A Darkness More Than Night

nobody cared about or loved can make up for that lost girl? Well, you’re wrong, man. Just go home and keep dreaming.”
    McCaleb hesitated in the doorway and looked back.
    “Good-bye, Harry.”
    “Yeah, good-bye.”
    McCaleb walked through the house. When he passed the reading chair where the light was on he saw the printout of his profile of Bosch sitting on the arm of the chair. He kept going. When he got to the front door he pulled it closed behind him.

Chapter 47
    Bosch stood with his arms folded on the deck railing and his head down. He thought about McCaleb’s words, both spoken and printed. They were pieces of hot shrapnel ripping through him. He felt a deep tearing of his interior lining. It felt as though something within had seized him and was pulling him into a black hole, that he was imploding into nothingness.
    “What did I do?” he whispered. “What did I do?” He straightened up and saw the bottle on the railing, its label gone. He grabbed it and threw it as far as he could out into the darkness. He watched its trajectory, able to follow its flight because of moonlight reflecting off the brown glass. The bottle exploded in the brush on the rocky hillside below.
    He saw McCaleb’s half-finished beer and grabbed it. He pulled his arm back, wanting to throw this one all the way to the freeway. Then he stopped. He put the bottle back on the railing and went inside.
    He grabbed the printed profile off the arm of the chair and started ripping the two pages apart. He went to the kitchen, turned the water on and put the pieces into the sink. He flicked on the garbage disposal and pushed the pieces of paper into the drain. He waited until he could tell by the sound that the paper had been chewed into nothing and was gone. He turned off the disposal and just watched the water running into the drain.
    Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.
    Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be.

Chapter 48
    He could still smell burned gunpowder. McCaleb stood in the master cabin and looked around. There were rubber gloves and other debris scattered on the floor. Black fingerprint dust was everywhere, on everything. The door to the room was gone and so was the doorjamb, cut right out of the wall. In the hallway an entire wall panel had been removed as well. McCaleb walked over and looked down at the floor where the little brother had died from the bullets he had fired. The blood had dried brown and would permanently stain the alternating light and dark wood strips in the floor. It would always be there to remind him.
    Staring at the blood, he replayed the shots he had fired at the man, the images in his mind moving much slower than real time. He thought about what Bosch had said to him, out on the deck. About letting the little brother follow him. He considered his own culpability. Could his guilt be any less than Bosch’s? They had both set things in motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You don’t go into the darkness without the darkness going into you.
    “We do what we have to do,” he said out loud.
    He went up into the salon and looked out the door at the parking lot. The reporters were still up there with their vans. He had sneaked in. Parked at the far end of the marina and then borrowed a skiff from somebody’s boat to get to The Following Sea. He had climbed aboard and slipped in without anyone seeing him.
    He noticed that the vans had their microwave towers cranked up and each crew was getting ready for the eleven o’clock report, the camera angles set so that The Following Sea would once more be in all the shots. McCaleb smiled and opened his phone. He hit a number on speed dial and Buddy Lockridge answered.
    “Buddy, it’s me. Listen, I’m on the boat and I gotta go home. I want you to do me a favor.”
    “You gotta go