Angels Flight

returned to the cards, doing what she had done when Bosch had found her, and it was at those blue felt tables that she found the thing that was missing.
    “Eleanor,” he said when they were finished making love, his arms wrapped around her neck. “I love you. I don’t want to lose you.”
    She smothered his mouth with a long kiss and then whispered, “Go to sleep, darling. Go to sleep.”
    “Stay with me,” he said. “Don’t move away until I’m asleep.”
    “I won’t.”
    She held him tighter and he tried for the moment to let everything go. Just for a while, he decided. He would take it all up later. But for now he would sleep.
    In a few minutes he was gone, deep into a dream in which he was riding Angels Flight up the tracks to the top of the hill. As the other car came down and passed, he looked in through the windows and saw Eleanor sitting alone. She wasn’t looking back at him.
    Bosch awoke in a little over an hour. The room was darker, as the light from outside was no longer directly on the windows. He looked around and saw Eleanor was gone from the bed. He sat up and called her name, his voice reminding him of how he had answered the phone that morning.
    “I’m here,” she called from the living room.
    Bosch pulled on his clothes and left the bedroom. Eleanor was sitting on the couch, wearing the bathrobe he had bought for her at the hotel in Hawaii where they had gone after getting married in Las Vegas.
    “Hey,” he said. “I thought… I don’t know.”
    “You were talking in your sleep. I came out here.”
    “What did I say?”
    “My name, a few other things that didn’t make sense. Something about a fight. Angels fighting.”
    He smiled and nodded and sat down in the chair on the other side of the coffee table.
    “Flight, not fight. You ever been on Angels Flight in downtown?”
    “No.”
    “It’s two train cars. When one goes up the hill, the other goes down. They pass in the middle. I dreamed I was going up and you were in the car going down. We passed in the middle but you wouldn’t look at me… What do you think it means, that we’re going different ways?”
    She smiled sadly.
    “I guess it means you’re the angel. You were going up.”
    He didn’t smile.
    “I have to go back in,” he said. “This one’s going to take up my life for a while. I think.”
    “You want to talk about it? Why were you called out?”
    He ran the case down for her in about ten minutes. He always liked telling her about his cases. He knew it was a form of ego gratification, but sometimes she made a suggestion that helped or a comment that let him see something he had missed. It was many years since she had been an FBI agent. It was a part of her life that was a distant memory. But he still respected her investigative logic and skills.
    “Oh, Harry,” she said when he was done telling the story. “Why is it always you?”
    “It’s not always me.”
    “Seems like it is. What are you going to do?”
    “Same as I always do. I’m going to work the case. All of us are. There’s a lot there to work with – they just have to give us the time with it. It’s not going to be a quick turn.”
    “I know you, they’ll throw every roadblock they can think of in front of you. It does no one any good to hook somebody up and bring them in on this. But you’ll be the one to do it. You’ll bring somebody in no matter if it makes every cop in every division despise you.”
    “Every case counts, Eleanor. Every person. I despise people like Elias. He was a suckerfish – making his life off bullshit cases against cops just trying to do their jobs. For the most part, at least. Every now and then he had a legitimate case, I guess. But the point is nobody should get away with what they did. Even if it’s a cop who did it. It’s not right.”
    “I know, Harry.”
    She looked away from him, out through the glass doors and past the deck. The sky was turning red. The lights of the city were coming on.
    “What’s your cigarette count?” he asked just to be saying something.
    “I had a couple. You?”
    “Still at zero.”
    He had smelled the smoke in her hair earlier. He was glad she hadn’t lied.
    “What happened over at Stocks and Bonds?”
    He’d been hesitant about asking. He knew that whatever had happened during the interview had been what sent her to the poker room.
    “Same as the others. They’ll call if something comes up.”
    “I’ll go over and talk to Charlie next time I’m