The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “No. I’m from L.A. I’m a cop there.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go around admitting that if I were you. You guys’ve got some bad PR problems.”

  “Yeah, I know. So…” He felt his courage rising. He told himself he was flying out in the morning and it didn’t matter what happened because he’d never see her or this state again. “You said something before about lemonade but I never got any. I was thinking, maybe I could tell you the story, apologize and have some lemonade or something.”

  He looked over toward the door of the condo.

  “You L.A. cops are pushy,” she said but she was smiling. “One glass and the story better be good. After that, we both gotta go. I’m driving up to Tampa tonight.”

  They started walking toward the door and Bosch realized he had a smile on his face.

  “What’s in Tampa?”

  “It’s where I live and I miss it. I’ve been down here more than up there since I put the condo on the market. I want to spend a Sunday at my own place and in my own studio.”

  “That’s right, a painter.”

  “I try to be.”

  She opened the door for him and allowed him in first.

  “Well, that’s okay by me. I have to get to Tampa sometime tonight. I fly out in the morning.”

  While nursing a tall glass of lemonade, Bosch explained his scam of using her to get into the complex to see another resident and she didn’t seem upset. In fact, he could tell she admired the ingenuity of it. Bosch didn’t tell her how it had backfired anyway when McKittrick had pulled a gun on him. He gave her a vague outline of the case, never mentioning its personal connection to himself and she seemed intrigued by the whole idea of solving a murder that happened thirty-three years earlier.

  The one glass of lemonade turned into four and the last two were spiked nicely with vodka. They took care of what was left of Bosch’s headache and put a nice bloom on everything. Between the third and the fourth she asked if he would mind if she smoked and he lit cigarettes for both of them. And as the sky darkened over the mangroves outside, he finally turned the conversation toward her. Bosch had sensed a loneliness about her, a mystery of some sort. Behind the pretty face there were scars. The kind that couldn’t be seen.

  Her name was Jasmine Corian but she said that friends called her Jazz. She spoke of growing up in the Florida sun, of never wanting to leave it. She had married once but it was a long time ago. There was nobody in her life now and she was used to it. She said she concentrated most of her life on her art and, in a way, Bosch understood what she meant. His own art, though few would call it that, took most of his life as well.

  “What do you paint?”

  “Portraits mostly.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Just someone I know. Maybe I’ll paint you, Bosch. Someday.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that so he made a clumsy transition to safer ground.

  “Why don’t you give this place to a realtor to sell? That way you could stay in Tampa and paint.”

  “Because I wanted the diversion. I also didn’t want to give a realtor the five percent. This is a nice complex. These units sell pretty well without realtors. A lot of Canadian investment. I think I’ll sell it. This was only the first week I’ve run the ad.”

  Bosch just nodded and wished he had kept the conversation on her painting instead of realtors. The clumsy change seemed to have clogged things up a bit.

  “I was thinking, you want to have dinner?”

  She looked at him solemnly, as if the request and her answer had far deeper implications. They probably did. At least, he thought they did.

  “Where would we go?”

  That was a stall but he played along.

  “I don’t know. It’s not my town. Not my state. You could pick a place. Around here or on the way up to Tampa. I don’t care. I’d like your company, though, Jazz. If you want to.”

  “How long has it been since you were with a woman? I mean on a date.”

  “On a date? I don’t know. A few months, I guess. But, look, I’m not a hard-luck case. I’m just in town and alone and thought maybe you’d—”

  “It’s okay, Harry. Let’s go.”

  “To eat?”

  “Yes, to eat. I know a place on the way up. It’s above Longboat. You’ll have to follow me.”

  He smiled and nodded.

  She drove a Volkswagen Beetle convertible that was powder blue with one red fender. He couldn’t lose her in a hailstorm let alone the slow-moving Florida highways.

  Bosch counted two drawbridges that they had to stop for before they got to Longboat Key. From there they headed north for the length of the island, crossed a bridge onto Anna Maria Island and finally stopped at a place called the Sandbar. They walked through the bar and sat on a deck overlooking the Gulf. It was cool and they ate crabs and oysters chased with Mexican beer. Bosch loved it.

  They didn’t talk much but didn’t need to. It was always in the silences that Bosch felt most comfortable with the women who had moved through his life. He felt the vodka and beer working on him, warming him toward her, sanding off any sharp edges to the evening. He felt a desire for her growing and tugging at him. McKittrick and the case had somehow been pushed into the darkness at the back of his mind.

