The Black Ice (hb-2)

placed in the back pocket. Harry’s single experience with Moore was all he had to go on. And what was that? A couple of hours drinking beer and whiskey with a morose and cynical cop. There was no way to know what had happened in the meantime. To know how the shell that protected him had corroded.

    * * *

    He thought back on his meeting with Moore. It had been only a few weeks before and it had been business, but Moore’s problems managed to come up. They met on a Tuesday night at the Catalina Bar Grill. Moore was working but the Catalina was just a half block south of the Boulevard. Harry was waiting at the bar in the back corner. They never charged cops the cover.
    Moore slid onto the next stool and ordered a shot and a Henry’s, the same as Bosch had on the bar in front of him. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that hung loose over his belt. Standard undercover attire and he looked at home in it. The thighs of the jeans were worn gray. The sleeves of the sweatshirt were cut off and peeking from below the frayed fringe of the right arm was the face of a devil tattooed in blue ink. Moore was handsome in a rugged way, but he was at least three days past needing a shave and he had a look about him, an unsteadiness-like a hostage released after long captivity and torment. In the Catalina crowd he stood out like a garbage man at a wedding. Harry noticed that the narc hooked gray snakeskin boots on the side rungs of the stool. They were bulldoggers, the boots favored by rodeo ropers because the heels angled forward to give better traction when taking down a roped calf. Harry knew street narcs called them “dustbusters” because they served the same purpose when they were taking down a suspect high on angel dust.
    They smoked and drank and small-talked at first, trying to establish connections and boundaries. Bosch noticed that the name Calexico truly represented Moore’s mixed heritage. Dark complexioned, with hair black as ink, thin hips and wide shoulders, Moore’s dark, ethnic image was contradicted by his eyes. They were the eyes of a California surfer, green like anti-freeze. And there was not a trace of Mexico in his voice.
    “There’s a border town named Calexico. Right across from Mexicali. Ever been there?”
    “I was born there. That’s how come I got the name.”
    “I’ve never been.”
    “Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much. Just a border town like all the rest. I still go on down every now and then.”
    “Family?”
    “Nah, not anymore.”
    Moore signaled the bartender for another round, then lit a cigarette off the one he had smoked down to the filter.
    “I thought you had something to ask about,” he said.
    “Yeah, I do. I gotta case.”
    The drinks arrived and Moore threw his shot back in one smooth movement. He had ordered another before the bartender had finished writing on the tab.
    Bosch began to outline his case. He had caught it a few weeks earlier and so far had gotten nowhere. The body of a thirty-year-old male, later identified through fingerprints as James Kappalanni of Oahu, Hawaii, was dumped beneath the Hollywood Freeway crossing over Gower Street. He had been strangled with an eighteen-inch length of baling wire with wooden dowels at the ends, the better to grip the wire with after it had been wrapped around somebody’s neck. Very neat and efficient job. Kappallani’s face was the bluish gray color of an oyster. The blue Hawaiian, the acting chief medical examiner had called him when she did the autopsy. By then Bosch knew through NCIC and DOJ computer runs that in life he had also been known as Jimmy Kapps, and that he had a drug record that printed out about as long as the wire somebody had used to take his life.
    “So it wasn’t too big a surprise when the ME cut him open and found forty-two rubbers in his gut,” Bosch said.
    “What was in them?”
    “This Hawaiian shit called glass. A derivative of ice, I am told. I remember when ice was a fad a few years back. Anyway, this Jimmy Kapps was a courier. He was carrying this glass inside his stomach, had probably just gotten off the plane from Honolulu when he walks into the baling wire.
    “I hear this glass is expensive stuff and the market for it is extremely competitive. I guess I’m looking for some background, maybe shake an idea loose here. ’Cause I’ve got nothing on this. No ideas on who did Jimmy Kapps.”
    “Who told you about glass?”
    “Major narcs downtown. Not much help.”
    “Nobody