9 Dragons

sympathy.
    “I told everybody in the staff meeting last week. We’ve got South’s back this week. They’ve got a skeleton crew on while everybody else is in homicide school until the fourteenth. They caught three cases over the weekend and one this morning. So there goes the skeleton crew. You guys are up and the rob job is yours. That’s it. Any other questions? Patrol is waiting down there with a witness.”
    “We’re good, Boss,” Bosch said, ending the discussion.
    “I’ll wait to hear from you, then.”
    Gandle headed back to his office. Bosch pulled his coat off the back of his chair, put it on and then opened the middle drawer of his desk. He took the leather notebook out of his back pocket and replaced the pad of lined paper in it with a new one. A fresh kill always got a fresh pad. That was his routine. He looked at the detective shield embossed on the notebook flap and then returned it to his back pocket. The truth was, he didn’t care what kind of case it was. He just wanted a case. It was like anything else. You fall out of practice and you lose your edge. Bosch didn’t want that.
    Ferras stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the clock on the wall over the bulletin boards.
    “Shit,” Ferras said. “Every time.”
    “What do you mean, ‘every time?’” Bosch said. “We haven’t caught a case in a month.”
    “Yeah, well, I was getting used to that.”
    “Well, if you don’t want to work murders, there’s always a nine-to-five table like auto theft.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “Then, let’s go.”
    Bosch stepped out of the cubicle into the aisle and headed toward the door. Ferras followed, pulling his phone out so he could call his wife and give her the bad news. On the way out of the squad room, both men reached up and patted the boar on its flat nose for good luck.

2
    B osch didn’t need to lecture Ferras on the way to South L.A. His driving in silence was his lecture. His young partner seemed to wither under the pressure of what was not said and finally opened up.
    “This is driving me crazy,” he said.
    “What is?” Bosch asked.
    “The twins. There’s so much work, so much crying. It’s a domino effect. One wakes up and that starts the other one up. Then my oldest kid wakes up. Nobody’s getting any sleep and my wife is…”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know, going crazy. Calling me all the time, asking when I’m coming home. So I come home and then it’s my turn and I get the boys and I get no break. It’s work, kids, work, kids, work, kids every day.”
    “What about a nanny?”
    “We can’t afford a nanny. Not with the way things are, and we don’t even get overtime anymore.”
    Bosch didn’t know what to say. His daughter, Madeline, was a month past her thirteenth birthday and almost ten thousand miles away from him. He had never been directly involved in raising her. He saw her four weeks a year-two in Hong Kong and two in L.A.-and that was it. What advice could he legitimately give a full-time dad with three kids, including twins?
    “Look, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “You know I’ve got your back. I’ll do what I can when I can. But-”
    “I know, Harry. I appreciate that. It’s just the first year with the twins, you know? It will be a lot easier when they get a little older.”
    “Yeah, but what I’m trying to say here is that maybe it’s more than just the twins. Maybe it’s you, Ignacio.”
    “Me? What are you saying?”
    “I’m saying maybe it’s you. Maybe you came back too soon-you ever think about that?”
    Ferras did a slow burn and didn’t respond.
    “Hey, it happens sometimes,” Bosch said. “You take a bullet and you start thinking that lightning might strike twice.”
    “Look, Harry, I don’t know what kind of bullshit that is, but I’m fine that way. I’m good. This is about sleep deprivation and being fucking exhausted all the time and not being able to catch up because my wife is riding my ass from the moment I get home, okay?”
    “Whatever you say, partner.”
    “That’s right, partner. Whatever I say. Believe me, I get it enough from her. I don’t need it from you, too.”
    Bosch nodded and that was enough said. He knew when to quit.
    The address Gandle had given them was in the Seventieth block of South Normandie Avenue. This was just a few blocks from the infamous corner of Florence and Normandie, where some of the most horrible images of the 1992 riots had been captured by news