Michael Connelly (90 page)

On Sunday morning Bosch called the number Ramos had given him from a pay phone at a restaurant called Casa de Mandarin in
downtown Mexicali. He gave his name and number, hung up and lit a cigarette. Two minutes later the phone rang and it was Ramos.

“Qué pasa, amigo?”

“Nothing. I want to look at the mugs you got, remember?”

“Right. Right. Tell you what. I’ll pick you up on my way in. Give me a half hour.”

“I checked out.”

“Leaving, are you?”

“No, I just checked out. I usually do that when somebody tries to kill me.”

“What?”

“Somebody with a rifle, Ramos. I’ll tell you about it. Anyway, I’m in the wind at the moment. You want to pick me up, I’m
at the Mandarin in downtown.”

“Half an hour. I want to hear about this.”

They hung up and Bosch went back to his table, where Aguila was still finishing breakfast. They had both ordered scrambled
eggs with salsa and chopped cilantro, fried dumplings on the side. The food was very good and Bosch had eaten quickly. He
always did after a sleepless night.

The night before, after he drove laughing from EnviroBreed, they had met at Aguila’s small house near the airport and the
Mexican detective reported on his findings at the hotel. The desk clerk could offer little description of the man who rented
504 other than to say he had three tears tattooed on his cheek below the left eye.

Aguila had not asked where Bosch had been, seeming to know that an answer would not be given. Instead he offered Harry the
couch in his sparsely furnished house. Harry accepted but didn’t sleep. He just spent the night watching the window and thinking
about things until bluish gray light pushed through the thin white curtains.

Much of the time Lucius Porter had been in his thoughts. He envisioned the detective’s body on the cold steel table, naked
and waxy, Teresa Corazón opening him up with the shears. He thought of the pinprick-sized blood hemorrhages she would find
in the corneas of his eyes, the confirmation of strangulation. And he thought of the times he had been in the suite with Porter,
watching others be cut up and the gutters on the table filling with their debris. Now it was Lucius on the table, a piece
of wood under his neck, propping his head back into position for the bone saw. Just before dawn Harry’s thoughts became confused
with fatigue and in his mind he suddenly saw it was himself on the steel table, Teresa nearby, readying her equipment for
the cut.

He had sat up then and reached for his cigarettes. And he made a vow to himself that it would never be himself on that table.
Not that way.

“Drug enforcement?” Aguila asked as he pushed his plate away.

“Huh?”

Aguila nodded to the pager on his belt. He had just noticed it.

“Yeah. They wanted me to wear it.”

Bosch believed he had to trust this man and that he had earned that trust. He didn’t care what Ramos had said. Or Corvo. All
his life Bosch had lived and worked in society’s institutions. But he hoped he had escaped institutional thinking, that he
made his own decisions. He would tell Aguila what was happening when the time was right.

“I’m going over there this morning, look at some mugs and stuff. Let’s get together later.”

Aguila agreed and said he would go to the Justice Plaza to complete paperwork on the confirmation of Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa’s
death. Bosch wanted to tell him about the shovel with the new handle he had seen in EnviroBreed but thought better of it.
He planned to tell only one person about the break-in.

Bosch drank coffee and Aguila drank tea for a while without speaking. Bosch finally asked, “Have you ever seen Zorrillo? In
person?”

“At a distance, yes.”

“Where was that? The bullfights?”

“Yes, at the Plaza de los Toros. El Papa often attends to see his bulls. But he has a box in the shade reserved each week
for him. I have afforded only seats on the sun side of the arena. This is the reason for the distance from which I have viewed
him.”

“He pulls for the bulls, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“He goes to see his bulls win? Not the fighters?”

“No. He goes to see that his bulls die honorably.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what that meant but let it go. “I want to go today. Can we get in? I want to sit in a box near the pope’s.”

“I don’t know. These are expensive. Sometimes they cannot sell them. Even so, they keep them locked…”

“How much?”

“You would need at least two hundred dollars American, I’m afraid. It is very expensive.”

Bosch took out his wallet and counted out $210. He left a ten on the table for the breakfast and pushed the rest across the
faded green tablecloth to Aguila. It occurred to him it was more money than Aguila made in a six-day week on the job. He wished
he had not been so quick to make a decision that would have taken Aguila hours of careful consideration.

