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“What are you, a cop? It’s just Walker.”

“Okay, got it. Just Walker. What are you doing in there, Walker?”

“What do you think I’m doing? Trying to sleep. What are you doing busting in here?”

Bosch slowly started crawling back toward the door. He was careful not to point the light directly into the hollow, as it might further alarm Walker.

“You don’t have any weapons in there, do you, Walker?” he asked.

“Why don’t you come in here and find out,” Walker said defiantly.

“No, I’m not coming in. I know how small that space is.”

“Yeah? How would you know?”

“I’ve been in there. A long time ago.”

“Well, join the fucking club.”

“When I was here, the Poes called it the quiet room. But we called it the hollow.”

“Name stuck. We called it that too.”

Bosch nodded. Of course the name stuck.

“When were you here?” he asked.

“Till the bitter end,” Walker said.

“That was almost twenty-five years ago.”

“Yeah, well, time flies when you’re having fun.”

“And you’ve been living in here since they closed the place down?”

“No. Fuck, no.”

Bosch waited for Walker to add more but he went silent.

“Then when did you come back?” he asked.

“After Soledad, I came back,” Walker said. “It was nice and quiet. The bathrooms still worked and everything. Then they started tearing the place apart.”

“They’re going to knock the whole thing down. They’re making it into a park and some housing for low-income people.”

“Sweet deal. Maybe I should apply.”

Walker laughed uproariously. Bosch guessed that he might be somewhere on the spectrum of mental illnesses that afflicted many of those who were homeless and squatting in places abandoned by society — just as they had been abandoned.

“You could get help from the county,” he said. “They could find a place for you.”

“Fuck that,” Walker said. “I don’t want their help. I take care of myself.”

“I get it. I’m the same way. Did you know Andre Guillen up there at Soledad?”

Guillen was a gangbanger who got a life-plus-five term for killing the mother of his child during a domestic dispute. It had been a slam dunk Bosch worked when he had a badge. Guillen was said to be a gang hit man responsible for several killings, but they got him only for the girlfriend. The last Bosch heard, he was in Soledad.

“He a Black?” Walker asked. “Has tear tattoos on both sides?”