City Of Bones

Chapter 11

JULIA Brasher stood in the living room of Bosch’s house and looked at the CDs stored in the racks next to the stereo.

“I love jazz.”

Bosch was in the kitchen. He smiled when he heard her say it. He finished pouring the two martinis out of a shaker and came out to the living room and handed her a glass.

“Who do you like?”

“Ummm, lately Bill Evans.”

Bosch nodded, went to the rack and came up with Kind of Blue. He loaded it into the stereo.

“Bill and Miles,” he said. “Not to mention Coltrane and a few other guys. Nothing better.”

As the music began he picked up his martini and she came over and tapped it with her glass. Rather than drink, they kissed each other. She started laughing halfway through the kiss.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. I’m just feeling reckless. And happy.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I think it was you giving me the flashlight.”

Bosch was puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, it’s so phallic.”

The look on Bosch’s face made her laugh again and she spilled some of her drink on the floor.

Later, when she was lying face down on his bed, Bosch was tracing the outline of the flaming sun tattooed on the small of her back and thinking about how comfortable and yet strange she felt to him. He knew almost nothing about her. Like the tattoo, there seemed to be a surprise from every angle of view he had on her.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just wondering about the guy who got to put this on your back. I wish it had been me, I guess.”

“How come?”

“Because there will always be a piece of him with you.”

She turned on her side, revealing her breasts and her smile. Her hair was out of its braid and down around her shoulders. He liked that, too. She reached up and pulled him down into a long kiss. Then she said, “That’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me in a long time.”

He put his head down on her pillow. He could smell the sweet scent of perfume and sex and sweat.

“You don’t have any pictures on your walls,” she said. “Photos, I mean.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

She turned over so her back was to him. He reached under her arm and cupped one of her breasts and pulled her back into him.

“Can you stay till the morning?” he asked.

“Well… my husband will probably wonder where I am, but I guess I could call him.”

Bosch froze. Then she started laughing.

“Don’t scare me like that.”

“Well, you never even asked me if I was involved with anyone.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“You were obvious. The lone detective type.” And then in a deep male voice: “Just the facts, ma’am. No time for dames. Murder is my business. I have a job to do and I am-”

He ran his thumb down her side, over the indentations of her ribs. She cut off her words with laughter.

“You lent me your flashlight,” he said. “I didn’t think an ‘involved’ woman would have done that.”

“And I’ve got news for you, tough guy. I saw the Mag in your trunk. In the box before you covered it up. You weren’t fooling anybody.”

Bosch rolled back on the other pillow, embarrassed. He could feel his face getting red. He brought his hands up to hide it.

“Oh, God… Mr. Obvious.”

She rolled over to him and peeled back his hands. She kissed him on the chin.

“I thought it was nice. Kinda made my day and gave me something to maybe look forward to.”

She turned his hands back and looked at the scarring across the knuckles. They were old marks and not very noticeable anymore.

“Hey, what is this?”

“Just scars.”

“I know that. From what?”

“I had tattoos. I took them off. It was a long time ago.”

“How come?”

“They made me take them off when I went into the army.”

She started to laugh.

“Why, what did it say, Fuck the army or something?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then what? Come on, I want to know.”

“It said H-O-L-D on one hand and F-A-S-T on the other.”

“Hold fast? What does ‘hold fast’ mean?”

“Well, it’s kind of a long story…”

“I have time. My husband doesn’t mind.”

She smiled.

“Come on, I want to know.”

“It’s not a big deal. When I was a kid, one of the times I ran away I ended up down in San Pedro. Down around the fishing docks. And a lot of those guys down there, the fishermen, the tuna guys, I saw they had this on their hands. Hold fast. And I asked one of them about it and he told me it was like their motto, their philosophy. It’s like when they were out there in those boats, way out there for weeks, and the waves got huge and it got scary, you just had to grab on and hold fast.”

Bosch made two fists and held them up.

“Hold fast to life… to everything that you have.”

“So you had it done. How old were you?”

“I don’t know, sixteen, thereabouts.”

He nodded and then he smiled.

