Читаем The Black Echo полностью

“Yeah. I’ll take care of him. I’ll get a patrol unit to take us. We’ll get his bike on the way. I’ll have ’em drop me by my car.”

“That’s nice. I mean about you getting his bike and taking care of him.”

“Well, we made a deal with him, remember?”

“I remember. But you care about him. I watched how you handled him. You see some of yourself there?”

He turned away from the glass to look at her.

“No, not especially,” he said. “He’s just another wit that has to be interviewed. You think he’s a little bastard now, wait another year, wait till he’s nineteen or twenty, if he makes it. He’ll be a monster then. Preying on people. This isn’t the last time he’ll be sitting in that room. He’ll be in and out of there his whole life till he kills somebody or they kill him. It’s Darwin’s rules; survival of the fittest, and he’s fit to survive. So no, I don’t care about him. I’m putting him in a shelter because I want to know where he is in case we need him again. That’s all.”

“Nice speech, but I don’t think so. I know a little bit about you, Bosch. You care, all right. The way you got him dinner and asked him-”

“Look, I don’t care how many times you read my file. You think that means you know about me? I told you, that’s bullshit.”

He had come up close to her, until his face was only a foot from hers. But she looked away from him, down at her notebook, as if what she had written there might have something to do with what he was saying.

“Look,” he said, “we can work this together, maybe even find out who killed Meadows if we get a few more breaks like the one with the kid today. But we won’t really be partners and we won’t really know each other. So maybe we shouldn’t act like we do. Don’t tell me about your little brother with a crew cut and how he looks the way I did, because you don’t know how I was. A bunch of papers and pictures in a file don’t say anything about me.”

She closed the notebook and put it in her purse. Then she finally looked up at him. There was a knocking from inside the interview room. Sharkey was looking at himself in the mirrored window of the door. But they both ignored him and Wish just drilled Bosch with her eyes.

“You always get this way when a woman turns you down for dinner?” she asked calmly.

“That’s got nothing to do with it and you know it.”

“Sure. I know it.” She started to walk away, then said, “Let’s say nineA.M., we meet at the bureau again?”

He didn’t answer and then she did walk away, toward the squad room door. Sharkey pounded on his door again, and Bosch looked over and saw the boy picking the acne on his face in the door’s mirror. Wish turned once more before she was out of the room.

“I wasn’t talking about my little brother,” she said. “He was my big brother, actually. And I was talking about a long time ago. About the way he looked when I was a little girl and he was going away for a while, to Vietnam.”

Bosch didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. He realized what was coming.

“I remember how he looked then,” she said, “because it was the last time I saw him. It sticks with you. He was one of the ones that didn’t come back.”

She walked out.

***

Harry ate the last slice of pizza. It was cold and he hated anchovies and he felt he deserved it that way. Same for the Coke, which was warm. Afterward, he sat at the homicide table and made calls until he found an empty bed, rather, an empty space, in one of the no-questions-asked shelters near the Boulevard. At Home Street Home they didn’t try to send runaways back to where they came from. They knew in most cases home was a worse nightmare than the streets. They just gave the children a safe place to sleep and then tried to send them off to any place but Hollywood.

He checked out an unmarked car and drove Sharkey to his motorbike. It would not fit in the trunk, so Bosch made a deal with the boy. Sharkey would ride the bike to the shelter and Bosch would follow. When the boy got there and got checked in, Bosch would give him back his money and wallet and cigarettes. But not the Polaroids and the joint. Those went into the trash. Sharkey didn’t like it but he did it. Bosch told him to hang around the shelter a couple of days, though he knew the boy would probably split first thing in the morning.

“I found you once. If I need to, I can do it again,” he said as the boy locked his bike up outside the home.

“I know, I know,” Sharkey said.

It was an idle threat. Bosch knew that he had found Sharkey when the boy didn’t know he was being looked for. It would be a different story if he wanted to hide. Bosch gave the boy one of his cheap business cards and told him to give a call if he thought of anything that would help.

“That would help you or me?” Sharkey asked.