The Black Box (27 page)

They next did a roll-up on a bank robbery in progress. As with the first exercise, they both opened fire and took down a man who emerged through the bank’s glass doors and took aim at the officers.

From there the scenarios grew more difficult. In one, there was a door knock and the resident opened the door angrily, gesturing with a black cell phone in his hand. Then there was a domestic dispute in which the arguing husband and wife both turned on the responding officers. Holodnak approved their handling of both situations without firing their weapons. He then put Madeline through a series of solo scenarios where she was responding to calls without a partner.

In the first exercise, she encountered a mentally deranged man with a knife and talked him into dropping the weapon. The second involved another domestic dispute, but in this case the male waved a knife at her from ten feet away, and she correctly opened fire.

“It takes two strides to cover ten feet,” Holodnak said. “If you had waited for him to make that move, he would’ve gotten to you as you fired. That would be a tie. Who loses in a tie?”

“I do,” Madeline said.

“That’s right. You handled it correctly.”

Next was a scenario where she entered a school after a report of gunfire. Moving down an empty hallway, she heard children’s screams from up ahead. She then made the turn
and saw a man outside a classroom door, pointing a gun at a woman huddled on the floor, trying to shield her head with her hands.

“Please don’t,” the woman begged.

The gunman’s back was to Madeline. She fired immediately, striking the man in the back and head, knocking him down before he could shoot the woman. Even though she had not identified herself as a police officer or told the gunman to drop his weapon, Holodnak told her she had performed well and within policy. He pointed to a whiteboard along the left wall. It had some shooting diagrams drawn on it, but across the top it had one word in large capitals: IDOL

“
Immediate
defense of life,” Holodnak said. “You are within policy if your action is in immediate defense of life. That can mean your life or somebody else’s. It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay.”

“I have one question for you, though. How did you assess what you saw? What I mean is, what made you think that was a teacher being threatened by a bad guy? How did you know the woman wasn’t the bad guy who had just been disarmed by a teacher?”

Bosch had drawn the same immediate conclusions as his daughter. It had just been instinct. He would have fired just as she had.

“Well,” Maddie said. “Their clothes. He had his shirt out, and I don’t think a teacher would do that. And she had glasses and her hair up like a teacher. I saw she had a rubber band around her wrist, and I had a teacher who did that.”

Holodnak nodded.

“Well, you got it right. I was just curious about how. It’s
amazing what can be assimilated by the mind in so short a time.”

They moved on, and Holodnak next put her in an unusual scenario where she was traveling on a commercial airliner, as detectives often do. She was armed and in her seat when a traveler two seats ahead of her jumped up and grabbed a flight attendant around the neck and threatened her with a knife.

Madeline stood and raised her weapon, identifying herself as a police officer and ordering the man to release the shrieking woman. Instead, the man pulled his hostage closer as cover and threatened to cut her. Other passengers were yelling and moving about the cabin, seeking places to hide. Finally, there was a moment when the flight attendant tried to break free, and a few inches separated her and the man with the knife. Madeline fired.

And the flight attendant went down.

“Shit!”

Madeline bent over in horror. The man on the screen yelled, “Who’s next?”

“Madeline!” Holodnak yelled. “Is it over? Is the danger over?”

Maddie realized she had lost focus. She straightened up and fired five rounds into the man with the knife. He dropped to the floor.

The lights came up and Holodnak came out from behind the computer station.

“I killed her,” Maddie said.

“Well, let’s talk about it,” Holodnak said. “Why did you shoot?”

“Because he was going to kill her.”

“Good. That’s good under the IDOL rule—immediate defense of life. Could you have done anything else?”

“I don’t know. He was going to kill her.”

“Did you have to stand and show your weapon, identify yourself?”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“That was your advantage. He didn’t know you were a cop. He didn’t know you were armed. You forced the action by standing. Once your gun came out, there was no going back.”

Maddie nodded and hung her head, and Bosch suddenly felt bad that he had set up the whole session.

