Harry Bosch Novels, The: Volume 2

by Michael Connelly

  “Anyway, I’m here because you’re alive and he isn’t.”

  “What’s the case?”

  “Marjorie Lowe.” He waited a moment for a reaction from McKittrick’s face and got none. “You remember it? She was found in the trash in an alley off—”

  “Vista. Behind Hollywood Boulevard between Vista and Gower. I remember them all, Bosch. Cleared or not, I remember every goddamn one of them.”

  But you don’t remember me, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Between Vista and Gower.”

  “What about it?”

  “It was never cleared.”

  “I know that,” McKittrick said, his voice rising. “I worked sixty-three cases during seven years on the homicide table. I worked Hollywood, Wilshire, then RHD. Cleared fifty-six. I’ll put that up against anybody. Today they’re lucky if they clear half of ’em. I’ll put it up against you blind.”

  “And you’d win. That’s a good record. This isn’t about you, Jake. It’s about the case.”

  “Don’t call me Jake. I don’t know you. Never seen you before in my life. I— wait a minute.”

  Bosch stared at him, astonished that he might actually remember the pool. But then he realized that McKittrick had stopped because of his wife’s approach along the dock. She was carrying a plastic cooler. McKittrick waited silently for her to put it down on the dock near the boat and he hoisted it aboard.

  “Oh, Detective Bosch, you’ll be way too hot in that,” Mrs. McKittrick said. “Do you want to come back up and borrow a pair of Jake’s shorts and a white T-shirt?”

  Bosch looked at McKittrick, then up at her.

  “No, thanks, ma’am, I’m fine.”

  “You are going fishing, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly been invited and I—”

  “Oh, Jake, invite him fishing. You’re always looking for somebody to go out with you. Besides, you can catch up on all that blood-and-guts stuff you used to love in Hollywood.”

  McKittrick looked up at her and Bosch could see the horses fighting against the restraints. He was able to get it under control.

  “Mary, thanks for the sandwiches,” he said calmly. “Now, could you go back up to the house and leave us be?”

  She threw him a frown and shook her head as if he were a spoiled boy. She went back the way she had come without another word. The two of them left on the boat let some time go by before Bosch finally spoke and tried to recover the situation.

  “Look, I’m not here for any reason other than to ask you a few questions about this case. I’m not trying to suggest there was anything wrong with the way it was handled. I’m just taking another look at it. That’s all.”

  “You left something out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’re full of shit.”

  Bosch could feel the horses rearing up in himself. He was angry at this man’s questioning his motives, even though he was right to do so. He was on the verge of shedding the nice-guy skin and going at him. But he knew better. He knew that for McKittrick to act this way, there must be a reason. Something about the old case was like a pebble in his shoe. He had worked it over to the side where it didn’t hurt when he walked. But it was still in there. Bosch had to make him want to take it out. He swallowed his own anger and tried to stay level.

  “Why am I full of shit?” he said.

  McKittrick’s back was to him. The former cop was reaching down under the steering console. Bosch couldn’t see what he was trying to do, except he guessed he was maybe looking for a hidden set of boat keys.

  “Why are you full of shit?” McKittrick answered as he turned around. “I’ll tell you why. Because you come here flashing that bullshit badge around when we both know you don’t have a badge.”

  McKittrick was pointing a Beretta twenty-two at Bosch. It was small but it would do the job at this distance, and Bosch had to believe that McKittrick knew how to use it.

  “Jesus, man, what’s the problem with you?”

  “I had no problem until you showed up.”

  Bosch held his hands chest-high in a nonthreatening pose.

  “Just take it easy.”

  “You take it easy. Put your fucking hands down. I want to see that badge again. Take it out and toss it over here. Slowly.”

  Bosch complied, all the while trying to look around the docks without turning his head more than a few inches. He didn’t see anyone. He was alone. And unarmed. He threw the badge wallet down on the deck near McKittrick’s feet.

