The Black Ice (Harry Bosch, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #2)

by Michael Connelly

In IAD, complaints were classified at the end as sustained, unsustained or unfounded. He was known as “Sustained” Chastain.

Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future.

‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.’ Whenever I read that I think of my husband. And me.”

It was a cover-your-ass paper. It said nothing and meant nothing. It had no value but could be produced to show a superior that you were aware of a problem and had been taking steps to attack it.

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

“Wooo!” Rickard yelped. “Eighteen. Looks like we got ourselves an A-dult here, Harry. No holding hands all the way to the juvie hall. We’ll go put this kid in seven thousand, see how quick he starts keeping house with one of the heavies.”

When he had first received his gold shield he had a partner on the robbery table in Van Nuys who told him that facts weren’t the most important part of an investigation, the glue was. He said the glue was made of instinct, imagination, sometimes guesswork and most times just plain luck.

Through studying the past we learn our future. Something like that. You seem to me to be a man still studying, maybe.”

All his life he believed he was slumming toward something good. That there was meaning. In the youth shelter, the foster homes, the Army and Vietnam, and now the department, he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty.

The half brother was now a top defense lawyer and Harry was a cop. There was a strange congruence to that that Bosch found acceptable. They had never spoken and probably never would.

The Lincoln Lawyer Series?

The summer after he had talked to his father Bosch had picked up the books by Hesse. He was curious about what the old man had meant. He found it in the second book he read. Harry Haller was a character in it. A disillusioned loner, a man of no real identity, Harry Haller was the steppenwolf. That August Bosch joined the cops.

“How’d you get a name like that?” “You can just write Harry for short.” “It’s no problem. I can write it. Just don’t ask me to say it. Looks like it rhymes with anonymous.”

A moon like the smile of the Cheshire cat hung over the top of the ugly silhouette of the industrial park on Val Verde. It was ten o’clock.

Bosch believed he had to trust this man and that he had earned that trust. He didn’t care what Ramos had said. Or Corvo. All his life Bosch had lived and worked in society’s institutions. But he hoped he had escaped institutional thinking, that he made his own decisions. He would tell Aguila what was happening when the time was right.

Bosch’s mind touched his memory of his brief meeting with his own father. A sick old man on his death bed. Bosch had forgiven him for every second he had been robbed. He knew he had to or he would face the rest of his life wasting his pain on it.

Two of the helicopters were wide-bodied personnel transport craft. Bosch recognized them. They were UH-1Ns. Hueys. The distinctive whop-whop of their rotors would forever be the sound of Vietnam to him.

Fear, though always unspoken, nevertheless stripped men of their carefully orchestrated poses. The adrenaline roars and the throat gurgles with fear like a backed-up drain. Sheer desire for survival takes over. It sharpens the mind, pares away all the bullshit.

He went back to the living room and stopped and listened. There was nothing. The house seemed still, empty, and it smelled dusty, like time spent slowly and painfully in wait for something or someone not coming.

Then he lit a cigarette and watched as the sleek black machine carried her out through the gate and left him alone with the dead.