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. (ibid, 223-224)
