The Black Ice

17

Bosch dragged deeply on a cigarette and then dropped the butt into the gutter. He hesitated before pulling the billy club that was the door handle of the Code Seven. He stared across First Street to the grass square that flanked City Hall and was called Freedom Park. Beneath the sodium lights he saw the bodies of homeless men and women sprawled asleep in the grass around the war memorial. They looked like casualties on a battlefield, the unburied dead.

He went inside, walked through the front restaurant and then parted the black curtains that hid the entrance to the bar like a judge’s robes. The place was crowded with lawyers and cops and blue with cigarette smoke. They had all come to wait out the rush hour and either gotten too comfortable or too drunk. Harry went down to the end of the bar where the stools were empty and ordered a beer and a shot. It was seven on the dot according to the Miller clock over the bar. He scanned the room in the mirror behind the bar but saw nobody he could assume was the DEA agent Corvo. He lit another cigarette and decided he would give it until eight.

The moment he decided that he looked back in the mirror and saw a short, dark man with a full black beard split the curtain and hesitate as his eyes focused in the dim bar. He wore blue jeans and a pullover shirt. Bosch saw the pager on his belt and the bulge the gun made under his shirt. The man looked around until their eyes met in the mirror and Harry nodded once. Corvo came over and took the stool next to him.

“So you made me,” Corvo said.

“And you made me. I guess we both need to go back to the academy. You want a beer?”

“Look, Bosch, before you start getting friendly on me, I gotta tell you I don’t know about this. I don’t know what this is about. I haven’t decided whether to talk to you.”

Harry took his cigarette from the ashtray and looked at Corvo in the mirror.

“I haven’t decided if Certs is a breath mint or a candy.”

Corvo slid back off his stool.

“Have a good one.”

“C’mon Corvo, have a beer, why don’t you? Relax, man.”

“I checked you out before I came over. The line on you is that you’re just another head case. You’re on the fast track to nowhere. RHD to Hollywood, the next stop probably riding shotgun in a Wells Fargo truck.”

“No, the next stop is Mexicali. And I can go down there blind, maybe walk in on whatever you got going with Zorrillo, or you can help me and yourself by telling me what’s what.”

“What’s what is that you aren’t going to do anything down there. I leave here I pick up the phone and your trip is over.”

“I leave here and I’m gone, on my way. Too late to stop. Have a seat. If I’ve been an asshole, I’m sorry. It’s the way I am sometimes. But I need you guys and you guys need me.”

Corvo still didn’t sit down.

“Bosch, what are you gonna do? Go down to the ranch, put the pope over your shoulder and carry him back up here? That it?”

“Something like that.”

“Shit.”

“Actually, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m just going to play it as it comes. Maybe I never see the pope, maybe I do. You want to risk it?”

Corvo slid back onto the stool and signaled the bartender. He ordered the same as Bosch. In the mirror Bosch noticed a long, thick scar cutting through the right side of Corvo’s beard. If he had grown the beard to cover the purplish-pink slug on his cheek, it hadn’t worked. Then again, maybe he didn’t want it to. Most DEA agents Bosch knew or had worked with had a macho swagger about them. A scar couldn’t hurt. It was a life of bluffing and bluster. Scars were worn like badges of courage. But Bosch wondered if the guy could do much undercover work with such a recognizable physical anomaly.

After the bartender put down the drinks, Corvo threw back the shot like a man used to it.

“So,” he said. “What are you really going down there for? And why should I trust you the least bit?”

Bosch thought about it for a few moments.

“Because I can give you Zorrillo.”

“Shit.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He had to give Corvo his due, had to let him run out his string. After he was done posturing they would get down to business. Bosch thought at the moment that the one thing the movies and TV shows didn’t get wrong or overexaggerate was the relationship of jealousy and distrust that existed between local and federal cops. One side always thought it was better, wiser, more qualified. Usually, the side that thought that was wrong.

“Okay,” Corvo said. “I’ll bite. What have you got?”

“Before I get into it. I have one question. Who are you, man? I mean, you’re up here in L.A. Why are you the one in Moore’s files? How come you’re the expert on Zorrillo?”

“That’s about ten questions. The basic answer to all of them is I’m a control agent on an investigation in Mexicali that is being jointly worked by Mexico City and L.A. offices. We are equidistant; we are splitting the case. I’m not telling you anything else until I know you’re worth talking to. Talk.”

Bosch told him about Jimmy Kapps, Juan Doe and the ties between their deaths and Dance and Moore and the Zorrillo operation. Lastly, he said that he had information that Dance had gone to Mexico, probably Mexicali, after Moore was murdered.

Corvo drained his beer glass and said, “Tell me something, because it’s a big fucking hole in your scenario. How come you think this Juan Doe was whacked out down there? And then, how come his body was taken all the way up here? Doesn’t make sense to me.”

