The Black Ice (hb-2)

it until it was too late. I got out of there but some people came looking. I wasn’t identifiable. I was wearing a mask. But, still, they know somebody was inside.”
    “Okay, Bosch, you aren’t leaving me many options. What did you see?”
    There it was. Ramos was acknowledging the illegal search. He was sanctioning it. Bosch would not have it come back on him now. He told the agent about the trapdoor hidden beneath the stack of bug trays in the radiation room.
    “You didn’t open it?”
    “Didn’t have time. But I wouldn’t have done it anyway. I worked tunnels in Vietnam. Every trapdoor was just that, a trap. The people that came after I got out of there came by car, not through the tunnel. That tells you right there that there might be a rig in the tunnel.”
    He then told Ramos that his application for a search warrant or approval or whatever they called them in Mexico should include requests to seize all tools and debris from trash cans.
    “Why?”
    “Because the stuff you will find will help me make one of the murder cases I came down here for. There is also evidence of a conspiracy to murder a law enforcement officer-me.”
    Ramos nodded and didn’t ask for further explanation. He wasn’t interested. He got up and went to a file cabinet and pulled out two large black binders.
    Bosch sat down at an empty desk and Ramos put the binders down in front of him.
    “These are KOs-known operatives-associated with Humberto Zorrillo. We have some bio info on some of them. Others, it’s just surveillance stuff. We might not even have a name.”
    Bosch opened the first binder and looked at the picture on top. It was a fuzzy eight-by-ten blow-up of a surveillance shot. Ramos said it was Zorrillo and Bosch had guessed as much. Dark hair, beard, intense stare through dark eyes. Bosch had seen the face before. Younger, no beard, a smile instead of the long, empty gaze. It was the grown-up face of the boy who had been in the pictures with Calexico Moore.
    “What do you know about him?” Bosch asked Ramos. “You know anything about his family?”
    “None that we know of. Not that we looked real hard. We don’t give a shit where he came from, just what he’s doing now and where he’s going.”
    Bosch turned the plastic page and began looking at the mugs and surveillance shots. Ramos went back to his desk, rolled a piece of paper into a typewriter and began typing.
    “I’m working up a CI statement here. I’ll get it by somehow.”
    About two-thirds through the first book Bosch found the man with three tears. There were several photos of him-mugs and surveillance-from all angles and over several years. Bosch saw his face change as the tears were added from a smiling wiseass to a hardened con. The brief biographical data said his name was Osvaldo Arpis Rafaelillo and that he was born in 1952. They said his three stays in the
penitenciaro
were for murder as a juvenile, murder as an adult and drug possession. He had spent half his life in prisons. The data described him as a lifelong associate of Zorrillo’s.
    “Here, I got him,” Bosch said.
    Ramos came over. He recognized the man also.
    “You’re saying he was up in L.A. whacking out cops?”
    “Yeah. At least one. I think he might have done the job on the first one, too. I think he also took down a courier for the competition. A Hawaiian named Jimmy Kapps. He and one of the cops were strangled the same way.”
    “Mexican necktie, right?”
    “Right.”
    “And the laborer? The one you think got it at the bug house?”
    “He could’ve done them all. I don’t know.”
    “This guy goes way back. Arpis. Yeah, he just got out of the
penta
a year or so ago. He’s a stone-cold killer, Bosch. One of the pope’s main men. An enforcer. In fact, people ’round here call him ‘Alvin Karpis,’ you know, after that killer with the machine gun in the thirties? The Ma Barker gang? Arpis was put away for a couple hits but they say that doesn’t do him service. He’s really down for more than you can count.”
    Bosch stared at the photos and said, “That’s all you got on him? This stuff here?”
    “There’s more around someplace but that’s all you have to know. Most of it is just he said/she said informant stuff. The main story about Al Karpis is that when Zorrillo first made his move to the top, this guy was a one-man front line doing the heavy stuff. Every time Zorrillo had a piece of work to do, he’d turn to his buddy Arpis from the barrio.