  “This is good,” he said when he was finally nearing his capacity for food and drink. “It’s great.”

  “Yeah, they do it right. Can I tell you something, Bosch?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was only kidding about what I was saying about L.A. cops before. But I have known some cops before…and you seem different. I don’t know what it is but it’s like you’ve got too much of yourself left, you know?”

  “I guess.” He nodded. “Thanks. I think.”

  They both laughed and then in a hesitant move, she leaned over and kissed him quickly on the lips. It was nice and he smiled. He could taste garlic.

  “I’m glad you’re already sunburned or you’d be turning red again.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I mean, that was a nice thing to say.”

  “You want to come home with me, Bosch?”

  Now he hesitated. Not because there was any deliberation in his answer. But he wanted her to have the chance to withdraw it in case she had spoken too quickly. After a moment of silence from her he smiled and nodded.

  “Yes, I would like that.”

  They left then and cut inland to the freeway. Bosch wondered as he tailed the Volkswagen if she would change her mind as she drove alone. He got his answer at the Skyway bridge. As he pulled up to the tollbooth with his dollar already in hand, the tolltaker shook his head and waved off the money.

  “Nope. That lady in the bug got ya covered.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You know her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I think you’re goin’ to. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  NOW BOSCH COULDN’T lose her in a blizzard. As the drive grew longer, he found himself in a growing sense of an almost adolescent euphoria of anticipation. He was captured by the directness of this woman and he was wondering how and what that would translate to when they were making love.

  She led him north to Tampa and then into an area called Hyde Park. Overlooking the bay, the neighborhood consisted of old Victorian and Craftsman-style houses with sweeping front porches. Her home was an apartment above the three-car garage set behind a gray Victorian with green trim.

  As they got to the top of the steps and she was putting the key into the knob, Bosch thought of something and didn’t know what to do. She opened the door and looked at him. She read him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. But I was thinking, maybe I should go find a drugstore or something and then come back.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got what you’ll need. But can you stand out here for a second? I just want to make a mad dash inside and clean up a few things.”
<
br />   He looked at her.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Please?”

  “Okay. Take your time.”

  He waited for about three minutes and then she opened the door and pulled him in. If she had cleaned up, she had done it in the dark. The only light came from what Bosch could see was the kitchen. She took his hand and led him away from the light to a darkened hallway that gave way to her bedroom. Here she turned on the light, revealing a sparely furnished room. A wrought-iron bed with a canopy was the centerpiece. There was a night table of unfinished wood next to it, a matching unfinished bureau and an antique Singer sewing machine table on which stood a blue vase with dead flowers in it. There was nothing hung on any of the walls, though Bosch saw a nail protruding from the plaster above the vase. Jasmine noticed the flowers and quickly took the vase off the table and headed out the door.

  “I have to go dump this. I haven’t been here in a week and forgot to change them.”

  Moving the flowers raised a slightly acrid smell in the room. While she was gone Bosch looked at the nail again and thought he could see the delineation of a rectangle on the wall. Something had hung there, he decided. She hadn’t come in to clean up. If she had, she would have gotten rid of the flowers. She’d come in to take down a painting.

  When she came back into the room, she put the empty vase back on the table.

  “Would you like another beer? I have some wine, too.”

  Bosch moved toward her, intrigued even more by her mysteries.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Without further word they embraced. He could taste beer and garlic and cigarette smoke as he kissed her but didn’t care. He knew she was getting the same from him. He pressed his cheek against hers and with his nose he came across the spot on her neck where she had dabbed perfume. Night-blooming jasmine.

  They moved onto the bed, each taking pieces of clothing off between hard kisses. Her body was beautiful, the tan lines distinct. He kissed her lovely small breasts and gently pushed her back on the bed. She told him to wait and she rolled to the side and from the drawer of the bed table extracted a strip of three condom packages and handed it to him.

  “Is this wishful thinking?” he asked.

