Michael Connelly: The Narrows

"Wow, nice view."

"Yeah, I like it."

I pointed down to the left, where a small cut of the river was in the view behind the soundstages on the Warner Brothers lot.

"There it is, the mighty Los Angeles River."

She squinted and looked and then found it.

"The narrows. Looks pretty weak right now."

"It's resting. Next storm, it will be back."

"How are you feeling, Harry?" "Good. Better. I've been sleeping a lot. I'm surprised you're still in town."

"Well, I took a few days. I'm actually looking at apartments."

"Really?"

I turned with my back to the railing so I could just look at her.

"I'm pretty sure this whole thing will be my ticket out of South Dakota. I don't know what squad they'll put me on but I'm going to ask for L.A. Or I was, until I saw what some of these apartments go for. In Rapid City I pay five-fifty a month for a really nice and secure place."

"I could find you five-fifty here but you probably won't like the location. You'd probably have to learn another language, too."

"No, thanks. I'm working on it. So what have you been doing?"

"I just came back from Parker Center. I put in my papers. I'm going back on the job."

"Then I guess this is it for us. I heard the FBI and the LAPD don't talk."

"Yeah, there is a wall there. But it's been known to come down from time to time. I have some friends with the bureau. Believe it or not."

"I believe it, Harry."

I noticed that she was back to calling me by my first name. I wondered if that meant the relationship was over.

"So," I said, "when did you know about McCaleb?"

"What do you mean? Know what?" "I mean when did you know that Backus didn't kill him? That he killed himself."

She put both hands on the railing and looked down into the arroyo. But she wasn't really looking at anything down there.

"Harry, what are you talking about?"

"I found out who William Bing is. He's a monkey from the pages of his daughter's favorite book."

"So? What's that mean?"

"It means he checked himself into the hospital in Vegas under a phony name. He had something wrong with him, Rachel. Something inside."

I touched the center of my chest.

"Maybe he was chasing the case, maybe not. But he knew something was wrong and he went over there to that hospital to have it checked and to keep it quiet. He didn't want his wife and his family to know. And so they checked him out and gave him the bad news. His second heart was going the way his first one went. Cardio… myo… whatever it's called. Bottom line was he was dying. He needed another heart or he was going to die."

Rachel shook her head like I was a fool.

"I don't know how you think you know all of this but you can't possib-"

"Look, I know what I know. And I know he had already burned through his medical insurance and if he was going to get in line for another heart, they would lose everything, the house, the boat, everything. Everything for another heart."

I paused and then continued in a quiet and calm voice.

"He didn't want that. He also didn't want his family to see him waste away and die, on the public dole. And he didn't like the idea of another person dying so he could live. He had already been through that, too."

I stopped there to see if she would protest again and try to dissuade me. She remained silent this time.

"The only things he had left were his life insurance and his pension. He wanted them to have that. So he was the one who changed out his pills. There's a receipt for a health food store under the seat of his car. I called there this morning to see if they sell powdered shark cartilage. They do.

"He changed out his pills and just kept on taking them. He figured as long as he made a show of taking them there'd be no autopsy and everything would work out fine."

"But it didn't, did it?"

"No, but he had a backup plan for that, too. That's why he waited for the long charter. He wanted to die out there on the boat. He wanted it to be in waters that would come under federal jurisdiction. His hope was that if anything came of it, his friends in the bureau would take care of everything for him.

"The only problem with his whole big plan was that he had no idea about the Poet. He had no idea his wife would come to me or that a few lines scribbled in a file would lead to all that happened."

I shook my head.

"I should have seen it. The med switch wasn't Backus's style. Too complicated. The complicated ones are usually inside jobs."

"What about the threat to his family? Whether or not he knew it was Backus, he knew somebody had threatened his family. He got those photographs-somebody stalking his family. You are saying he checked out and left his family at risk? That's not the Terry McCaleb I knew."

"Maybe he thought he was ending the risk. The threat to his family was aimed at him. If he was gone, then so, too, was the threat."

Rachel nodded, but it wasn't in any sort of confirmation.

"If nothing else, your fact chain is interesting, Harry. I'll give you that. But what makes you think we know about this, that I know about it?"

"Oh, you know. The way you dismissed my questions about William Bing for one thing. But the other is what you did in that house the other day. When I had the gun on Backus, he was about to say something about Terry and you cut him off. You jumped all over what he was about to say. I think he was about to say he didn't kill Terry."

"Oh, yeah, a killer denying one of his victims. Isn't that unusual."

Her sarcasm sounded defensive to me.

"This time it would have been. He was no longer hiding. He was out in the open and he would have taken credit if credit was due him. You knew that and that's why you cut him off. You knew he was going to deny it."

She came away from the railing and stood in front of me.

"Okay, Harry, you think you've got it all figured out. You found a sad little suicide hidden in all the murders. What are you going to do with it? You going to go out there and announce it to the world? The only thing that might do is take the money away from the family. Is that what you want? Maybe you can get a piece of it as the whistleblower reward."

Now I turned away from her and leaned down on the railing.

"No, I don't want that. I just don't like being lied to."

"Oh, I get it. This really isn't about Terry. It's about you and me, isn't it?"

"I don't know what it's about, Rachel."

"Well, when you do, when you figure it all out, let me know, okay?"

She suddenly came up next to me and kissed me hard on the cheek.

"Good-bye, Bosch. Maybe I'll see you around once the transfer comes through."

I didn't turn around to watch her go. I listened as her angry footsteps crossed the deck and then the maple floor inside. I heard the front door slam with a finality that reverberated right through me. It was that tumbling bullet again.

I stood on the porch, elbows on the railing, for a long time after Rachel left. My guess was that I would never see her again, whether or not she took a transfer to Los Angeles. I felt a loss. I felt like something good had been taken from me before I really knew how good it could be.

I tried to put her out of my mind for a little while. Terry McCaleb, too. I looked out at the city and thought it was beautiful. The rain had cleaned the sky out and I could see all the way to the San Gabriels and the snow-covered peaks beyond. The air seemed to be as clean and as pure as the air breathed by the Gabrielenos and the padres so many years before. I saw what they had seen in the place. It was the kind of day you felt you could build a future on.