In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part of pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had just done that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.

“Harry, what are you doing? Get an ambulance.”

I looked at him.

“Yeah, right away.”

***

The woodworker’s cell was all concrete and steel. It had been a decade since he had run his fingers over the grain of wood. I stepped closer to the bars and looked in at him.

“You’re running out of time. You’ve exhausted your appeals, you’ve got a governor who needs to show he’s tough on crime. This is it, Victor. A week from today you take the needle.”

I waited for a reaction but there was nothing. He just looked at me and waited for what he knew I would ask.

“Time to come clean. Tell me who she was. Tell me where you took her from.”

He moved closer to the bars, close enough for me to smell the decay in his breath. I didn’t back away.

“All these years, Bosch. All these years and you still need to know. Why is that?”

“I just need to.”

“You and McCaleb.”

“What about him?”

“Oh, he came to see me, too.”

I knew McCaleb was out of the life. The job had taken his heart. He got a transplant and moved to Catalina. He was running a fishing charter.

“When did he come?”

“Oh, let me see. Time is so hard to track here. A few months ago. Dropped by for a chat with his new heart, Terry did. Said he was in the neighborhood. He didn’t like my review of the film. What did you think of it?”

He was talking about the film in which Clint Eastwood portrayed McCaleb.

“I didn’t see it. What did he want when he came here?”