Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

“Eleanor, why?”

“I don’t-it’s hard for me to explain. But everything that happened. Everything about the job has turned to shit. And I don’t think I can go back and work in that squad room again after what has happened.”

“Will you come back to L.A.?”

She looked down at her hands and then around the room again.

“I don’t know. Harry, I’m sorry. It seemed like-I don’t know, I’m very confused about things right now.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know. Us. What’s happened. Everything.”

Silence filled the room again and it seemed so loud that Bosch hoped a nurse or even Galvin Junior would stick a head in to see if everything was all right. He needed a cigarette badly. He realized it was the first time today that he had thought about smoking. Eleanor looked down at her feet now, and he looked over at his untouched food. He picked up the roll and started to toss it up and down in his hand like a baseball. After a while Eleanor’s eyes made their third trip around the room without seeing whatever it was she was looking for. Bosch couldn’t figure it out.

“Didn’t you get the flowers I sent?”

“Flowers?”

“Yes, I sent daisies. Like the ones growing on the hill below your house. I don’t see any in here.”

Daisies, Bosch thought. The vase he had knocked against the wall. Where are my goddam cigarettes, he wanted to yell.

“They’ll probably come later. They only make deliveries up here once a day.”

She frowned.

“You know,” Bosch said, “if Rourke knew we’d found the second vault and were watching it, and if he knew that we watched Tran go in and clear his box, why didn’t he get his people out? That really bothers me about this whole thing. Why’d he go through with it?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. Maybe… well, I’ve been thinking that maybe he wanted them to go down. He knew those guys, maybe he knew it would work out that they’d go down shooting, that without them he’d get to keep all the diamonds from the first vault.”

“Yeah. But you know, I’ve been remembering things all day. About when we were down there. It’s been coming back, and I remember that he didn’t say he’d get it all. He said something about his share being bigger now with Meadows and the other two dead. He still used the word ‘share,’ like there was still someone else to split it with.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe, but it’s just semantics, Harry.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve got to go. You know how long they’ll keep you?”

“Haven’t been told, but I think tomorrow I’ll take myself out. Thinking about going to Meadows’s funeral over at veterans.”

“A Memorial Day funeral. Sounds appropriate to me.”

“Want to go with me?”

“Mmmm, no. I don’t think I want anything more to do with Mr. Meadows… But I’ll be at the bureau tomorrow. Clearing out my desk and writing up status sheets on the cases I’ll have to pass to other agents. You could come by if you’d like. I’ll brew you some fresh coffee like before. But, you know, I don’t really think they are going to let you out so fast, Harry. Not with a bullet wound. You need to rest. You need to heal some.”

“Sure,” Bosch said. He knew she was saying good-bye to him.

“Okay, then, maybe I’ll see you.”

She leaned over and kissed him good-bye, and he knew it was good-bye to everything about them. She was almost out the door before he opened his eyes.

“One last thing,” he said, and she turned at the door and looked back at him. “How’d you find me, Eleanor? You know, in the tunnels with Rourke.”

She hesitated and her eyebrows went up again.

“Well, I went down with Hanlon. But when we got out of the hand-dug tunnel we split up. He went one way in that first line and I went the other. I picked the winner. I found the blood. Then I found Franklin. Dead. And after that I was a little lucky. I heard the shots and then the voices. Mostly Rourke’s voice. I followed that. Why did you think of that now?”

“I don’t know. It just sort of came up. You saved my life.”

They looked at each other. Her hand was on the door handle and it was open just enough so that Bosch could look past her and see Galvin Junior still there, sitting in a chair in the hallway.

“All I can say is thanks.”

She made a shushing sound, dismissing his gratitude.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Don’t quit.”

He saw the crack in the door disappear, Junior with it. She stood there silently.

“Don’t leave.”

“I must. I’ll see you, Harry.”

She pulled the door all the way open now.

“Good-bye,” she said, and then she was gone.

Bosch remained motionless on the hospital bed for the better part of an hour. He was thinking about two people: Eleanor Wish and John Rourke. For a long time he closed his eyes and dwelt on the look on Rourke’s face as he crumpled and went down into the black water. I’d be surprised, too, Bosch thought, but there was also something else there, something he couldn’t exactly identify. Some kind of knowing look of recognition and resolution-not of his dying, but of another, secret knowledge.

After a while he got up and took a few tentative steps alongside his bed. His body felt weak, yet all the sleep in the last thirty-six hours had made him restless. After he got his bearings and his shoulder made a slightly painful adjustment to gravity, he began to pace back and forth alongside the bed. He was wearing pale green hospital pajamas, not one of the opened-back smocks that he would have found humiliating. He padded around the room in bare feet, stopping to read the cards that had come with the flowers. The protective league had sent one of the vases. The others came from a couple of cops he knew but wasn’t particularly close to, the widow of an old partner, his union lawyer and another old partner who lived in Ensenada.

He walked away from the flowers and went to the door. He opened it a crack and saw Galvin Junior still sitting there, reading a police equipment catalog. Bosch pulled the door all the way open. Galvin’s head jerked up and he slapped the magazine closed and slipped it into a briefcase at his feet. He didn’t say anything.

“So, Clifford-I hope I can call you that-what are you doing here? Am I supposed to be in danger?”

The younger cop didn’t say anything. Bosch glanced up and down the hall and saw that it was empty all the way down to the nurses’ station about fifty feet away. He looked at his door and noticed he was in room 313.

“Detective, please go back in your room,” Galvin finally said. “I am only here to keep the press out of your room. The deputy chief thinks they will probably try to get in to get an interview with you, and my job is to prevent that, to prevent you from being disturbed.”

“What if they use the sneaky method of just”-Bosch made a show of looking up and down the hall to make sure no one would hear-“using the telephone?”

Galvin exhaled loudly and continued not to look at Bosch. “The nurses are screening incoming calls. Only family, and I am told you don’t have family, so no calls.”

“How’d that lady FBI agent get by you?”

“She was cleared by Irving. Go back into your room, please.”

“Certainly.”

Bosch sat on his bed and tried to go over the case again in his mind. But the more he turned the parts of it over the more he got an anxious feeling that sitting on a bed in a hospital room was wasting time. He felt he was onto something, a breakthrough in the logic of the case. A detective’s job was to walk down the trail of evidence, examine each piece and take it with him. At the end of the trail, what he had in his basket made or lost the case. Bosch had a full basket, but he began to believe there were pieces missing. What had he missed? What had Rourke told him at the end? Not so much in his words but his meaning. And the look on his face. Surprise. But surprise at what? Was he shocked at the bullet? Or shocked by where, and who, it came from? It could have been both, Bosch decided, and either way, what did it mean?