The Black Box

25

They stopped for lunch at the Academy Grill, where the walls were adorned with LAPD memorabilia, and the sandwiches were named after past police chiefs and famous cops real and imagined.

Soon after Maddie ordered the Bratton Burger and Bosch asked for the Joe Friday, the humor Holodnak had injected at the end of the shooting session wore off and Bosch’s daughter grew silent and slumped in her seat.

“Cheer up, baby,” Bosch tried. “It was just a simulator. Overall you did very well. You heard what he said. You have three seconds to recognize and shoot. . . . I think you did great.”

“Dad, I killed a flight attendant.”

“But you saved a teacher. Besides, it wasn’t real. You took a shot that you probably wouldn’t have taken in real life. There’s this sense of urgency with the simulator. When it happens in real life, things actually seem to slow down. There’s—I don’t know—more clarity.”

That didn’t seem to impress her. He tried again.

“Besides that, the gun probably wasn’t zeroed out perfectly.”

“Thanks a lot, Dad. That means all the shots I did hit on target were actually off target because the gun wasn’t zeroed.”

“No, I—”

“I have to go wash my hands.”

She abruptly slid out of the booth and headed to the back hallway as Bosch realized how stupid it had been for him to blame a bad shot on the adjustment of the gun to the screen.

While he waited for her, he looked at a framed front page of the Los Angeles Times on the wall above the booth. The whole top of the page was dedicated to the police shoot-out with the Symbionese Liberation Army at 54th and Compton in 1974. Bosch had been there that day as a young patrol officer. He worked traffic and crowd control during the deadly standoff and the next day stood guard as a team combed through the debris of the burned-out house, looking for the remains of Patty Hearst.

Lucky for her, she hadn’t been there.

Bosch’s daughter slid back into the booth.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

“Relax,” Bosch said. “We just ordered five minutes ago.”

“Dad, why did you become a cop?”

Bosch was momentarily taken aback by the question that came out of the blue.

“A lot of reasons.”

“Like what?”

He paused while he put together his thoughts. This was the second time in a week that she had asked the question. He knew it was important to her.

“The snap answer is to say I wanted to protect and to serve. But because it’s you asking, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’t because I had a desire to protect and serve or to be some sort of do-gooder public servant. When I think back on it, I actually just wanted to protect and serve myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, at the time, I had just come back from the war in Vietnam, and people like me—you know, ex-soldiers from over there—they weren’t really accepted back here. Especially by people our own age.”

Bosch looked around to see if the food was coming. Now he was getting anxious about waiting. He looked back at his daughter.

“I remember I came back and wasn’t sure what I was doing and I started taking classes at L.A. City College over there on Vermont. And I met this girl in a class, and we started hanging out a little bit, and I didn’t tell her where I had been—you know, Vietnam—because I knew it might be an issue.”

“Didn’t she see your tattoo?”

The tunnel rat on his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway.

“No, we hadn’t gotten that far or anything. I’d never had my shirt off with her. But one day we were walking after class through the commons and she sort of asked me out of the blue why I was so quiet . . . . And I don’t know, I just sort of decided that was the opening, that I could let the cat out of the bag. I thought she would accept it, you know?”

“But she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t. I said something like, ‘Well, I’ve spent the last few years in the military,’ and she right away asked if that meant I was in Vietnam, and I told her—I said yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She just did one of those pirouette moves like a dancer and walked away. She didn’t say a thing.”

“Oh my God! How mean!”

“That was when I really knew what I had come back to.”

“Well, what happened when you went to class the next day? Did you say anything to her?”

“No, because I didn’t go back. I never went back to that school, because I knew that’s how it was going to be. So that’s a big part of why a week later I joined the cops. The department was full of military vets, and a lot had been over there in Southeast Asia. So I knew there would be people like me and I could be accepted. It was like somebody coming out of prison and going to a halfway house first. I wasn’t inside anymore, but I was with people like me.”

His daughter seemed to have forgotten about killing a flight attendant. Bosch was glad for that but wasn’t too happy about pushing his own memory buttons.

He suddenly smiled.

“What?” Maddie asked.

“Nothing, I just sort of jumped to another memory from back then. A crazy thing.”

“Well, tell me. You just told me a super-sad story, so tell me the crazy story.”

He waited while the waitress put down their food. She had been working there since Bosch had been a cadet nearly forty years before.

“Thanks, Margie,” Bosch said.

“You’re welcome, Harry.”

Madeline put ketchup on her Bratton Burger, and they took a few bites of food before Bosch began his story.

“Well, when I graduated and got my badge and was put out on the street, it was sort of the same thing all over again. You know, counterculture, the war-protest movement, crazy stuff like that going on.”