“The autopsy puts his death six to eight hours before Moore found it, or said he found it up here. There were things about the autopsy that tie it to Mexicali, to a specific location in Mexicali. I think they wanted to get it out of Mexicali to make sure it was not connected to that location. It got sent to L.A. because there was already a truck heading this way. It was convenient.”

“You’re talking jigsaws, Bosch. What location are we talking about?”

“We aren’t talking. That’s the problem. I’m talking. You haven’t said shit. But I’m here to trade. I know your record. You guys haven’t taken down one of Zorrillo’s shipments. I can give you Zorrillo’s pipeline. What can you give me?”

Corvo laughed and shot a peace sign at the bartender. He brought two more beers.

“Know something? I like you. Believe it or not. I did check you out but I do like what I know of you. But something tells me you don’t have shit worth trading for.”

“You ever check out a place down there called EnviroBreed?”

Corvo looked down at the beer placed in front of him and seemed to be composing his thoughts. Bosch had to prompt him.

“Yes or no?”

“EnviroBreed is a plant down there. They make these sterile fruit flies to set loose around here. It’s a government contractor. They have to breed the bugs down there ’cause-”

“I know all of that. How come you know?”

“The only reason is that I was involved in setting plans on our operation down there. We wanted a ground Observation Point on the target’s ranch. We went into the industrial parks that border the ranch to look for candidates. EnviroBreed was obvious. American-managed. It was a government contractor. We went to see if we could set up an OP, maybe on the roof or an office or something. The ranch property starts just across the street.”

“But they said no.”

“No, actually, they said yes. We said no.”

“How come?”

“Radiation. Bugs-they got those damned flies buzzing all over the goddamn place. But most of all the view was obscured. We went up on the roof and we could see the ranch all right but the barn and stables-the whole bull-breeding facility-was in line between EnviroBreed and the main ranch facilities. We couldn’t use the place. We told the guy there, thanks but no thanks.”

“What was your cover? Or did you just come out and say DEA?”

“Nah, we cooked something up. Said we were from the National Weather Service on a project tracking desert and mountain wind systems. Some bullshit like that. The guy bought it.”

“Right.”

Corvo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“So, how does EnviroBreed figure into it from this end?”

“My Juan Doe. He had those bugs you were talking about in his body. I think he was probably killed there.”

Corvo turned so he was looking directly at Bosch. Harry continued to watch him in the mirror behind the bar.

“Okay, Bosch, let’s say you’ve got my attention. Go ahead and spin the tale.”

Bosch said he believed that EnviroBreed, which he didn’t even know was across from Zorrillo’s ranch until Corvo told him, was part of the black ice pipeline. He told Corvo the rest of his theory: that Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa was a day laborer who either hired on as a mule and didn’t make the grade or had worked at the bug breeding plant and seen something he should not have seen or done something he should not have done. Either way, he was beaten to death, his body put in one of the white environment boxes and taken with a shipment of fruit flies to Los Angeles. His body was then dumped in Hollywood and reported by Moore, who probably handled everything on this end.

“They had to get the body out of there because they couldn’t bring an investigation into the plant. There is something there. At least, something that was worth killing an old man for.”

Corvo had his arm up on the bar and his face in the palm of his hand. He said, “What did he see?”

“I don’t know. I do know that EnviroBreed has a deal with the feds not to have their shipments across the border bothered with. Opening those boxes could damage the goods.”

“Who have you told this to?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody? You have told no one about EnviroBreed?”

“I’ve made some inquiries. I haven’t told anyone the story I just told you.”

“Who have you made inquiries with? You called the SJP?”

“Yeah. They put out a letter to the consulate on the old man. That’s how I put it together. I still have to make a formal ID of the body when I’m down there.”

“Yeah, but did you bring up EnviroBreed?”

“I asked if they ever heard of him working at EnviroBreed.”

Corvo spun back toward the bar with an exasperated sigh.

“Who did you talk to there?”

“A captain named Grena.”

“I don’t know him. But you’ve probably spoiled your lead. You just don’t go to the locals with this sort of thing. They pick up the phone, tell Zorrillo what you just said and then pick up a bonus at the end of the month.”

“Maybe it’s spoiled, maybe it isn’t. Grena brushed me off and may think that’s it. At least I didn’t go walking into the bug place and ask to set up a weather station.”

Neither spoke. Each one thinking about what the other had said so far.

“I’m going to get down on this right away,” Corvo said after a while. “You have to promise me you won’t go fucking around with it when you get down there.”

“I’m not promising anything. And so far I’ve done all the giving here. You haven’t said shit.”

“What do you want to know?”

“About Zorrillo.”

“All you really gotta know is that we’ve wanted his ass for a long time.”

This time Bosch signaled for two more beers. He lit a cigarette and saw the smoke blur his reflection in the mirror.

