“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.”