The Black Echo

didn’t answer because he had heard similar stories, his own included. And she seemed to stop there. She either didn’t know what had happened to her brother over there or didn’t want to recount the details.
    After a while she said, “Why’d you go?”
    He knew the question was coming but in his whole life he had never been able to truthfully answer it, even to himself.
    “I don’t know. No choice, I guess. The institutional life, like you said before. I wasn’t going to college. Never really thought about Canada. I think it would have been harder to go there than to just get drafted and go to Vietnam. Then in sixty-eight I sort of won the draft lottery. My number came up so low I knew I was going to go. So I thought I’d outsmart ’em by joining, thought I’d write my own ticket.”
    “And so?”
    Bosch laughed a little in the same phony way she had laughed before. “I got in, went through basic and all the bullshit and when it came time to choose something, I picked the infantry. I still have never figured out why. They get you at that age, you know? You’re invincible. Once I got over there I volunteered for a tunnel squad. It was kind of like that letter Meadows wrote to Scales. You want to see what you’ve got. You do things you’ll never understand. You know what I mean?”
    “I think so,” she said. “What about Meadows? He had chances to leave and he never did, not till the very end. Why would anybody want to stay if they didn’t have to?”
    “There were a lot like that,” Bosch said. “I guess it wasn’t usual or unusual. Some just didn’t want to leave that place. Meadows was one of them. It might have been a business decision, too.”
    “You mean drugs?”
    “Well, I know he was using heroin while he was there. We know he was using and selling afterward when he got back here. So maybe when he was over there he got involved in moving it and he didn’t want to leave a good thing. There is a lot that points to it. He was moved to Saigon after they took him out of the tunnels. Saigon would have been the place to be, especially with embassy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Whores, hash, heroin, it was a free market. A lot of people jumped into it. Heroin would have made him some nice money, especially if he had a plan, a way to move some of the stuff back here.”
    She pushed pieces of red snapper she wasn’t going to eat around on her plate with a fork.
    “It’s unfair,” she said. “He didn’t want to come back. Some boys wanted to come home but never got the chance.”
    “Yes. There was nothing fair about that place.”
    Bosch turned and looked out the window at the ocean. There were four surfers in bright wet suits riding on the swells.
    “And after the war you joined the cops.”
    “Well, I kicked around a little and then joined the department. It seemed most of the vets I knew, like what Scales said today, were going into the police departments or the penitentiaries.”
    “I don’t know, Harry. You seem like the loner type. A private eye, not a man who has to take orders from men he doesn’t respect.”
    “There are no more private operators. Everybody takes orders… But all this stuff about me is in the file. You know it all.”
    “Not everything about somebody can be put down on paper. Isn’t that what you said?”
    He smiled as a waitress cleared the table. He said, “What about you? What’s your story with the bureau?”
    “Pretty simple, really. Criminal justice major, accounting minor, recruited out of Penn State. Good pay, good benefits, women highly sought and valued. Nothing original.”
    “Why the bank detail? I thought the fast track was antiterrorism, white-collar stuff, maybe even drugs. But not the heavy squad.”
    “I did the white-collar stuff for five years. I was in D.C., too, the right place to be. The thing is, the emperor had no clothes. It was all deadly, deadly boring stuff.” She smiled and shook her head. “I realized I just wanted to be a cop. So, that’s what I became. I transferred to the first good street unit that had an opening. L.A. is the bank robbery capital of the country. When an opening came up here, I called in my markers and got the transfer. Call me a dinosaur, if you want.”
    “You are too beautiful for that.”
    Despite her dark tan, Bosch could tell the remark embarrassed her. It embarrassed him, too, just sort of slipping out like that.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    “No. No, that was nice.