The Last Coyote

yourself to the same level as the man who was set free?”
    “Not by a long shot, Doctor. Let me tell you something, you can look at all parts of my life, you can throw in earthquakes, fires, floods, riots and even Vietnam, but when it came down to just me and Pounds in that glass room, none of that mattered. You can call it a mad minute or whatever you want. Sometimes, the moment is all that matters and in that moment I was doing the right thing. And if these sessions are designed to make me see I did something wrong, forget it. Irving buttonholed me the other day in the lobby and asked me to think about an apology. Fuck that. I did the right thing.”
    She nodded, adjusted herself in her seat and looked more uncomfortable than she had through his long diatribe. Finally, she looked at her watch and he looked at his. His time was up.
    “So,” he said, “I guess I’ve set the cause of psychotherapy back a century, huh?”
    “No, not at all. The more you know of a person and the more you know of a story, the more you understand how things happen. It’s why I enjoy my job.”
    “Same here.”
    “Have you spoken to Lieutenant Pounds since the incident?”
    “I saw him when I dropped off the keys to my car. He had it taken away. I went into his office and he practically got hysterical. He’s a very small man and I think he knows it.”
    “They usually do.”
    Bosch leaned forward, ready to get up and leave, when he noticed the envelope she had pushed to the side of her desk.
    “What about the photos?”
    “I knew you’d bring that up one more time.”
    She looked at the envelope and frowned.
    “I need to think about it. On several levels. Can I keep them while you go to Florida? Or will you need them?”
    “You can keep ’em.”

Chapter Twenty-two
    AT FOUR-FORTY IN the morning California time the air carrier landed at Tampa International Airport. Bosch leaned bleary-eyed against a window in the coach cabin, watching the sun rising in the Florida sky for the first time. As the plane taxied, he took off his watch and moved the hands ahead three hours. He was tempted to check into the nearest motel for some real sleep but knew he didn’t have the time. From the AAA map he had brought with him, it looked like it was at least a two-hour drive down to Venice.
    “It’s nice to see a blue sky.”
    It was the woman next to him in the aisle seat. She was leaning over toward him, looking out the window herself. She was in her mid-forties with prematurely gray hair. It was almost white. They had talked a bit in the early part of the flight and Bosch knew she was heading back to Florida rather than visiting as he was. She had given L.A. five years but had had enough. She was going home. Bosch didn’t ask who or what she was coming home to, but had wondered if her hair was white when she had first landed in L.A. five years before.
    “Yeah,” he replied. “These night flights take forever.”
    “No, I meant the smog. There is none.”
    Bosch looked at her and then out the window, studying the sky.
    “Not yet.”
    But she was right. The sky had a quality of blue he rarely saw in L.A. It was the color of swimming pools, with billowing white cumulus clouds floating like dreams in the upper atmosphere.
    The plane cleared out slowly. Bosch waited until the end, got up and rolled his back to relieve the tension. The joints of his backbone cracked like dominoes going down. He got his overnighter out of the compartment above and headed out.
    As soon as he stepped off the plane into the jetway, the humidity surrounded him like a wet towel with an incubating warmth. He made it into the air-conditioned terminal and decided to scratch his plan to rent a convertible.
    A half hour later he was on the 275 freeway crossing Tampa Bay in another rented Mustang. He had the windows up and the air-conditioning on but he was sweating as his body still had not acclimated to the humidity.
    What struck him most about Florida on this first drive was its flatness. For forty-five minutes not a hillrise came in sight until he reached the concrete-and-steel mountain called the Skyway Bridge. Bosch knew that the steeply graded bridge over the mouth of the bay was a replacement for one that had fallen but he drove across it fearlessly and above the speed limit. After all, he came from postquake Los Angeles, where the unofficial speed limit under bridges and overpasses was on the far right side of the speedometer.
    After the skyway the