he was going. It made him think of Trent and Stokes and most of all Arthur Delacroix and Julia Brasher. It made him think about what Golliher had said while studying the bones of the murder victims from millenniums ago. And it made him know the answer to the question on the piece of paper.
“Nowhere,” he said out loud.
He folded the paper and put it in the box. He looked down at his hands, at the scars across the knuckles. He ran the fingers of one hand across the markings on the other. He thought about the interior scars left from punching all of the brick walls he couldn’t see.
He had always known that he would be lost without his job and his badge and his mission. In that moment he came to realize that he could be just as lost with it all. In fact, he could be lost because of it. The very thing he thought he needed the most was the thing that drew the shroud of futility around him.
He made a decision.
He reached into his back pocket and took out his badge wallet. He slid the ID card out from behind the plastic window and then unclipped the badge. He ran his thumb along the indentations where it said Detective. It felt like the scars on his knuckles.
He put the badge and the ID card in the desk drawer. He then pulled his gun from its holster, looked at it for a long moment and put it in the drawer, too. He closed the drawer and locked it with a key.
He stood up and walked through the squad room to Billets’s office. The door was unlocked. He put the key to his desk drawer and the key to his slickback down on her blotter. When he didn’t show up in the morning he was sure she would get curious and check out his desk. She’d then understand that he wasn’t coming back. Not to Hollywood Division and not to RHD. He was turning in his badge, going Code 7. He was done.
On the walk back through the squad room Bosch looked about and felt a wave of finality move through him. But he didn’t hesitate. At his desk he put one box on top of the other and carried them out through the front hallway. He left the lights on behind him. After he passed the front desk he used his back to push open the heavy front door of the station. He called to the officer sitting behind the counter.
“Hey, do me a favor. Call a cab for me.”
“You got it. But with the weather it might be a while. You might want to wait in-”
The door closed, cutting off the cop’s voice. Bosch walked out to the curb. It was a crisp, wet night. There was no sign of the moon beyond the cloud cover. He held the boxes against his chest and waited in the rain.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1914 the bones of a female homicide victim were recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The bones were nine thousand years old, making the woman the earliest known murder victim in the place now known as Los Angeles. The tar pits continue to churn the past and bring bones to the surface for study. However, the finding of a second homicide victim mentioned in this book is wholly fictional-as of this writing.
Michael Connelly
Connelly has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Barry, Ridley, Maltese Falcon (Japan),.38 Caliber (France), Grand Prix (France), and Premio Bancarella (Italy) awards.
In addition to his work in publishing, Michael Connelly was one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the Fall of 2000.
Connelly lives with his family in Florida.
