The Last Coyote

back. You said that two different times before this you lived with foster parents but were then sent back. What happened? Why were you sent back?”
    “I don’t know. They didn’t like me. They said it wasn’t working out. I went back into the dorms behind the fence and waited. I think getting rid of a teenage boy was about as easy as selling a car with no wheels. The fosters always wanted the younger ones.”
    “Did you ever run away from the hall?”
    “A couple times. I always got caught in Hollywood.”
    “If placing teenagers was so difficult, how did it happen to you the third time, when you were even older, sixteen?”
    Bosch laughed falsely and shook his head.
    “You’ll get a kick out of this. I was chosen by this guy and his wife because I was left-handed.”
    “Left-handed? I don’t follow.”
    “I was a lefty and I could throw a pretty good fastball.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Ah, Jesus, it was-see, Sandy Koufax was with the Dodgers then. He was a lefty and I guess they were paying him about a zillion bucks a year to pitch. This guy, the foster, his name was Earl Morse, he had played semipro baseball or something and never really made it. So, he wanted to create a left-handed major league prospect. Good left-handers were pretty rare back then, I guess. Or he thought that. Anyway, they were the hot commodity. Earl thought he’d grab some kid with some potential, slap him into shape and then be his manager or agent or something when it came to contract time. He saw it as his way back into the game. It was crazy. But I guess he’d seen his own big league dream crash and burn. So he came out to McClaren and took a bunch of us into the field for a catch. We had a team, we played other halls, sometimes the schools in the Valley let us play them. Anyway, Earl took us out to throw the ball around and it was a tryout but none of us knew it at the time. It didn’t even enter my mind what was going on until later. Anyway, he glommed on to me when he saw I was a lefty and could throw. He forgot the others like they were last season’s program.”
    Bosch shook his head again at the memory.
    “What happened? You went with him?”
    “Yeah. I went with him. There was a wife, too. She never said much to me or him. He used to make me throw a hundred balls a day at a tire hanging in the back yard. Then every night he’d have these coaching sessions. I put up with it for about a year and then I split.”
    “You ran away?”
    “Sort of. I joined the Army. I had to get Earl to sign for me, though. At first he wouldn’t do it. He had major league plans for me. But then I told him I was never going to pick up another baseball as long as I lived. He signed. Then he and the wife kept cashing those DPSS checks while I was overseas. I guess the extra money helped make up for losing the prospect.”
    She was quiet for a long time. It looked to Bosch like she was reading her notes but he had not seen her write anything during this session.
    “You know,” he said into the silence, “about ten years later, when I was still in patrol, I pulled over a drunk driver coming off the Hollywood Freeway onto Sunset. He was all over the place. When I finally got him over and got up there to the window, I bent over to look in and it was Earl. It was a Sunday. He was coming home from the Dodgers. I saw the program on the seat.”
    She looked at him but didn’t say anything. He was looking at the memory still.
    “I guess he’d never found that lefty he was looking for…Anyway, he was so drunk he didn’t recognize me.”
    “What did you do?”
    “Took his keys and called his wife…I guess it was the only break I ever gave the guy.”
    She looked back down at the pad while asking her next question.
    “What about your real father?”
    “What about him?”
    “Did you ever know who he was? Did you have any relationship at all?”
    “I met him once. I was never curious about it until I came back from overseas. Then I traced it down. Turned out he was my mother’s lawyer. He had a family and all of that. He was dying when I met him, looked like a skeleton…So I never really knew him.”
    “His name was Bosch?”
    “No. My name was just something she came up with. The painter, you know. She thought L.A. was a lot like his paintings. All the paranoia, the fear. Once she gave me a book that had his paintings in it.”
    More silence followed as she thought about this one, too.
    “These stories, Harry,” she