City Of Bones

back, head propped on a pillow. Bosch put the picture on the bed table and then turned back and moved in next to her. Under the sheet he put his arm across her body and pulled her tightly to him.
    “Look, you want to trade scars again? I got my heart broken twice by the same woman. And you know what? I kept her picture on a shelf in my living room for a long time. Then on New Year’s Day I decided it had been a long enough time. I put her picture away. Then I got called out to work and I met you.”
    She looked at him, her eyes moving slightly back and forth as she seemed to be searching his face for something, maybe the slightest hint of insincerity.
    “Yes,” she finally said. “He broke my heart. Okay?”
    “No, not okay. Who is the creep?”
    She started laughing.
    “Harry, you’re my knight in tarnished armor, aren’t you?”
    She pulled herself up into a sitting position, the sheet falling away from her breasts. She folded her arms across them.
    “He was in the firm. I really fell for him-right down the old elevator shaft. And then… then he decided it was over. And he decided to betray me and to tell secret things to my father.”
    “What things?”
    She shook her head.
    “Things I will never tell a man again.”
    “Where was that picture taken?”
    “Oh, at a firm function-probably the New Year’s banquet, I don’t remember. They have a lot of them.”
    Bosch had become angled behind her. He leaned down and kissed her back, just above the tattoo.
    “I couldn’t be there anymore while he was there. So I quit. I said I wanted to travel. My father thought it was a midlife crisis because I had turned thirty. I just let him think it. But then I had to do what I said I wanted to do-travel. I went to Australia first. It was the farthest place I could think of.”
    Bosch pulled himself up and stacked two pillows behind his back. He then pulled her back against his chest. He kissed the top of her head and kept his nose in her hair.
    “I had a lot of money from the firm,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry. I just kept traveling, going wherever I wanted, working odd jobs when I felt like it. I didn’t come home for almost four years. And when I did, that’s when I joined the academy. I was walking along the boardwalk and saw the little Venice community service office. I went in and picked up a pamphlet. It all happened pretty fast after that.”
    “Your history shows impulsive and possibly reckless decision-making processes. How did that get by the screeners?”
    She gently elbowed him in the side, setting off a flare of pain from his ribs. He tensed.
    “Oh, Harry, sorry. I forgot.”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    She laughed.
    “I guess all you old guys know that the department’s been pushing big time for what they term ‘mature’ women cadets the last few years. To smooth off all the hard testosterone edges of the department.”
    She rocked her hips back against Bosch’s genitals to underline the point.
    “And speaking of testosterone,” she said, “you never told me how it went with old bullet head himself today.”
    Bosch groaned but didn’t answer.
    “You know,” she said, “Irving came to address our class one day on the moral responsibilities that come with carrying the badge. And everybody sitting there knew the guy probably makes more backroom deals up there on the sixth floor than there are days in the year. The guy’s the classic fixer. You could practically cut the irony in the auditorium with a knife.”
    Her use of the word “irony” made Bosch flash on what Antoine Jesper had said about coupling the bones found on the hill with the bones on the skateboard. He felt his body tensing as thoughts of the case started encroaching on what had been an oasis of respite from the investigation.
    She sensed his tightness.
    “What is it?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You got all tense all of a sudden.”
    “The case, I guess.”
    She was quiet a moment.
    “I think it’s kind of amazing,” she then said. “Those bones being up there all of these years and then coming up out of the ground. Like a ghost or something.”
    “It’s a city of bones. And all of them are waiting to come up.”
    He paused.
    “I don’t want to talk about Irving or the bones or the case or anything else right now.”
    “Then what do you want?”
    He didn’t answer. She turned to face him and started pushing him down off the pillows until he was flat on his back.
    “How about a mature woman to smooth off