“Cielo Azul.”
He took a long pull from the bottle, answering Bosch’s question about the glass.
Cielo Azul, Bosch thought and then he remembered. They had gotten drunk on the back porch once, both of them dulling the edges of a case that was too terrible to think deeply about with a sober mind. He remembered being embarrassed about it the next day, about how he had lost control and kept rhetorically asking in an alcohol- slowed voice, “Where is God’s hand, where is God’s hand?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bosch said. “One of my finer existential moments.”
“Yeah. Except the place is different now. The old one slide down the hill in the quake?”
“Just about. Red-tagged, the whole bit. Started over from the ground up.”
“Yeah, I didn’t recognize it. I drove up here looking for the old place. But then I saw the Shamu and figured there couldn’t be another cop in the neighborhood.”
Bosch thought about the black-and-white parked in the carport. He hadn’t bothered to take it to the station to exchange for his personal car. It would save him time in the morning by allowing him to drive straight to court. The car was a slickback – a black-and-white without the emergency lights on top. Detectives from the divisions used them as part of a program designed to make it look as if there were more cops on the street than there really were.
McCaleb reached over and clicked Bosch’s bottle with his own.
“To Cielo Azul,” he said.
“Yeah,” Bosch said.
He drank from the bottle. It was ice cold and good. His first beer since the start of the trial. He decided he would keep it to one, even if McCaleb pressed on.
“This your ex?” McCaleb asked, pointing to the photo on the shelves.
“My wife. Not my ex, yet – at least as far as I know. But I guess it’s heading that way.”
Bosch stared at the photo of Eleanor Wish. It was the only picture of her he had.
“That’s too bad, man.”
“Yeah. So what’s up, Terry? I’ve got some stuff I have to go over for -”
“I know, the trial. I’m sorry to intrude, man. I know that’s gotta be all-consuming. I just had a couple things on the Gunn case I wanted to clear up. But also I wanted to tell you something. I mean, show you, too.”
He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, opened it and took out a photo. He handed it to Bosch. The photo had taken on the contour line of the wallet. It showed a dark-haired baby in the arms of a dark-haired woman.
“That’s my daughter, Harry. And my wife.”
Bosch nodded and studied the photo. Both mother and child had dark hair and skin and were quite beautiful. He knew they were probably even more so to McCaleb.
“Beautiful,” he said. “The baby looks brand-new. So tiny.”
“She’s about four months now. That picture’s a month old, though. Anyway, I forgot to tell you yesterday at lunch. We named her Cielo Azul.”
Bosch’s eyes came up from the photo to McCaleb’s. They held for a moment and then he nodded.
“Nice.”
“Yeah, I told Graciela I wanted to do it and I told her why. She thought it was a good idea.”
Bosch handed the photo back.
“I hope someday the kid does, too.”
“Me, too. We call her CiCi most of the time. Anyway, remember that night up here, how you kept asking that question about the hand of God and how you couldn’t find it in anything anymore? That happened to me, too. I lost it. This kind of job… it’s hard not to. Then…”
He held up the photo.
“Here it is right here. I found it again. The hand of God. I see it in her eyes.”
Bosch looked at him for a long moment and then nodded.
“Good for you, Terry.”
“I mean, I’m not trying to come off like… I mean I’m not trying to convert you or anything. I’m just saying I found that thing that was missing. And I don’t know if you’re still looking for it… I just wanted to say, you know, that it is out there. Don’t give up.”
Bosch glanced away from McCaleb and out the glass doors to the darkness.
“For some people I’m sure it is.”
He drained his bottle and went into the kitchen to break his promise to himself to have only one. He called back to McCaleb to see if he was ready for a second but his visitor passed. As he bent into the open refrigerator he paused and closed his eyes as the cool air caressed his face. He thought about what McCaleb had just told him.
“You don’t think you are one of them?”
Bosch jerked up at the sound of McCaleb’s voice. He was standing in the kitchen’s doorway.
“What?”
“You said it was out there for some people. You don’t think you are one of them?”
Bosch took a beer out of the refrigerator and slid it into the bottle opener mounted on the wall. He snapped the bottle open and drank deeply from it before answering.
“What is this, Terry, twenty questions? You thinking of becoming a priest or something?”
McCaleb smiled and shook his head.
“Sorry, Harry. A new father, you know? I guess I want to tell the world, that’s all.”
“That’s nice. You want to talk about Gunn now?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s go out and look at the night.”
They walked out to the back deck and both looked at the view. The 101 was its usual ribbon of light, a glowing vein cutting through the mountains. The sky was clear, the smog having been washed out by rain the week before. Bosch could see the lights on the floor of the Valley seemingly extending into infinity. Closer to the house there was only darkness held in the brush on the hillside below. He could smell the eucalyptus from below; it was always strongest after the rain.
McCaleb was the first to speak.
“You’ve got a nice place here, Harry. A nice spot. You must hate having to ride down into the plague every morning.”
Bosch looked over at him.
“Not as long as I get a shot at the carriers every now and then. People like David Storey. I don’t mind that.”
“And what about the ones who walk away? Like Gunn.”
“Nobody walks away, Terry. If I believed that they did, then I couldn’t do this. Sure we might not get every one of them, but I believe in the circle. The big wheel. What goes around comes around. Eventually. I might not see the hand of God too often like you do but I believe in that.”
Bosch put his bottle down on the railing. It was empty and he wanted another but knew he had to put on the brakes. He’d need every brain cell he could muster in court the next day. He thought about a cigarette and knew there was a fresh pack in a kitchen cabinet. But he decided to hold off on that, too.
“Then I guess what happened with Gunn must be a confirmation of your faith in the big wheel theory.”
Bosch didn’t say anything for a long time. He just stared out across the Valley of light.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess it does.”
He broke his stare away and turned his back on the view. He leaned against the railing and looked at McCaleb again.
“So what about Gunn? I thought I told you everything there was to tell yesterday. You’ve got the file, right?”
McCaleb nodded.
“You probably did and I do have the file. But I was just wondering if anything else came up. You know, if maybe our conversation jump-started your thinking on it.”
Bosch sort of laughed and picked up the bottle before remembering it was empty.
