Michael Connelly (10 page)

The photographs were all taken in Vietnam. Like the picture found in Meadows’s apartment, these were mostly in black and white.
It was cheaper back then, getting black-and-white film developed in Saigon. Bosch was in some of the shots, but most were
photos that he had taken with an old Leica his foster father had given him before he left. It was a peace gesture from the
old man. He hadn’t wanted Harry to go, and they had fought about it. So the camera was given. And accepted. But Bosch was
not one to tell stories when he returned, and the snapshots were left spread through the pages of the scrapbook, never to
be mounted, rarely to be looked at.

If there was a recurring theme of the photographs it was the smiling faces and the tunnels. In almost every shot, there were
soldiers standing in defiant poses at the mouth of a hole they had probably just been in and conquered. To the outsider, the
photos would appear strange, maybe fascinating. But to Bosch they were scary, like newspaper photos he had seen of people
trapped in wrecked cars, waiting to be cut out by the firemen. The photos were of the smiling faces of young men who had dropped
down into hell and come back to smile into the camera. Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a
tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there. But, still, they went.

Bosch turned a cracked page of the album and found Billy Meadows staring up at him. The photo had undoubtedly been taken a
few minutes after the one Bosch had found at Meadows’s apartment. The same group of soldiers. The same trench and tunnel.
Echo Sector, Cu Chi District. But Bosch wasn’t in this portrait because he had left the frame to snap the photo. His Leica
had caught Meadows’s vacant stare and stoned smile — his pale skin looked waxy but taut. He had captured the real Meadows,
Bosch thought. He put the photo back in the page and turned to the next one. This one was of himself, no one else in the frame.
He clearly remembered setting the camera down on a wooden table in a hootch and setting the timer. Then he moved into the
frame. The camera had snapped as he was shirtless, the tattoo on his deeply tanned shoulder catching the falling sun through
the window. Behind him, but out of focus, was the dark entrance to a tunnel lying uncovered on the straw floor of the hootch.
The tunnel was blurred, forbidding darkness, like the ghastly mouth in Edvard Munch’s painting
The Scream.

It was a tunnel in the village they called Timbuk2, Bosch knew as he stared at the photo. His last tunnel. He was not smiling
in the picture. His eyes were set in dark sockets. And neither was he smiling as he looked at it now. He held the photo in
two hands, absentmindedly rubbing his thumbs up and down the borders. He stared at the photograph until fatigue and alcohol
pulled him down into sleepy thought. Almost dreamlike. He remembered that last tunnel and he remembered Billy Meadows.

• • •

Three of them went in. Two of them came out.

The tunnel had been discovered during a routine sweep at a small village in E Sector. The village had no name on the recon
maps, so the soldiers called it Timbuk2. The tunnels were turning up everywhere, so there weren’t enough rats to go around.
When the tunnel mouth was found under a rice basket in a hootch, the top sergeant didn’t want to have to wait for a dust-off
to land with fresh rats. He wanted to press on, but he knew he had to check the tunnel out. So the top made a decision like
so many others in the war. He sent three of his own men in. Three virgins, scared as shit, maybe six weeks in country among
them. The top told them not to go far, just set charges and come out. Do it fast, and cover each other’s ass. The three green
soldiers dutifully went down into the hole. Except a half-hour later, only two came out.

The two who made it out said that the three of them had separated. The tunnel branched into several directions and they split
up. They were telling the top this when there was a rumble, and a huge cough of noise and smoke and dust belched from the
tunnel mouth. The C-4 charges had detonated. The company loot came in then and said they wouldn’t leave the zone without the
missing man. The whole company waited a day for the smoke and dust to settle in the tunnel and then two tunnel rats were dropped
during a dust-off — Harry Bosch and Billy Meadows. He didn’t care if the missing soldier was dead, the lieutenant told them.
Get him out. He wasn’t going to leave one of his boys in that hole. “Go get ‘im and bring ‘im out here so we can get ‘im a
decent burial,” the lieutenant said.

Meadows said, “We wouldn’t leave any of our own in there, either.”

