The Traffickers Page 4

  The second episode had happened in the last thirty-odd days, and the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line again had made headlines.

  Payne and his date had been in his Porsche 911 Carrera. They were headed for his apartment, about to leave the parking lot of La Famiglia Ristorante, when they came across a middle-class black couple who only moments earlier had left the restaurant and been robbed by two armed men. The doers had pistol-whipped the husband, knocking out teeth, and had gotten only as far as the end of the lot.

  Sergeant Payne, Matthew M., Badge Number 471, Philadelphia Police Department, automatically gave chase—and almost immediately his car took the brunt of two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun. Payne then pulled his Colt .45 Officer’s Model pistol and put down the shotgunner with a round to the head and severely wounded the accomplice, who had fired at Payne with a .380-caliber Browning semiautomatic pistol.

  Payne’s date—the extremely bright and attractive Terry Davis, a heavy hitter in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles—had not been badly hurt, but their budding relationship died in that parking lot.

  While Matt Payne’s shootings were all righteous ones—ones in which he not only was found to be justified by the system but also ones in which he’d been hailed a hero by the public—they haunted him.

  And this last shooting had put him over the edge.

  It set up a series of events that found him hospitalized and briefly under psychiatric care. After careful examination—and a more or less completely clean bill of health—he was ordered to take a thirty-day leave of compensatory time. The purpose of this leave was (a) to fulfill the prescription for recovery that the psychiatrist said was necessary for such an overworked and overstressed police sergeant, and (b) to be a period of reflection, in which said police sergeant could consider if he might be better suited to another career path at the somewhat tender age of twenty-seven, such as that of a lawyer.

  Sitting at his computer in his Rittenhouse Square apartment, Matt Payne had begun his morning—after making coffee and filling the thermos—reading e-mails and the online edition of The Philadelphia Bulletin. Then he’d moved on to reviewing the files saved from websites he’d studied the previous night. These had extolled the virtues of various law schools he’d looked at across the country, from Harvard Law—a short scull ride from the Atlantic Ocean via the Charles River and Boston Harbor—to Pepperdine Law, overlooking the surfers in the Pacific Ocean at Malibu. He also had a yellow legal pad on which he’d listed the pros and cons for each of the schools he was considering—or not considering, as there were more schools marked through than not.

  And, just as last night, they had begun to bore the shit out of him.

  About the time he had poured coffee cup number three, Payne started clicking on another website that he found far more exciting: 911s.com. It had, among other things, a search engine that required the user’s home zip code. Payne had first punched in and searched his home zip code, 19103, and almost instantaneously was offered a listing of twenty one-year-old and two-year-old Porsche 911s offered for sale by dealers and brokers and individuals within twenty-five miles of his apartment.

  He scrolled through the list, clicked on a few Carrera models, idly wondering as he read the pages how much of their histories were truly factual—“Only 10,250 pampered miles! Always garaged! Never driven in rain!”—and how many of the cars actually, say, had been raced from Media down I-95 to Miami Beach, or run in last month’s Poconos Mountain Off-Road Rally then hosed off for resale before the tires—as the stand-up comedian Ron White was famous for saying—fell the fuck off!

  Matt had grinned at the thought of the comedian’s shtick—not a day went by, especially when on the job, that he couldn’t apply at least one of White’s hilarious observations to a particular situation, most often “You can’t fix stupid”—and then he had thought: Or an even worse abuse—the cars used as daily commuters, rain or shine.

  Porsche actually built their cars to fly down the highway at the hammers of hell.

  Stop-and-go traffic is the equivalent of a slow death.

  Especially in salt-laced snow sludge.

  Figuring he would search major cities that had no snow, and thus no road salt to rust out body panels, he’d punched in 90210, 85001, and 75065, and read the results from those. They belonged, respectively, to Beverly Hills, Phoenix, and Dallas. And each offered three times as many 911s as did 19103.

  Ones with no road salt.

  Maybe I could get one shipped back here.

  Or maybe go get one, and drive it back here at the hammers of hell. Now that would be fun . . . .

  He then punched in 33301, which was one of Fort Lauderdale’s zip codes. In the search field that asked for a radius in miles from that geographic point, he’d typed in “50.”

  Fifty miles easily covers Miami to the south and Palm Beach to the north.

  Then he’d chuckled as he clicked the SEARCH button.

  And plenty of Everglades swamp to the west and Atlantic Ocean to the east.

  If there’s a Porsche in either, it’s going to be worse off than my shot-up Carrera.

  Maybe I should donate mine as an artificial reef. It’d sink like a rock with all those shotgun pellet holes. . . .

  It took a long moment for the page to completely load on his computer screen.

  Jesus! Look at all those Porsches for sale!

  Ninety Carreras alone!

  Who the hell is buying them?

  He took a sip of his coffee.

  Stupid question. Who the hell else?

  All the goddamned drug-runners.

  It had been then that his cellular had started to vibrate, flash Soup King—and cause him to worry.

  Matt Payne looked at the cellular phone and said aloud, “What’s he want at this hour?”

