gonna be fish food. Makes no difference to me.'
'Nobody sent me. I sent myself
McKittrick slapped his palm against the red ball on the throttle lever and the boat surged forward. Its bow rose and Bosch grabbed the railing to hold on.
'Bullshit!' McKittrick yelled above the engine noise. 'You're a liar. You lied before, you're lying now.'
'Listen to me,' Bosch yelled. 'You said you remember every case.'
'I do, goddamnit! I can't forget them.'
'Cut it back!'
McKittrick pulled the throttle back and the boat evened off and the noise reduced.
'On the Marjorie Lowe case you pulled the dirty work. You remember that? Remember what we call the dirty work? You had to tell the next of kin. You had to tell her kid. Out at McClaren.'
'That was in the reports, Bosch. So -'
He stopped and stared at Bosch for a long moment.
Then he flipped open the badge case and read the name. He looked back at Bosch.
'I remember that name. The swimming pool. You're the kid.'
'I'm the kid.'
McKittrick let the boat drift in the shallows of Little Sarasota Bay while Bosch told the story. He asked no questions. He simply listened. At a moment where Bosch paused, he opened the cooler his wife had packed and took out two beers, handing one to Bosch. The can felt ice-cold in Bosch's hand.
Bosch didn't pull the tab on his beer until he finished the story. He had told everything he knew to McKittrick, even the nonessential part about his run-in with Pounds. He had a hunch, based on McKittrick's anger and bizarre behavior, that he had been wrong about the old cop. He had flown out to Florida believing he was coming to see either a corrupt or a stupid cop and he wasn't sure which he would dislike more. But now he believed that McKittrick was a man who was haunted by memories and the demons of choices made badly many years ago. Bosch thought that the pebble still had to come out of the shoe and that his own honesty was the best way to get to it.
'So that's my story,' he said at the end. 'I hope she packed more than two of these.'
He popped the beer and drank nearly a third of it. It tasted delicious going down his throat in the afternoon
sun.
'Oh, there's plenty more where that came from,' McKittrick replied. 'You want a sandwich?' 'Not yet.'
'No, what you want is my story now.'
'That's what I came for.'
'Well, let's get out there to the fish.'
He restarted the engine and they followed a trail of channel markers south through the bay. Bosch finally remembered he had sunglasses in the pocket of his sport coat and put them on.
It seemed like the wind was cutting in on him from all directions and on occasion its warmth would be traded for a cool breeze that would come up off the surface of the water. It was a long time since Bosch had been on a boat or had even been fishing. For a man who had had a gun pointed at him twenty minutes earlier, he realized he felt pretty good.
As the bay tapered off into a canal, McKittrick pulled back on the throttle and cut their wake. He waved to a man on the bridge of a giant yacht tied up outside a waterside restaurant. Bosch couldn't tell if he knew the man or was just being neighborly.
'Take it on a line even with the lantern on the bridge,' McKittrick said.
'What?'
'Take it.'
McKittrick stepped away from the wheel and into the stern of the boat. Bosch quickly stepped behind the wheel, sighted the red lantern hanging at center point beneath the span of a drawbridge a half mile ahead and adjusted the wheel to bring the boat into line. He looked back and saw McKittrick pull a plastic bag of small dead fish out of a compartment in the deck.
'Let's see who we've got here today,' he said.
He went to the side of the boat and leaned well over the gunwale. Bosch saw him start slapping an open palm on the side of the boat. McKittrick then stood up, surveyed the water for about ten seconds and repeated the banging.
'What's going on?' Bosch asked.
Just as he said it, a dolphin crested the water off the port stem and reentered no more than five feet from where McKittrick was standing. It was a slippery gray blur and Bosch wasn't exactly sure at first what had happened. But the dolphin quickly resurfaced next to the boat, its snout out of the water and chattering. It sounded like it was laughing. McKittrick dropped two of the fish into its open mouth.
'That's Sergeant, see the scars?'
Bosch took a quick look back at the bridge to make sure they were still reasonably on line and then stepped back to the stern. The dolphin was still there. McKittrick pointed down into the water beneath its dorsal fin. Bosch could see three white stripes slashed across its smooth gray back.
'He got too close to a prop one time and it cut him up. The people up at Mote Marine took care of him. But he was left with those sergeant's stripes.'
Bosch nodded as McKittrick fed the dolphin again. Without looking up to see if they were off course, McKittrick said, 'You better get the wheel.'
Bosch turned and saw that they had drifted far offline. He went back to the wheel and corrected the course. He stayed there while McKittrick remained in the back, throwing fish to the dolphin, until they passed under the bridge. Bosch decided he could wait him out. Whether it was while they were going out or coming in didn't matter. He was going to get McKittrick's story. He was not going to leave without it.
Ten minutes after the bridge they came to a channel that took them out to the Gulf of Mexico. McKittrick dropped lures from two of the poles into the water and put out about a hundred yards of line on each one. He took the wheel back from Bosch then, yelling into the wind and engine noise.
'I want to take it out to the reefs. We'll troll until we're there and then we'll do some drift fishing in the shallows. We'll talk then.'
'Sounds like a plan,' Bosch yelled back. .
Nothing hit either of the lures, and about two miles from the shore McKittrick killed the engines and told Bosch to bring in one line while he handled the other. It took Bosch, who was left handed, a few moments to get himself coordinated on the right-handed reel but then he started smiling.
'I don't think I've done this since I was a kid. At McClaren every now and then they'd put us on a bus and take us out to the Malibu Pier.'
'Jesus, that pier still there?'
'Yeah.' 'Must be like fishing in a cesspool by now.'
'I guess.'
McKittrick laughed and shook his head.
'Why do you stay there, Bosch? Doesn't sound like they particularly want you.'
Bosch thought a moment before answering. The comment was on point but he wondered if it was on point from McKittrick or whoever the source was he had called.
'Who'd you call back there about me?'
'I'm not telling you. That's why he talked to me, because he knew I wouldn't tell you.'
Bosch nodded, signaling he'd let it go.
'Well, you're right,' he said. 'I don't think they particularly want me back there. But I don't know. It's kind've like the more they push one way, the more I push the other. I feel like if they'd stop asking or trying to make me leave, then I'd probably want to do it.'
'I guess I know what you mean.'
McKittrick stowed the two rods they had used and set
to work outfitting the other two with hooks and buckshot weights.
'We're going to use mullet.'
