The Black Box

humor Holodnak had injected at the end of the shooting session wore off and Bosch’s daughter grew silent and slumped in her seat.
    “Cheer up, baby,” Bosch tried. “It was just a simulator. Overall you did very well. You heard what he said. You have three seconds to recognize and shoot. . . . I think you did great.”
    “Dad, I killed a flight attendant.”
    “But you saved a teacher. Besides, it wasn’t real. You took a shot that you probably wouldn’t have taken in real life. There’s this sense of urgency with the simulator. When it happens in real life, things actually seem to slow down. There’s—I don’t know—more clarity.”
    That didn’t seem to impress her. He tried again.
    “Besides that, the gun probably wasn’t zeroed out perfectly.”
    “Thanks a lot, Dad. That means all the shots I did hit on target were actually off target because the gun wasn’t zeroed.”
    “No, I—”
    “I have to go wash my hands.”
    She abruptly slid out of the booth and headed to the back hallway as Bosch realized how stupid it had been for him to blame a bad shot on the adjustment of the gun to the screen.
    While he waited for her, he looked at a framed front page of the Los Angeles Times on the wall above the booth. The whole top of the page was dedicated to the police shoot-out with the Symbionese Liberation Army at 54th and Compton in 1974. Bosch had been there that day as a young patrol officer. He worked traffic and crowd control during the deadly standoff and the next day stood guard as a team combed through the debris of the burned-out house, looking for the remains of Patty Hearst.
    Lucky for her, she hadn’t been there.
    Bosch’s daughter slid back into the booth.
    “What’s taking so long?” she asked.
    “Relax,” Bosch said. “We just ordered five minutes ago.”
    “Dad, why did you become a cop?”
    Bosch was momentarily taken aback by the question that came out of the blue.
    “A lot of reasons.”
    “Like what?”
    He paused while he put together his thoughts. This was the second time in a week that she had asked the question. He knew it was important to her.
    “The snap answer is to say I wanted to protect and to serve. But because it’s you asking, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’tbecause I had a desire to protect and serve or to be some sort of do-gooder public servant. When I think back on it, I actually just wanted to protect and serve myself.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, at the time, I had just come back from the war in Vietnam, and people like me—you know, ex-soldiers from over there—they weren’t really accepted back here. Especially by people our own age.”
    Bosch looked around to see if the food was coming. Now he was getting anxious about waiting. He looked back at his daughter.
    “I remember I came back and wasn’t sure what I was doing and I started taking classes at L.A. City College over there on Vermont. And I met this girl in a class, and we started hanging out a little bit, and I didn’t tell her where I had been—you know, Vietnam—because I knew it might be an issue.”
    “Didn’t she see your tattoo?”
    The tunnel rat on his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway.
    “No, we hadn’t gotten that far or anything. I’d never had my shirt off with her. But one day we were walking after class through the commons and she sort of asked me out of the blue why I was so quiet . . . . And I don’t know, I just sort of decided that was the opening, that I could let the cat out of the bag. I thought she would accept it, you know?”
    “But she didn’t.”
    “No, she didn’t. I said something like, ‘Well, I’ve spent the last few years in the military,’ and she right away asked if that meant I was in Vietnam, and I told her—I said yes.”
    “What did she say?”
    “She didn’t say anything. She just did one of those pirouette moves like a dancer and walked away. She didn’t say a thing.”
    “Oh my God! How mean!”
    “That was when I really knew what I had come back to.”
    “Well, what happened when you went to class the next day? Did you say anything to her?”
    “No, because I didn’t go back. I never went back to that school, because I knew that’s how it was going to be. So that’s a big part of why a week later I joined the cops. The department was full of military vets, and a lot had been over there in Southeast Asia. So I knew there would be people like me and I could be accepted. It was like somebody coming