It’s sad that a cool cat like Detective Jimmy Robertson had to go down for such schmucks as these. The Fuerte cartel’s black ice smuggling ring, coordinated by murderous branch manager Hector Zorillo and enabled by the Lancaster sheriff’s department, fizzles like a wet match in the dark once Harry Bosch gets the drop on Garrity. Anybody up to no good, you better check the shadows of your home. Because Bosch, the silent samurai, will be waiting there for you.
It was Garrity whose phone call lured Jimmy to the taco truck, and it was Zorillo who pulled the trigger. And once Bosch puts the arm on the former – “Ball’s in your court now,” he tells Chandler and her officers as he delivers Garrity into custody – it’s only a matter of time for the latter. The look he gives the DA and her people indicates how “believe it when I see it” Bosch feels about their ability to prosecute. But he at least believes his work to expose the Zorillo-Garrity connection answered for Jimmy’s death. With this second-to-last episode of Bosch: Legacy, It’s time to start wrapping things up, anyway. And Bosch has a bigger, Finbar-shaped murder fish to fry.
It’s funny when Maddie rolls into her dad’s house for a visit, only to find a merry band of assault team plotters. She takes in Gurbizs and Mo talking with Harry, the topo map of northern Mexico spread across the table, the nearby stack of fresh burner phones, and the tactical gear strewn all over. Even though she knows what it all means – this is what justice one way or the other looks like – she’s gotta ask. But while Bosch, already in Other Mode, doesn’t quite answer his daughter, he doesn’t lie to her, either. He is fulfilling his promise to Siobhan Murphy, and will aim to do the same for Maddie. But by not vocalizing outcomes, he can also retain some deniability.
While Bosch and Gurbizs take a private prop aircraft to Tecate, just across the border, and rendezvous at the dusty airfield with an already-on-the-ground Mo, Maddie is trying to manage the fallout from her partner putting the cuffs on family. Vasquez is moody and quiet, mostly because her sister and mother somehow blame her for Albert’s turn to a life of crime. “I gave him a chance, and he lied to my face,” Reina tells them, but they stay bitter. And pretty soon Maddie is breaking up a bar fight Vasquez started with some pushy rando, just to burn out her frustrations.
Down in Tecate, Finbar’s got a plan to charge up his cashflow at a local cantina casino before escaping further south into Mexico. But the boiling look of determination he saw in Bosch’s eyes has led the assaulters to the hills above his hidey-hole, and they’re watching him as he loads his stolen car with survival gear. “Shoot me straight,” Gurbizs asks Harry while they wait. “Is this kill or capture?” Because as Silver Wolf’s former Special Forces mate, he knows that boiling look, too. Knows where it usually leads. And where it usually doesn’t. But this time, even with a scumbag murderer of innocents like McShane, Maddie might have gotten through to her father. “We are bringing him back. I want to be able to look her in the eye when we get home.”
Bosch doesn’t need the shadows of a corrupt cop’s house to get the drop on you. He and Gurbizs roll up on Finbar heavy, but one punch does the trick, and they are off to the airfield for extraction and – presumably – another prisoner turnover to Chandler. But amid the hardscrabble dirt of a Tecate sidetrack, as an unrepentant McShane brags about killing children, justice one way or the other has its own ideas. Gurbizs made his own promise to Maddie, that he’d bring her father back to her. And he understands and respects that his old friend gave her his word. But nothing in either of those sentences says he’s beholden to the same rules. And Gurbizs executes Finbar McShane as Bosch looks on gravely.
Anticlimactic? Maybe a little. The sense was always that Bosch would get his man – again, one way or the other. It’s just that the other turned out a little differently. And it’s not like Finbar, that shitstain, didn’t deserve it. But back in Los Angeles, and as Bosch: Legacy anticipates its finale, the way it played out takes on a greater significance. Harry called Siobhan and told her the news. She didn’t ask how it went down. Didn’t need to. Definitive closure was the justice she asked of Harry, and that was delivered. But it’s when Maddie comes over to the house that the Finbar stuff takes on its greatest resonance. “Not by my hand,” he said simply. And that was enough of a statement to close the case for both of them.
In his retirement, while he’s still willing and able to take whatever measures he deems necessary, Harry Bosch has finally displayed some of the restraint that Maddie has always preached. And yet, she learned something from all of this, too. Doing right by her partner, certainly – standing by her, even while Vasquez processes the whole Albert thing. But also about what it takes to not only live in the grey, but survive there. It’s a challenge. But it’s better than dying in the dark.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
Read the full article here