  “Now I want you to walk around the bridge to the bow up there. Stand against the bow rail where I can see you. I knew somebody would try to fuck with me someday. Well, you picked the wrong guy and the wrong day.”

  Bosch did as instructed and went up to the bow. He grabbed the railing for support and turned around to face his captor. Without taking his eyes off Bosch, McKittrick bent and picked up the wallet. Then he moved into the cockpit and put the gun down on top of the console. Bosch knew if he tried for it McKittrick would get there first. McKittrick reached down and turned something and the engine kicked over.

  “What are you doing, McKittrick?”

  “Oh, now it’s ‘McKittrick.’ What happened to the friendly ‘Jake’? Well, what’s doing is, we’re going fishing. You wanted to fish, that’s what we’ll do. You try to jump and I’ll shoot you in the water. I don’t care.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Just take it easy.”

  “Now, reach down to that cleat and unhook that line. Throw it up on the dock.”

  When Bosch had finished completing the order, McKittrick picked up the gun and stepped back three paces into the stern. He untied the other line and pushed off from a pylon. He returned to the helm and gently put the boat in reverse. It glided out of the slip. McKittrick then put it in forward and they started moving through the inlet toward the mouth of the canal. Bosch could feel the warm salt breezes drying the sweat on his skin. He decided he would jump as soon as they got to some open water, or where there were other boats with people on them.

  “Kind of surprised you’re not carrying. What kind of guy says he’s a cop, then doesn’t carry a piece?”

  “I am a cop, McKittrick. Let me explain.”

  “You don’t have to, boy, I already know. Know all about you.”

  McKittrick flipped open the badge wallet and Bosch watched him study the ID card and the gold lieutenant’s badge. He threw it on the console.

  “What do you know about me, McKittrick?”

  “Don’t worry, I still have a few teeth left, Bosch, and I still have a few friends in the department. After the wife called, I made a call. One of my friends. He knew all about you. You’re on leave, Bosch. Involuntary. So I don’t know about this bullshit story about earthquakes you were spinning. Makes me think maybe you picked up a little freelance work while you’re off the job.”

  “You got it wrong.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see. Once we get out into some open water, you’re gonna tell me who sent you or you’re gonna be fish food. Makes no difference to me.”

  “Nobody sent me. I sent myself.”

  McKittrick slapped his palm against the red ball on the throttle lever and the boat surged forward. Its bow rose and Bosch grabbed the railing to hold on.

  “Bullshit!” McKittrick yelled above the engine noise. “You’re a liar. You lied before, you’re lying now.”

  “Listen to me,” Bosch yelled. “You said you remember every case.”

  “I do, goddamnit! I can’t forget them.”

  “Cut it back!”

  McKittrick pulled the throttle back and the boat evened off and the noise reduced.

  “On the Marjorie Lowe case you pulled the dirty work. You remember that? Remember what we call the dirty work? You had to tell the next of kin. You had to tell her kid. Out at McClaren.”

  “That was in the reports, Bosch. So—”

  He stopped and stared at Bosch for a long
moment. Then he flipped open the badge case and read the name. He looked back at Bosch.

  “I remember that name. The swimming pool. You’re the kid.”

  “I’m the kid.”

  Chapter 25

  McKittrick let the boat drift in the shallows of Little Sarasota Bay while Bosch told the story. He asked no questions. He simply listened. At a moment where Bosch paused, he opened the cooler his wife had packed and took out two beers, handing one to Bosch. The can felt ice-cold in Bosch’s hand.

  Bosch didn’t pull the tab on his beer until he finished the story. He had told everything he knew to McKittrick, even the nonessential part about his run-in with Pounds. He had a hunch, based on McKittrick’s anger and bizarre behavior, that he had been wrong about the old cop. He had flown out to Florida believing he was coming to see either a corrupt or a stupid cop and he wasn’t sure which he would dislike more. But now he believed that McKittrick was a man who was haunted by memories and the demons of choices made badly many years ago. Bosch thought that the pebble still had to come out of the shoe and that his own honesty was the best way to get to it.

