in the desk drawer. He then pulled his gun from its holster, looked at it for a long moment and put it in the drawer, too. He closed the drawer and locked it with a key.
He stood up and walked through the squad room to Billets’s office. The door was unlocked. He put the key to his desk drawer and the key to his slickback down on her blotter. When he didn’t show up in the morning he was sure she would get curious and check out his desk. She’d then understand that he wasn’t coming back. Not to Hollywood Division and not to RHD. He was turning in his badge, going Code 7. He was done.
On the walk back through the squad room Bosch looked about and felt a wave of finality move through him. But he didn’t hesitate. At his desk he put one box on top of the other and carried them out through the front hallway. He left the lights on behind him. After he passed the front desk he used his back to push open the heavy front door of the station. He called to the officer sitting behind the counter.
“Hey, do me a favor. Call a cab for me.”
“You got it. But with the weather it might be a while. You might want to wait in-”
The door closed, cutting off the cop’s voice. Bosch walked out to the curb. It was a crisp, wet night. There was no sign of the moon beyond the cloud cover. He held the boxes against his chest and waited in the rain.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1914 the bones of a female homicide victim were recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The bones were nine thousand years old, making the woman the earliest known murder victim in the place now known as Los Angeles. The tar pits continue to churn the past and bring bones to the surface for study. However, the finding of a second homicide victim mentioned in this book is wholly fictional-as of this writing.
Michael Connelly
Connelly has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Barry, Ridley, Maltese Falcon (Japan),.38 Caliber (France), Grand Prix (France), and Premio Bancarella (Italy) awards.
In addition to his work in publishing, Michael Connelly was one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the Fall of 2000.
Connelly lives with his family in Florida.