He pointed to the framed front page on the wall next to them.

“The police were viewed by a lot of people out there as maybe just a slight level above the baby killers coming back from Vietnam. You know what I mean?”

“I guess.”

“So my first job out on the street as a slick sleeve was to walk—”

“What’s that, a ‘slick sleeve’?”

“A rookie, a boot. No stripes on my sleeves yet.”

“Okay.”

“My first assignment out of the academy was a foot beat on Hollywood Boulevard. And back then it was pretty grim on the boulevard. Really run down.”

“It’s still pretty sketchy in some parts.”

“That’s true. But anyway, I was assigned to a partner who was an old guy named Pepin, and he was my training officer. I remember everybody called him the French Dip because on the beat he stopped every day for an ice cream at this place called Dips near Hollywood and Vine. Like clockwork. Every day. Anyway, Pepin had been around a long time, and I walked the beat with him. We’d do the same routine. Walk up Wilcox from the station, go right on Hollywood till we got to Bronson, then turn around and walk all the way down to La Brea and then back to the station. The French Dip had a built-in clock, and he knew just what pace to keep so that we were back at the station by end of watch.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It was, unless we got a call or something. But even then it was all small-time shit—I mean, stuff. Shoplifting, prostitution, drug dealing—little stuff. Anyway, almost every day we’d get yelled at by somebody passing in a car. You know, they’d call us fascists and pigs and other stuff. And the French Dip hated being called a pig. You could call him a fascist or a Nazi or almost anything else, but he hated being called a pig. So, what he would do when a car went by and they called us pigs was he’d get the make and model and plate number off the car and he’d pull out his ticket book and write the car up for a parking violation. Then he’d tear out the copy you were supposed to leave under the windshield wiper and he’d just crumple it up and throw it away.”

Bosch laughed again as he took a bite of his grilled cheese with tomato and onion.

“I don’t get it,” Maddie said. “Why is that so funny?”

“Well, he would turn in his copy of the ticket, and, of course, the car owner wouldn’t know anything about it and the ticket would go unpaid and then to warrant. So the guy who called us pigs would eventually someday get stopped and there’d be a warrant for his arrest, and that was the French Dip’s way of getting the last laugh.”

He ate a French fry before finishing.

“What I was laughing about was the first time I was on the beat with him when he did it. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he told me. And I said, ‘That’s not in policy, is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s in my policy!’”

Bosch laughed again but his daughter only shook her head. Harry decided the story was funny only to him and went back to finishing his sandwich. He soon got down to telling her what he had been putting off all weekend.

“So listen, I have to go out of town for a few days. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Where to?”

“Just up to the Central Valley, the Modesto area, to talk to some people on a case. I’ll be back either Tuesday night or maybe have to stay till Wednesday. I won’t know until I get there.”

“Okay.”

He braced himself.

“And so I want Hannah to stay with you.”

“Dad, no one has to stay with me. I’m sixteen and I have a gun. I’m fine.”

“I know that but I want her to stay. It will just make me feel better. Can you do that for me?”

She shook her head but agreed halfheartedly.

“I guess. I just don’t—”

“She’s very excited about staying. And she won’t get in your way or tell you when to go to bed or anything like that. I already talked to her about all of that.”

She put her half-eaten hamburger down in a manner that Bosch had come to learn meant that she was finished with her meal.

“How come she never stays over when you’re there?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

“Like last night. We had a great time and then you dropped her off at her house.”

“Maddie . . . that stuff’s private.”

“Whatever.”

All such conversations universally ended with whatever. Bosch looked around and tried to think of something else to talk about. He felt he had fumbled the Hannah situation.

“Why did you suddenly ask me before why I became a cop?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know. I just wanted to know.”

He thought about that for a moment before responding.

“You know, if you’re thinking about whether it’s the right choice for you, you’ve got plenty of time.”

“I know. It’s not that.”

“And you know that I want you to do whatever you want to do in life. I want you happy and that will make me happy. Never think you have to do this for me or follow in my footsteps. It’s not about that.”

“I know, Dad. I just asked you a question, that’s all.”

He nodded.

“Okay, then. But for what it’s worth, I already know you would be a damn good cop and a damn good detective. It’s not about how you shoot, it’s about how you think and your basic understanding of fairness. You got what it takes, Mads. You just have to decide if it’s what you want. Either way, I got your back.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“And just getting back to the simulator for a second, I’m really proud of you. Not just because of the shooting. I’m talking about how cool you were, how confident you were with your commands. It was all good.”

She seemed to take the encouragement well, and then he watched the line of her mouth turn down in a frown.

“Tell that to the flight attendant,” she said.