Now Bosch slowly sipped his coffee and knew it would be his only breakfast. At eight, he slid the door closed and made a call to his friend Bill Holodnak to make sure their plan for the morning—which they had previously set up—was still in play. He spoke in a low voice so he would not be overheard or wake his daughter prematurely. He had learned from experience that hell hath no fury like a teenage girl awakened too early on a day off from school.
“We’re good to go, Harry,” Holodnak said. “I zeroed the lasers yesterday, and no one’s been in there since. I have one question, though. Do you want to go with the blowback option? If so, we’ll put her in armor but she still might want to wear old clothes.”
Holodnak was the LAPD training officer who ran the Force Options Simulator at the academy in Elysian Park.
“I think we’ll skip the blowback this time, Bill.”
“Less cleanup for me. When will you be there?”
“As soon as I can get her up.”
“Been there, done that, with my own. But you gotta give me a time so I’m there.”
“How about ten?”
“That’ll work.”
“Good. See—”
“Hey, Harry, what have you got in the changer these days?”
“Some old Art Pepper live stuff. My kid found it for my birthday. Why, you got something?”
Holodnak was a jazz aficionado like no other Bosch knew. And his tips were usually gold.
“Danny Grissett.”
Bosch recognized the name but had to try to place it. This was the game he and Holodnak often played.
“Piano,” he finally said. “He plays in Tom Harrell’s group, doesn’t he? He’s a local, too.”
Bosch felt proud of himself.
“Right and wrong. He’s from here, but he’s been New York–based for a while now. Saw him with Harrell at the Standard when I was last back there visiting Lili.”
Holodnak’s daughter was a writer living in New York. He went there often and made many jazz discoveries in the clubs he haunted at night when his daughter kicked him out of her apartment so she could write.
“Grissett’s been putting out his own stuff,” he continued. “I recommend a disc called Form. It’s not his latest, but it’s worth a listen. Neo-bop stuff. He’s got a great tenor on there you’d like. Seamus Blake. Check the solo on ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance.’ It’s tight.”
“All right, I’ll check it out,” Bosch said. “And I’ll see you at ten.”
“Wait a minute. Not so fast there, buddy boy,” Holodnak threw right back at him. “Your turn. Give me something.”
That was the rule. Bosch had to give after receiving. He had to give back something that hopefully wasn’t already on Holodnak’s jazz radar. He thought hard. He had disappeared into the Pepper discs Maddie had given him, but before receiving the birthday bounty, he had been attempting to expand his jazz horizons a bit and also to get his daughter interested by going young.
“Grace Kelly,” he said. “Not the princess.”
Holodnak laughed at the ease of the challenge.
“Not the princess, the kid. Young alto sensation. She’s teamed with Woods and Konitz on records. I think the Konitz is better. Next?”
The challenge seemed hopeless to Bosch.
“Okay, one more. How about . . . Gary Smulyan?”
“Hidden Treasures,” Holodnak answered quickly, naming the very disc Bosch was thinking of. “Smulyan on the bari and then just bass and drums in rhythm. Good stuff, Harry. But I got you.”
“Well, someday I’ll get you.”
“Not on my watch. See you at ten.”
Bosch disconnected and checked the clock on the phone. He could let his daughter sleep for another hour, wake her with the smell of a fresh pot of coffee, and cut down on the chances of her being grumpy about being wakened at what she would consider such an early hour on a Sunday. He knew that, grumpy or not, she’d eventually come around and like the plan he had for the day.
He went back inside to write down the name Danny Grissett.
The Force Options Simulator was a training device housed at the academy that consisted of a wall-size screen on which varying interactive shoot/don’t shoot scenarios were projected. The images were not computer generated. Real actors were filmed in multiple high-definition sequences that would play out according to the actions taken by the officer in the training session. The officer was given a handgun that fired a laser instead of bullets and was electronically wedded to the action on the screen. If the laser hit one of the players on the screen—good or bad—that person went down. Each scenario played out until the officer took action or decided that no action was the correct response.
There was a blowback option, which involved a paintball gun located above the screen and that fired at the trainee at the same moment a figure in the simulation fired.
On the ride to the academy, Bosch explained what they were doing, and his daughter grew excited. She had become a top shooter in her age group in local competitions, but those were tests of marksmanship against paper targets. She had read about shoot/don’t shoot situations in a book by Malcolm Gladwell, but this would be the first time she faced the split-second life-and-death decisions with a gun in her hand.
The front lot at the academy was almost empty. There were no classes or scheduled activities on a Sunday morning. Besides that, the citywide hiring freeze made the cadet classes lean and the activity level low, as the department could hire only to replace retiring officers.
They entered the gym and crossed the basketball court to where the FO Simulator had been set up in an old storage room. Holodnak, an affable man with a gray-white mane, was there waiting for them. Bosch introduced his daughter as Madeline, and the trainer handed them both handguns, each equipped with a laser and linked by an electronic tether to the simulator’s computer.
After explaining the procedures, Holodnak took his place behind a computer in the back of the room. He dimmed the lights and started the first scenario. It began with a view through the windshield of a patrol car that was pulling to a stop behind a car that had pulled onto the road’s shoulder. An electronic voice from overhead announced the situation.
“You and your partner have made a traffic stop of a vehicle that was driving erratically.”
Almost immediately two young men got out of both sides of the car in front of them. They both started yelling and cursing at the officers who had stopped them.
“Man, why you fucking with me?” said the driver.
“What’d we do, man?” said the passenger. “This ain’t fair!”
It escalated from there. Bosch called out commands for the men to turn and place their hands on the roof of their car. But the two men ignored him. Bosch registered tattoos, hang-low pants, and baseball hats worn backwards. He told them to calm down. But they didn’t, and then Bosch’s daughter chimed in.
“Calm down! Place your hands on the car. Do not—”
Simultaneously the two men went to their waistbands. Bosch drew his weapon too, and as soon as he saw the driver’s weapon hand coming up, he opened fire. He heard fire come from his daughter on his right as well.
Both men on the screen went down.
The lights came up.
“So,” said Holodnak from behind them. “What did we see?”
“They had guns,” Maddie said.
“Are you sure?” Holodnak asked.
“My guy did. I saw it.”
“Harry, what about you? What did you see?”
“I saw a gun,” Bosch said.
He looked over at his daughter and nodded.
“Okay,” Holodnak said. “Let’s back it up.”
He then ran the scenario over in slow motion. Sure enough, both men had reached for guns and were raising them to fire when Bosch and his daughter had fired first. Hits on the screen were marked with red Xs and the misses were black. Maddie had hit the passenger with three shots in the torso, no misses. Bosch had hit the driver twice
in the chest and missed high with the third shot because his target was already falling backward to the ground.
Holodnak said they had both done well.
“Remember, we are always at a disadvantage,” he said. “It takes a second and a half to recognize the weapon, another second and a half to assess and fire. Three seconds. That’s the advantage a shooter has on us. That is what we must work to overcome. Three seconds is too long. People die in three seconds.”
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
They 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.”
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