Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“But whoever wrote that wasn’t over there. When you’re alive but you’re that close to dying, you think about those things. And then it does matter… And so we made the promise.”

Bosch knew he hadn’t explained a thing. He told her he was going to get another beer. She said she was fine. When he came back out she smiled at him and said nothing.

“Let me tell you a story about Meadows,” he said. “See, the way they worked it was, they’d assign a couple, maybe three of us tunnel rats to go out with a company. So when they’d come across a tunnel, we’d zip on down, check it out, mine it, whatever.”

He took a long pull on the fresh beer.

“And so once, this would have been in 1970, Meadows and me were tagging at the back of a patrol. We were in a VC stronghold and, man, it was just riddled with tunnels. Anyway, we were about three miles from a village called Nhuan Luc when we lost a point man. He got-I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear this. With your brother and all.”

“I do want to hear. Please.”

“So this point got shot by a sniper who was in a spider hole. That was what they called the little entrances to a tunnel network. So somebody took out the sniper and then me and Meadows had to go down the hole to check it out. We went down, and right away we had to split up. This was a big network. I followed one line one way and he went the other. We had said we’d go for fifteen minutes, set charges with a twenty-minute delay, then head back, setting more along the way… I remember I found a hospital down there. Four empty grass mats, a cabinet of supplies, all just sitting in the middle of this tunnel. I remember I thought, Jesus Christ, what’s going to be around the bend, a drive-in movie or something? I mean these people had dug themselves in… Anyway, there was a little altar in there and there was incense burning. Still burning. I knew then that they were still in there somewhere, the VC, and it scared me. I set a charge and hid it behind the altar, and then I started back as fast as I could. I set two more charges along the way, timing everything so it would all go off at once. So I get back to the drop-in point, you know, the original spider hole, and no Meadows. I waited a few minutes and it’s getting close. You don’t want to be down there when the C-4 goes. Some of those tunnels are a hundred years old. There was nothing I could do, so I climbed out. He wasn’t up top either.”

He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn’t prod him.

“A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents and other spider holes all around the jungle.

“And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn’t find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn’t wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise.”

Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.

“Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren’t in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn’t want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags.”

He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.

“So that’s my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn’t stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear.”

She shook her head. He nodded his.

Bosch said, “I wish I had found him that time I went back in to look. I let him down.”

They both stood for a while looking down at the kitchen floor. Bosch poured the rest of his beer down the sink.

“One question about Meadows’s sheet and then no more business,” he said. “He got jammed up at Lompoc on an escape attempt. Then sent to TI. You know anything about that?”

“Yes. And it was a tunnel. He was a trusty and he worked in the laundry. The gas dryers had underground vents going out of the building. He dug beneath one of them. No more than an hour a day. They said he had probably been at it at least six months before it was discovered, when the sprinklers they use in the summer on the rec field softened the ground and there was a cave-in.”

He nodded his head. He figured it had been a tunnel.

“The two others that were in on it,” she said. “A drug dealer and a bank robber. They’re still inside. There’s no connection to this.”

He nodded again.

“I think I should go now,” she said. “We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“Yeah. I have a lot more questions.”

“I’ll try to answer them if I can.”

She passed closely by him in the small space between the refrigerator and counter and moved out into the hallway. He could smell her hair as she went by. An apple scent, he thought. He noticed that she was looking at the print hanging on the wall opposite the mirror in the hallway. It was in three separate framed sections and was a print of a fifteenth-century painting called The Garden of Delights . The painter was a Dutchman.

“Hieronymus Bosch,” she said as she studied the nightmarish landscape of the painting. “When I saw that was your full name I wondered if-”

“No relation,” he said. “My mother, she just liked his stuff. I guess ’cause of the last name. She sent that print to me once. Said in the note that it reminded her of L.A. All the crazy people. My foster parents… they didn’t like it, but I kept it for a lot of years. Had it hanging there as long as I’ve had this place.”

“But you like to be called Harry.”

“Yeah, I like Harry.”

“Good night, Harry. Thanks for the beer.”

“Good night, Eleanor… Thanks for the company.”

By 10A.M. they were on the Ventura Freeway, which cuts across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and out of the city. Bosch was driving and they were going against the grain of traffic, heading northwest, toward Ventura County, and leaving behind the blanket of smog that filled the Valley like dirty cream in a bowl.

They were heading to Charlie Company. The FBI had only done a cursory check on Meadows and the prison outreach program the year before. Wish said she had thought its importance was minimal because Meadows’s stay had ended nearly a year before the tunnel caper. She said the bureau had requested a copy of Meadows’s file but had not checked the names of other convicts who were part of the program at the same time as Meadows. Bosch thought this was a mistake. Meadows’s work record indicated the bank caper was part of a long-range plan, he told Wish. The bank burglary might have been hatched at Charlie Company.