Page 62 of The Hollow | AllFreeNovel

“Me neither,” Chops said.

Harry knew it was their way of saying they would stay friends no matter what. It didn’t need to be said out loud.

“Here, you take this,” Harry said.

He held out the transistor.

“No, man, I can’t take that!” Chops said.

“Take it,” Harry insisted. “The Hobart doesn’t run right without it.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Chops took the radio. He placed it on the ground, stood up and retied the apron tight around his body, and picked it up again.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s go finish this shit.”

Bosch flicked his cigarette at the gate and watched the sparks fly as it hit. He got up and followed Chops through the doors and back into the kitchen.

THE NEXT MORNING Bosch finished off the remaining eggs in the carton, scrambling them with oregano. While the coffee was brewing, he started eating directly from the pan as he carried it out of the kitchen to the rear deck.

He stopped short at the dining table when he noticed that his laptop and the summary report on the Lamb investigation were gone.

Bosch put the pan back on the stove and did a quick sweep of the house, questioning his memory of leaving both the laptop and printed summary where he had worked the night before. He found nothing. He made a second sweep, looking to see what else was missing and checking the locks on all doors and windows.

Nothing else seemed to be missing, and he doubted the intruder would have gone into the bedroom where he was sleeping. The slider to the back deck was unlocked, which was how he often left it.

He knew that someone had come into the house in the middle of the night. The fact that the Lamb report was taken made it clear that that someone had been sent by Nikolai Novak.

The laptop was protected by a lengthy and random password. Bosch used his daughter’s birthday as a passcode for his phone but relied on a stronger password for his computer. He knew it would not stand up to a professional hacker’s efforts, but it would not be easy and it would take some time. He was more worried about the summary report. He now had no report to turn in and he could not reprint it because the original was on the missing laptop.

But then Bosch remembered something his daughter had once told him: His printer had a circular memory, meaning it kept its most recent jobs in memory and deleted the older ones. He went down the hall to the closet where Maddie had set the printer up, back when she lived at home. He pressed the appropriate buttons and soon the printer started spitting out the Lamb case summary. He could now turn it in as planned, but he still had to consider whether the task force was compromised by the theft of the original document and laptop.

While he thought about what revealing the break-in might do to his standing in the task force, his phone started to buzz. The caller ID wasn’t blocked, but it showed only a 310 number on the screen. Bosch knew the 310 area code encompassed most of West Los Angeles, including the neighborhood where the Novak estate was located.