“Kid,” Holodnak said. “You’re doing better than most of the cops who come through here. Let’s do another and end it on a good note. Forget this one and get ready.”

He returned to the computer, and Maddie went through one more scenario, an off-duty incident where she was approached by an armed carjacker. She put him down with a center-mass shot as soon as he started to pull his gun. Then she held back when a passing civilian suddenly ran up and started shaking a cell phone at her and screaming, “What did you do? What did you do?”

Holodnak said she handled the situation expertly and that seemed to raise her spirits. He once again added that he was impressed with her shooting and decision-making processes.

Harry and Maddie thanked Holodnak for the time on the machine and headed out. They were recrossing the basketball court when Holodnak called from the door of the simulator room. He was still playing pin the tail on the donkey with Bosch.

“Michael Formanek,” he said. “
The Rub and Spare Change.”

He pointed at Bosch in a
gotcha
gesture. Maddie laughed even though she didn’t know that Holodnak was talking jazz. Bosch turned, started walking backwards and raised his hands in an I-give-up fashion.

“Bass player from San Francisco,” Holodnak said. “Great inside/outside stuff. You gotta expand your equation, Harry. Not everybody who’s worth listening to is dead. Madeline, your dad’s next birthday, you come see me.”

Bosch waved him off as he turned back around.

25

T
hey stopped for lunch at the Academy Grill, where the walls were adorned with LAPD memorabilia, and the sandwiches were named after past police chiefs and famous cops real and imagined.

Soon after Maddie ordered the Bratton Burger and Bosch asked for the Joe Friday, the humor Holodnak had injected at the end of the shooting session wore off and Bosch’s daughter grew silent and slumped in her seat.

“Cheer up, baby,” Bosch tried. “It was just a simulator. Overall you did very well. You heard what he said. You have three seconds to recognize and shoot. . . . I think you did great.”

“Dad, I killed a flight attendant.”

“But you saved a teacher. Besides, it wasn’t real. You took a shot that you probably wouldn’t have taken in real life. There’s this sense of urgency with the simulator. When it happens in real life, things actually seem to slow down. There’s—I don’t know—more clarity.”

That didn’t seem to impress her. He tried again.

“Besides that, the gun probably wasn’t zeroed out perfectly.”

“Thanks a lot, Dad. That means all the shots I did hit on target were actually off target because the gun wasn’t zeroed.”

“No, I—”

“I have to go wash my hands.”

She abruptly slid out of the booth and headed to the back hallway as Bosch realized how stupid it had been for him to blame a bad shot on the adjustment of the gun to the screen.

While he waited for her, he looked at a framed front page of the
Los Angeles Times
on the wall above the booth. The whole top of the page was dedicated to the police shoot-out with the Symbionese Liberation Army at 54th and Compton in 1974. Bosch had been there that day as a young patrol officer. He worked traffic and crowd control during the deadly standoff and the next day stood guard as a team combed through the debris of the burned-out house, looking for the remains of Patty Hearst.

Lucky for her, she hadn’t been there.

Bosch’s daughter slid back into the booth.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

“Relax,” Bosch said. “We just ordered five minutes ago.”

“Dad, why did you become a cop?”

Bosch was momentarily taken aback by the question that came out of the blue.

“A lot of reasons.”

“Like what?”

He paused while he put together his thoughts. This was the second time in a week that she had asked the question. He knew it was important to her.

“The snap answer is to say I wanted to protect and to serve. But because it’s you asking, I’ll tell you the truth. It wasn’t
because I had a desire to protect and serve or to be some sort of do-gooder public servant. When I think back on it, I actually just wanted to protect and serve myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, at the time, I had just come back from the war in Vietnam, and people like me—you know, ex-soldiers from over there—they weren’t really accepted back here. Especially by people our own age.”

Bosch looked around to see if the food was coming. Now he was getting anxious about waiting. He looked back at his daughter.