“Get us a box near the pope.”

“You must understand, there will be many men with him. He will be —”

“I just want a look at him, is all. Just get us the box.”

They left the restaurant then and Aguila said he would walk to the Justice Plaza, a couple blocks away. After he left, Harry
stood in front of the restaurant waiting for Ramos. He looked at his watch and saw it was eight o’clock. He was supposed to
be in Irving’s office at Parker Center. He wondered if the assistant chief had initiated disciplinary action against him yet.
Bosch would probably be put on a desk as soon as he got back into town.

Unless …unless he brought back the whole package in his back pocket. That was the only way he would have any leverage with
Irving. He knew he had to come out of Mexico with everything tied together.

It dawned on him that it was stupid to be standing like a target on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. He stepped back
inside and watched for Ramos through the front door. The waitress approached him and bowed effusively several times and walked
away. It must’ve been the three-dollar tip, he thought.

It took Ramos nearly an hour to get there. Bosch decided he didn’t want to be without a car so he told the agent he would
follow him. They drove north on Lopez Mateos. At the circle around the statue of Juarez they went east, into a neighborhood
of unmarked warehouses. They went down an alley and parked behind a building that had been tagged dozens of times with graffiti.
Ramos looked furtively around after he got out of the beat-up Chevy Camaro with Mexican plates he was driving.

“Welcome to our humble federal office,” he said.

Inside, it was Sunday morning quiet. No one else was there. Ramos put on the overhead lights and Bosch saw several rows of
desks and file cabinets. Toward the back were two weapons storage lockers and a two-ton Cincinnati safe for storing evidence.

“Okay, let me see what we got while you tell me about last night. You are sure somebody tried to do you, right?”

“Only way to be surer was if I got hit.”

The Band-Aid Bosch had used on his neck was covered by his collar. There was another on his right palm, which also was not
very noticeable.

Bosch told Ramos about the hotel shooting, leaving out no detail, including that he had recovered a shell from room 504.

“What about the slug? Recoverable?”

“I assume it’s still in the headboard. I didn’t hang around long enough to check.”

“No, I bet you went running to warn your pal, the Mexican. Bosch, I am telling you to wise up. He may be a good guy but you
don’t know him. He mighta been the one that set the whole thing up.”

“Actually, Ramos, I did warn him. But then I left and did what you wanted me to do.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“EnviroBreed. I went in last night.”

“What? Are you crazy, Bosch? I didn’t tell you to —”

“C’mon, man, don’t fuck with me. You told me all that shit last night so I would know what was needed to get the search okayed.
Don’t bullshit me. We’re alone here. I know that’s what you wanted and I got it. Put me down as a CI.”

Ramos was pacing in front of the file cabinets. He was making a good show of it.

“Look, Bosch, I have to clear any confidential informant I use with my supe. So that’s not going to fly. I can’t —”

“Make it fly.”

“Bosch, I —”

“Do you want to know what I found there or should we just drop it?”

That quieted the DEA agent for a few moments.

“Do you have your ninjas, the — what did you call them, the clits, in town yet?

“CLETs, Bosch. And, yeah, they came in last night.”

“Good. You’re going to have to get going. I was seen.”

Bosch watched the agent’s face grow dark. He shook his head and dropped down into a chair.

“Fuck! How do you know?”

“There was a camera. I didn’t see 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. He’d get the job done.
And like I said, they only bagged him a couple times. He probably paid his way out of the rest.”

Bosch began writing some of the information from the bio in a notebook. Ramos kept talking.

“Those two, they came from a barrio south of here. Some —”

“Saints and Sinners.”

“Yeah, Saints and Sinners. Some of the local cops, the ones I trust about as far as I can throw ’em, said Arpis had a real
taste for killing. In the barrio they had a saying.
Quien eres?
Means who are you? It was a challenge. It means what side are you on, you know? Are you with us or against us? Saint or Sinner?
And when Zorrillo rose to power, he had Arpis taking out the people that were against them. The locals said that after they
whacked somebody, they’d spread the word around the barrio.
El descubrio quien era
. Means —”