The next day, El Gato told the girls he had a special surprise: He took them shopping for new clothes. “For looking nice when you start to work,” he said. And that night he produced more packets of coke. The girls needed no further formal introduction.
After these were consumed and they had the desired effect, and there was more laughter, the doorbell rang. El Gato then announced that he had one very special surprise.
He went to the front door and opened it. There stood an older white man carrying a black hard-plastic box resembling a small suitcase. As El Gato embraced the older man, the girls noticed that he had his long graying black hair pulled back in a ponytail-and that his hands and arms, from fingers on up into his shirtsleeves, were covered in tattoos. The body art even extended onto his neck.
El Gato introduced the man simply as “mi amigo,” and moments later his friend had opened the box on the kitchen table and was pulling from it what turned out to be a tattoo machine.
Not an hour later, both Ana Lopez and Rosario Flores were enjoying another cellophane packet of the white powder. It was to celebrate their newest gift from El Gato: a tiny tattoo, no larger than their smallest fingernail, at the hairline behind the left ear. It was of a gothic black letter D with three short black lines shooting out on either side.
“The whiskers of El Gato,” he said with pride.
Later, after they had all retired to bed, Ana had been grateful for the very numbing sensation caused by the white powder. Particularly when El Gato had come into her bedroom, said that he loved her-then torn off her new panties and forced himself inside her.
The next night, Juan Paulo Delgado had his way with Rosario Flores, too. But without the numbing benefit of the coke, she suffered. Earlier, she’d turned down the drug for fear it would lead to what Ana said had happened to her.
The next night, when the girls thought they might have the power and control to spurn his advances, he beat them. And had his way with them again.
If they weren’t getting the message, he spelled it out for them: They now bore his mark and were his until they repaid him for their passage.
Then, confusing them even more, El Gato went repeatedly to each girl individually, telling her that while the beating had been “necessary,” he was still very sorry, that in fact he loved them both.
The proof of that, he said, was that the next day they would leave with El Cheque to go north. And he, El Gato, would see them at the end of their trip.
El Gato was gone the next morning when El Cheque arrived at the house driving a four-year-old Chevy Suburban with deeply tinted windows.
The three of them loaded up the SUV, including the tan Nike backpacks the girls had brought across the river. These went into hidden compartments in the back.
They drove U.S. Highway 281 the 250-plus miles from Brownsville to San Antonio, then continued on it north another 250 miles through the rolling terrain of the Texas Hill Country.
Over the many miles and hours, the girls tried to engage El Cheque in discussions about something, anything. Except for answering their questions about where they were going-someplace they could not pronounce called “Philadelphia”; it may as well have been the moon-he had no personality and said absolutely nothing. Not even on his cellular telephone, which he used exclusively for sending and receiving text messages.
He simply played the radio and drove.
They hit Fort Worth, then turned east toward Dallas. On the far side of downtown Dallas, they went through an area where the billboards-advertising radio stations, beers, and more-were all in Spanish. They stopped overnight at an East Dallas house. It was surrounded by chain-link fencing and the backyard held a half-dozen utility trailers loaded with lawn care equipment beside a wooden garage.
El Cheque delivered one of the backpacks to a young Latino who came out of the back of the house to greet them.
The next morning, El Cheque went to the wooden garage. It stood separately from the house, freestanding, and looked much newer. He backed out of it another late-model Suburban, nearly identical to the one in which they’d driven up from Brownsville. The only differences were its color, silver, and its Tennessee tag. After transferring their luggage and the two remaining backpacks, he put the Suburban bearing the Texas tags inside the garage, then closed and locked the garage doors.
Just before they left, the young Latino came out with a long black duffle. The girls noticed that it not only looked similar to the one Hector had carried across the Rio Grande into Mexico, but made the same metal-and-heavy-plastic clunking sounds when its contents were jostled.
The spare tire under the rear deck of the Suburban was lowered on its cable hoist. That revealed a sealed compartment that had been added under the far-back flooring. The bag was placed in there, and the spare tire cranked back into place.
They drove Interstate Highway 30 to Little Rock, Arkansas, then I-40 into Tennessee, first passing Memphis, then going on to Nashville. El Cheque covered the six hundred-odd miles-coldly ignoring the girls’ pleas for more bathroom breaks-in just under ten hours.
Outside Nashville, the same thing happened as in Dallas: They stopped overnight at a house in an area that was heavily Latino, then swapped vehicles. This time the garage held a late-model Dodge Durango with darkly tinted windows and Pennsylvania plates.
The next day, down to one backpack and the big black duffle-all secreted in various parts of the vehicle-they drove on eastward, passed Knoxville, then picked up Interstate Highway 81. They took it in a northeast direction, following along the western side of the Smoky Mountains.
The girls marveled at how they had gone from the dusty desert of south Texas to this place with verdant green cloud-topped mountains-all within a couple days’ drive.
Just shy of the Pennsylvania border, they got off on U.S. 15 and drove to Gettysburg. El Cheque always recalled the first time he and El Gato had made this same trip-particularly when El Gato out of nowhere suddenly started dramatically reciting the Gettysburg Address.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” Then El Gato laughed and said, “Thank you, North Dallas High, for forcing me to memorize that. Ol’ President Lincoln-I wonder what Honest Abe the Great Emancipator would think of El Gato’s little operation?”
From Gettysburg, they took the Dodge Durango up U.S. 15 the hundred or so miles right into Philadelphia.
It was just after dark when El Cheque pulled to a stop before what looked like an old city warehouse near a river. He killed the headlights. The warehouse had a corrugated overhead door, and after El Cheque sent a text message on his phone, the door began rolling upward with a clunking sound. The warehouse was darkened, and once the Durango had rolled inside, the overhead door clunked shut.