  They both burst out laughing and it seemed to make things all the better.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  For Bosch, sexual encounters had always been a question of timing. The desires of two individuals rose and subsided on their own courses. There were emotional needs separate from physical needs. And sometimes all of those things clicked together in a person and then clicked in tandem with those of the other person. Bosch’s encounter with Jasmine Corian was one of those times. The sex created a world without intrusion. One so vital that it could have lasted an hour or maybe only a few minutes and he wouldn’t have known the difference. At the end, he was above her, looking into her open eyes, and she clutched his upper arms as if she were holding on for her life. Both of their bodies shuddered in unison and then he lay still on top of her, catching his breath from the hollow between her neck and shoulder. He felt so good he had the urge to laugh out loud but he didn’t think she’d understand. He stifled it and made it sound like a muffled cough.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  “I’ve never felt better.”

  Eventually, he moved off her, backing down over her body. He kissed both of her breasts, then sat up with her legs on either side of him. He removed the condom while using his body to shield her view of the process.

  He got up and walked to the door he hoped was the bathroom and found it was a closet. The next door he tried was the bathroom and he flushed the condom down the toilet. He absentmindedly wondered if it would end up somewhere in Tampa Bay.

  When he came back from the bathroom she was sitting up with the sheet bunched around her waist. He found his sport coat on the floor and got out his cigarettes. He gave her one and lit it. Then he bent over and kissed her breasts again. Her laugh was infectious and it made him smile.

  “You know, I like it that you didn’t come equipped.”

  “Equipped? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, that you offered to go to the drugstore. It shows what kind of man you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you had come over here from L.A. with a condom in your wallet, that would’ve been so…I don’t know, premeditated. Like some guy just on the make. The whole thing would have had no spontaneity. I’m glad you weren’t like that, Harry Bosch, that’s all.”

  He nodded, trying to follow her line of thought. He wasn’t sure he understood. And he wondered what he should think of the fact that she was equipped. He decided to drop it and lit his cigarette.

  “How’d you hurt your hand like that?”

  She had noticed the marks on his fingers. Bosch had taken the Band-Aids off while flying over. The burns had healed to the point that they looked like red welts on two of his fingers.

  “Cigarette. I fell asleep.”

  He felt he could tell her the truth about everything about himself.

  “God, that’s scary.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think it will happen again.”

  “Do you want to stay with me tonight?”

  He moved closer to her and kissed her on the neck.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  She reached over and touched the zipper scar on his left shoulder. The women he was with in bed always seemed to do this. It was an ugly mark and he never understood why they were drawn to touch it.

  “You got shot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s even scarier.”

  He hiked his shoulders. It was history and he never really thought about it anymore.

  “You know, what I was trying to say before is that you’re not like most cops I’ve known. You’ve got too much of your humanity left. How’d that happen?”

  He shook his shoulders again like he didn’t know.

  “Are you okay, Bosch?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You know what that guy Marvin Gaye sang about, don’t you? Before he got killed by his own dad? He sang about sexual healing. Said it’s good for the soul. Something like that. Anyway, I believe it, do you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I think you need healing in your life, Bosch. That’s the vibe I’m getting.”

  “You want to go to sleep now?”

  She lay down again and pulled the sheet up. He walked around the room naked, turning out the lights. When he was under the sheet in the dark, she turned on her side so her back was to him and told him to put his arm around her. He moved up close behind her and did. He loved her smell.

  “How come people call you Jazz?”

  “I don’t know. They just do. Because it goes with the name.”

  After a few moments she asked him why he had asked that.

  “Because. You smell like both your names. Like the flower and the music.”

  “What does jazz smell like?”

  “It smells dark and smoky.”

  They were silent for a long while after that and eventually Bosch thought she was asleep. But he still could not make it down. He lay with his eyes open, looking at the shadows of the room. Then she spoke softly to him.

  “Bosch, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. What’s the worst thing? What’s the thing that keeps you awake at night if you think about it too hard?”

  He thought for a few moments before answering.

  “I don’t know.” He forced an uneasy and short laugh. “I guess I’ve done a lot of bad things. I suppose a lot of them are to myself. At least I think about them a lot…”

  “What’s one of them? You can tell me.”

  And he knew that he could. He thought he could tell her alm
ost anything and not be judged harshly.

  “When I was a kid—I grew up mostly in a youth hall, like an orphanage. When I was new there, one of the older kids took my shoes, my sneakers. They didn’t fit him or anything but he did it because he knew he could do it. He was one of the rulers of the roost and he took ’em. I didn’t do anything about it and it hurt.”