The Black Ice (hb-2)

actual contact with them. He didn’t have to hear them or smell them or know them. The blinds that were often used to cut off his sight of them were open this morning.
    “Sit down, Harry. I don’t have to tell you not to smoke. Have a good Christmas?”
    Bosch just looked at him. He was uncomfortable with this guy calling him Harry and asking him about Christmas. He hesitantly sat down.
    “What’s up?” he said.
    “Let’s not get hostile, Harry. I’m the one who should be hostile. I just heard you spent a good part of Christmas night at that dump motel, the Hideaway, where nobody in this world would want to be and where Robbery-Homicide happened to be conducting an investigation.”
    “I was on call,” Bosch said. “And I should have been called out to the scene. I went by to see what was going on. Turned out, Irving needed me, anyway.”
    “That’s fine, Harry, if you leave it at that. I have been told to tell you not to get any ideas about the Moore case.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Just what it sounds like it means.”
    “Look, if you-”
    “Never mind, never mind.” Pounds raised his hands in a calming gesture, then pinched the bridge of his nose, signifying the onset of a headache. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of aspirin. He took two without water.
    “Enough said, okay?” Pounds said. “I’m not-I don’t need to get into-”
    Pounds made a choking sound and jumped up from his desk. He moved past Bosch and out of the box to the water fountain near the entrance to the bureau. Bosch didn’t even watch him. He just sat in his chair. Pounds was back in a few moments and continued.
    “Excuse me. Anyway, what I was saying was that I don’t need an argument with you every time I bring you in here. I really think you have to work through this problem you have with dealing with the command structure of this department. You take it to extremes.”
    Bosch could still see chalky white aspirin caking at the corners of his mouth. Pounds cleared his throat again.
    “I was just passing on an aside in your best-”
    “Why doesn’t Irving pass it on himself?”
    “I didn’t say-look, Bosch, forget it. Just forget it. You’ve been told and that’s that. If you have any ideas about last night, about Moore, drop them. It’s being handled.”
    “I am sure it is.”
    The warning delivered, Bosch stood up. He wanted to throw this guy through his glass wall but would settle for a cigarette out behind the drunk tank.
    “Siddown,” Pounds said. “That’s not why I brought you in.”
    Bosch sat down again and quietly waited. He watched Pounds try to compose himself. He opened the drawer again and pulled out a wood ruler, which he absentmindedly manipulated in his hands while he began to talk.
    “Harry, you know how many homicides we’ve caught in the division this year?”
    The question came from left field. Harry wondered what Pounds was up to. He knew he had handled eleven cases himself, but he had been out of the rotation for six weeks during the summer while in Mexico recovering from the bullet wound. He figured the homicide squad for about seventy cases in the year. He said, “I have no idea.”
    “Well, I’m going to tell you,” Pounds said. “Right now we are at sixty-six homicides for the year to date. And, of course, we’ve still got five days to go. Probably, we’ll pick up another. I’m thinking, at least one. New Year’s Eve is always trouble. We’ll pro-”
    “So what about it? I remember we had fifty-nine last year. Murder is going up. What else is new?”
    “What is new is that the number of cases we have cleared is going down. It is less than half that number. Thirty-two out of sixty-six cases have been cleared. Now, a good number of those cases have been cleared by you. I have you with eleven cases. Seven have been cleared by arrest or other. We have warrants out on two others. Of the two you have open, one is idle pending developments and you are actively pursuing the James Kappalanni matter. Correct?”
    Bosch nodded. He didn’t like the way this was going but wasn’t sure why.
    “The problem is the overall record,” Pounds said. “When taken in its entirety,… well, it’s a pitiful record of success.”
    Pounds slapped the ruler hard into his palm and shook his head. An idea was forming in Harry’s mind about what this was about, but still there was a part missing. He wasn’t sure exactly what Pounds was up