“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.