“He’s got SoCal, NorCal, and the Pacific Coast. New Mexico, especially Albuquerque, which he owns. He moved into Texas a few years back and took out a bunch of people who objected. We found them in unhappy circumstances. Meanwhile, Raúl is flooding the barrio with the latest in designer shit, he’s big into meth and fentanyl, as well as pushing the old favorite, Mexican Mud. A late big move has a touch of genius to it: he owns an opioid pharmaceutical plant in Guadalajara and produces extremely good counterfeit merchandise, right down to the packaging. He sells cut-rate to a lot of hospitals, infirmaries, and pharmacists, and even if you go to Walgreens in Cambridge, you may be buying his stuff. He makes big dough off that. Anything that makes you go buzz seems to originate from him. DEA would do anything to bring him down, and if it happened, a lot of our beefs, particularly for the ditch floaters and alley bleeders found all over the southland when he first got here, might get cleared up. But he’s too tricky for that.”

“Can we hit him?” asked Bob.

“See, that’s just it. You can’t. He’s so lawyered up, you’d never get a warrant from the locals without him knowing about it. The local cops would find excuses to do nothing, even the emergency room docs might go on strike.”

“At the federal level, we could get action.”

“You’d think. But DEA has tried that route, and it’s never panned out. He knows if someone is poking around, and next thing you know, smart guys from Harvard and the town’s biggest white-shoe law firm are visiting the federal judges, doing a real soft-soap approach, but making it clear that no matter what D.C. says, the locals don’t want any ruckus here. Because they know that when the mandarins go back to Peking, the blood will flow, and it won’t be—pardon the harsh truth—out of the veins of any mandarin.”

“Okay, he’s tough and smart.”

“As for the warrant, here’s another wrinkle: it only works if you can find him. He has no headquarters. His headquarters is his brain, which he takes with him everywhere he goes. And he goes a lot. He likes big, fancy houses, and he owns a batch of ’em—penthouses, places in Europe and the Far East. Under his name, under his wife’s name, under various corporate and dodge-company names. DEA doesn’t even know half of them. Sees family in L.A. about once every two months. So we don’t know where he is, even if we could get the warrant without loud sirens going off. So nobody’s ever made the big commitment of assets necessary to raid. It just hasn’t seemed worth it.”

“Any penetration?” Nick asked.