  “So that’s my story,” he said at the end. “I hope she packed more than two of these.”

  He popped the beer and drank nearly a third of it. It tasted delicious going down his throat in the afternoon sun.

  “Oh, there’s plenty more where that came from,” McKittrick replied. “You want a sandwich?”

  “Not yet.”

  “No, what you want is my story now.”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  “Well, let’s get out there to the fish.”

  He restarted the engine and they followed a trail of channel markers south through the bay. Bosch finally remembered he had sunglasses in the pocket of his sport coat and put them on.

  It seemed like the wind was cutting in on him from all directions and on occasion its warmth would be traded for a cool breeze that would come up off the surface of the water. It was a long time since Bosch had been on a boat or had even been fishing. For a man who had had a gun pointed at him twenty minutes earlier, he realized he felt pretty good.

  As the bay tapered off into a canal, McKittrick pulled back on the throttle and cut their wake. He waved to a man on the bridge of a giant yacht tied up outside a waterside restaurant. Bosch couldn’t tell if he knew the man or was just being neighborly.

  “Take it on a line even with the lantern on the bridge,” McKittrick said.

  “What?”

  “Take it.”

  McKittrick stepped away from the wheel and into the stern of the boat. Bosch quickly stepped behind the wheel, sighted the red lantern hanging at center point beneath the span of a drawbridge a half mile ahead and adjusted the wheel to bring the boat into line. He looked back and saw McKittrick pull a plastic bag of small dead fish out of a compartment in the deck.

  “Let’s see who we’ve got here today,” he said.

  He went to the side of the boat and leaned well over the gunwale. Bosch saw him start slapping an open palm on the side of the boat. McKittrick then stood up, surveyed the water for about ten seconds and repeated the banging.

  “What’s going on?” Bosch asked.

  Just as he said it, a dolphin crested the water off the port stern and reentered no more than five feet from where McKittrick was standing. It was a slippery gray blur and Bosch wasn’t exactly sure at first what had happened. But the dolphin quickly resurfaced next to the boat, its snout out of the water and chattering. It sounded like it was laughing. McKittrick dropped two of the fish into its open mouth.

  “That’s Sergeant, see the scars?”

  Bosch took a quick look back at the bridge to make sure they were still reasonably on line and then stepped back to the stern. The dolphin was still there. McKittrick pointed down into the water beneath its dorsal fin. Bosch could see three white stripes slashed across its smooth gray back.

  “He got too close to a prop one time and it cut him up. The people up at Mote Marine took care of him. But he was left with those sergeant’s stripes.”

  Bosch nodded as McKittrick fed the dolphin again. Without looking up to see if they were off course, McKittrick said, “You better get the wheel.”

  Bosch turned and saw that they had drifted far off line. He went back to the wheel and corrected the course. He stayed there while McKittrick remained in the back, throwing fish to the dolphin, until they passed under the bridge. Bosch decided he could wait him out. Whether it was while they were going out or coming in didn’t matter. He was going to get McKittrick’s story. He was not going to leave without it.

  Ten minutes after the bridge they came to a channel that took them out to the Gulf of Mexico. McKittrick dropped lures from two of the poles into the water and put out about a hundred yards of line on each one. He took the wheel back from Bosch then, yelling into the wind and engine noise.

  “I want to take it out to the reefs. We’ll troll until we’re there and then we’ll do some drift fishing in the shallows. We’ll talk then.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bosch yelled back.

  Nothing hit either of the lures, and about two miles from the shore McKittrick killed the engines and told Bosch to bring in one line while he handled the other. It took Bosch, who was left handed, a few moments to get himself coordinated on the right-handed reel but then he started smiling.

