Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

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.”

Bosch put his rod in a pipe and went to his jacket.

“You mind if I take notes?”

“No, I don’t mind. I guess I’ve been waiting for somebody to care about this one since I walked away from it.”

“Go ahead. Eno was in charge.”

“Yeah, he was the man. You’ve got to understand something. We’d been a team maybe three, four months at that time. We weren’t tight. After this one, we’d never be tight. I switched off after about a year. I went in for the transfer. They moved me to Wilshire dicks, homicide table. Never had much to do with him after that. He never had much to do with me.”

“Okay, what happened with the investigation?”

“Well, it was like anything else that you’d expect. We were going through the routine. We had a list of her KAs-got it mostly from the vice guys-and were working our way through it.”

“The known associates, did they include clients? There was no list in the murder book.”

“I think there were a few clients. And the list didn’t go into the book because Eno said so. Remember, he was the lead.”

“Okay. Johnny Fox was on the list?”

“Yeah, he was at the top of it. He was her…uh, manager and-”

“Her pimp, you mean.”

McKittrick looked at him.

“Yeah. That’s what he was. I wasn’t sure what you, uh-”

“Forget it. Go on.”

“Yeah, Johnny Fox was on the list. We talked to about everybody who knew her and this guy was described by everybody as one mean guy. He had a history.”

Bosch thought of Meredith Roman’s report that he had beaten her.

“We’d heard that she was trying to get away from him. I don’t know, either to go out on her own or maybe go straight. Who knows? We heard-”

“She wanted to be a straight citizen,” Bosch interrupted. “That way she could get me out of the hall.”

He felt foolish for saying it, knowing his saying it was not convincing.

“Yeah, whatever,” McKittrick said. “Point is, Fox was none too happy about that. That put him at the top of our list.”

“But you couldn’t find him. The chrono says you watched his place.”

“Yeah. He was our man. We had prints we had taken off the belt-the murder weapon-but we had no comparisons from him. Johnny had been pulled in a few times in the past but never booked. Never printed. So we really needed to bring him in.”

“What did it tell you, that he’d been picked up but never booked?”

McKittrick finished his beer, crunched it in his hand and walked the empty over to a large bucket in the corner of the deck and dropped it.

“To be honest, at the time it didn’t hit me. Now, of course, it’s obvious. He had an angel watching over him.”

“Who?”

“Well, on one of the days we were watching Fox’s place, waiting for him to show up, we got a message on the radio to call Arno Conklin. He wanted to talk about the case. ASAP. Now this was a holy shit kind of call. For two reasons. One, Arno was going great guns then. He was running the city’s moral commandos at the time and had a lock on the DA’s office, which was coming open in a year. The other reason was that we’d only had the case a few days and hadn’t come near the DA’s office with anything. So now all of a sudden the most powerful guy in the agency wants to see us. I’m thinking…I don’t really know what I was thinking. I just knew it-hey, you got one!”

Bosch looked at his pole and saw it bend from a violent jerk on the line. The reel started spinning as the fish pulled against the drag. Bosch grabbed the pole out of the pipe and jerked it back. The hook was set well. He started reeling but the fish had a lot of fight and was pulling out more line than he was reeling in. McKittrick came over and tightened the drag dial, which immediately put a more pronounced bend in the pole.

“Keep the pole up, keep the pole up,” McKittrick counseled.

Bosch did as he was told and spent five minutes battling the fish. His arms started to ache. He felt a strain on his lower back. McKittrick put on gloves and when the fish finally surrendered and Bosch had it alongside the boat, he bent over and hooked his fingers into the gills and brought it on board. Bosch saw a shiny blue-black fish that looked beautiful in the sunlight.

“Wahoo,” McKittrick said.

“What?”

McKittrick held the fish up horizontally.