The Drop(7)

“I guess you had no choice,” Bosch added.

“Just get here as soon as you can and keep me apprised. If you can’t get directly to me, use Lieutenant Rider as a go-between.”

But he didn’t offer his cell phone’s blocked number, so the message was clear to Bosch. He would no longer be talking directly with his old pal the chief. What wasn’t clear was what the chief was telling Bosch to do about the investigation.

“Chief,” he said, going formal to make sure it was clear he wasn’t calling on old loyalties. “If I get up there and it’s a suicide, I’m going to call it a suicide. If you want something else, get somebody else.”

“It’s okay, Harry. Just let the chips fall. It is what it is.”

“You sure about that? Is that what Irving wants?”

“It’s what I want.”

“Got it.”

“By the way, did Duvall give you the news about the DROP?”

“Yeah, she told me.”

“I pushed for the whole five but you got a couple of people on the commission who didn’t like everything in your file. We got what we could, Harry.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Good.”

The chief closed the connection. Bosch barely had time to close his phone before Chu was on him with questions about what had been said. Harry relayed the conversation as he pulled off the freeway onto Sunset Boulevard and headed west.

Chu parlayed the report on the chief’s call into a question about what really had been bothering him all morning.

“What about the lieutenant?” he said. “Are you ever going to tell me what that was about?”

Bosch played dumb.

“What what was about?”

“Don’t play dumb, Harry. When she held you back in the office, what was she saying? She wants me out of the unit, doesn’t she? I never liked her either.”

Bosch couldn’t help himself. His partner’s glass was always half empty and an opportunity to needle him about it was not to be missed.

“She said she wanted to move you laterally—keep you in homicide. She said there were some slots coming up in South Bureau and she’s talking to them about a switch.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Chu had recently moved out to Pasadena. The commute to South Bureau would be a nightmare.

“Well, what did you tell her?” he demanded. “Did you stick up for me?”

“South is a good gig, man. I told her you’d get seasoned down there in two years. It would take five anywhere else.”

“Harry!”

Bosch started laughing. It was a good release. The impending meeting with Irving was weighing on him. It was coming and he wasn’t sure yet how to play it.

“Are you shitting me?” Chu cried, fully turned in his seat now. “Are you fucking shitting me?”

“Yes, I’m fucking shitting you, Chu. So chill out. All she told me was that my DROP came through. You’re going to have to put up with me for another three years and three months, okay?”

“Oh . . . well, that’s good, right?”

“Yes, that’s good.”

Chu was too young to worry about things like the DROP. Almost ten years before, Bosch had taken a full pension and retired from the department in an ill-advised decision. After two years as a citizen he came back under the department’s Deferred Retirement Option Plan, which was designed to keep experienced detectives in the department and doing the work they did best. For Bosch that was homicide. He was a retread with a seven-year contract. Not everybody in the department was happy with the program, especially divisional detectives hoping for a shot at some of the prestige slots in the downtown Robbery-Homicide Division.

Department policy allowed for one extension of the DROP of three to five years. After that, retirement was mandated. Bosch had applied for his second contract the year before and, bureaucracy being what it was in the department, waited more than a year for the news the lieutenant gave him, going well past his original DROP date. He had been anxious while waiting, knowing that he could be dismissed from the department immediately if the police commission decided not to extend his stay. It was certainly good news to finally get but he now saw a defined limit on his time carrying a badge. So the good news was tinged with a certain melancholy. When he got the formal notification from the commission, it would have an exact date on it that would be his last day as a cop. He couldn’t help but focus on that. His future had limitations. Maybe he was a half-empty kind of guy himself.

Chu gave him a break on the questions after that and Harry tried to avoid thinking about the DROP. Instead he thought about Irvin Irving as he drove west. The councilman had spent more than forty years in the police department but had never gotten to the top floor. After a career spent grooming and positioning himself for the chief’s job, it had been snatched from him in a political windstorm. A few years after that, he was engineered out of the department—with Bosch’s help. A man scorned, he ran for the city council, won the election, and made it his business to exact retribution on the department where he had toiled for so many decades. He had gone so far as to vote against every proposed raise in salaries for police officers and expansion of the department. He was always first to call for an independent review or investigation of any perceived impropriety or alleged transgression committed by officers. His sharpest poke, however, had come the year before when he had wholeheartedly joined the cost-cutting charge that slashed a hundred million in overtime out of the department budget. That hurt every officer up and down the ladder.