The Black Ice (hb-2)

singer’s plaintive voice carried strongly across the park and Bosch thought the song was beautiful. He leaned against his car and smoked until the singer was done.
    The kisses that you gave me my love
    Are the ones that are killing me
    But my tears are now drying
    With my pistol and my heart
    And here as always I spend my life
    With the pistol and the heart
    At the song’s end, the men at the picnic table gave the singer a cheer and a toast.
    Inside the glass door marked Police was a sour-smelling room no larger than the back of a pickup truck. On the left was a Coke machine, straight ahead was a door with an electronic bolt, and on the right was a thick glass window with a slide tray beneath it. A uniformed officer sat behind the glass. Behind him, a woman sat at a radio-dispatch console. On the other side of the console was a wall of square-foot-sized lockers.
    “You can’t smoke in there, sir,” the uniform said.
    He wore mirrored sunglasses and was overweight. The plate over his breast pocket said his name was Gruber. Bosch stepped back to the door and flicked the butt out into the parking lot.
    “You know, it’s a hundred-dollar fine for littering in Calexico, sir,” Gruber said.
    Harry held up his open badge and I.D. wallet.
    “You can bill me,” he said. “I need to check a gun.”
    Gruber smiled curtly, revealing his receding, purplish gums.
    “I chew tobacco myself. Then you don’t have that problem.”
    “I can tell.”
    Gruber frowned and had to think about that a moment before saying, “Well, let’s have it. Man says he wants to check a gun has to turn the gun in to be checked.”
    He turned back to the dispatcher to see if she thought that he now had the upper hand. She showed no response. Bosch noticed the strain Gruber’s gut was putting on the buttons of his uniform. He pulled the forty-four out of his holster and put it in the slide tray.
    “Foe– dee foe,” Gruber announced and he lifted the gun out and examined it. “You want to keep it in the holster?”
    Bosch hadn’t thought about that. He needed the holster. Otherwise he’d have to jam the Smith in his waistband and he’d probably lose it if he ended up having to do any running.
    “Nah,” he said. “Just checking the gun.”
    Gruber winked and took it over to the lockers, opened one up and put the gun inside. After he closed it, he locked it, took the key out and came back to the window.
    “Let me see the I.D. again. I have to write up a receipt.”
    Bosch dropped his badge wallet into the tray and watched as Gruber slowly wrote out a receipt in duplicate. It seemed that the officer had to look from the I.D. card to what he was writing every two letters.
    “How’d you get a name like that?”
    “You can just write Harry for short.”
    “It’s no problem. I can write it. Just don’t ask me to say it. Looks like it rhymes with anonymous.”
    He finished and put the receipts into the tray and told Harry to sign them both. Harry used his own pen.
    “Lookee there, a lefty signing for a right-handed gun,” Gruber said. “Somethin’ you don’t see ’round here too often.”
    He winked at Bosch again. Bosch just looked at him.
    “Just talking is all,” Gruber said.
    Harry dropped one of the receipts into the tray and Gruber exchanged it for the locker key. It was numbered.
    “Don’t lose it now,” Gruber said.
    As he walked back to the Caprice he saw that the men were still at the picnic table in the park but there was no more singing. He got into the Caprice and put the locker key in the ashtray. He never used it for smoking. He noticed an old man with white hair unlocking the door below the historical society sign. Bosch backed out and headed over to the De Anza.
    It was a three-story, Spanish-style building with a satellite dish on the roof. Bosch parked in the brick drive up in front. His plan was to check in, drop his bags in his room, wash his face and then make the border crossing into Mexicali. The man behind the front desk wore a white shirt and brown bow tie to match his brown vest. He could not have been much older than twenty. A plastic tag on the vest identified him as Miguel, assistant front desk manager.
    Bosch said he wanted a room, filled out a registration card and handed it back. Miguel said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Bosch, we have messages for you.”
    He turned to a basket file and pulled out three pink message forms. Two were from Pounds, one from Irving. Bosch looked at the times and noticed