The Overlook

the monitor off.
    “What is it?” she yelled.
    Bosch pointed toward the truck’s door.
    “The gun’s in the glove box and the cesium’s in the center compartment.”
    “What?”
    “The cesium is in the compartment under the armrest. He took the capsules out of the pig. That’s why they weren’t in his pocket. They were in the center armrest.”
    He touched his right hip, the place where Gonzalves was burned by radiation. The same spot would have been next to the armrest compartment when he was sitting in the truck.
    Rachel didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just stared at his face.
    “Are you okay?” she finally asked.
    Bosch almost laughed.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in about ten years.”
    She hesitated as if she knew something but couldn’t share it.
    “What?” Bosch asked.
    “Nothing. You should be checked out, though.”
    “What are they going to be able to do? Look, I wasn’t in the truck that long. It’s not like Gonzalves, who was sitting in there with it. He was practically eating off of it.”
    She didn’t answer. Bosch handed her the monitor.
    “It was never on. I thought it was on when you gave it to me.”
    She took it and looked at it in her hand.
    “I thought it was, too.”
    Bosch thought about how he had carried the monitor in his pocket rather than clipped to his belt. He had probably switched it off unknowingly when he had twice put it in and removed it. He looked back at the truck and wondered if he had possibly just hurt or killed himself.
    “I need a drink of water,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle in the trunk.”
    Bosch walked back to the rear of his car. Using the open trunk lid to shield Walling’s view of him, he leaned his hands down on the bumper for support and tried to decipher the messages his body was sending to his brain. He felt something happening but didn’t know if it was something physiological or if the shakes he felt were just an emotional response to what had just happened. He remembered what the ER doctor had said about Gonzalves and how the most serious damage was internal. Was his own immune system shutting down? Was he circling the drain?
    He suddenly thought of his daughter, getting a vision of her at the airport the last time he saw her.
    He cursed out loud.
    “Harry?”
    Bosch looked around the trunk lid. Rachel was walking toward him.
    “The teams are headed this way. They’ll be here in five minutes. How do you feel?”
    “I think I’m okay.”
    “Good. I talked to the head of the team. He thinks the exposure was too short to be anything serious. But you still should go to the ER and get checked out.”
    “We’ll see.”
    He reached into the trunk and got a liter bottle of water out of his kit. It was an emergency bottle he kept for surveillances that dragged on longer than expected. He opened it and took two strong pulls. The water wasn’t cold but it felt good going down. His throat was dry.
    Bosch recapped the bottle and put it back in the kit. He stepped around the car to Walling. As he walked toward her he looked past her to the south. He realized that the alley they were in extended several blocks past the back of the Easy Print and ran behind all the storefronts and offices on Cahuenga. All the way down to Barham.
    In the alley every twenty yards or so was a green Dumpster positioned perpendicular to the rear of the structures. Bosch realized they had been pushed out of spaces between the buildings and fenced corrals. Just like in Silver Lake, it was pickup day and the Dumpsters were waiting for the city trucks to come.
    Suddenly it all came to him. Like fusion. Two elements coming together and creating something new. The thing that bothered him about the crime scene photos, the yoga poster, everything. The gamma rays had shot right through him but they had left him enlightened. He knew. He understood.
    “He’s a scavenger.”
    “Who is?”
    “Digoberto Gonzalves,” Bosch said, his eyes looking down the alley. “It’s collection day. The Dumpsters are all pushed out for the city trucks. Gonzalves is a scavenger, a Dumpster diver, and he knew they would be out and this would be a good time to come here.”
    He looked at Walling before completing the thought.
    “And so did somebody else,” he said.
    “You mean he found the cesium in a Dumpster?”
    Bosch nodded and pointed down the alley.
    “All the way at the end, that’s Barham. Barham takes you up to Lake Hollywood. Lake Hollywood takes