Michael Connelly - City Of Bones

“I heard you were in the house,” she said. “I checked and saw the light out and thought maybe I’d missed you.”

“Just don’t tell the chief about the lights.”

She smiled and Bosch sat down next to her. He wanted to touch her but didn’t.

“Or us,” he said.

She nodded.

“Yeah. A lot of people know, don’t they?”

“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that. Can you get a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s walk over to the Cat and Fiddle. I’m tired of driving today.”

Rather than walk through the station together and out the front door, they took the long way through the parking lot and around the station. They walked two blocks up to Sunset and then another two down to the pub. Along the way Bosch apologized for missing her in the squad room before her shift and explained he had driven to Palm Springs. She was very quiet as they walked, mostly just nodding her head at his explanations. They didn’t talk about the issue at hand until they reached the pub and slid into one of the booths by the fireplace.

They both ordered pints of Guinness and then Julia folded her arms on the table and fixed Bosch with a hard stare.

“Okay, Harry, I’ve got my drink coming. You can give it to me. But I have to warn you, if you are going to say you want to just be friends, well, I already have enough friends.”

Bosch couldn’t help but break into a broad smile. He loved her boldness, her directness. He started shaking his head.

“Nah, I don’t want to be your friend, Julia. Not at all.”

He reached across the table and squeezed her forearm. Instinctively, he glanced around the pub to make sure no one from the cop shop had wandered over for an after-shift drink. He didn’t recognize anyone and looked back at Julia.

“What I want is to be with you. Just like we’ve been.”

“Good. So do I.”

“But we have to be careful. You haven’t been around the department long enough. I have and I know how things get around, and so it’s my fault. We should’ve never left your car in the station lot that first night.”

“Oh, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

“No, it’s-”

He waited while the barmaid put their beers down on little paper coasters with the Guinness seal on them.

“It’s not like that, Julia,” he said when they were alone again. “If we’re going to keep going, we need to be more careful. We have to go underground. No more meeting at the bench, no more notes, no more anything like that. We can’t even go here anymore because cops come here. We have to be totally underground. We meet outside the division, we talk outside the division.”

“You make it sound like we’re a couple of spies or something.”

Bosch picked up his glass, clicked it off hers and drank deeply from it. It tasted so good after such a long day. He immediately had to stifle a yawn, which Julia caught and repeated.

“Spies? That’s not too far off. You forget, I’ve been in this department more than twenty-five years. You’re just a boot, a baby. I’ve got more enemies inside the wire than you’ve got arrests under your belt. Some of these people would take any opportunity to put me down if they could. It sounds like I’m just worrying about myself here, but the thing is if they need to go after a rookie to get to me, they’ll do it in a heartbeat. I mean that. A heartbeat.”

She turtled her head down and looked both ways.

“Okay, Harry-I mean, Secret Agent double-oh-forty-five.”

Bosch smiled and shook his head.

“Yeah, yeah, you think it’s all a joke. Wait until you get your first IAD jacket. Then you’ll see the light.”

“Come on, I don’t think it’s a joke. I’m just having fun.”

They both drank from their beers, and Bosch leaned back and tried to relax. The heat from the fireplace felt good. The walk over had been brisk. He looked at Julia and she was smiling like she knew a secret about him.

“What?”

“Nothing. You just get so worked up.”

“I’m trying to protect you, that’s all. I’m plus-twenty-five, so it doesn’t matter as much to me.”

“What does that mean? I’ve heard people say that-‘plus-twenty-five’-like they’re untouchable or something.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Nobody’s untouchable. But after you hit twenty-five years in, you top out on the pension scale. So it doesn’t matter if you quit at twenty-five years or thirty-five years, you get the same pension. So ‘plus-twenty-five’ means you have some fuck-you room. You don’t like what they’re doing to you, you can always pull the pin and say have a nice day. Because you’re not in it for the check and the bennies anymore.”

The waitress came back to the table and put down a basket of popcorn. Julia let some time go by and then leaned across the table, her chin almost over the mouth of her pint.

“Then what are you in it for?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his glass.

“The job, I guess… Nothing big, nothing heroic. Just the chance to maybe make things right every now and then in a fucked-up world.”

He used his thumb to draw patterns on the frosted glass. He continued speaking without taking his eyes off the glass.

“This case, for example…”

“What about it?”

“If we can just figure it out and put it together… we can maybe make up a little bit for what happened to that kid. I don’t know, I think it might mean something, something really small, to the world.”

He thought about the skull Golliher had held up to him that morning. A murder victim buried in tar for 9,000 years. A city of bones, and all of them waiting to come up out of the ground. For what? Maybe nobody cares anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything in the long run. Suicide terrorists hit New York and three thousand people are dead before they’ve finished their first cup of coffee. What does one little set of bones buried in the past matter?”

She smiled sweetly and shook her head.

“Don’t go existential on me, Harry. The important thing is that it means something to you. And if it means something to you, then it is important to do what you can. No matter what happens in the world, there will always be the need for heroes. I hope someday I get a chance to be one.”

“Maybe.”

He nodded and kept his eyes from hers. He played some more with his glass.

“Do you remember that commercial that used to be on TV, where there’s this old lady who’s on the ground or something and she says, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ and everybody used to make fun of it?”

“I remember. They sell T-shirts that say that on Venice Beach.”

“Yeah, well… sometimes I feel like that. I mean, plus twenty-five. You can’t go the distance without screwing up from time to time. You fall down, Julia, and sometimes you feel like you can’t get up.”

He nodded to himself.

“But then you get lucky and a case comes along and you say to yourself, this is the one. You just feel it. This is the one I can get back up with.”

“It’s called redemption, Harry. What’s that song say, ‘Everybody wants a shot at it’?”

“Something like that. Yeah.”

“And maybe this case is your shot?”

“Yeah, I think it is. I hope so.”

“Then here’s to redemption.”

She picked up her glass for a toast.

“Hold fast,” he said.

She banged it off of his. Some of her beer sloshed into his almost empty glass.

“Sorry. I need to practice that.”

“It’s okay. I needed a refill.”

He raised his glass and drained it. He put it back down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“So are you coming home with me tonight?” he asked.