Bosch and Meadows went down the hole then and found that the main entry led to a junction room where baskets of rice were
stored and three other passageways began. Two of these had collapsed in the C-4 explosions. The third was still open. It was
the one the missing soldier had taken. And that was the way they went.

They crawled through the darkness, Meadows in front, using their lights sparingly, until they reached a dead end. Meadows
poked around the tunnel’s dirt floor until he found the concealed door. He pried it open and they dropped down into another
level of the labyrinth. Without saying a word, Meadows pointed one way and crawled off. Bosch knew he would go the other way.
Each would be alone now, unless the VC were waiting ahead. Bosch’s way was a winding passage that was as warm as a steam bath.
The tunnel smelled damp and faintly like a latrine. He smelled the missing soldier before he saw him. He was dead, his body
putrifying but sitting in the middle of the tunnel with his legs straight out and spread, the toes of his boots pointed upward.
His body was propped against a stake planted in the floor of the tunnel. A piece of wire that cut an inch into his neck was
wrapped around the stake and held him in place. Afraid of a booby trap, Bosch didn’t touch him. He played the beam of his
flashlight over the neck wound and followed the trail of dried blood down the front of the body. The dead man wore a green
T-shirt with his name stenciled in white on the front. Al Crofton, it said beneath the blood. There were flies mired in the
crusted blood on his chest, and for a moment Bosch wondered how they found their way so far down. He dipped the light to the
dead soldier’s crotch and saw that it, too, was black with dried blood. The pants were torn open and Crofton looked as though
he had been mauled by a wild animal. Sweat began to sting Bosch’s eyes and his breathing became louder, more hurried than
he wanted it to be. He was immediately aware of this but was also aware that he could do nothing to stop it. Crofton’s left
hand was palm up on the ground next to his thigh. Bosch put the light on it and saw the bloody set of testicles. He stifled
the urge to vomit but could not prevent himself from hyperventilating.

He cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to slow his gasping for air. It didn’t work. He was losing it. He was panicking.
He was twenty years old and he was scared. The walls of the tunnel were closing tighter on him. He rolled away from the body
and dropped the light, its beam still focused on Crofton. Bosch kicked at the clay walls of the tunnel and curled into a fetal
position. The sweat in his eyes was replaced by tears. At first they came silently, but soon his sobs racked his entire body
and his noise seemed to echo in all directions in the darkness, right to where Charlie sat and waited. Right to hell.

MONDAY, MAY 21

Bosch came awake in his watch chair about 4
A.M.
He had left the sliding glass door open to the porch, and the Santa Ana winds were billowing the curtains, ghostlike, out
across the room. The warm wind and the dream had made him sweat. Then the wind had dried the moisture on his skin like a salty
shell. He stepped out onto the porch and leaned against the wood railing, looking down at the lights of the Valley. The searchlights
at Universal were long since retired for the night and there was no traffic sound from the freeway down in the pass. In the
distance, maybe from Glendale, he heard the
whupping
sound of a helicopter. He searched and found the red light moving low in the basin. It wasn’t circling and there was no searchlight.
It wasn’t a cop. He thought then that he could smell the slight scent of malathion, sharp and bitter, on the red wind.

He went back inside and closed the sliding glass door. He thought about bed but knew there would be no more sleep this night.
It was often this way with Bosch. Sleep would come early in the night but not last. Or it would not come until the arriving
sun softly cut the outline of the hills in the morning fog.

He had been to the sleep disorder clinic at the VA in Sepulveda but the shrinks couldn’t help him. They told him he was in
a cycle. He would have extended periods of deep sleep trances into which torturous dreams invaded. This would be followed
by months of insomnia, the mind reacting defensively to the terrors that awaited in sleep. Your mind has repressed the anxiety
you feel over your part in the war, the doctor told him. You must assuage these feelings in your waking hours before your
sleep time can progress undisturbed. But the doctor didn’t understand that what was done was done. There was no going back
to repair what had happened. You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

He showered and shaved, afterward studying his face in the mirror and remembering how unkind time had been to Billy Meadows.
Bosch’s hair was turning to gray but it was full and curly. Other than the circles under his eyes, his face was unlined and
handsome. He wiped the remaining shaving cream off and put on his beige summer suit with a light-blue button-down oxford.
On a hanger in the closet he found a maroon tie with little gladiator helmets on it that was not unreasonably wrinkled or
stained. He pegged it in place with the 187 tie pin, clipped his gun to his belt and then headed out into the predawn dark.
He drove into downtown for an omelet, toast and coffee at the Pantry on Figueroa. Open twenty-four hours a day since before
the Depression. A sign boasted that the place had not gone one minute in that time without a customer. Bosch looked around
from the counter and saw that at the moment he was personally carrying the record on his shoulders. He was alone.

