The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

As El Gato yelled-there was a furiousness in his voice that she had never before heard, even during the other beatings-she silently prayed, Holy Mother of God, please make him stop.

But he began striking her repeatedly, the sickening thuds of his fist on her face triggering whimpers of sympathy-or fear, or both-from Alicia and Jorgina, who were clinging to each other in the corner of the bedroom.

Then she stopped sobbing, made an awful groan, and went limp.

And Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez’s prayer was answered; he stopped beating her.

Alicia and Jorgina, fearful El Gato would turn and unleash his fury on them, tried to silence their whimpering. They watched in the dimness as he walked back to the doorway, picked up what he’d dropped on the floor, then returned to Ana.

The sound of a strip of heavy tape being ripped from its roll came next. Delgado applied that over Ana’s mouth and nose. He then took the roll of heavy tape and wrapped her wrists behind her back, then bound together her ankles.

He threw the roll of tape back on the floor, then grunted as he dragged Ana’s limp body out the door and let it fall with a dull thud.

A moment later, he came back into the room.

Alicia and Jorgina recoiled.

El Gato walked over to them in the corner. He got down on one knee and in Spanish softly said, “It will be okay now,” then reached out with his left hand and stroked Alicia’s hair, his fingers brushing her tattoo in the process.

Then he pulled from the front pocket of his blue jeans two paper packets and tossed them to the floor by the girls. Without looking, the girls knew what they were.

Each small packet-the size of a business card-was white and had a rubber stamp imprint in light blue ink of a cartoonish block of Swiss cheese, on either side of which were three lines that shot outward-not unlike the lines of their D tattoos-and above the cheese the legend QUESO AZUL.

“If you’re good, and I know you will be, I will bring you more,” he said, then stroked Jorgina’s hair and stood and left the room.

Alicia and Jorgina heard the thump, thump, thump of El Gato dragging Ana down the stairs. Then the back door opening, then the sliding of the minivan door, then the grating of the wooden slat gate of the lot. There was a banging of metal tools in the lawn care trailer, then the slamming shut of a minivan door.

The Plymouth spun its wheels in the dirt and gravel of the lot, the tires chirping as it quickly drove off the sidewalk and up the street.

In the now eerie silence of the dirty bedroom, fourteen-year-old Alicia and Jorgina clung to each other and started crying uncontrollably.

After a few minutes, Jorgina reached for one of the paper packets. She opened the flap at the end, took the tiny straw from inside, put that to her nose, and snorted the brown powder contents of the packet.

II

ONE

Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:10 A.M.

After Matt Payne had gently lowered the screen of his notebook computer, closing it to put it in sleep mode, he’d gotten up from the desk and crossed the room to go into his bedroom. It had been a short trip.

“Small” didn’t begin to describe the apartment, which actually was the garret of a brownstone mansion, 150 years old and recently renovated. The first three floors had been converted to office space, the current occupant being the Delaware Cancer Society. The garret had been turned into an apartment-no more than a bedroom barely able to contain its king-size bed (and nothing more, the few lamps and shelves wall-mounted), a bath not large enough for a bathtub, a kitchen separated from the dining area by a sliding partition stuck half-open, and a living room from which a small area of historic Rittenhouse Square could be seen if one stood high on tiptoe and squinted through one of its two eighteen-inch-wide dormer windows.

Payne pulled on a pair of lightweight khakis, a black T-shirt, and then a short-sleeved striped cotton shirt that he left unbuttoned down the front and the shirttail untucked. He slipped his wallet and badge into the back pockets of his pants, and his cellular phone and two magazines of.45 ACP ammo in the front ones. His bare feet went into a well-worn pair of boater’s deck shoes. Then he pulled back the tail of his striped cotton shirt. He snugged his loaded Colt Officer’s Model semiautomatic pistol-six rounds in the mag, one in the chamber-inside the waistband of his khakis so that it rested comfortably on his right hip. He felt the cold of the stainless-steel pistol through his clothing.

That won’t last long.

There’ll be a sweaty spot there the second I step out of the air-conditioning.

He then took the stairs down to the third-floor landing, where he pushed the button to summon the elevator.

Getting off the elevator

in the basement garage, he walked toward his rental car. It was a nondescript Ford midsize sedan that he had come to loathe for its utter blandness, the car’s only redeeming quality being that it was so nondescript, and so white, that no one tended to notice it, making it an unlikely candidate for key-scratched doors and other such abuse afforded nicer cars in the city. He wasn’t sure if the New York State license plates were a plus or a minus. But he had decided that the best thing about the rental car was that his insurance company was paying for it while they decided what to do with-which meant how much they were going to cough up to fix or replace-his shot-up Porsche.

Payne looked somewhat wistfully at the empty parking spot that normally held his 911. He really missed the car-it was a helluva lot of fun driving it hard on Bucks County’s two-lane country roads. Yet even if he had it now, he sure as hell would not use it, as where he was going was not the place for a nearly new sports car of any kind. While Rittenhouse Square had some of the oldest and most expensive real estate in Philadelphia, if not all of Pennsylvania, Frankford Avenue-though only miles away-cut through some rough neighborhoods that were a world removed.

Matt pulled out of the garage, cursing the sloppy feel of the Ford’s front-wheel drive as he drove to Eighteenth Street, deciding at the last moment to take Eighteenth and not Broad Street north, the latter of which would have submitted him to the circle jerk of traffic that was around City Hall. He’d long ago decided it was best to avoid that, even at this very early hour.