  Payne told himself that it wasn’t the time of day that bothered him; rather, it was what it suggested. For as long as he could remember, certainly since his early teen years, his parents had told him that calls in the late of night or early morning almost never announced good news. And his experience as a Philly cop sure as hell had only proved their point, time and again.

  Maybe he accidentally hit my auto-dial number?

  And if that’s the case, and if I’d been sound asleep, I’d be pissed he’s waking me up.

  Payne had been pals with the “Soup King”—Payne’s nickname for Chad-wick Thomas Nesbitt IV—since they were in diapers, when Chad was merely the Soup Prince-in-Waiting. Later, they attended prep school together before both graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

  Had Payne’s cellular phone volume not been muted, the phone, having linked “Soup King” with the audio file Matt had saved to its memory chip, would have blared from the speaker their alma mater’s marching band playing:

  Tell the story of Glory

  Of Pennsylvania

  Drink a highball And be jolly

  Here’s a toast to dear old Penn!

  The Soup King crack came from the fact that Chad’s family was Nesfoods International—his father, Mr. Nesbitt III, was now chairman of the executive committee—having succeeded his father, who’d succeeded his—and Chad was recently named a vice president, having worked his way up in the corporate ranks, just as his father and Grandfather Nesbitt had.

  And Matt’s father and Chad’s father were best friends.

  Chad never had lacked in the self-esteem department, and Matt often found it his duty to help keep him grounded.

  Payne grabbed the phone from its cradle, which automatically answered the call. He put it to his head and by way of greeting said: “My telephone tells me that the Soup King is calling at four forty-six in the morning. Why, pray tell, would anyone—friend or foe or vegetable royalty—wish to awaken a fine person such as myself from a peaceful slumber at this ungodly hour?”

  “Matt? Are you awake, Matt?”

  Payne pulled the phone from his head and looked at it askance; it was as if Nesbitt hadn’t heard a word he’
d said. He put the phone back to his head and replied: “Such a query calls into question the intelligence of one who asks it. Because, it would follow that if one were to telephone a person, and said person were to answer, then, yes, it could be presumed that that person was awake. Or perhaps rudely awakened.”

  Nesbitt didn’t reply.

  “Actually, you’re lucky,” Payne went on. “I wasn’t rudely awakened. I was, instead, accomplishing multiple tasks, from plotting my future to looking for a new car. All with the wonders of this miraculous thing called the Internet that’s ready at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know about you, but I think this Internet thing might be around for a while. Wonderfully handy. And you can go anywhere on it, even in just your underwear.”

  Nesbitt either ignored the ridiculous sarcasm or again didn’t hear what he’d said.

  “Look, Matt. I need your help. This is bad.”

  Payne thought that Nesbitt’s voice had an odd tone to it, and that caused a knot in his stomach.

  “What’s bad, Chad?”

  Nesbitt did not address the question directly. “I’d heard—Mother said at dinner last week—are you still a cop or not?”

  “Well, the days of the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line very well may be numbered. I’m thinking of taking a road trip. Any interest in—”

  “So,” Chad interrupted, “does that mean no?”

  “No. It means technically, yes, I’m still a cop. The real question, though, is: ‘Will I continue to be a cop?’ I’ve been put on ice to take time and consider just that—”

  “Dammit, yes or no?” he interrupted.

  “Yes. What the hell’s got you upset? And at this hour?”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Remember the Philly Inn? On Frankford?”

  Remember it?

  No way in hell could anyone forget a party like we had that night—what?—ten, eleven years ago.

  Damn. Has it been that long?

  “Sure, Chad, I remember. Who could forget Whatshisface diving off the roof into the pool?”

  “What? Oh, right.” His voice tapered off. “Skipper did that . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s who it was. So, what happened? Did Daffy finally have enough and throw you out?”

  Daphne Elizabeth Browne Nesbitt was wife to Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, and Matt was godfather to their baby girl, Penelope Alice Nesbitt, named after the late Penelope Alice Detweiler, with whom, before she shot up her last vein of heroin, causing her to breathe her last breath, Matt had fancied himself in love.

  Payne heard only silence, then said, “What’s the room number?”

  “No. I’m at the All-Nite Diner, by the shopping strip just south of it. Thanks, pal.”

  “Be there in—” Matt began but stopped when he realized the connection had been broken.

  [FIVE]

  2512 Hancock Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:01 A.M.

  Hancock, off Lehigh Avenue, was only a couple miles southwest of the Philly Inn. It was in the section known as North Philly, which of course was due north of Center City—downtown proper—hence North Philly’s name. If the area around the Philly Inn could be described as seedy and sliding to worse, then it would be no less than a kind and charitable act to call North Philly, particularly the more and more Latino neighborhood containing Hancock Street, a miserable godforsaken slum with zero to zilch chance of redemption.

  And in a dilapidated row house on Hancock, Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez—a petite pretty seventeen-year-old Honduran with light-brown skin, long straight black hair, dark eyes, and soft facial features, including a smattering of freckles across her upper cheeks and pixie nose that made her appear even younger—was startled awake from an uneasy sleep by sounds outside her open second-story bedroom window.

