The Last Coyote

sure?”
    “Yes, I’m sure. You want some tea?”
    She had stopped filling the kettle but did not turn around or make a move to put it on the stove.
    “No. I was thinking maybe I could take you out for breakfast.”
    “When do you leave? I thought you said the plane’s this morning.”
    “That was the other thing I was thinking about. I could stay another day, leave tomorrow, if you want me to. I mean, if you’ll have me. I’d like to stay.”
    She turned around and looked at him.
    “I want you to stay, too.”
    They embraced and kissed but she quickly pulled back.
    “It’s not fair, you brushed your teeth. I have monster breath.”
    “Yeah, but I used your toothbrush, so it evens out.”
    “Gross. Now I have to get a new one.”
    “That’s right.”
    They smiled and she gave him a tight hug around the neck, his trespass in her studio seemingly forgotten.
    “You call the airline and I’ll get ready. I know where we can go.”
    When she pulled away he held her in front of him. He wanted to bring it up again. He couldn’t help it.
    “I want to ask you something.”
    “What?”
    “How come those paintings aren’t signed?”
    “They’re not ready to be signed.”
    “The one at your father’s was signed.”
    “That was for him, so I signed it. Those others are for me.”
    “The one on the bridge. Is she going to jump?”
    She looked at him a long time before answering.
    “I don’t know. Sometimes when I look at it, I think she is. I think the thought is there, but you never know.”
    “It can’t happen, Jazz.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it can’t.”
    “I’ll get ready.”
    She broke away from him then and left the kitchen.
    He went to the wall phone next to the refrigerator and dialed the airline. While making the arrangements to fly out Monday morning, he decided on a whim to ask the airline agent if it was possible to route his new flight back to Los Angeles through Las Vegas. She said not without a three-hour-and-fourteen-minute layover. He said he’d take it. He had to pay fifty dollars on top of the seven hundred they already had from him in order to make the needed changes. He put it on his credit card.
    He thought about Vegas as he hung up. Claude Eno might be dead but his wife was still cashing his checks. She might be worth the fifty-dollar layover.
    “Ready?”
    It was Jasmine calling from the living room. Bosch stepped out of the kitchen and she was waiting for him in cut-off jeans and a tank top beneath a white shirt she left open and tied above her waist. She already had on sunglasses.
    She took him to a place where they poured honey on top of the biscuits and served the eggs with grits and butter. Bosch hadn’t had grits since basic training at Benning. The meal was delicious. Neither of them spoke much. The paintings and the conversation they had before falling asleep the night before were not mentioned. It seemed that what they had said was better left for the dark shadows of night, and maybe her paintings, too.
    When they were done with their coffee, she insisted on picking up the check. He got the tip. They spent the afternoon cruising in her Volkswagen with the top down. She took him all over the place, from Ybor City to St. Petersburg Beach, burning up a tank of gas and two packs of cigarettes. By late in the afternoon they were at a place called Indian Rocks Beach to look at the sunset over the Gulf.
    “I’ve been a lot of places,” Jasmine told him. “I like the light here the best.”
    “Ever been out to California?”
    “No, not yet.”
    “Sometimes the sunset looks like lava pouring down on the city.”
    “That must be beautiful.”
    “It makes you forgive a lot, forget a lot…That’s the thing about Los Angeles. It’s got a lot of broken pieces to it. But the ones that still work, really do work.”
    “I think I know what you mean.”
    “I’m curious about something.”
    “Here we go again. What?”
    “If you don’t show your paintings to anybody, how do you make a living?”
    It was from out of left field but he had been thinking about it all day.
    “I have money from my father. Even before he died. It’s not a lot but I don’t need a lot. It’s enough. If I don’t feel the need to sell my work when it is finished, then as I am doing it, it won’t be compromised. It will be pure.”
    It sounded to Bosch like a convenient way of explaining away the fear of exposing oneself. But he let it go. She didn’t.
    “Are you always a cop?