“Only thing you have to know about Zorrillo is that he is one smart fucker and, like I said, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he already knows you’re coming. Fuckin’ SJP. We only deal with thefederales. Even them you can trust about as much as an ex-wife.”

Bosch nodded meaningfully, just hoping Corvo would continue.

“If he doesn’t know now, he’ll know before you get there. So you’ve got to watch your ass. And the best way of doing that is not to go. With you, I know, that isn’t an option. The second best way is to skip the SJP altogether. You can’t trust ’em. The pope has people inside there. Okay?”

Bosch nodded at him in the mirror. He decided to stop nodding all the time.

“Now, I know everything I just said went in your ears and out your asshole,” Corvo said. “So what I’m willing to do is put you with a guy down there, work it from there. Name’s Ramos. You go down, say your howdy-dos with the local SJPs, act like everything is nice, and then hook up with Ramos.”

“If this EnviroBreed thing pans out and you make a move on Zorrillo, I want to be there.”

“You will. Just hang with Ramos. Okay?”

Bosch thought it over a few moments and said, “Yeah. Now tell me about Zorrillo. You keep going off on other shit.”

“Zorrillo’s been around a long time. We’ve got intelligence on him going back to the seventies at least. A career doper. One of the bounces on the trampoline, I’d guess you’d call him.”

Bosch had heard the term before but was confident Corvo would get around to explaining it anyway.

“Black ice is just his latest thing. He was amarijuanito when he was a kid. Pulled out of the barrio by someone like himself today. He took backpacks of grass over the fence when he was twelve, made the truck runs when he was older and just worked his way up. By the eighties, when we had most of our efforts concentrated on Florida, the Colombians contracted with the Mexicans. They flew cocaine to Mexico and the Mexicans took it across the border, using the same old pot trails. Mexicali across to Calexico was one of them. They called the route the Trampoline. The shit bounces from Colombia to Mexico and then up to the states.

“And Zorrillo became a rich man. From the barrio to that nice big ranch with his own personalguardia and half the cops in Baja on his payroll. And the cycle started over. He pulled most of his people out of the slums. He never forgot the barrio and it never forgot him. A lot of loyalty. That’s when he got the name El Papa. So once we shifted our resources a little bit to address the cocaine situation in Mexico, the pope moved on to heroin. He had tar labs in the nearby barrios. Always had volunteers to mule it across. For one trip he’d pay one of those poor suckers down there more than they’d make in five years doing anything else.”

Bosch thought of the temptation, that much money for what amounted to so little risk. Even those who were caught spent little time in jail.

“It was a natural transition to go from tar heroin to black ice. Zorrillo’s an entrepreneur. Obviously, this is a drug that is in its infancy as far as awareness in the drug culture goes. But we think he is the country’s main supplier. We’ve got black ice showing up all over the place. New York, Seattle, Chicago, all your large cities. Whatever operation you stumbled over in L.A., that was just a drop in the bucket. One of many. We think he’s still running straight heroin with his barrio mules but the ice is his growth product. It’s the future and he knows it. He’s shifting more and more of his operation into it and he’s going to drive Hawaiians out. His overhead is so low, his stuff is selling twenty bucks a cap below the going rate for Hawaiian ice, or glass, or whatever they call it this week. And Zorrillo’s stuff is better. He’s putting the Hawaiians out of business on the mainland. Then when the demand for this thing really starts to escalate-conceivably as fast as crack did in the mid-eighties-he’ll bump the price and have a virtual monopoly until the others catch up with him.

“Zorrillo’s kinda like one of those fishing boats with the ten-mile net behind it. He’s circling around and he’s going to pull that sucker closed on all the fish.”

“An entrepreneur,” Bosch said, just to be saying something.

“Yeah, that’s what I’d call him. You remember a couple years ago the Border Patrol found the tunnel in Arizona? Went from a warehouse on one side of the border to a warehouse on the other? In Nogales? Well, we think that he was an investor in that. One of them at least. It was probably his idea.”

“But the bottom line is you’ve never touched him.”

“Nope. Whenever we’d get close, somebody’d end up dead. I guess you’d say he’s a violent sort of entrepreneur.”

Bosch envisioned Moore’s body in the dingy motel bathroom. Had he been planning to make a move, to go against Zorrillo?

“Zorrillo’s tied in with theeMe, ” Corvo said. “Word is he can have anybody anywhere whacked out. Supposedly back in the seventies there was all kinds of slaughter going on for control of the pot trails. Zorrillo emerged on top. It was like a gang war, barrio against barrio. He has since united all of them but back then, his was the dominant clan. Saints and Sinners. A lot of theeMe came out of that.”

TheeMe was the Mexican Mafia, a Latino gang with control over inmates in most of Mexico’s and California’s prisons. Bosch knew little about them and had had few cases that involved members. He did know that allegiance to the group was strictly enforced. Infractions were punishable by death.

