The Black Ice (hb-2)

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 personal
guardia
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 the
eMe,
” 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 the
eMe
came out of that.”
    The
eMe
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