Free City Of Bones by Michael Connelly Page B

he had on her.
    “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
    “Nothing. Just wondering about the guy who got to put this on your back. I wish it had been me, I guess.”
    “How come?”
    “Because there will always be a piece of him with you.”
    She turned on her side, revealing her breasts and her smile. Her hair was out of its braid and down around her shoulders. He liked that, too. She reached up and pulled him down into a long kiss. Then she said, “That’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me in a long time.”
    He put his head down on her pillow. He could smell the sweet scent of perfume and sex and sweat.
    “You don’t have any pictures on your walls,” she said. “Photos, I mean.”
    He shrugged his shoulders.
    She turned over so her back was to him. He reached under her arm and cupped one of her breasts and pulled her back into him.
    “Can you stay till the morning?” he asked.
    “Well… my husband will probably wonder where I am, but I guess I could call him.”
    Bosch froze. Then she started laughing.
    “Don’t scare me like that.”
    “Well, you never even asked me if I was involved with anyone.”
    “You didn’t ask me.”
    “You were obvious. The lone detective type.” And then in a deep male voice: “Just the facts, ma’am. No time for dames. Murder is my business. I have a job to do and I am-”
    He ran his thumb down her side, over the indentations of her ribs. She cut off her words with laughter.
    “You lent me your flashlight,” he said. “I didn’t think an ‘involved’ woman would have done that.”
    “And I’ve got news for you, tough guy. I saw the Mag in your trunk. In the box before you covered it up. You weren’t fooling anybody.”
    Bosch rolled back on the other pillow, embarrassed. He could feel his face getting red. He brought his hands up to hide it.
    “Oh, God… Mr. Obvious.”
    She rolled over to him and peeled back his hands. She kissed him on the chin.
    “I thought it was nice. Kinda made my day and gave me something to maybe look forward to.”
    She turned his hands back and looked at the scarring across the knuckles. They were old marks and not very noticeable anymore.
    “Hey, what is this?”
    “Just scars.”
    “I know that. From what?”
    “I had tattoos. I took them off. It was a long time ago.”
    “How come?”
    “They made me take them off when I went into the army.”
    She started to laugh.
    “Why, what did it say, Fuck the army or something?”
    “No, nothing like that.”
    “Then what? Come on, I want to know.”
    “It said H-O-L-D on one hand and F-A-S-T on the other.”
    “Hold fast? What does ‘hold fast’ mean?”
    “Well, it’s kind of a long story…”
    “I have time. My husband doesn’t mind.”
    She smiled.
    “Come on, I want to know.”
    “It’s not a big deal. When I was a kid, one of the times I ran away I ended up down in San Pedro. Down around the fishing docks. And a lot of those guys down there, the fishermen, the tuna guys, I saw they had this on their hands. Hold fast. And I asked one of them about it and he told me it was like their motto, their philosophy. It’s like when they were out there in those boats, way out there for weeks, and the waves got huge and it got scary, you just had to grab on and hold fast.”
    Bosch made two fists and held them up.
    “Hold fast to life… to everything that you have.”
    “So you had it done. How old were you?”
    “I don’t know, sixteen, thereabouts.”
    He nodded and then he smiled.
    “What I didn’t know was that those tuna guys got it from some navy guys. So a year later I go waltzing into the army with ‘Hold Fast’ on my hands and the first thing my sergeant told me was to get rid of it. He wasn’t going to have any squid tattoo on one of his guys’ hands.”
    She grabbed his hands and looked closely at the knuckles.
    “This doesn’t look like laser work.”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “They didn’t have lasers back then.”
    “So what did you