The Black Box

money for the machines?”
    “Good for the rest of this week.”
    “What about that boy who was bothering you about not wearing makeup yet?”
    “I avoid him. It’s no big deal, Dad, and it’s not ‘yet.’ I’m never wearing makeup.”
    “Sorry, that’s what I meant.”
    He waited, but that was the end of the discussion. He wondered if her saying the bullying was no big deal was actually her way of saying it was. He wished she would look up from the book when they talked, but she was on the last chapter. He let it go.
    He took his beer out to the back deck so he could look out at the city. The air was cold and crisp. It made the lights in the canyon and down on the freeway sharper and clearer. Cold nights always made Bosch feel lonely. The chill worked its way into his backbone and held there, made him think about things he had lost over time.
    He turned and looked in through the glass at his daughter on the couch. He watched her finish the book she was reading. He watched her cry when she got to the last page.

13
    B osch was in the parking lot in front of the Regional Crime Lab by six o’clock Thursday. Dawn’s light was just bleeding into the sky over East L.A. The Cal State campus surrounding the building was quiet this early. Bosch took a parking space that allowed him to view all the lab workers as they parked and headed toward the building. He sipped a coffee and waited.
    At 6:25 he saw the person he wanted. He left his coffee behind, got out with the gun package under his arm, and moved between cars and across lanes to head off his quarry. He got to him before the man got to the entrance of the stone-and-glass building.
    “Pistol Pete, just the guy I was hoping to run into. I’m even going to the third floor.”
    Bosch reached the door and held it open for Peter Sargent. He was a veteran examiner in the lab’s Firearm Analysis Unit. They had worked several cases together in the past.
    Sargent used a key card to get through the electronic gate. Bosch held his badge up to the security officer behind the desk and followed Sargent through. He then followed him into the elevator.
    “What’s up, Harry? It kind of looked like you were waiting for me out there.”
    Bosch gave an aw-shucks-you-got-me smile and nodded.
    “Yeah, I guess I was. Because you’re the guy I need on this. I need Pistol Pete.”
    The L.A. Times had given him the sobriquet several years earlier in the headline of a story that reported his tireless work in matching a Kahr P9 to bullets from four seemingly unrelated homicides. He gave the key testimony in the successful prosecution of a mob hit man.
    “What’s the case?” Sargent asked.
    “A twenty-year-old murder. Yesterday we finally recovered what we’re pretty sure is the murder weapon. I need the bullet match done but I also need to see if we can raise the serial number. That’s the key thing. We get that number, and I think it leads us to the suspect. We solve the case.”
    “That simple, huh?”
    He reached for the package as the elevator doors opened on three.
    “Well, we both know nothing is that simple. But the case has got some mojo going and I don’t want to slow it down.”
    “Was the number filed or acid burned?”
    They were walking down the hall toward the double-door entrance to the Firearms Unit.
    “Looks to me like it was filed down. But you can raise it, right?”
    “Some of the time we can—at least partially. But you know the process takes four hours, right? A half day. And you know that we’re supposed to take these in line. The wait’s running five weeks, no cutting in line.”
    Bosch was ready for that.
    “I’m not asking to cut in line. I’m just wondering if maybe you could look at it on your lunch break, and if it looks good, then you put your magic mix on it and check it at the end of the day to see what you’ve got. Four hours but no time taken off the clock from your regular work.”
    Bosch spread his arms like he was explaining something that was so simple it was beautiful.
    “The line stays intact and nobody gets upset.”
    Sargent smiled as he raised his hand to punch in the combo on the unit’s door lock. He typed 1-8-5-2 on the keypad, the year Smith & Wesson was founded.
    He pushed the door open.
    “I don’t know, Harry. We only get fifty minutes for lunch and I need to go out. I don’t bring my lunch like some of the other guys.”
    “That’s why you need to tell me what you want for lunch so I can be back here