Behind the noise of the plane’s engine she leaned into him and spoke into his ear.
“Welcome to hell.”
Bosch pulled back and looked at her. He could see that she had once been a beauty, but her eyes were dead now. He guessed that she was at least fifty years old, maybe a few years younger. Maybe a lot of years younger, depending on how long she’d been ravaged by addiction. He picked up an earthy smell about her. She reminded him of someone — the angle of her cheekbones. She looked like she had Indian blood. He wondered if her shaved head was part of the sell, like his cane and knee brace. She presented as someone who was sick, maybe going through radiation.
Who knew? Maybe it was all legit. He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what to say to her.
Bosch looked around the plane and noticed that in getting on, he had passed by a man sitting at the front who was obviously part of the operation. He was young and muscular and had an Eastern European look to him. His back was to a makeshift aluminum wall that separated the cockpit from the passenger hold. There was a small sliding window but the opening was closed and Bosch could not see the pilot.
The man at the front reached back and knocked on the separation panel. Immediately, the plane started moving out to the airfield. Once on the runway, the aircraft picked up speed and seemed to effortlessly take off and climb into the sky. The steep incline and gravity pulled the woman sliding into Bosch and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. It was as though she had been touched with dry ice. She violently jerked away from him and he raised his arm in a hands-off gesture.
While still climbing, the plane began to bank right in a southerly direction. Bosch leaned toward the woman without touching her and spoke as low as he could while still being heard.
“Where are we going?”
“Where we always go. Don’t talk to me.”
“You talked to me.”
“A mistake. Please stop talking.”
The plane hit an air pocket and was buffeted. She was thrown toward him again but she managed to steady herself by gripping an overhead handle once used by skydivers to approach the jump platform.
“Okay?” he tried.
“Yes,” she said. “Fuck off.”
Bosch made a hand gesture signaling he was finished. He had wanted to ask about the tattoo but he could see fear in her eyes. He looked toward the front of the plane and saw the reason. His efforts to communicate with her had caught the eye of the muscleman at the front. Bosch made a hands-off gesture to assure him that he was finished trying to communicate.
He turned to the window that was behind him and tried to lift the shade, but it appeared to be permanently closed. Only the jump-door window was uncovered, but it was too far forward for Bosch to check the geography passing below. All he could see from his angle was blue, cloudless sky.
He wondered if Hovan and the DEA were tracking the plane, as had been promised. They had already checked and knew the Cessna’s transponder had been disabled. They would need to rely on visual tracking from the air. The device hidden in Bosch’s wallet was for short-range ground-level tracking.
He looked at the faces of the people lined along both sides of the plane. Eleven men and women who looked as gaunt and hapless as the people in Dust Bowl photos of a century before. People with no hope in their eyes, no place to call home, trapped by addiction. People who couldn’t fit in before and never would now, all herded like cattle at the low edge of a national crisis.
He leaned back and did the math. With twelve of them on the plane, if they were each producing a hundred pills a day for the Santos operation, that was twelve hundred pills going for a minimum of thirty bucks a pop on the street. That added up to $36,000 a day coming out of this one crew. More than thirteen million a year. Bosch knew there were other crews and other operations too.
The money and numbers were staggering. It was a giant corporation feeding a demand that infiltrated every state, city, and town. He began to see why the woman with the stars had welcomed him to hell.
24
While in the air Bosch could feel the plane going through maneuvers, making wide circles and changing altitude, going up and then down. He guessed these were efforts to determine if there was any aerial surveillance. What he didn’t know was whether this was routine or because of him. He thought about the man Jerry Edgar had mentioned. The shill who had been flipped by the DEA, who had gone up in a plane but had not been aboard when it landed.
Eventually, the plane went into a gradual descent and landed hard, almost two hours after takeoff. That was just a guess on Bosch’s part. He was not wearing a watch, part of the pose of a drifter who had checked out of society.
Everyone climbed out of the plane in a quiet and orderly fashion. Bosch saw that they were on a desert runway, a range of brown mountains ringing the sun-torched flats. For all he knew they might be in Mexico, but as he followed the others to a waiting van, he looked around. The dense odor and white, salty crust of the land told him that they were likely close to the Salton Sea. The intel from Jerry Edgar had helped.
Bosch got a window seat in the van and was able to further observe his position. He saw two other jump planes parked further down the strip, and beyond them the sun hung low in the sky. It oriented him and soon he knew the van was moving south from the airstrip.
Bosch looked around for the woman with stars on her hand and saw her sitting two benches ahead of him. He watched her lean forward and tighten her shoulders as she crossed her arms in front of her chest. He recognized the behavior, and it was a reminder that he was only posing as an addict. Everybody else on the van was the real thing.
After a thirty-minute drive, the van pulled into what looked like the kind of shantytown Bosch had seen when he had followed cases into the barrios in Mexicali and other places across the border. There was a collection of RVs, buses, tents, and shacks made of aluminum sheeting, canvas tarps, and other construction debris.
Before the van came to a stop, people were up from their seats and crowding toward the side door as if they couldn’t wait for the next leg of the journey. Bosch stayed seated and watched as the shills that had been sitting so quietly and peacefully moments before now pushed and shoved for position. He saw the woman with stars on her hand grabbing at a man’s arm to pull him away from the scrum so she could improve her position.
The door slid open and people nearly fell out of the van. Through a side window Bosch saw why. The man who had come out from the encampment to open the door was giving each of the van riders their nightly dosage. He put pills into the outstretched hands of the shills as they came through the van door.
Realizing he had to act to support his cover, Bosch got up, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and slid out of his bench seat. He moved up behind the last man in the line to get out, put his free hand on his shoulder and yanked him backward so that he could move up into the open slot.
“Hey, motherfucker!” the man yelped.
Bosch felt him coming back for his place. He turned, raised the cane up, and held it crosswise in his hands. The man coming at him was much younger but was weak from addiction. Bosch easily deflected his efforts with the cane and the man fell backward into the open channel next to the bench seats. Bosch kept his eyes on him as he inched toward the door.
Bosch was the second to last out of the van, and the man waiting put a pale green pill into his raised palm. Bosch looked at it as he stepped away from the van and saw the 80 stamped on it. The man he had struggled with came out next, and he got one pill as well.
“No, no, no, wait a minute,” he said. “I need more. I need the two. Give me the two.”