The Black Echo

Epilogue

The morning after Memorial Day, Harry Bosch checked back into MLK, where he was severely chastised by his doctor, who seemed, to Harry at least, to take a perverse pleasure in ripping the home-applied bandages away from his shoulder and then using a stinging saline solution to rinse the wound. He spent two days resting and then was wheeled into the OR for surgery to reattach muscles that had been torn from bone by the bullet.

On the second day of his recovery from surgery, a nurse’s aide dropped off a day-oldLos Angeles Times for him to while away a few hours with. Bremmer’s story was on the front page, and it accompanied a photograph of a priest standing before a lonely casket at a cemetery in Syracuse, New York. It was FBI Special Agent John Rourke’s casket. Bosch could tell from the photo that more mourners-albeit members of the media-had been at Meadows’s funeral. But Bosch tossed the front section aside after scanning the first few paragraphs of the story and realizing it wasn’t about Eleanor. He turned to the sports.

The next day, he had a visitor. Lieutenant Harvey Pounds told Bosch that when he was recovered, he would report back to Hollywood homicide. Pounds said that neither of them had any choice in the matter. The order came from the sixth floor at Parker Center. The lieutenant didn’t have much else to say, and didn’t mention the newspaper article at all. Harry took the news with a smile and a nod, not wanting to show a hint of what he felt or thought.

“Of course, this is all contingent on you being able to pass a departmental physical when you’re released by your physicians here,” Pounds added.

“Of course,” Bosch said.

“You know, Bosch, some officers would want the disability, retire at eighty percent pay. You could get a job in the private sector and do very nicely. You’d deserve it.”

Ah, Harry thought, there is the reason for the visit.

“Is that what the department wants me to do, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Are you the messenger?”

“Of course not. The department wants you to do what you want, Harry. I’m just looking at the advantages of the situation. You know, just something to think about. I understand private investigation is the growth market of the nineties. No trust anymore, you know? Nowadays people are secretly getting complete backgrounds-medical, financial, romantic-on the people they are going to marry.”

“That doesn’t sound like my kind of work.”

“You’ll take the homicide table, then?”

“Soon as I pass the physical.”

He had another visitor the next day. This one was expected. She was a prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office. Her name was Chavez and she wanted to know about the night Sharkey was killed. Eleanor Wish had come in, Bosch knew then.

He told the prosecutor that he had been with Eleanor, confirming her alibi. Chavez said she just had to check to be sure, before they started talking a deal. She asked a few other questions about the case, then got up from the visitor’s chair to go.

“What’s going to happen to her?” Bosch asked.

“I can’t discuss that, Detective.”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record, she’s obviously going to have to go away, but it probably won’t be long. The climate is right for this to be handled very quietly. She came forward, she brought competent counsel and it appears she was not directly responsible for the deaths involved. If you ask me, she’ll get out of this very lucky. She’ll plead and do maybe thirty months tops up at Tehachapi.”

Bosch nodded and Chavez was gone.

Harry, too, was gone the next day, sent home for six weeks’ recuperative leave before reporting back to the station on Wilcox. When he arrived at the house on Woodrow Wilson he found a yellow slip of paper in his mailbox. He took it to the post office and exchanged it for a wide, flat package in brown paper. He didn’t open it until he was home. It was from Eleanor Wish, though it did not say so: it was just something he knew. After tearing away the paper and bubbled plastic liner, he found a framed print of Hopper’sNighthawks. It was the piece he had seen above her couch that first night he was with her.

Bosch hung the print in the hallway near his front door, and from time to time he would stop and study it when he came in, particularly from a weary day or night on the job. The painting never failed to fascinate him, or to evoke memories of Eleanor Wish. The darkness. The stark loneliness. The man sitting alone, his face turned to the shadows. I am that man, Harry Bosch would think each time he looked.