The Black Ice (hb-2)

don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll look through the stuff. I got the murder books here and I’ll look through ’em.”
    Nothing.
    “Lou?”
    “Okay, Harry. Give me a call back if you want. Maybe later I’ll think of something. Right now I’m not too fucking good.”
    Bosch thought a few moments before saying anything else. In his mind he pictured Porter on the other end of the line standing in total darkness. Alone.
    “Listen,” he said in a low voice. “You better… you have to watch out for Pounds on your application. He might ask the suits to check you out, you know what I mean, put a couple of guys on you. You gotta stay out of the bars. He might try to bust your application. Understand?”
    After a while Porter said he understood. Bosch hung up then and looked at the others at the table. The squad room always seemed loud until he had to make phone calls he didn’t want anyone to hear. He got out a cigarette.
    “Ninety– eight dumped Porter’s whole caseload on you?” Edgar asked.
    “That’s right. That’s me, the bureau garbage man.”
    “Yeah, then what’s that make us, chopped liver?”
    Bosch smiled. He could tell Edgar didn’t know whether to be happy he avoided the assignment or mad because he was passed over.
    “Well, Jed, if you want, I’ll hustle back into the box and tell Ninety-eight that you’re volunteering to split this up with me. I’m sure the pencil-pushing prick will-”
    He stopped because Edgar had kicked him under the table. He turned in his seat and saw Pounds coming up from behind. His face was red. He had probably heard the last exchange.
    “Bosch, you’re not going to smoke that disgusting thing in here, are you?”
    “No, Lieutenant, I was just on my way out back.”
    He pushed his chair back and walked out to the back parking lot to smoke. The backdoor of the drunk tank was unlocked and open. The Christmas-night drunks had already been loaded into the jail bus and hauled to arraignment court to make their pleas. A trustee in gray overalls was spraying the floor of the tank with a hose. Harry knew the concrete floor of the tank had been graded on a slight incline as an aid in this daily cleansing. He watched the dirty water slosh out the door and into the parking lot where it flowed to a sewer drain. There was vomit and blood in the water and the smell from the tank was terrible. But Harry stood his ground. This was his place.
    When he was done he threw his cigarette butt into the water and watched the flow take it to the drain.

Chapter 6
    It felt like the detective bureau had become a fishbowl and he was the only one in the water. He had to get away from the curious eyes that were watching him. Bosch picked up the stack of blue binders and walked out the backdoor into the parking lot. Then he quickly walked back into the station through the watch office door, went down a short hallway past the lockup and up a staircase to the second-floor storage room. It was called the Bridal Suite because of the cots in the back corner. An unofficial official cooping station. There was an old cafeteria table up there and a phone. And it was quiet. It was all he needed.
    The room was empty today. Bosch put the stack of binders down and cleared a dented bumper marked with an evidence tag off the table. He leaned it against a stack of file boxes next to a broken surfboard that had also been tagged as evidence. Then he got down to work.
    Harry stared at the foot-high stack of binders. Pounds said the division had sixty-six homicides so far in the year. Figuring the rotation and including Harry’s two-month absence while recovering from the bullet wound, Porter had probably caught fourteen of the cases. With eight still open, that meant he had cleared six others. It wasn’t a bad record, considering the transient nature of homicide in Hollywood. Nationwide, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer. They are the people they eat with, drink with, sleep with, live with. But Hollywood was different. There were no norms. There were only deviations, aberrations. Strangers killed strangers here. Reasons were not a requirement. The victims turned up in alleys, on freeway shoulders, along the brushy hillsides in Griffith Park, in bags dropped like garbage into restaurant Dumpsters. One of Harry’s open files was the discovery of a body in parts-one on each of the fire escape landings of a six-story hotel on Gower. That one didn’t raise too many eyebrows in the