“I remember I came back and wasn’t sure what I was doing and I started taking classes at L.A. City College over there on Vermont. And I met this girl in a class, and we started hanging out a little bit, and I didn’t tell her where I had been—you know, Vietnam—because I knew it might be an issue.”

“Didn’t she see your tattoo?”

The tunnel rat on his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway.

“No, we hadn’t gotten that far or anything. I’d never had my shirt off with her. But one day we were walking after class through the commons and she sort of asked me out of the blue why I was so quiet . . . . And I don’t know, I just sort of decided that was the opening, that I could let the cat out of the bag. I thought she would accept it, you know?”

“But she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t. I said something like, ‘Well, I’ve spent the last few years in the military,’ and she right away asked if that meant I was in Vietnam, and I told her—I said yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She just did one of those pirouette moves like a dancer and walked away. She didn’t say a thing.”

“Oh my God! How mean!”

“That was when I really knew what I had come back to.”

“Well, what happened when you went to class the next day? Did you say anything to her?”

“No, because I didn’t go back. I never went back to that school, because I knew that’s how it was going to be. So that’s a big part of why a week later I joined the cops. The department was full of military vets, and a lot had been over there in Southeast Asia. So I knew there would be people like me and I could be accepted. It was like somebody coming out of prison and going to a halfway house first. I wasn’t inside anymore, but I was with people like me.”

His daughter seemed to have forgotten about killing a flight attendant. Bosch was glad for that but wasn’t too happy about pushing his own memory buttons.

He suddenly smiled.

“What?” Maddie asked.

“Nothing, I just sort of jumped to another memory from back then. A crazy thing.”

“Well, tell me. You just told me a super-sad story, so tell me the crazy story.”

He waited while the waitress put down their food. She had been working there since Bosch had been a cadet nearly forty years before.

“Thanks, Margie,” Bosch said.

“You’re welcome, Harry.”

Madeline put ketchup on her Bratton Burger, and they took a few bites of food before Bosch began his story.

“Well, when I graduated and got my badge and was put out on the street, it was sort of the same thing all over again. You know, counterculture, the war-protest movement, crazy stuff like that going on.”

He pointed to the framed front page on the wall next to them.

“The police were viewed by a lot of people out there as maybe just a slight level above the baby killers coming back from Vietnam. You know what I mean?”

“I guess.”

“So my first job out on the street as a slick sleeve was to walk—”

“What’s that, a ‘slick sleeve’?”

“A rookie, a boot. No stripes on my sleeves yet.”

“Okay.”

“My first assignment out of the academy was a foot beat on Hollywood Boulevard. And back then it was pretty grim on the boulevard. Really run down.”

“It’s still pretty sketchy in some parts.”

“That’s true. But anyway, I was assigned to a partner who was an old guy named Pepin, and he was my training officer. I remember everybody called him the French Dip because on the beat he stopped every day for an ice cream at this place called Dips near Hollywood and Vine. Like clockwork. Every day. Anyway, Pepin had been around a long time, and I walked the beat with him. We’d do the same routine. Walk up Wilcox from the station, go right on Hollywood till we got to Bronson, then turn around and
walk all the way down to La Brea and then back to the station. The French Dip had a built-in clock, and he knew just what pace to keep so that we were back at the station by end of watch.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It was, unless we got a call or something. But even then it was all small-time shit—I mean, stuff. Shoplifting, prostitution, drug dealing—little stuff. Anyway, almost every day we’d get yelled at by somebody passing in a car. You know, they’d call us fascists and pigs and other stuff. And the French Dip hated being called a pig. You could call him a fascist or a Nazi or almost anything else, but he hated being called a pig. So, what he would do when a car went by and they called us pigs was he’d get the make and model and plate number off the car and he’d pull out his ticket book and write the car up for a parking violation. Then he’d tear out the copy you were supposed to leave under the windshield wiper and he’d just crumple it up and throw it away.”

Bosch laughed again as he took a bite of his grilled cheese with tomato and onion.