  Ana was lying with two younger girls from Mexico on a dirty mattress on the wooden floor of the bedroom. She first heard the familiar rattling of a lawn care utility trailer, then the squeaking springs of the dirty tan Ford panel van pulling it over the curb, across the sidewalk, and through the open gate of the vacant lot next door—where two abandoned row houses once stood before burning and being torn down—and then the white rusty Plymouth minivan with its darkened windows that followed the van and trailer into the lot.

  Ana’s pulse quickened as she then heard Latin music coming from another vehicle that was accelerating up Hancock Street. While she was not surprised, she was scared. This had happened nearly every night for the two months she’d been here: One of two vans would bring the girls and others back to the house—she wasn’t sure why they had the trailer of lawn mowers out so late—and El Gato would be right on their heels to collect the cash. If everyone was lucky, he then would just take the money and drive off into the dark humid night.

  At five feet eleven inches tall and 180 pounds, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado moved with the grace and power of a big cat—thus his nickname, “El Gato.” He had the toned, muscular body of one who worked out regularly with gym weights, which he’d learned to perfect during a short stint in the prison system. He was as fastidious as a cat in his appearance, keeping his black hair cut short and neat, his face clean-shaven, his body—with one exception—absolutely unmarked.

  The exception was a small black tattoo—a gothic block letter D with three short lines on either side representing whiskers—at the base of his palm. The location made it more or less unnoticeable to the casual observer unless El Gato chose to show it. It was the same tattoo he convinced each of the girls to get when he first met them—“To show my love of family,” El Gato told them. But each girl’s whiskered D was tattooed on the neck behind the left ear, at the hairline.

  The girls—at first, while they still were under his influence, desperate to believe his bullshit ruse of “love of family”—had enjoyed flashing the tattoo by pulling back their hair and smiling appreciatively, if not seductively, at El Gato.

  And Juan Paulo Delgado had another catlike trait: He carried himself in such a way that one moment he could be all charm, his deep, dark eyes almost smiling—then the next moment his short Latin temper turned him intimidating, his eyes cold and hard. When his anger erupted, it made him seem much older than his twenty-one years.

  Ana felt the two other girls, Jorgina and Alicia, both fourteen years old and with attractive features somewhat similar to hers, snuggle in closer for protection. Yet they all knew that there would be no protection from whatever was to come.

  Of course they know, she thought. And they, too, are scared.

  My bruises are almost gone.

  Theirs are still dark, still fresh and with much pain . . .

  There was the grating of the wooden slats of the gate as it was being slid closed on the vacant lot. And when that was done—and only after the gate was closed and its chain locked—there came the slamming of the van’s front doors and the sliding open of the rusty side doors of the minivan for the half-dozen girls to exit.

  Footsteps could be heard as the girls were herded through the backyard to the back door of the row house, then into their bedrooms. There they, like Ana and Jorgina and Alicia, were kept more or less warehoused, guarded under lock and key until sent out to work—which could be any hour of the day or night.

  Ana did not think that the round-the-clock watch was really necessary. If the fear of being beaten again was not enough to keep the girls from trying to get away, then the threats made against their families certainly was. Proof of that was that almost no one tried to get away.

  No one but Rosario, may the Holy Father protect her wherever she ran off to.

  And then there were the other invisible barriers, among them not having any papers proving who they were—those girls who actually had, for example, a birth certificate had them taken by El Gato “to keep them safe.” Also, the girls could speak only Spanish—and with no real formal education could barely read it—and so they had no understanding of exactly where they were and especially whe
re they could go. Certainly not to the police, whose screaming woop-woop sirens they heard piercing the night. Back home, they’d learned policía could not be completely trusted.

  And so the fear of the unknown was as strong a deterrent as any of the iron shackles or guarded doors.

  Ana listened closely for what would happen next.

  Usually, El Gato simply stopped in the street, and Amando or Omar or Eduardo or Jesús handed over to him the cash—usually in a backpack—and exchanged a few words—or none—and then his Chevrolet Tahoe accelerated up Hancock and made the turn onto Lehigh Avenue as he headed toward his nice converted warehouse apartment in Manayunk, a gentrifying middle-class section on the banks of the Schuylkill River in Northwestern Philly.

  Occasionally, however, he came into one of the houses and dealt with whatever problem there had been that night—most often a girl who had not performed for a client as expected or another who needed “encouragement” to work.

  El Gato, Ana thought, always says he does not like raising a hand to us girls.

  But I think the reason is not because he doesn’t like to hurt people—I think he does, and pray that God may punish him—it is because the marks he puts on us make the men not want to pay.

  So we stay locked up till the marks go away . . .

  Ana heard the sounds of tires climbing the curb—El Gato liked to park his SUV off the narrow street, its right-side wheels crushing the weeds growing in the sidewalk cracks—then the engine being turned off. Next came a door being opened and shut, followed by a short honk that reported a button on the remote had been pushed to lock the SUV’s doors and activate its alarm.