The Black Box

out of prison and going to a halfway house first. I wasn’t inside anymore, but I was with people like me.”
    His daughter seemed to have forgotten about killing a flight attendant. Bosch was glad for that but wasn’t too happy about pushing his own memory buttons.
    He suddenly smiled.
    “What?” Maddie asked.
    “Nothing, I just sort of jumped to another memory from back then. A crazy thing.”
    “Well, tell me. You just told me a super-sad story, so tell me the crazy story.”
    He waited while the waitress put down their food. She had been working there since Bosch had been a cadet nearly forty years before.
    “Thanks, Margie,” Bosch said.
    “You’re welcome, Harry.”
    Madeline put ketchup on her Bratton Burger, and they took a few bites of food before Bosch began his story.
    “Well, when I graduated and got my badge and was put out on the street, it was sort of the same thing all over again. You know, counterculture, the war-protest movement, crazy stuff like that going on.”
    He pointed to the framed front page on the wall next to them.
    “The police were viewed by a lot of people out there as maybe just a slight level above the baby killers coming back from Vietnam. You know what I mean?”
    “I guess.”
    “So my first job out on the street as a slick sleeve was to walk—”
    “What’s that, a ‘slick sleeve’?”
    “A rookie, a boot. No stripes on my sleeves yet.”
    “Okay.”
    “My first assignment out of the academy was a foot beat on Hollywood Boulevard. And back then it was pretty grim on the boulevard. Really run down.”
    “It’s still pretty sketchy in some parts.”
    “That’s true. But anyway, I was assigned to a partner who was an old guy named Pepin, and he was my training officer. I remember everybody called him the French Dip because on the beat he stopped every day for an ice cream at this place called Dips near Hollywood and Vine. Like clockwork. Every day. Anyway, Pepin had been around a long time, and I walked the beat with him. We’d do the same routine. Walk up Wilcox from the station, go right on Hollywood till we got to Bronson, then turn around andwalk all the way down to La Brea and then back to the station. The French Dip had a built-in clock, and he knew just what pace to keep so that we were back at the station by end of watch.”
    “Sounds boring.”
    “It was, unless we got a call or something. But even then it was all small-time shit—I mean, stuff. Shoplifting, prostitution, drug dealing—little stuff. Anyway, almost every day we’d get yelled at by somebody passing in a car. You know, they’d call us fascists and pigs and other stuff. And the French Dip hated being called a pig. You could call him a fascist or a Nazi or almost anything else, but he hated being called a pig. So, what he would do when a car went by and they called us pigs was he’d get the make and model and plate number off the car and he’d pull out his ticket book and write the car up for a parking violation. Then he’d tear out the copy you were supposed to leave under the windshield wiper and he’d just crumple it up and throw it away.”
    Bosch laughed again as he took a bite of his grilled cheese with tomato and onion.
    “I don’t get it,” Maddie said. “Why is that so funny?”
    “Well, he would turn in his copy of the ticket, and, of course, the car owner wouldn’t know anything about it and the ticket would go unpaid and then to warrant. So the guy who called us pigs would eventually someday get stopped and there’d be a warrant for his arrest, and that was the French Dip’s way of getting the last laugh.”
    He ate a French fry before finishing.
    “What I was laughing about was the first time I was on thebeat with him when he did it. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he told me. And I said, ‘That’s not in policy, is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s in my policy!’”
    Bosch laughed again but his daughter only shook her head. Harry decided the story was funny only to him and went back to finishing his sandwich. He soon got down to telling her what he had been putting off all weekend.
    “So listen, I have to go out of town for a few days. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
    “Where to?”
    “Just up to the Central Valley, the Modesto area, to talk to some people on a case. I’ll be back either Tuesday night or maybe have to stay till Wednesday. I won’t know until I get there.”
    “Okay.”
    He braced himself.
    “And so I want Hannah to stay with