The Black Echo

wanted to ask a question but couldn’t form the words. There was another light in the tunnel and he thought he heard a voice, a woman’s voice, telling him everything was okay. Then he thought he saw Eleanor Wish’s face, floating in and out of focus. And then it sank away into inky blackness. That blackness was finally all he saw.

PART VIII
    SUNDAY, MAY 27

    Bosch dreamed of the jungle. Meadows was there, and all the soldiers from Harry’s photo album. They stood around the hole at the bottom of a leaf-covered trench. Above them a gray mist clung to the top of the jungle canopy. The air was still and warm. Bosch took photographs of the other rats with his camera. Meadows was going into the ground, he said. Out of the blue and into the black. He looked at Bosch through the camera and said, “Remember the promise, Hieronymus.”
    “Rhymes with anonymous,” Bosch said.
    But before he could tell him not to go, Meadows promptly jumped feet first into the hole and disappeared. Bosch rushed to the edge and looked down but saw nothing, just darkness like ink. Faces came into focus, then slipped back into the blackness. There was Meadows and Rourke and Lewis and Clarke. From behind him, he heard a voice he recognized but couldn’t place with a face.
    “Harry, c’mon, man. I need to talk to you.”
    Then Bosch became aware of a deep pain in his shoulder, throbbing from elbow to neck. Someone was tapping his left hand, lightly patting it. He opened his eyes. It was Jerry Edgar.
    “Yeah, that’s it,” Edgar said. “I don’t have much time. This guy on the door says they’ll be here anytime now. Plus he’s due to go off watch. I wanted to try to talk to you before the brass did. Would’ve been by yesterday but this place was crawling with silk. Besides, I heard you were out most of the day. Too delirious.”
    Bosch just stared at him.
    “On these things,” Edgar said, “I’ve always heard it’s best to say you can’t remember a thing. Let them put it whatever way they want. I mean, when you catch a round, there’s no way they can say you’re lying about remembering. The mind shuts down, man, when there is traumatic insult to the body. I’ve read that.”
    By now Bosch realized he was in a hospital room and he began to look about. He noticed five or six vases of flowers, and the room smelled putridly sweet. He also noticed he had restraining belts across his chest and waist.
    “You’re at MLK, Harry. Um, doctors say you’ll be all right. They still have some work to do on your arm, though.” Edgar lowered his voice to a whisper. “I snuck in. Think the nurses have a change of shift or something. Cop on the door, he’s over from Wilshire patrol, let me in ’cause he’s selling and he musta heard that’s my gig. I told him I’d take his listing for two points if he gave me five minutes in here.”
    Bosch still hadn’t spoken. He wasn’t sure he could. He felt like he was floating on a layer of air. He had trouble concentrating on Edgar’s words. What did he mean about points? And why was he at Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center near Watts? Last he remembered, he had been in Beverly Hills. In the tunnel. UCLA Med Center or Cedars would have been closer.
    “Anyway,” Edgar was saying, “I’m just trying to let you know what’s going on as much as possible before the silks get here and try to fuck you over. Rourke is dead. Lewis is dead. Clarke is bad, he’s on the machine, and I heard they were just keeping him going for parts. As soon as they line up people that need ’em, they’ll pull the plug. How’d you like to end up with that asshole’s heart or eyeball or something? Anyway, like I said, you should come out of this all right. Either way, with that arm, you can get your eighty percent, no questions asked. Line of duty. You’re a made man.”
    He smiled at Bosch, who just looked at him blankly. Harry’s throat was dry and cracked when he finally tried to speak.
    “MLK?”
    It came out a little weak but okay. Edgar poured a cup of water from a pitcher on the bedside table and handed it to him. Bosch unbuckled the restraints, sat himself up to drink it and immediately felt a wave of nausea hit him. Edgar didn’t notice.
    “It’s a gun-and-knife club, man. This is where they take the gangbangers after the drive-bys. No better place to go with a gunshot in the county, leastwise those yuppie doctors over at UCLA. They train military doctors here. So they’ll be ready for