“How do you know all of that?” he asked.

“Informants over the years. The ones that lived to talk about it. We’ve got a whole history on our friend the pope. I even know he’s got a velvet painting of Elvis in his office at the ranch.”

“Did his barrio have a sign?”

“What do you mean, a sign?”

“A symbol.”

“It’s the devil. With a halo.”

Bosch emptied his beer and looked around the bar. He saw a deputy district attorney he knew was part of a team that rubber-stamped investigations of police shootings. He was sitting alone at a table with a martini. There were a few cops Bosch recognized huddled at other tables. They all were smoking, dinosaurs all. Harry wanted to leave, to go somewhere he could think about this information. The devil with a halo. Moore had it tattooed on his arm. He had come from the same place as Zorrillo. Harry could feel his adrenaline kicking up a notch.

“How will I get together with Ramos down there?”

“He’ll come to you. Where’re you staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stay at the De Anza, in Calexico. It’s safer on our side of the border. Water’s better for you, too.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Another thing is, you can’t take a weapon across. I mean, it’s easy enough to do. You flash your badge at the crossing and nobody’s going to check your trunk. But if something happens down there, the first thing that will be checked is whether you checked your gun in at the police station in Calexico.”

He nodded meaningfully at Bosch.

“They have a gun locker at Calexico PD where they check weapons for crossing cops. They keep a log, you get a receipt. Professional courtesy. So check a weapon. Don’t take it across and then think you can say you left it up here at home. Check it in down there. Get it on the log. Then you don’t have a problem.Comprende? It’s like having an alibi for your gun in case something happens.”

Bosch nodded. He knew what Corvo was telling him.

Corvo took out his wallet and gave Bosch a business card.

“Call anytime and if I’m not in the office they will locate me. Just tell the operator it’s you. I’ll leave your name and word that you are to be put through.”

Corvo’s speech pattern had changed. He was talking faster. Bosch guessed this was because he was excited about the EnviroBreed tip. The DEA agent was anxious to get on it. Harry studied him in the mirror. The scar on his cheek seemed darker now, as if it had changed color with his mood. Corvo looked at him in the mirror.

“Knife fight,” he said, fingering the scar. “Zihuatenajo. I was under, working a case. Carrying my piece in my boot. Guy got me here before I could get to the boot. Down there they don’t have hospitals for shit. They did a bad job on it and I ended up with this. I couldn’t go under anymore. Too recognizable.”

Bosch could tell he liked telling the story. He was stoked with bravado as he told it. It was probably the one time he had come close to his own end. Bosch knew what Corvo was waiting for him to ask. He asked anyway.

“And the guy who did it? What did he get?”

“A state burial. I put him down once I got to my piece.”

Corvo had found a way to make killing a man who brought a knife to a gunfight sound heroic. At least to his own ears. He probably told the story a lot, every time he caught someone new looking at the scar. Bosch nodded respectfully and slipped off his stool and put money on the bar.

“Remember our deal. You don’t move on Zorrillo without me. Make sure you tell Ramos.”

“Oh, we’ve got a deal,” Corvo said. “But I’m not guaranteeing it will happen when you’re down there. We aren’t going to rush anything. Besides, we’ve lost Zorrillo. Temporarily, I’m sure.”

“What are you talking about, you’ve lost him?”

“I mean we haven’t had a bona fide sighting in about ten days or so. We think he’s there on the ranch, though. He’s just laying low, changing his routine.”

“Routine?”

“The pope is a man who likes to be seen. He likes to taunt us. Usually, he rides the ranch in a Jeep, hunting coyotes, shooting his Uzi, admiring his bulls. There is one bull in particular, a champion that once killed a matador. El Temblar, he is called. Zorrillo often goes out to watch this bull. It’s like him, I guess. Very proud.

“Anyway, Zorrillo has not been seen on the ranch or the Plaza de Toros, which was his Sunday custom. He hasn’t been seen cruising the barrios, reminding himself of where he came from. He’s a well-known figure in them all. He gets off on this pope of Mexicali shit.”

Bosch tried to imagine Zorrillo’s life. A celebrity in a town that celebrated nothing. He lit a cigarette. He wanted to get out of there.

“So when was the last bona fide?”

“If he is still there, he hasn’t come out of the compound since December fifteenth. That was a Sunday. He was at the plaza watching his bulls. That’s the last bona fide. After that, we have some informants who move that up to the eighteenth. They say they saw him at the compound, dicking around outside. But that’s it. He’s either split or he is laying low, like I said.”

“Maybe because he ordered a cop blown away.”

Corvo nodded.

Bosch left alone after that. Corvo said he was going to use the pay phone. Harry stepped out of the bar, felt the brisk night air and took the last drag on his cigarette. He saw movement in the darkness of the park across the street. Then one of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a marching band in a world somewhere else.