The Last Coyote

guess I’ve been waiting for somebody to care about this one since I walked away from it.”
    “Go ahead. Eno was in charge.”
    “Yeah, he was the man. You’ve got to understand something. We’d been a team maybe three, four months at that time. We weren’t tight. After this one, we’d never be tight. I switched off after about a year. I went in for the transfer. They moved me to Wilshire dicks, homicide table. Never had much to do with him after that. He never had much to do with me.”
    “Okay, what happened with the investigation?”
    “Well, it was like anything else that you’d expect. We were going through the routine. We had a list of her KAs-got it mostly from the vice guys-and were working our way through it.”
    “The known associates, did they include clients? There was no list in the murder book.”
    “I think there were a few clients. And the list didn’t go into the book because Eno said so. Remember, he was the lead.”
    “Okay. Johnny Fox was on the list?”
    “Yeah, he was at the top of it. He was her…uh, manager and-”
    “Her pimp, you mean.”
    McKittrick looked at him.
    “Yeah. That’s what he was. I wasn’t sure what you, uh-”
    “Forget it. Go on.”
    “Yeah, Johnny Fox was on the list. We talked to about everybody who knew her and this guy was described by everybody as one mean guy. He had a history.”
    Bosch thought of Meredith Roman’s report that he had beaten her.
    “We’d heard that she was trying to get away from him. I don’t know, either to go out on her own or maybe go straight. Who knows? We heard-”
    “She wanted to be a straight citizen,” Bosch interrupted. “That way she could get me out of the hall.”
    He felt foolish for saying it, knowing his saying it was not convincing.
    “Yeah, whatever,” McKittrick said. “Point is, Fox was none too happy about that. That put him at the top of our list.”
    “But you couldn’t find him. The chrono says you watched his place.”
    “Yeah. He was our man. We had prints we had taken off the belt-the murder weapon-but we had no comparisons from him. Johnny had been pulled in a few times in the past but never booked. Never printed. So we really needed to bring him in.”
    “What did it tell you, that he’d been picked up but never booked?”
    McKittrick finished his beer, crunched it in his hand and walked the empty over to a large bucket in the corner of the deck and dropped it.
    “To be honest, at the time it didn’t hit me. Now, of course, it’s obvious. He had an angel watching over him.”
    “Who?”
    “Well, on one of the days we were watching Fox’s place, waiting for him to show up, we got a message on the radio to call Arno Conklin. He wanted to talk about the case. ASAP. Now this was a holy shit kind of call. For two reasons. One, Arno was going great guns then. He was running the city’s moral commandos at the time and had a lock on the DA’s office, which was coming open in a year. The other reason was that we’d only had the case a few days and hadn’t come near the DA’s office with anything. So now all of a sudden the most powerful guy in the agency wants to see us. I’m thinking…I don’t really know what I was thinking. I just knew it-hey, you got one!”
    Bosch looked at his pole and saw it bend from a violent jerk on the line. The reel started spinning as the fish pulled against the drag. Bosch grabbed the pole out of the pipe and jerked it back. The hook was set well. He started reeling but the fish had a lot of fight and was pulling out more line than he was reeling in. McKittrick came over and tightened the drag dial, which immediately put a more pronounced bend in the pole.
    “Keep the pole up, keep the pole up,” McKittrick counseled.
    Bosch did as he was told and spent five minutes battling the fish. His arms started to ache. He felt a strain on his lower back. McKittrick put on gloves and when the fish finally surrendered and Bosch had it alongside the boat, he bent over and hooked his fingers into the gills and brought it on board. Bosch saw a shiny blue-black fish that looked beautiful in the sunlight.
    “Wahoo,” McKittrick said.
    “What?”
    McKittrick held the fish up horizontally.
    “Wahoo. Over there in your fancy L.A. restaurants I think they call it Ono. Here, we just call it wahoo. Meat cooks up white as halibut, you wanna keep it?”
    “No, put it back. It’s beautiful.”
    McKittrick roughly pulled the hook from the gulping mouth of the fish