the adrenaline wore off, I guess I kind of just got scared. Made me start thinking about things."
Bosch nodded his head but didn't say anything. His mind drifted and he remembered a time in the Triangle when a company that had taken heavy casualties from sniper fire stumbled onto the entrance to a tunnel complex. Bosch, Meadows and a couple of other rats named Jarvis and Hanrahan were dropped at a nearby LZ and escorted to the hole. The first thing they did was drop a Couple of LZ flares, a blue one and a red one, into the hole and blow the smoke in with a Mighty Mite fan, to find the other entrances in the jungle. Pretty soon ribbons of smoke started curling out of the ground at a couple dozen spots for two hundred yards in all directions. The smoke was coming up through the spider holes the snipers used as firing positions or to move in and out of the tunnels. There were so many of them, the jungle was turning purple from the smoke. Meadows was stoned. He popped a cassette into the portable tape player he always carried and started blasting Hendrix's "Purple Haze" into the tunnel. It was one of Bosch's most vivid memories, aside from his dreams, of the war.
He never liked rock and roll after that. The jolting energy of the music reminded him too much of the war.
"Did you ever go see the memorial?" Eleanor asked.
She didn't have to say which one. There was only the one, in Washington. But then he remembered the long black replica he had watched them installing at the cemetery by the Federal Building.
"No," he said after a while. "I've never seen it."
After the air in the jungle cleared and the Hendrix tape was done, the four of them had gone into the tunnel while the rest of the company sat on backpacks and chowed and waited. An hour later, only Bosch and Meadows had come back. Meadows carried with him three NVA scalps. He held them up for the troops above ground and yelled, "You're looking at the baddest blood brother in the black echo." And so came the name. Later, they found Jarvis and Hanrahan in the tunnels. They had fallen into punji traps. They were dead.
Eleanor said, "I visited it when I was living in D.C. I couldn't make myself go to the dedication in eighty-two. But a lot of years later I finally got the courage. I wanted to see my brother's name. I thought maybe it would help me sort things out, you know, about what happened with him."
"And did it?"
"No. Made it worse. It made me angry. It left me with this need for justice, if that makes sense. I wanted justice for my brother."
The silence filled the car again and Bosch poured more coffee into his cup. He was beginning to feel the onset of caffeine jitters but couldn't stop. He was addicted. He watched a couple of drunks who were stumbling down the street stop in front of the window before the vault. One of the men threw his hands up as if trying to gain a measure of the vault's huge door. After a while they moved on. He thought of the rage Eleanor must have felt because of her brother. The helplessness. He thought of his own rage. He knew the same feelings, maybe not to the same degree but from a different perspective. Anybody who was touched by the war knew some part of those feelings. He had never worked it out completely and wasn't sure he wanted to. The anger and sadness gave him something that was better than complete emptiness. Is that what Meadows felt? He wondered. The emptiness. Is that what bounced him from job to job and needle to needle until he was finally and fatally used up on this last mission? Bosch decided that he would go to Meadows's funeral, that he owed him that much.
"You know what you were telling me the other day about that guy, the Dollmaker killer?" Eleanor asked.
"What about it?"
"IAD, they tried to make a case that you executed him?"
"Yes, I told you. They tried. But it wasn't there. All they got me on was suspension for procedure violations."
"Well, I just wanted to say that even if they were right, they were wrong. That would have been justice in my book. You knew what would happen with a guy like that. Look at the