  “I don’t think I’ve done this since I was a kid. At McClaren every now and then they’d put us on a bus and take us out to the Malibu Pier.”

  “Jesus, that pier still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be like fishing in a cesspool by now.”

  “I guess.”

  McKittrick laughed and shook his head.

  “Why do you stay there, Bosch? Doesn’t sound like they particularly want you.”

  Bosch thought a moment before answering. The comment was on point but he wondered if it was on point from McKittrick or whoever the source was he had called.

  “Who’d you call back there about me?”

  “I’m not telling you. That’s why he talked to me, because he knew I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Bosch nodded, signaling he’d let it go.

  “Well, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t think they particularly want me back there. But I don’t know. It’s kind of like the more they push one way, the more I push the other. I feel like if they’d stop asking or trying to make me leave, then I’d probably want to do it.”

  “I guess I know what you mean.”

  McKittrick stowed the two rods they had used and set to work outfitting the other two with hooks and buckshot weights.

  “We’re going to use mullet.”

  Bosch nodded. He didn’t know the first thing about it. But he watched McKittrick closely. He thought it might be a good time to start.

  “So you punched out after your twenty in L.A. What’d you do after that?”

  “You’re looking at it. I moved back here— I’m from Palmetto, up the coast, originally. I bought a boat and became a fishing guide. Did that another twenty, retired and now I fish for my own damned self.”

  Bosch smiled.

  “Palmetto? Isn’t that the name of those big cockroaches?”

  “No. Well, yeah, but it’s also the name of a scrub palm. That’s what the town’s named for, not the bug.”

  Bosch nodded and watched as McKittrick opened a bag of mullet strips and hooked pieces on each line. After opening fresh beers, they cast on separate sides of the boat and then sat on the gunwales, waiting.

  “Then how’d you end up in L.A.?” Bosch asked.

  “What was that somebody said about going west young man? Well, after Japan surrendered I passed through L.A. on my way back home and I saw those mountains going all the way up from the sea to the sky . . . Damn, I ate dinner at the Derby my first night in town. I was going to blow my whole wallet and you know who saw me there in uniform and picked up the tab? Goddamn Clark Gable. I’m not kidding you.
I fuckin’ fell in love with that place and it took me almost thirty years to see the light . . . Mary’s from L.A., you know. Born and raised. She likes it out here fine.”

  He nodded to reassure himself. Bosch waited a few moments and McKittrick was still looking off at distant memories.

  “He was a nice guy.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Clark Gable.”

  Bosch crunched the empty beer can in his hand and got another.

  “So tell me about the case,” he said after popping it. “What happened?”

  “You know what happened if you read the book. It was all in there. It got dumped. One day we had an investigation, the next we were writing ‘No leads at this time.’ It was a joke. That’s why I remember the case so well. They shouldn’t’ve done what they did.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “You know, the big shots.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They took it away from us. And Eno let them. He cut some deal with them himself. Shit.”

  He shook his head bitterly.

  “Jake,” Bosch tried. He got no protest this time over using the first name. “Why don’t you start at the beginning. I need to know everything I can from you.”

  McKittrick was quiet while he reeled in. His bait hadn’t been touched. He recast it, put the rod in one of the gunwale pipes and got another beer. From beneath the console he grabbed a Tampa Bay Lightning cap and put it on. He leaned on the gunwale with his beer and looked at Bosch.

  “Okay, kid, listen, I got nothin’ against your mother. I’m just gonna tell you this the way it fell, okay?”

  “That’s all I want.”

  “You want a hat? You’re gonna get burned.”

  “I’m fine.”

  McKittrick nodded and finally started.

  “Okay, so we got the call out from home. It was a Saturday morning. One of the footbeat guys had found her. She hadn’t been killed in that alley. That much was clear. She’d been dropped off. By the time I got down there from Tujunga, the crime scene investigation was already underway. My partner was there, too. Eno. He was the senior man, he was there first. He took charge of it.”