“What I didn’t know was that those tuna guys got it from some navy guys. So a year later I go waltzing into the army with ‘Hold Fast’ on my hands and the first thing my sergeant told me was to get rid of it. He wasn’t going to have any squid tattoo on one of his guys’ hands.”

She grabbed his hands and looked closely at the knuckles.

“This doesn’t look like laser work.”

Bosch shook his head.

“They didn’t have lasers back then.”

“So what did you do?”

“My sergeant, his name was Rosser, took me out of the barracks and over to the back of the administration building. There was a brick wall. He made me punch it. Until every one of my knuckles was cut up. Then after they were scabbed up in about a week he made me do it again.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, that’s barbaric.”

“No, that’s the army.”

He smiled at the memory. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He looked down at his hands. The music stopped and he got up and walked through the house naked to change it. When he came back to the bedroom, she recognized the music.

“Clifford Brown?”

He nodded and came toward the bed. He didn’t think he had ever known a woman who could identify jazz music like that.

“Stand there.”

“What?”

“Let me look at you. Tell me about those other scars.”

The room was dimly lit by a light from the bathroom but Bosch became conscious of his nakedness. He was in good shape but he was more than fifteen years older than her. He wondered if she had ever been with a man so old.

“Harry, you look great. You totally turn me on, okay? What about the other scars?”

He touched the thick rope of skin above his left hip.

“This? This was a knife.”

“Where’d that happen?”

“A tunnel.”

“And your shoulder?”

“Bullet.”

“Where?”

He smiled.

“A tunnel.”

“Ouch, stay out of tunnels.”

“I try.”

He got into the bed and pulled the sheet up. She touched his shoulder, running her thumb over the thick skin of the scar.

“Right in the bone,” she said.

“Yeah, I got lucky. No permanent damage. It aches in the winter and when it rains, that’s about it.”

“What did it feel like? Being shot, I mean.”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“It hurt like hell and then everything sort of went numb.”

“How long were you down?”

“About three months.”

“You didn’t get a disability out?”

“It was offered. I declined.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I like the job, I guess. And I thought that if I stuck with it, someday I’d meet this beautiful young cop who’d be impressed by all my scars.”

She jammed him in the ribs and the pain made him grimace.

“Oh, poor baby,” she said in a mocking voice.

“That hurt.”

She touched the tattoo on his shoulder.

“What’s that supposed to be, Mickey Mouse on acid?”

“Sort of. It’s a tunnel rat.”

Her face lost all trace of humor.

“What’s the matter?”

“You were in Vietnam,” she said, putting things together. “I’ve been in those tunnels.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was on the road. I spent six weeks in Vietnam. The tunnels, they’re like a tourist thing now. You pay your money and you can go down into them. It must’ve been… what you had to do must’ve been so frightening.”

“It was more scary afterward. Thinking about it.”

“They have them roped off so they can sort of control where you go. But nobody really watches you. So I went under the rope and went further in. It got so dark in there, Harry.”

Bosch studied her eyes.

“And did you see it?” he asked quietly. “The lost light?”

She held his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“I saw it. My eyes adjusted and there was light. Almost like a whisper. But it was enough for me to find my way.”

“Lost light. We called it lost light. We never knew where it came from. But it was down there. Like smoke hanging in the dark. Some people said it wasn’t light, that it was the ghosts of everybody who died in those things. From both sides.”

They spoke no more after that. They held each other and soon she was asleep.

Bosch realized he had not thought about the case for more than three hours. At first this made him feel guilty but then he let it go and soon he too was asleep. He dreamed he was moving through a tunnel. But he wasn’t crawling. It was as if he were underwater and moving like an eel through the labyrinth. He came to a dead end and there was a boy sitting against the curve of the tunnel’s wall. He had his knees up and his face down, buried in his folded arms.

“Come with me,” Bosch said.

The boy peeked his eyes over one arm and looked up at Bosch. A single bubble of air rose from his mouth. He then looked past Bosch as if something was coming up behind him. Bosch turned around but there was only the darkness of the tunnel behind him.

When he looked back at the boy, he was gone.