The Black Ice hb-2

by Michael Connelly

  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 goi
ng 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.

  Chapter 18

  The apartment building where Cal Moore had lived was a three-story affair that stuck out on Franklin about the same way cabs do at the airport. It was one of the many stuccoed, post-World War II jobs that lined the streets in that area. It was called The Fountains but they had been filled in with dirt and made into planters. It was about a block from the mansion that was headquarters for the Church of Scientology and the complex’s white neon sign threw an eerie glow down to where Bosch was standing on the curb. It was near ten o’clock, so he wasn’t worried about anyone offering him a personality test. He stood there smoking and studying the apartment building for a half hour before finally deciding to go ahead with the break-in.

  It was a security building but it really wasn’t. Bosch slipped the lock on the front gate with a butter knife he kept with his picks in the glove compartment of the Caprice. The next door, the one leading to the lobby, he didn’t have to worry about. It needed to be oiled and showed this by not snapping all the way closed. Bosch went through the door, checked a listing of tenants and found Moore’s name listed next to number seven, on the third floor.

  Moore’s place was at the end of a hallway that split the center of the floor. At the door, Harry saw the police evidence sticker had been placed across the jamb. He cut it with the small pen knife attached to his key chain and then knelt down to look at the lock. There were two other apartments on the hallway. He heard no TV sound or talking coming from either. The lighting in the hall was good, so he didn’t need the flashlight. Moore had a standard pin tumbler dead bolt on the door. Using a curved tension hook and saw-tooth comb, he turned the lock in less than two minutes.