The backpack had been completely designed to be searched and to help convince those who looked through its contents of Dominic Reilly’s legitimacy as a drifter addict. They would find the paraphernalia of opiate addiction—over-the-counter laxatives and stool softeners—as well as a gun wrapped in a T-shirt and secreted at the bottom of one of the compartments. They would also find a burner cell complete with fake text files and call log.
It was all put together by careful design. Reilly carried the things a drifter would have. The gun was an old revolver missing one of its grips. It was loaded but the firing pin had been filed down so that it could not function as a firearm. It was anticipated that it would be confiscated as Bosch hopefully worked his way into the Santos operation, but the DEA did not want to be responsible for giving a functioning weapon to the enemy. There was no telling how that could come back at the agency later. The reputation of the ATF was still recovering from an undercover program that ended up putting weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Most important, the backpack contained a plastic pill vial with the name Dominic Reilly on the prescription label. It would have a West Valley pharmacy listed as the provider and the prescribing doctor as Kenneth Vincent of Woodland Hills. These would come back as legitimate if checked out. There would be only two pills in the vial, Reilly’s last two eighty-milligram doses of generic oxycodone. They would help make clear why he had come to the clinic in Pacoima.
The backpack also contained a pill crusher made out of an old fountain pen, which could serve double-duty as a sniffer—place the pill inside, turn the barrel to grind it to dust, remove the top, and snort. Powdered oxycodone produced the best high, and crushing pills defeated the manufacturer’s time-release additives.
It was all there in the backpack, the complete persona. The only thing Bosch had to worry about at the moment was the wallet and chain. The wallet contained a GPS transmitter secreted within one of its leather bifolds. The attached security chain was both an antenna and a rescue switch. If it was pulled loose from the wallet, it would add an emergency code to the GPS pulse and bring the DEA’s ghost team crashing in.
Bosch hoped that wouldn’t happen. He didn’t want the ghost team to descend on the clinic and end his mission before it had actually even started.
Bosch sat patiently on the plastic chair, naked and waiting to find out.
23
By Bosch’s estimate, more than an hour went by without anyone coming into the room. Several times he heard voices or movement from the hallway but no one opened the door. He reached to the floor and grabbed the cane, holding it across his thighs with the curved handle near his left hand.
The minutes went by like hours but still Bosch’s mind raced. His attention was focused on his daughter and on his decision not to call her to say he would be out of contact for a while. He didn’t want her to worry or ask him questions. He realized in choosing not to call and tell her, he had robbed himself of what might be a last conversation with the most important person in his world. Realizing his mistake, he vowed to himself that it wouldn’t matter. That he would do everything possible to return to his life and make his first call one to her.
The door was suddenly flung open, startling Bosch. He almost turned the handle on the cane to pull out the blade but he held back. The counterman entered, carrying everything the driver had left with. He threw the clothes into Bosch’s lap and dropped the backpack off his shoulder to the floor with a thud.
“You get dress,” he said. “No gun, no phone.”
“What are you talking about?” Bosch said. “I paid for those. They’re mine. You can’t just take them.”
Bosch stood up, letting his clothes drop to the floor. He held the cane halfway down the barrel like he was ready to start cracking heads with it, unashamed of being naked.
“Get dress,” the counterman repeated. “No gun, no phone.”
“Fuck this,” Bosch said. “Give me my gun and give me my phone and I’m out of here.”
The counterman smirked.
“The boss come back, talk to you,” he said.
“Yeah, he better,” Bosch said. “I want to talk to him. This is bullshit.”
The Russian went back through the doorway and closed the door behind him. Bosch got dressed but took a fresh but still dirty T-shirt out of the backpack to put on as his first layer. He found the wallet in the backpack, chain still attached, and checked through it. He was able to determine that the seams in the partition where the GPS tracker was located had not been tampered with. He found his driver’s license and Medicare card missing, however.
Before he finished dressing, the door opened again, and this time both Russians entered. Bosch was on the chair lacing up one of his work boots. The counterman went to the far wall and leaned back in the corner with his arms folded as the driver stood front and center.
“We have work for you,” the driver said.
“You mean a job?” Bosch asked. “What can I tell you—I don’t work.”