The coffee and cigarettes got Bosch ready for the day. After, he took the freeway back up to Hollywood, passing a frozen sea
of cars already fighting to get downtown.

Hollywood Station was on Wilcox justa couple of blocks south of the Boulevard, where most of its business came from. He parked
at the curb out front because he was only staying awhile and didn’t want to get caught in the back lot traffic jam at the
change of watch. As he walked through the small lobby he saw a woman with a blackened eye, who was crying and filling out
a report with the desk officer. But down the hall to the left the detective bureau was quiet. The night man must have been
out on a call or up in the Bridal Suite, a storage room on the second floor where there were two cots, first come, first served.
The detective bureau’s hustle and bustle seemed to be frozen in place. No one was there, but the long tables assigned to burglary,
auto, juvenile, robbery and homicide were all awash in paperwork and clutter. The detectives came and went. The paper never
changed.

Bosch went to the back of the bureau to start a pot of coffee. He glanced through a rear door and down the back hallway where
the lockup benches and the jail were located. Halfway down the hall to the holding tank, a young white boy with blond dreadlocks
sat handcuffed to a bench. A juvie, maybe seventeen at most, Bosch figured. It was against California law to put them in a
holding tank with adults. Which was like saying it might be dangerous for coyotes to be put in a pen with Dobermans.

“What you looking at, fuckhead?” the boy called down the hall to Bosch.

Bosch didn’t say anything. He dumped a bag of coffee into a paper filter. A uniform stuck his head out of the watch commander’s
office farther down the hall.

“I told you,” the uniform yelled at the kid. “Once more and I’m going to go up a notch on the cuffs. Half hour and you won’t
feel your hands. Then how you going to wipe your ass in the john?”

“I guess I’ll have to use your fuckin’ face.”

The uniform stepped into the hall and headed toward the kid, his hard black shoes making long, mean strides. Bosch shoved
the filter bowl into the coffee machine and hit the brewing cycle switch. He walked away from the hallway door and over to
the homicide table. He didn’t want to see what happened with the kid. He dragged his chair away from his spot at the table
and over to one of the community typewriters. The pertinent forms he needed were in slots on a rack on the wall above the
machine. He rolled a blank crime scene report into the typewriter. Then he took his notebook out of his pocket and opened
to the first page.

Two hours of typing and smoking and drinking bad coffee later, a bluish cloud hung near the ceiling lights over the homicide
table and Bosch had completed the myriad forms that accompany a homicide investigation. He got up and made copies on the Xerox
in the back hall. He noticed the dread-lock kid was gone. Then he got a new blue binder out of the office supplies closet
— after finessing the door with his LAPD ID card — and hooked one set of the typed reports onto the three rings. The other
set he hid in an old blue binder he kept in a file drawer and that was labeled with the name of an old unsolved case. When
he was done, he reread his work. He liked the order the paperwork gave the case. On many previous cases he had made it a practice
to reread the murder book each morning. It helped him draw out theories. The smell of the binder’s new plastic reminded him
of other cases and invigorated him. He was in the hunt again. The reports he had typed and placed in the murder book were
not complete, though. On the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report he had left out several parts of his Sunday afternoon
and evening. He neglected to type in the connection he had made between Meadows and the WestLand bank burglary. He also left
out the visits to the pawnshop and to see Bremmer at the
Times.
There were no typed summaries of these interviews either. It was only Monday, day two. He wanted to wait until he had been
to the FBI before committing any of that information to the official record. He wanted to know, exactly, what was going on
first. It was a precaution he took on every case. He left the bureau before any of the other detectives had arrived for the
day.