craft's wings hung the hardware of war. He watched the three jets bank and come about in a tight triangle pattern and retrace their path back to the mountain. After they crossed above him, Harry looked down at his maps and found blocks marked off to the southwest as closed to the public. It was the U.S. Naval Gunnery Range at Superstition Mountain. The map said it was a live bombing area. Keep out.
Bosch felt a dull vibration rock the car slightly and then the following rumble. He looked up from the map and thought he could make out the plume of smoke beginning to rise from the base of Superstition. Then he felt and heard another bomb hit. Then another.
As the jets, the silvery skin of each reflecting a diamond of sunlight, passed overhead again to begin another run, Bosch pulled back onto the road behind a flatbed truck with two teenagers in the back. They were Mexican fieldworkers with weary eyes that seemed already knowledgeable about the long, hard life ahead of them. They were about the same age as the two boys on the picnic table in the photo that had been in the white bag. They stared at Bosch with indifference.
In a few moments it was clear to pass the slow-moving truck. Bosch heard other explosions from Superstition Mountain as he moved away. He went on to pass more farms and mom-and-pop restaurants. He passed a sugar mill where a line painted at the top of its huge silo marked sea level.
The summer after he had talked to his father Bosch had picked up the books by Hesse. He was curious about what the old man had meant. He found it in the second book he read. Harry Haller was a character in it. A disillusioned loner, a man of no real identity, Harry Haller was the steppenwolf.
That August Bosch joined the cops.
He believed he felt the land rising. The farmland gave way to brown brush and there were dust devils rising in the open land. His ears popped as he ascended. And he knew the border was nearing long before he passed the green sign that told him Calexico was twenty miles away.
Twenty
CALEXICO WAS LIKE MOST BORDER TOWNS: dusty and built low to the ground, its main street a garish collision of neon and plastic signage, the inevitable golden arches being the recognizable if not comforting icon amid the drive-through Mexican auto insurance offices and souvenir shops.
In town, Route 86 connected with 111 and dropped straight down to the border crossroad. Traffic was backed up about five blocks from the exhaust-stained concrete auto terminal manned by the Mexican federales. It looked like the five o'clock lineup at the Broadway entrance to the 101 in L.A. Before he got caught up in it, Bosch turned east on Fifth Street. He passed the De Anza Hotel and drove two blocks to the police station. It was a one-story concrete-block affair that was painted the same yellow as the tablets lawyers used. From the signs out front, Bosch learned it was also Town Hall. It was also the town fire station. It was also the historical society. He found a parking space in front.
As he opened the door of the dirty Caprice he heard singing from the park across the street. On a picnic bench five Mexican men sat drinking Budweisers. A sixth man, wearing a black cowboy shirt with white embroidery and a straw Stetson, stood facing them, playing a guitar and singing in Spanish. The song was sung slowly and Harry had no trouble translating.
I don't know how to love you
I don't even know how to embrace you
Because what never leaves me
Is this pain that hurts me so
The singer's plaintive voice carried strongly across the park and Bosch thought the song was beautiful. He leaned against his car and smoked until the singer was done.
The kisses that you gave me my love
Are the ones that are killing me
But my tears are now drying
With my pistol and my heart
And here as always I spend my life
With the pistol and the heart
At the song's end, the men at the picnic table gave the singer a cheer and a toast.
Inside the glass door marked Police was a sour-smelling room no larger than the back of a pickup truck. On the left was a Coke machine, straight ahead was a door with an electronic bolt, and on the right was a thick glass window with a slide tray beneath it.