The driver took a step toward him and Bosch braced himself this time. But the driver only held out a folded slip of paper. Bosch hesitated and then took it. He opened it to find it was a prescription slip. Dr. Efram Herrera’s name was printed at the top along with his required state and federal drug license numbers. Handwritten on the slip was a sixty-count prescription for oxycodone in eighty-milligram form. For a pill shill or a user it was the Holy Grail. For Bosch it was pay dirt. Not only did he have the makings of a case against the operators of the clinic, he had clearly gotten inside the wire.
“What’s this?” he asked. “You put me through all of this, punch me in the gut, and then just give me the scrip?”
The driver snatched the prescription back out of Bosch’s hand.
“You don’t want it, fine, we give it somebody else,” he said.
“Look, I want it, okay?” Bosch said. “I just want to know what the fuck is going on here.”
“We have business,” the driver said. “You want pills, you work. We share.”
“Share what?”
“Share pills. One for you, two for me, like that.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good deal for me. I think I’ll just—”
“Unlimited supply. We handle scrips, you pick up pills. Easy. We pay you one dollar for each. So, pills and money, do you say yes?”
“One dollar? I know a place I can get twenty.”
“We offer quantity. We have protection. We have beds.”
“Beds where?”
“You join, you see.”
Bosch looked at the man still leaning on the back wall. The message was clear. Join up or get beat down. Bosch put a look of resignation on his face.
“How long I gotta work?” he asked.
The driver shrugged.
“Nobody quits,” he said. “Money and pills too good.”
“Yeah, but what if I want to?”
“You want to quit, you quit. That’s it.”
Bosch nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
The driver walked out of the room. The counterman came over and handed Bosch his ID and Medicare card.
“You go now,” he said.
“Go where?” Bosch asked.
“The van. Out front.”
“Okay.”
The counterman pointed toward the door. Bosch grabbed his backpack and cane from the floor and moved toward the door. He walked normally. He had the brace down below his knee.
Bosch went back through the clinic and out the front door, with the counterman behind him. The van was parked in front and the shills were climbing in through the side door. Bosch could see the driver behind the wheel, turned and staring at him through the door. He and Bosch both knew that this would be the moment he would bolt if he was going to. He looked around and then off across San Fernando Road toward the tower at Whiteman. He knew he was being watched from there and the ghost team was also stashed somewhere nearby. One quick fist pump into the air was
the signal. If Bosch did that, they would come charging in to get him. And it would be the end of the whole operation.
He looked back at the driver. The last shill was climbing in and then it was Bosch’s turn. He shook his head like a man with no choice and climbed into the van. He pushed in on the bench seat behind the driver and sat next to a woman with a shaved head. He put his backpack in the space between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat, which was empty.
The counterman slid the door shut with a bang and slapped the roof twice. The van pulled away from the curb. Everyone was silent, even the driver. Bosch leaned forward to get the best angle on the driver’s face.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the next location,” the driver said.
“Where?”
“Don’t speak. Just do what you are told, old man.”
“Where’s my phone? I have a daughter I need to call.”
“No. Not anymore.”
The woman with the shaved head pushed her elbow into Bosch’s ribs. He turned to look at her. She just shook her head. Her dark eyes told him that there would be consequences for all of them if he continued to speak.
Bosch leaned back in the seat and stopped talking. He first made a quick look around the van. He counted eleven other people in the seats behind the driver. Many of them he recognized from the surveillance on Tuesday. Men and women: older, haggard, defeated. He lowered his chin to now mind his own business. He saw the hands of the woman next to him clasped tightly together on her lap. In the webbing between her left thumb and forefinger he saw a small tattoo of three stars by what looked like an amateur hand. The ink was dark, the points of the stars sharp, the tattoo not old like his own.
The van took the same route Bosch and Lourdes had watched it take earlier in the week. It drove through the gate into Whiteman and to the hangar where the jump plane waited. The van unloaded and the group started to board the plane through the jump door. Bosch held back, letting the woman climb past him to get out of the van.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” he yelled at the driver. “What the fuck is this?”
“This is the plane,” the driver said. “You get on.”
“Where the hell are we going? I didn’t sign up for this. Give me my scrip. I’m out of here.”
“No, you get on. Now.”
He reached down under his seat, and Bosch saw his arm muscles flex as he grasped something. He turned to look back at Bosch without revealing what it was. The message, though, was clear.
“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “I’m getting on.”
He was the last one to board the plane. There were benches running lengthwise down both sides of the interior, with seat belts hanging loose. People were buckling in. Bosch saw an open space next to the woman with the stars and took it, this time on her left side.
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.