Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

“For what?”

“Stories about Conklin.”

“There will be hundreds, Bosch. You said he was DA for two terms.”

“I only want stories from before he was elected. And if you have the time, throw in stories on Mittel, too.”

“You know, you’re asking a lot. I could get in trouble if they knew I was doing clip searches for a cop.”

She put on a fake pout and he ignored that, too. He knew what she was driving at.

“You want to tell me what this is about, Bosch?”

He still didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t think so. Well, look, I’ve got two interviews to do this afternoon. I’m going to be gone. What I can do is get an intern to get the clips together and leave it all for you with the guard in the globe lobby. It will be in an envelope so nobody will know what it is. Would that be okay?”

He nodded. He’d been to Times Square before on a handful of occasions, usually meetings with reporters. It was a block-sized building with two lobbies. The centerpiece of the lobby at the First and Spring entrance was a huge globe that never stopped rotating, just as the news never stopped happening.

“You’ll just leave it under my name? Won’t that get you in trouble? You know, like you said, being too friendly with a cop. That’s got to be against the rules over there.”

She smiled at his sarcasm.

“Don’t worry. If an editor or somebody asks, I’ll just say it’s an investment in the future. You better remember that, Bosch. Friendship is a two-way street.”

“Don’t worry. I never forget that.”

He leaned forward across the table so he was up close to her face.

“I want you to remember something, too. One of the reasons I’m not telling you why I need this stuff is because I’m not sure what it means. If anything. But don’t you get too curious. Don’t you go making any calls. You do that, and you might mess things up. I might get hurt. You might get hurt. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The man with the waxed mustache appeared at the side of the table with their plates.

I NOTICED YOU ARRIVED early today. Am I to take that as a sign that you want to be here?”

“Not especially. I was downtown having lunch with a friend, so I just came over.”

“Well, it’s good to hear you were out with a friend. I think that is good.”

Carmen Hinojos was behind her desk. The notebook was out and open but she sat with her hands clasped together in front of her. It was as if she was going out of her way to make no move that could be construed as threatening to the dialogue.

“What happened to your hand?”

Bosch held it up and looked at the bandages on his fingers.

“I hit it with a hammer. I was working on my house.”

“That’s too bad. I hope it’s okay.”

“I’ll live.”

“Why are you so dressed up? I hope you don’t feel you have to do that for these sessions.”

“No. I…I just like following my routine. Even if I’m not going to work, I got dressed like I was.”

“I understand.”

After she made an offer of coffee or water and Bosch declined, she got the session going.

“Tell me, what would you like to talk about today?”

“I don’t care. You’re the boss.”

“I’d rather that you not look at the relationship in that way. I’m not your boss, Detective Bosch. I’m just a facilitator, someone to help you talk about whatever you want, whatever you want to get off your chest.”

Bosch was silent. He couldn’t think of anything to volunteer. Carmen Hinojos drummed her pencil on her yellow tablet for a few moments before taking up the slack.

“Nothing at all, huh?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“Then why don’t we talk about yesterday. When I called you, to remind you of our session today, you obviously seemed upset about something. Was that when you hit your hand?”

“No, that wasn’t it.”

He stopped but she said nothing and he decided to give in a little bit. He had to admit to himself that there was something about her that he liked. She was not threatening and he believed she was telling the truth when she said she was there only to help him.

“What happened when you called was that I had found out earlier that my partner, you know, my partner before all of this, had been paired up with a new man. I’ve been replaced already.”

“And how’d that make you feel?”

“You heard how I was. I was mad about it. I think anybody would be. Then I called my partner up later and he treated me like yesterday’s news. I taught that guy a lot and…”

“And what?”

“I don’t know. It hurt, I guess.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do. You’d have to be me to see it the way I did.”

“I guess that’s true. But I can sympathize. Let’s leave it at that. Let me ask you this. Shouldn’t you have expected your partner to be paired up again? After all, isn’t it a department rule that detectives work in pairs? You are on leave for a so-far-unknown period of time. Wasn’t it a given that he’d get a new partner, whether permanent or otherwise?”

“I suppose.”

“Isn’t it safer to work in pairs?”

“I suppose.”

“What is your own experience? Did you feel safer the times you were with a partner on the job as opposed to those times when you were alone?”

“Yes, I felt safer.”

“So what happened was inevitable and inarguable, yet still it made you angry.”

“It wasn’t that it happened that brought it on. I don’t know, it was the way he told me and then the way he acted when I called. I really felt left out. I asked him for a favor and he…I don’t know.”

“He what?”

“He hesitated. Partners don’t do that. Not with each other. They’re supposed be there for each other. It’s supposedly a lot like a marriage, but I’ve never been married.”

She paused to write some notes, which made Bosch wonder what had just been said that was so important.

“You seem,” she said while still writing, “to have a low threshold for the toleration of frustrations.”

Her statement immediately made him angry but he knew that if he showed it then he would be confirming her statement. He thought maybe it was a trick designed to elicit such a response. He tried to calm himself.

“Doesn’t everybody?” he said in a controlled voice.

“I suppose, to a degree. When I reviewed your records I saw that you were in the Army during the Vietnam War. Did you see any combat?”

“Did I see any combat? Yes, I saw combat. I was in the middle of combat, too. I was even under it. Why do people always ask, did you see combat, like it was a goddamn movie they took you to over there?”

She was quiet for a long time, holding the pen but doing no writing. It seemed like she was simply waiting for the sails of his anger to lose the wind. He waved his hand in a gesture he hoped told her that he was sorry, that it was behind him, that they should move on.

“Sorry,” he said, just to make sure.

She still didn’t say anything and her stare was beginning to weigh on him. He looked away from her to the bookshelves along one wall of the office. They were filled with heavy, leather-bound psychiatry texts.

“I am sorry to intrude on such an emotionally sensitive area,” she finally said. “The reason-”

“But that’s what this is all about, right? What you have is a license to intrude and I can’t do anything about it.”

“So, then, accept it,” she said sternly. “We’ve been over this before. To help you we have to talk about you. Accept it and maybe we can move on. Now, as I was saying, the reason I mentioned the war was that I wanted to ask you if you are familiar with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Have you ever heard of it?”