The Black Echo

eyes.
    “One last thing,” he said, and she turned at the door and looked back at him. “How’d you find me, Eleanor? You know, in the tunnels with Rourke.”
    She hesitated and her eyebrows went up again.
    “Well, I went down with Hanlon. But when we got out of the hand-dug tunnel we split up. He went one way in that first line and I went the other. I picked the winner. I found the blood. Then I found Franklin. Dead. And after that I was a little lucky. I heard the shots and then the voices. Mostly Rourke’s voice. I followed that. Why did you think of that now?”
    “I don’t know. It just sort of came up. You saved my life.”
    They looked at each other. Her hand was on the door handle and it was open just enough so that Bosch could look past her and see Galvin Junior still there, sitting in a chair in the hallway.
    “All I can say is thanks.”
    She made a shushing sound, dismissing his gratitude.
    “You don’t have to say anything.”
    “Don’t quit.”
    He saw the crack in the door disappear, Junior with it. She stood there silently.
    “Don’t leave.”
    “I must. I’ll see you, Harry.”
    She pulled the door all the way open now.
    “Good-bye,” she said, and then she was gone.

    ***

    Bosch remained motionless on the hospital bed for the better part of an hour. He was thinking about two people: Eleanor Wish and John Rourke. For a long time he closed his eyes and dwelt on the look on Rourke’s face as he crumpled and went down into the black water. I’d be surprised, too, Bosch thought, but there was also something else there, something he couldn’t exactly identify. Some kind of knowing look of recognition and resolution-not of his dying, but of another, secret knowledge.
    After a while he got up and took a few tentative steps alongside his bed. His body felt weak, yet all the sleep in the last thirty-six hours had made him restless. After he got his bearings and his shoulder made a slightly painful adjustment to gravity, he began to pace back and forth alongside the bed. He was wearing pale green hospital pajamas, not one of the opened-back smocks that he would have found humiliating. He padded around the room in bare feet, stopping to read the cards that had come with the flowers. The protective league had sent one of the vases. The others came from a couple of cops he knew but wasn’t particularly close to, the widow of an old partner, his union lawyer and another old partner who lived in Ensenada.
    He walked away from the flowers and went to the door. He opened it a crack and saw Galvin Junior still sitting there, reading a police equipment catalog. Bosch pulled the door all the way open. Galvin’s head jerked up and he slapped the magazine closed and slipped it into a briefcase at his feet. He didn’t say anything.
    “So, Clifford-I hope I can call you that-what are you doing here? Am I supposed to be in danger?”
    The younger cop didn’t say anything. Bosch glanced up and down the hall and saw that it was empty all the way down to the nurses’ station about fifty feet away. He looked at his door and noticed he was in room 313.
    “Detective, please go back in your room,” Galvin finally said. “I am only here to keep the press out of your room. The deputy chief thinks they will probably try to get in to get an interview with you, and my job is to prevent that, to prevent you from being disturbed.”
    “What if they use the sneaky method of just”-Bosch made a show of looking up and down the hall to make sure no one would hear-“using the telephone?”
    Galvin exhaled loudly and continued not to look at Bosch. “The nurses are screening incoming calls. Only family, and I am told you don’t have family, so no calls.”
    “How’d that lady FBI agent get by you?”
    “She was cleared by Irving. Go back into your room, please.”
    “Certainly.”
    Bosch sat on his bed and tried to go over the case again in his mind. But the more he turned the parts of it over the more he got an anxious feeling that sitting on a bed in a hospital room was wasting time. He felt he was onto something, a breakthrough in the logic of the case. A detective’s job was to walk down the trail of evidence, examine each piece and take it with him. At the end of the trail, what he had in his basket made or lost the case. Bosch had a full basket, but he began to believe there were pieces missing. What had he missed? What had Rourke told him at the end? Not so much in his words but his meaning. And