The Last Coyote

wanted to be at a distance from McKittrick when he showed the badge. He smiled.
    “Never thought I’d see somebody from the Hollywood homicide table so far away from home,” he said.
    McKittrick looked up but showed no surprise. He showed nothing.
    “Nope, you’re wrong. This is home. When I was over there, that’s when I was far away.”
    Bosch gave a that’s-fair-enough nod and showed the badge. He held it the same way as when he’d showed it to McKittrick’s wife.
    “I’m Harry Bosch, from Hollywood homicide.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I heard.”
    Bosch was the one who showed surprise. He could not think of who in L.A. would have tipped McKittrick to his arrival. No one knew. He had only told Hinojos and he could not fathom that she would betray him.
    McKittrick relieved him by gesturing to the portable phone on the dashboard of the boat.
    “The wife called.”
    “Oh.”
    “So what’s this all about, Detective Bosch? When I used to work there, we did things in pairs. It was safer that way. You folks that understaffed, you’re going singleton?”
    “Not really. My partner’s chasing down another old case. These are such long shots, they’re not wasting money sending two.”
    “I assume you’re going to explain that.”
    “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I am. Mind if I come down there?”
    “Suit yourself. I’m fixing to shove off as soon as the wife comes with the food.”
    Bosch began walking along the finger dock to the side of McKittrick’s boat. He then stepped down into the craft. It wobbled on the water with the added weight but then steadied. McKittrick lifted the engine cover and began snapping it back in place. Bosch felt grossly out of place. He wore street shoes with black jeans, an Army green T-shirt and a black light-weight sport jacket. And he was still hot. He took the jacket off and folded it over one of the two chairs in the cockpit.
    “What are you going for?”
    “Whatever’s biting. What are you going for?”
    He looked directly at Bosch when he asked this and Harry saw that his eyes were brown like beer-bottle glass.
    “Well, you heard about the earthquake, didn’t you?”
    “Sure, who didn’t? You know, I’ve been through quakes and ’canes and you can keep the quakes. At least with a hurricane, you see it coming. You take Andrew, he left a lot of devastation, but think how much it woulda been if nobody knew he was about to hit. That’s what you get with your earthquakes.”
    It took Bosch a few moments to place Andrew, the hurricane that had slammed the South Florida coast a couple of years earlier. It was hard to keep track of all the disasters in the world. There were enough just in L.A. He looked out across the inlet. He saw a fish jump and its reentry create a stampede of jumping among the others in the school. He looked at McKittrick and was about to tell him when he realized it was probably something McKittrick saw every day of his life.
    “When’d you leave L.A.?”
    “Twenty-one years ago. I got my twenty in and pffft, I was gone. You can have L.A., Bosch. Shit, I was out there for the Sylmar quake in seventy-one. Knocked down a hospital and a couple freeways. At the time we were living in Tujunga, a few miles from the epicenter. I’ll always remember that one. It was like God and the devil meetin’ in the room and you were there with ’em playin’ referee. Goddamn…So what’s the quake got to do with you being here?”
    “Well, it’s kind of a strange phenomenon but the murder rate’s fallen off. People are being more civil, I guess. We-”
    “Maybe there’s nothing left there worth killing for.”
    “Maybe. Anyway, we’re usually running seventy, eighty murders a year in the division, I don’t know what it was like when you-”
    “We’d do less than half that. Easy.”
    “Well, we’re running way below the average this year. It’s given us time to go back through some of the old ones. Everybody on the table’s taken a share. One of the ones I’ve got has your name on it. I guess you know your partner from back then passed away and-”
    “Eno’s dead? Goddamn, I didn’t know that. I thought I would’ve heard about that. Not that it would’ve mattered a whole hell of a lot.”
    “Yeah, he’s dead. His wife gets the pension checks. Sorry, you hadn’t heard.”
    “That’s okay. Eno and me…well, we were partners. That’s about it.”
    “Anyway, I’m here because you’re alive and he isn’t.”
    “What’s the