“It’s not good to be too reckless,” he said. “You cross the tube too often, you’ll eventually get burned.”
“Hmm. Are you lecturing me, Harry? You want to be my training officer now?”
“No. I checked my gun and my badge at the door, remember?”
“Okay, then.”
She turned around, his hands still on her neck, and kissed him. Then she pulled back away.
“You know, the great thing about this risotto is that it can keep in the oven as long as we need it to.”
Bosch smiled.
Later on, after they had made love, Bosch got up from her bed and went out to the living room.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
When he didn’t answer she called out to him to turn the oven up. He came back into the room carrying the gold-framed photo. He got into the bed and turned on the light on the bed table. It was a low-wattage bulb beneath a heavy lamp shade. The room still was cast in shadow.
“Harry, what are you doing?” Julia said in a tone that warned he was treading close to her heart. “Did you turn the oven up?”
“Yeah, three-fifty. Tell me about this guy.”
“Why?”
“I just want to know.”
“It’s a private story.”
“I know. But you can tell me.”
She tried to take the photo away but he held it out of her reach.
“Is he the one? Did he break your heart and send you running?”
“Harry. I thought you took your badge off.”
“I did. And my clothes, everything.”
She smiled.
“Well, I’m not telling you anything.”
She was on her back, head propped on a pillow. Bosch put the picture on the bed table and then turned back and moved in next to her. Under the sheet he put his arm across her body and pulled her tightly to him.
“Look, you want to trade scars again? I got my heart broken twice by the same woman. And you know what? I kept her picture on a shelf in my living room for a long time. Then on New Year’s Day I decided it had been a long enough time. I put her picture away. Then I got called out to work and I met you.”
She looked at him, her eyes moving slightly back and forth as she seemed to be searching his face for something, maybe the slightest hint of insincerity.
“Yes,” she finally said. “He broke my heart. Okay?”
“No, not okay. Who is the creep?”
She started laughing.
“Harry, you’re my knight in tarnished armor, aren’t you?”
She pulled herself up into a sitting position, the sheet falling away from her breasts. She folded her arms across them.
“He was in the firm. I really fell for him-right down the old elevator shaft. And then… then he decided it was over. And he decided to betray me and to tell secret things to my father.”
“What things?”
She shook her head.
“Things I will never tell a man again.”
“Where was that picture taken?”
“Oh, at a firm function-probably the New Year’s banquet, I don’t remember. They have a lot of them.”
Bosch had become angled behind her. He leaned down and kissed her back, just above the tattoo.
“I couldn’t be there anymore while he was there. So I quit. I said I wanted to travel. My father thought it was a midlife crisis because I had turned thirty. I just let him think it. But then I had to do what I said I wanted to do- travel. I went to Australia first. It was the farthest place I could think of.”
Bosch pulled himself up and stacked two pillows behind his back. He then pulled her back against his chest. He kissed the top of her head and kept his nose in her hair.
“I had a lot of money from the firm,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry. I just kept traveling, going wherever I wanted, working odd jobs when I felt like it. I didn’t come home for almost four years. And when I did, that’s when I joined the academy. I was walking along the boardwalk and saw the little Venice community service office. I went in and picked up a pamphlet. It all happened pretty fast after that.”
“Your history shows impulsive and possibly reckless decision-making processes. How did that get by the screeners?”
She gently elbowed him in the side, setting off a flare of pain from his ribs. He tensed.
“Oh, Harry, sorry. I forgot.”
“Yeah, sure.”
She laughed.
“I guess all you old guys know that the department’s been pushing big time for what they term ‘mature’ women cadets the last few years. To smooth off all the hard testosterone edges of the department.”
She rocked her hips back against Bosch’s genitals to underline the point.
“And speaking of testosterone,” she said, “you never told me how it went with old bullet head himself today.”
Bosch groaned but didn’t answer.
“You know,” she said, “Irving came to address our class one day on the moral responsibilities that come with carrying the badge. And everybody sitting there knew the guy probably makes more backroom deals up there on the sixth floor than there are days in the year. The guy’s the classic fixer. You could practically cut the irony in the auditorium with a knife.”
Her use of the word “irony” made Bosch flash on what Antoine Jesper had said about coupling the bones found on the hill with the bones on the skateboard. He felt his body tensing as thoughts of the case started encroaching on what had been an oasis of respite from the investigation.
She sensed his tightness.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You got all tense all of a sudden.”
“The case, I guess.”
She was quiet a moment.
“I think it’s kind of amazing,” she then said. “Those bones being up there all of these years and then coming up out of the ground. Like a ghost or something.”
“It’s a city of bones. And all of them are waiting to come up.”
He paused.
“I don’t want to talk about Irving or the bones or the case or anything else right now.”
“Then what do you want?”
He didn’t answer. She turned to face him and started pushing him down off the pillows until he was flat on his back.
“How about a mature woman to smooth off all the hard edges again?”
It was impossible for Bosch not to smile.
Chapter 23
BEFORE dawn Bosch was on the road. He left Julia Brasher sleeping in her bed and started on his way to his home, after first stopping at Abbot’s Habit for a coffee to go. Venice was like a ghost town, with the tendrils of the morning fog moving across the streets. But as he got closer to Hollywood the lights of cars on the streets multiplied and Bosch was reminded that the city of bones was a twenty-four-hour city.
