“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?”
