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.She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the tunnel rat tattoo at the top of his right arm.“I do remember this one,” she said.“It’s not holding up so well, is it?”She was right.That tattoo he had gotten in Vietnam had lost its lines over time and the colors had blurred.The character of the rat with a gun emerging from a tunnel was not recognizable.That tattoo looked like a painful bruise.“I’m not holding up so well myself, Vicki,” Bosch said.She ignored his complaint and got down to work.She first used an eyeliner pencil to sketch out the tattoos on his body.Michael Allen Smith had what he had called a Gestapo collar tattooed on his neck.On each side of his neck was the twin lightning bolt insignia of the SS.This symbolized the emblems attached to the collar points of the uniforms worn by Hitler’s elite force.Landreth etched these onto Bosch’s skin easily and quickly.It tickled and he had a hard time holding still.Then it was time for the bicep piece.“Which arm?” she asked.“I think the left.”He was thinking of the play with Mackey.He thought the chances were better that he would end up sitting on Mackey’s right as opposed to his left.That meant his left arm would be in Mackey’s line of sight.Landreth asked him to hold the photo of Smith’s arm up next to his own so she could copy it.Tattooed on Smith’s bicep was a skull with a swastika inside a circle on the crown.While Smith had never admitted to the murders he was charged with, he had always been quite open about his racist beliefs and the origins of his many body markings.The bicep skull, he said, had been copied from a World War II propaganda poster.Shifting the sketch work from his neck to his arm allowed Bosch to breathe easier and Landreth to engage him in conversation.“So what’s new with you?” she asked.“Not a lot.”“Retirement was boring?”“You could say that.”“What did you do with yourself, Harry?”“I worked a couple old cases, but mostly I spent time in Las Vegas trying to get to know my daughter.”She leaned back away from her work and looked up at Bosch with surprise in her eyes.“Yeah, I was surprised too when I found out,” he said.“How old?”“Almost six.”“You still going to be able to see her now that you’re on the job?”“Doesn’t matter, she’s not there.”“Well, where is she?”“Her mother took her to Hong Kong for a year.”“Hong Kong? What’s in Hong Kong?”“A job.She signed a year contract.”“She didn’t consult you about it?”“I don’t know if ‘consulted’ is the right word.She told me she was going.I talked to a lawyer about it and there wasn’t much I could do.”“That’s not fair, Harry.”“I’m all right.I talk to her once a week.As soon as I earn up some vacation I’ll go over there.”“I’m not talking about it being unfair to you.I’m talking about her.A girl should be close to her father.”Bosch nodded because that was all he could do.A few minutes later Landreth finished the sketch work, opened a case and took out a jar of Hollywood tattoo ink along with a penlike applicator.“This is Bic blue,” she said.“It’s what most of them use in the jails.I won’t be perforating the skin so it should come off in a couple weeks.”“Should?”“Most times.There was one actor I worked with, though.I put an ace of spades on his arm.And the funny thing was that it wouldn’t come off.Not all the way.So he just ended up having a real tattoo put over my piece.He wasn’t too happy about it.”“Just like I’m not going to be happy if I have lightning bolts on my neck for the rest of my life.Before you start putting that stuff on me, Vicki, is there -”He stopped when he realized she was laughing at him.“Just kidding, Bosch.It’s Hollywood magic.It comes off with a couple of good scrubs, okay?”“Okay, then.”“Then hold still and let’s get this done.”She went to work applying the dark blue ink to the pencil drawing on his skin
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