The feeling of doom had fallen upon the marriage then. During the summer he had caught a series of time-consuming investigations, including a case requiring him to make a week-long trip to New York. While he was gone she went to the poker room at Hollywood Park for the first time. It was out of the boredom of being left alone and the frustration at her lack of success in finding an acceptable job in Los Angeles. She had returned to the cards, doing what she had done when Bosch had found her, and it was at those blue felt tables that she found the thing that was missing.

“Eleanor,” he said when they were finished making love, his arms wrapped around her neck. “I love you. I don’t want to lose you.”

She smothered his mouth with a long kiss and then whispered, “Go to sleep, darling. Go to sleep.”

“Stay with me,” he said. “Don’t move away until I’m asleep.”

“I won’t.”

She held him tighter and he tried for the moment to let everything go. Just for a while, he decided. He would take it all up later. But for now he would sleep.

In a few minutes he was gone, deep into a dream in which he was riding Angels Flight up the tracks to the top of the hill. As the other car came down and passed, he looked in through the windows and saw Eleanor sitting alone. She wasn’t looking back at him.

Bosch awoke in a little over an hour. The room was darker, as the light from outside was no longer directly on the windows. He looked around and saw Eleanor was gone from the bed. He sat up and called her name, his voice reminding him of how he had answered the phone that morning.

“I’m here,” she called from the living room.

Bosch pulled on his clothes and left the bedroom. Eleanor was sitting on the couch, wearing the bathrobe he had bought for her at the hotel in Hawaii where they had gone after getting married in Las Vegas.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought . . . I don’t know.”

“You were talking in your sleep. I came out here.”

“What did I say?”

“My name, a few other things that didn’t make sense. Something about a fight. Angels fighting.”

He smiled and nodded and sat down in the chair on the other side of the coffee table.

“Flight, not fight. You ever been on Angels Flight in downtown?”

“No.”

“It’s two train cars. When one goes up the hill, the other goes down. They pass in the middle. I dreamed I was going up and you were in the car going down. We passed in the middle but you wouldn’t look at me . . . What do you think it means, that we’re going different ways?”

She smiled sadly.

“I guess it means you’re the angel. You were going up.”