Angle of Investigation_ Three Harry Bosch Stories - Michael Connelly [10]
“Man, you remember everything.”
“Just ’cause I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t remember. The man on the moon was there, too.”
Bosch smiled. Sugar Ray was filling in details he had forgotten.
“Neil Armstrong, yeah. But the rest of the band—the Playboy All-Stars—was on one of the other choppers and it went back to Danang. It was only you and you carried your own ax. You played for us. Solo.”
Bosch looked at the instrument in the old man’s gray hands. He remembered the day on the Sanctuary as clearly as he remembered any other moment of his life.
“You played ‘The Sweet Spot’ and then ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”
“I played the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ too. By request of a young man in the front row. He’d lost both his legs and he asked me to play that waltz.”
Bosch nodded solemnly.
“Bob Hope told us his jokes and Connie Stevens sang ‘Promises, Promises.’ A cappella. In less than an hour it was all over and the chopper took off. Man, I can’t explain it but it meant something. It made something right in a messed-up world, you know? I was only nineteen years old and I wasn’t sure how or why I was even over there.
“Anyway, I’ve listened to a lot of saxophone since then but I haven’t heard it any better.”
Bosch nodded and stood up. His knee creaked loudly. He guessed it wouldn’t be too long before he was in one of these places. If he was lucky.
“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said. “That’s all.”
“You were in the tunnels over there, huh? I heard about them.”
Bosch nodded.
“Coulda used you going about this bin Laden character.”
He pointed up to the TV, as if that were where the terrorist was.
Bosch shook his head.
“Nah, it’s a different game. Back then they gave you a flashlight and a forty-five, said good luck and dropped you in a hole. Now it’s sound and motion detectors, heat sensors, infrared… it’s a different game.”
“Maybe. But a hunter is still a hunter.”
Bosch look lu">Bosched at him for a moment before speaking.
“Take it easy, Sugar Ray.”
He headed toward the door and one more time Sugar Ray stopped him.
“Hey, Santa Claus.”
Bosch turned back.
“You strike me as a man who is alone in the world,” Sugar Ray said. “That true?”
Bosch nodded without hesitation.
“Most of the time.”
“You got plans for Christmas dinner?”
Bosch hesitated. He finally shook his head.
“No plans.”
“Then, come back here at three tomorrow. We have a dinner and I can bring a guest. I’ll sign you up.”
Bosch hesitated. He had been alone so often on Christmases past that he thought it might be too late, that being around anyone might be intolerable.
“Don’t worry,” Sugar Ray said. “They won’t put your turkey in the blender as long as you’ve got teeth.”
Bosch smiled.
“All right, Sugar Ray, I’ll be by.”
“Then, I’ll see you then.”
Bosch walked down the yellowed corridor and out into the night. As he headed to the car he heard Christmas music still playing from an open window somewhere. It was an instrumental, slow and heavy on the saxophone. He stopped and it took him a moment to recognize it as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” He stood there on the walkway and listened until the end of the song.
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge John Houghton for recounting and sharing the experience on the USS Sanctuary that inspired this story.
Father’s Day
The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it.
The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. He had worked thousands of cases but nothing ever touched Bosch liket di the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in