Ferras stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the clock on the wall over the bulletin boards.
“Shit,” Ferras said. “Every time.”
“What do you mean, ‘every time?’” Bosch said. “We haven’t caught a case in a month.”
“Yeah, well, I was getting used to that.”
“Well, if you don’t want to work murders, there’s always a nine-to-five table like auto theft.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Then, let’s go.”
Bosch stepped out of the cubicle into the aisle and headed toward the door. Ferras followed, pulling his phone out so he could call his wife and give her the bad news. On the way out of the squad room, both men reached up and patted the boar on its flat nose for good luck.
2
Bosch didn’t need to lecture Ferras on the way to South L.A. His driving in silence was his lecture. His young partner seemed to wither under the pressure of what was not said and finally opened up.
“This is driving me crazy,” he said.
“What is?” Bosch asked.
“The twins. There’s so much work, so much crying. It’s a domino effect. One wakes up and that starts the other one up. Then my oldest kid wakes up. Nobody’s getting any sleep and my wife is…”
“What?”
“I don’t know, going crazy. Calling me all the time, asking when I’m coming home. So I come home and then it’s my turn and I get the boys and I get no break. It’s work, kids, work, kids, work, kids every day.”
“What about a nanny?”
“We can’t afford a nanny. Not with the way things are, and we don’t even get overtime anymore.”
Bosch didn’t know what to say. His daughter, Madeline, was a month past her thirteenth birthday and almost ten thousand miles away from him. He had never been directly involved in raising her. He saw her four weeks a year-two in Hong Kong and two in L.A.-and that was it. What advice could he legitimately give a full-time dad with three kids, including twins?