The Black Echo

street. There was rarely a murder on the Boulevard that went by without Bosch’s checking with him to see what his informants were saying. And he almost always came through.
    “Yeah, it’s curious,” Bosch said. He added nothing else.
    “You doing paper from your shooting?” Pederson asked after settling himself in front of a typewriter. When Bosch didn’t answer he added, “You got any more of those cigarettes?”
    Bosch got up and carried a whole pack over to Pederson. He put them down on the typewriter in front of the beat cop and told him they were his. Pederson got the message. Nothing personal, but Bosch wasn’t going to talk about the shoot-out, especially about what a couple of IAD cops were doing there.
    Pederson got to work on the typewriter after that, and Bosch went back to his murder book. He finished reading through it without a single forty-watt bulb lighting up in his head. He sat there with the typewriter clacking in the background and smoked and tried to think of what else there was to do. There was nothing. He was at the wall.
    He decided to call his home and check the tape machine. He picked up his phone, then thought better of using it and hung up. On the off chance his desk phone wasn’t a private line, he walked around to Jerry Edgar’s spot at the table and used his line. He got his answering machine, punched in a code and listened as it played a dozen messages. The first nine were from cops and some old friends wishing him a speedy recovery. The last three, the most recent messages, were from the doctor who had been treating him, Irving and Pounds.
    “Mr. Bosch, this is Dr. McKenna. I consider it very unwise and unsafe for you to have left the hospital environment. You are risking further damage to your body. If you get this message, would you please return to the hospital. We are holding the bed. I can no longer treat you or consider you my patient if you do not return. Please. Thank you.”
    Irving and Pounds were not as worried about Bosch’s health.
    Irving’s message said, “I do not know where you are or what you are doing, but it better be that you just do not like hospital food. Think about what I told you, Detective Bosch. Do not make a mistake we will both be sorry for.”
    Irving hadn’t bothered to identify himself but didn’t have to. Neither did Pounds. His message was the last. It was the chorus.
    “Bosch, call me at home as soon as you get this. I have received word that you left the hospital and we need to talk. Bosch, you are not, repeat, not, to continue any line of investigation relating to the shootings on Saturday. Call me.”
    Bosch hung up. He wasn’t going to call any of them. Not yet. While sitting at Edgar’s spot he noticed a scratch pad on the table on which the name Veronica Niese was written. Sharkey’s mother. There was also a phone number. Edgar must have called her to notify her about her son’s death. Bosch thought of her answering the call, expecting it to be another one of her jerkoff customers, and instead it was Jerry Edgar calling to say her son was dead.
    His thought of the boy reminded Bosch of the interview. He had not had the tape transcribed yet. He decided to listen to it, and went back to his place at the table. He pulled his tape recorder out of a drawer. The tape was gone. He remembered he had given it to Eleanor. He went to the supply closet, trying to calculate whether the interview would still be on the backup tape. The backup automatically rewound when it reached its end and then started taping over itself. Depending on how often the taping system in the interview room had been used since Tuesday’s session with Sharkey, the Q-and-A with the boy might still be intact on the backup tape.
    Bosch popped the cassette out of the recorder and brought it back to his table. He put it in his own portable, put on a set of earphones and rewound the tape to its beginning. He reviewed it by playing it for a few seconds until he could tell whether it was his voice or Sharkey’s or Eleanor’s, and then fast-forwarding for about ten seconds. He repeated this process for several minutes before he finally hit the Sharkey interview in the last half of the tape.
    Once he found it, he rewound the tape a bit so he could hear the interview from the start. He rewound too far and ended up listening to half a minute of another interview concluding. Then he heard Sharkey’s voice.
    “What are you looking at?”
    “I don’t know.” It was