She reached for the TV remote and put on CNN. Her screen immediately filled with the images of people, hordes of them, storming the U.S. Capitol. She flipped channels and it was on every network and cable news channel. The commentators were calling it an insurrection, an attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election two months before. Ballard watched in stunned silence for an hour without moving from the couch, before finally sending a text to Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds.
I assume I am still on the bench?
She did not have to wait long for a response.
Stay on the bench, Ballard. Do not come here.
She then thought of responding with a snarky comment about being accused of insurrection within the department but let it pass. She got up, slipped on shoes, and took Pinto out for his first walk in the neighborhood. She went up to Los Feliz Boulevard and back, the streets almost deserted. Pinto stayed close, never pulling the slack out of the leash. Lola had always pulled the line tight, charging forward, all seventy pounds of her. Ballard missed that.
After coming home and feeding Pinto some of the food from Wags and Walks, Ballard returned to the couch. For the next two hours, remote in hand, she flipped channels and watched the disturbing images of complete lawlessness, trying to comprehend how divisions in the country had grown so wide that people felt the need to storm the Capitol and try to change the results of an election in which 160 million people had voted.
Tired of watching and thinking about what she was seeing, she packed two energy bars for herself as well as some more food for the dog. In the garage, she put both her paddleboard and the mini onto the roof racks of the Defender. She was about to hop in, when a voice came from behind.
“You’re going surfing?”
She whipped around. It was the neighbor. Nate from 13.
“What?” Ballard asked.
“You’re going surfing?” Nate said. “The country’s falling apart, there are protests all over the place, and you’re going surfing. You’re a cop — shouldn’t you be … I don’t know … doing something?”
“The department is on twelve-hour shifts,” Ballard said. “If everybody went to work now, there’d be nobody to work at night.”
“Oh, okay.”
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“What the fuck are you doing, Nate? You people hate us. You hate the cops until the shit comes down and then you need us. Why don’t you go out there and do something?”
Ballard immediately regretted saying it. The frustrations of everything in her job and life had just misfired at the wrong person.
“You are paid to protect and serve,” Nate said. “I’m not.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ballard said. “That’s fine.”
“Is that a dog in there?”
He pointed through the window at Pinto.
“Yeah, that’s my dog,” Ballard said.
“You need HOA approval for that,” Nate said.
“I read the rules. I can have a dog under twenty pounds. He’s not even ten.”
“You still have to have approval.”
“Well, you’re the president, right? Are you telling me you don’t approve of me having a dog in an apartment where somehow a man was able to get around building security and break in and assault me?”
“No. I’m just saying there are rules. You have to submit a request and then get the approval.”
“Sure. I’ll do that, Nate.”
She left him there and got in the Defender. Pinto immediately jumped in her lap and licked her chin.
“It’s okay,” Ballard said. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
An hour later, she was paddling west along the Sunset break, the little dog out on the nose of the board, standing alert but shaking. It was a new experience for him.
The sun and salt air worked deeply on her muscles and eased the tension and pain. It was a good workout. She went ninety minutes — forty-five minutes toward Malibu and forty-five back. She was exhausted when she climbed into the tent she had pitched on the sand and took a nap, with Pinto sleeping on the blanket at her feet.
Ballard did not return home until after dark. She had purposely left her phone behind and found that she had accumulated several messages throughout the day. The first was from Harry Bosch, checking in to see how she was faring and to mention that he thought he had seen everything but never expected to ever see the Capitol stormed by its own citizens.
The second message was a formal notification that a Board of Rights hearing had been scheduled for her to appear at in two weeks at the Police Administration Building. Ballard saved the message. She knew she would need to have a representative from the union with her as a defense rep. She would make that call later. But the very next message was from the union and an officer named Jim Lawson saying that they had also received notice of the Board of Rights hearing and were prepared to defend her. Ballard saved that one too and moved on to the next message, which had come in at 2:15 p.m. from Ross Bettany.