Michael Connelly - The Concrete Blonde

Bosch could imagine. He envisioned the scenes and felt an unexpected flutter in his heart, as if it had torn loose inside of him and was banging against his ribs like a bird trying to break out of its cage.

“Anyway, the DA’s got it and the big development is Bremmer’s going to talk.”

“He is?”

“Yeah, he heard we had the tapes and everything else. I guess he told his lawyer to deal. He’s going to get life without the possibility of parole in exchange for leading us to the bodies and letting the shrinks have at him, study what makes him tick. My vote is they squash him like a fly, but I guess they are considering the families and science.”

Bosch was silent. Bremmer would live. At first he didn’t know what to think. Then he realized he could live with the deal. It had bothered him that those women might never be found. That was why he had visited Bremmer at the jail the day charges were first filed. Whether the victims had families who cared or not, he didn’t want to leave them down there in the black chasm of the unknown.

It wasn’t a bad deal, Bosch decided. Bremmer would be alive, but he wouldn’t be living. It might even be worse for him than the gas chamber. And that would be justice, he thought.

“Anyway,” Edgar said, “thought you’d want to know.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a weird fuckin’ thing, you know? It being Bremmer. It’s weirder than if it was Mora, man. A reporter! And, man, I knew the guy, too.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of us did. I guess nobody knows anybody like they think.”

“Yeah. Seeya, Harry.”

Late that afternoon, he stood on the back deck, leaning forward on his new oak railing, looking out into the pass and thinking about the black heart. Its rhythm was so strong it could set the beat of a whole city. He knew it would always be the background beat, the cadence, of his own life. Bremmer would be banished now, hidden away forever, but he knew there would be another after him. And another after him. The black heart does not beat alone.

He lit a cigarette and thought about Honey Chandler, crowding his last view of her from his mind with the vision of her holding forth in court. That would always be her place in his mind. There had been something so pure and distilled about her fury-like the blue flame on a match before it burns out on its own. Even directed at him he could appreciate it.

His mind wandered to the statue at the courthouse steps. He still couldn’t think of her name. A concrete blonde, Chandler had called her. Bosch wondered what Chandler had thought about justice at the end. At her end. He knew there was no justice without hope. Did she still have any hope left at the end? He believed that she did. Like the pure blue flame dimming to nothing, it was still there. Still hot. It was what allowed her to beat Bremmer.

He did not hear Sylvia until she stepped out onto the porch. He looked up and saw her there and wanted to go to her immediately, but held back. She was wearing blue jeans and a dark blue denim shirt. He’d bought the shirt for her birthday and he took that as a good sign. He guessed she had probably come from school, it having recessed for the weekend only an hour earlier.

“I called your office and they told me you were off. I thought I would come by to see how you were. I’ve been reading all about the case.”

“I’m okay, Sylvia. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“How are we?”

She smiled a little at that.

“Sounds like one of those bumper stickers you see. ‘How’m I driving?’… Harry, I don’t know how we are. I guess that’s why I’m here.”

There was an uneasy silence as she looked around the porch and out into the pass. Bosch crushed his cigarette out and dropped it in an old coffee can he kept by the door.

“Hey, new cushions.”

“Yeah.”

“Harry, you have to understand why I needed some time. It’s-”

“I do.”

“Let me finish. I rehearsed this enough times, I’d like to get a chance to actually say it to you. I just wanted to say that it is going to be very hard for me, for us, if we go on. It is going to be hard to deal with our pasts, our secrets, and most of all what you do, what you bring home with you…”

Bosch waited for her to continue. He knew she wasn’t done.

“I know I don’t have to remind you, but I’ve been through it before with a man I loved. And I saw it all go bad and-you know how it ended. There was a lot of pain for both of us. So you have to understand why I needed to take a step back and take a look at this. At us.”

He nodded but she wasn’t looking at him. Her not looking concerned him more than her words. He couldn’t bring himself to speak, though. He didn’t know what he could say.

“You live a very hard struggle, Harry. Your life, I mean. A cop. Yet with all your baggage I see and know there are still very noble things about you.”

Now she looked at him.

“I do love you, Harry. I want to try to keep that alive because it’s one of the best things about my life. One of the best things I know. I know it will be hard. But that might make it all the better. Who knows?”

He went to her then.

“Who knows?” he said.

And they held each other for a long time, his face next to hers, smelling her hair and skin. He held the back of her neck as though it was as fragile as a porcelain vase.

After a while they broke apart but only long enough to get on the chaise lounge together. They sat silently, just holding each other, for the longest time-until the sky started to dim and turn red and purple over the San Gabriels. Bosch knew there were still the secrets he carried, but they would keep for now. And he would avoid that black place of loneliness for just a while longer.

“Do you want to go away this weekend?” he asked. “Get away from the city? We could take that trip up to Lone Pine. Stay in a cabin tomorrow night.”

“That would be wonderful. I could-We could use it.”

A few minutes later she added, “We might not be able to get a cabin, Harry. There’s so few of them and they’re usually booked by Friday.”

“I already have one on reserve.”

She turned around so she could face him. She smiled slyly and said, “Oh, so you knew all the time. You were just hanging around waiting for me to come back. No sleepless nights, no surprise.”

He didn’t smile. He shook his head and for a few moments he looked out at the dying light reflected on the west wall of the San Gabriels.

“I didn’t know, Sylvia,” he said. “I hoped.”