City Of Bones by Michael Connelly

do?”
    “My sergeant, his name was Rosser, took me out of the barracks and over to the back of the administration building. There was a brick wall. He made me punch it. Until every one of my knuckles was cut up. Then after they were scabbed up in about a week he made me do it again.”
    “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s barbaric.”
    “No, that’s the army.”
    He smiled at the memory. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He looked down at his hands. The music stopped and he got up and walked through the house naked to change it. When he came back to the bedroom, she recognized the music.
    “Clifford Brown?”
    He nodded and came toward the bed. He didn’t think he had ever known a woman who could identify jazz music like that.
    “Stand there.”
    “What?”
    “Let me look at you. Tell me about those other scars.”
    The room was dimly lit by a light from the bathroom but Bosch became conscious of his nakedness. He was in good shape but he was more than fifteen years older than her. He wondered if she had ever been with a man so old.
    “Harry, you look great. You totally turn me on, okay? What about the other scars?”
    He touched the thick rope of skin above his left hip.
    “This? This was a knife.”
    “Where’d that happen?”
    “A tunnel.”
    “And your shoulder?”
    “Bullet.”
    “Where?”
    He smiled.
    “A tunnel.”
    “Ouch, stay out of tunnels.”
    “I try.”
    He got into the bed and pulled the sheet up. She touched his shoulder, running her thumb over the thick skin of the scar.
    “Right in the bone,” she said.
    “Yeah, I got lucky. No permanent damage. It aches in the winter and when it rains, that’s about it.”
    “What did it feel like? Being shot, I mean.”
    Bosch shrugged his shoulders.
    “It hurt like hell and then everything sort of went numb.”
    “How long were you down?”
    “About three months.”
    “You didn’t get a disability out?”
    “It was offered. I declined.”
    “How come?”
    “I don’t know. I like the job, I guess. And I thought that if I stuck with it, someday I’d meet this beautiful young cop who’d be impressed by all my scars.”
    She jammed him in the ribs and the pain made him grimace.
    “Oh, poor baby,” she said in a mocking voice.
    “That hurt.”
    She touched the tattoo on his shoulder.
    “What’s that supposed to be, Mickey Mouse on acid?”
    “Sort of. It’s a tunnel rat.”
    Her face lost all trace of humor.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “You were in Vietnam,” she said, putting things together. “I’ve been in those tunnels.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “When I was on the road. I spent six weeks in Vietnam. The tunnels, they’re like a tourist thing now. You pay your money and you can go down into them. It must’ve been… what you had to do must’ve been so frightening.”
    “It was more scary afterward. Thinking about it.”
    “They have them roped off so they can sort of control where you go. But nobody really watches you. So I went under the rope and went further in. It got so dark in there, Harry.”
    Bosch studied her eyes.
    “And did you see it?” he asked quietly. “The lost light?”
    She held his eyes for a moment and nodded.
    “I saw it. My eyes adjusted and there was light. Almost like a whisper. But it was enough for me to find my way.”
    “Lost light. We called it lost light. We never knew where it came from. But it was down there. Like smoke hanging in the dark. Some people said it wasn’t light, that it was the ghosts of everybody who died in those things. From both sides.”
    They spoke no more after that. They held each other and soon she was asleep.
    Bosch realized he had not thought about the case for more than three hours. At first this made him feel guilty but then he let it go and soon he too was asleep. He dreamed he was moving through a tunnel. But he wasn’t crawling. It was as if he were underwater and moving like an eel through the labyrinth. He came to a dead end and there was a boy