The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

His voice trailed off.

Matt Payne knew the hospital. And he knew why Becca and Skipper had been taken there, and not to Nazareth Hospital, even though it was only blocks away from the Philly Inn.

Tony Harris had explained to him that the “Where do we take ’em?” decision for the medics on the scene had been a no-brainer.

“The medics followed the trauma triage protocol,” Harris had told Payne. “The first thing, they measured for vital signs and level of consciousness. Then came other immediate steps, including establishing an airway, immobilizing the spine, beginning a high flow of oh-two-maintaining an oxygen saturation of at least eighty or ninety percent-controlling the hemorrhaging, attempting to determine the level of injury. Then there’s a long list of criteria that, if a patient meets any one of them and certainly more than one, the medics contact the Level One Trauma Center. And because both of these victims were pretty fucked up, and ‘trauma with burns’ is one criterion, it was a simple call. Temple has (a) the only Level One Trauma Center, and (b) it has the Burn Center.”

“Matt,” Nesbitt then went on, “any chance you can swing by? You know the Benjamins better than I do. They could use a friendly face to maybe answer any questions.”

“What kind of questions, Chad?”

“Hell, I don’t know. What kind of fucking questions go through a parent’s mind when their daughter’s just suffered through an explosion and now lies in a burn unit ICU? And the parent has no idea what’s happened and what may happen.” He paused. “I’d guess those kinds of fucking questions. Maybe if you were a parent, Matt, you’d understand.”

Nesbitt saw that Police Officer Kowenski had looked up from her magazine, and he realized how loud he’d been. He looked down the other corridor; luckily, it appeared that the Benjamins hadn’t overheard him.

“Sorry, Matt,” he said more quietly. “Can you come?”

“I’m maybe ten minutes out. Just coming up on Broad and Race now. See you shortly.”

“Thanks, pal.”

Omar Quintanilla was at the wheel of the rusty white Plymouth minivan as it drove up Broad Street. The Temple Burn Center was no more than a fifteen-minute drive from the row house on Hancock Street and about a dozen blocks north of Susquehanna, where Juan Paulo Delgado had delivered Ana’s head at the laundromat. Quintanilla made a right turn onto West Tiago Street and pulled to the curb just shy of Germantown Avenue.

Jes?s Jim?nez opened the front passenger door, stepped out, and slammed the door shut without any formalities.

The minivan drove off.

Jim?nez was nineteen years old, stood five-feet-one, and weighed just over a hundred pounds. He kept his dark hair cut somewhat short, and his attempt at growing a mustache left it looking a bit ragged. On occasion, El Gato called him “El Gigante”-but always from a distance and always with a smile. Jim?nez could have a vicious temper.

He wore a top and bottom of royal blue cotton hospital scrubs over a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt. A black nine-millimeter Beretta Model 92 was hidden inside the front of his waistband. The 92 was the civilian variant of the M9 semiautomatic pistol that was standard U.S. military issue.

Jim?nez started back toward Broad Street, setting a slow pace until he saw a clump of four others in hospital scrubs moving toward the Temple Burn Clinic entrance. He quickened his pace so that he more or less joined their flow. The group of men and women entered the building.

Once inside, he headed for the bank of elevators and there joined a mix of visitors in street clothing and others in various colored scrubs.

In the elevator, one of the female visitors pushed the button for the third floor, then quickly corrected herself and pushed the one for four. He slipped to the back of the car.

At the second floor, all but two visitors got off.

The elevator doors closed, and it rose to the third floor.

When the doors next opened, the visitors did not move. But then they realized there was a hospital worker behind them and stepped aside.

He squeezed through the closing doors and stepped off the elevator. He turned a corner and found himself looking down a corridor. Halfway down it, he saw an empty gurney along the wall and went to it.

He pushed the gurney to a nurse’s stand. There, an obviously overworked, and overweight, white female nurse with a puffy face and thin brown hair sat behind the counter, looking at a chart.

“Excuse me?” Jes?s Jim?nez said, using a meek tone. “They call for this. For the burned one, the man?”

The overworked nurse looked up from the chart and made no effort at all to conceal the fact that she was annoyed (a) by the interrup

tion and (b) by an orderly’s interruption.

Then that look changed to one of confusion.

“Why,” she said, “would they call for a gurney for him? There’re gurneys everywhere.”

Jes?s Jim?nez shrugged, his facial expression saying, I just do as I’m told.