He had seen Gas & Go signage on the corner up ahead, and was able to roll to its island of fuel pumps.
El Nariz had no credit cards, which required him to prepay with two ten-dollar bills. When he went inside the store, he was not surprised to find, in addition to the arrogant young Asian man behind the register and the pungent smell of kimchee and garlic that hung heavily in the air, that there was a pair of more or less attractive and young Latinas. They were filing their nails at a folding table, clearly bored. In a nearby corner, under a sign with an arrow to the XXX video room, stood a midtwenties Hispanic male with arms crossed and keeping a somewhat intense watch on the door.
El Nariz was not surprised, because he had seen the same situation at the Gas & Go next door to the Susquehanna Avenue laundromat: a shopkeeper, hookers, and their guard. Considering himself a principled man, he’d stopped going into that Gas & Go when he’d learned what they did—Paco Esteban took pride in helping people, not enslaving them—and had it not been for the minivan running out of gas right then and there, he would have chosen to buy his fuel at some place—any place—other than a damned Gas & Go.
Paco Esteban had made no eye contact with the guard. He did catch himself glancing at the girls, but only out of sadness for them. One, who had a cold hard expression, paid him no attention. But the other one caught his eye, and he saw in hers both fear and hope—the hope likely coming from not having long been forced to do what she was doing.
After paying the young Asian man at the register, El Nariz began walking toward the door. He made eye contact again with the girl. This time, her expression turned to one of sad desperation.
She quickly glanced over at her guard. He had noticed her look and made a face at her that showed he was at once annoyed and menacing.
Outside, as El Nariz pumped his gas, he thought about what had just happened. He had heard that girls in such a situation who did anything but what was expected of them faced harsh consequences. He’d wondered if what this girl had just done would result in that.
He’d shaken his head at the thought of all the misery in the world, and was glad that he didn’t have to go back inside the store and again witness this small pocket of it.
After a few minutes, the pump shut off at eight dollars, not the twenty he’d prepaid.
This was not the first time that El Nariz had experienced this. The first time, not sure of what to do and having just arrived in the big city, he had simply driven off and tried to forget about the lost hard-earned money.
But then it happened to him again two weeks later, and at a different gas station. He kicked himself for not having earlier figured out the scam: The setting of the pump at a lower cutoff amount had been done intentionally, on the assumption that if the person pumping gas was an illegal alien, he’d almost certainly not be stupid enough to want to make a scene over a couple bucks. Rather, he would, as El Nariz had done the first time, simply drive off.
If, however, the person did come back inside the store and called the attendant on the discrepancy, the attendant would blame the faulty machinery, or offer up some other bullshit excuse, and with a knowing smile hand over the money in dispute.
Back inside the Gas & Go, El Nariz saw that the girl had not been punished for her look—at least not yet.
After he explained to the young Asian male at the counter that he’d been shorted, the clerk said nothing. The young Asian simply peeled twelve bucks from a wad of cash he pulled from his own pocket. He handed the singles to El Nariz with a look of utter disgust that anyone would worry about such a paltry amount.
Paco Esteban said nothing, just pocketed the cash and started to leave, making an effort not to look again at the girl. Then the front door of the Gas & Go swung open and all eyes turned to it. A swarthy thirtyish Hispanic male in baggy blue jeans and white T-shirt swaggered in through the door.
The newcomer was drinking from a bottle of Budweiser. That earned him an admonishment from the Asian that there was no drinking beer in the store and to throw it away.
El Nariz saw the newcomer make eye contact with the Hispanic male who was keeping guard from the corner. He then drained the bottle and casually tossed the empty into a trash container. The guard looked at the girl with the cold expression, which seemed suddenly to turn even harder. Then she turned on a patently artificial smile, put down her nail file, and, without a word, got up and crossed the floor in the direction of the XXX video room, then made the turn to disappear behind the door labeled LADIES.
The newcomer passed El Nariz, then went past the guard and into the dimly lit room beyond the signage reading XXX VIDEOS MUST BE OVER 18 TO ENTER.
As El Nariz pushed the handle of the front door, he saw that the guard had stayed where he was until certain that El Nariz definitely was leaving. Then he followed the newcomer into the XXX room.
El Nariz shook his head sadly as he got behind the wheel and started the engine. He knew the odds were very high that money was being paid to the Hispanic male guard for fifteen minutes with the girl—probably twenty bucks, about the same amount he’d paid to put gas in his tank, with ten for overhead going to the Asian, even more if any coke or meth was sold—and that the girl and the newcomer were now in a dark, discreet space somewhere between the ladies’ room and the XXX video room.
As Paco “El Nariz” Esteban put the van in gear and tried to shake the image from his mind, the passenger door swung open. Instinctively, trying to evade whoever he believed was probably trying to rob him, he’d floored the accelerator. The passenger door slammed shut with the force of the sudden forward movement—but whoever it was had managed to make it inside, onto the floor.
A horn blared angrily, and El Nariz swerved to miss hitting a car that was turning into the parking lot. Then he slammed on the brakes.
He turned to look toward the passenger floor, bracing himself for the view of a gleaming knife or the muzzle of a pistol being pointed at him.
Instead, he saw the young girl from inside the Gas & Go staring up at him, her eyes now at once terrified and pleading.
“Vaya! Vaya!” she cried, begging him to go, to drive.
El Nariz glanced around the parking lot. He could see no one coming after her—or him—but he floored the accelerator again anyway.
Paco Esteban smiled as he now watched that teenage girl, Rosario Flores, being quick but meticulous with her folding and stacking. Within the last week, she had worked hard to prove her thanks to El Nariz for his kind act of rescue, and for him and his wife taking her into their home. If she had not quite become as dedicated a worker as all his others, she was very close.
Slowly, first with El Nariz’s wife, then with them both, Rosario had shared her story. It was sickening—her being fed drugs and forced to have sex with up to ten, twelve men in the course of fifteen-hour workdays. If only a small part of it was true—and El Nariz had no reason to believe she’d made up any of it—it was one of those horrors beyond description that he, as a God-fearing human being, despised to his very core.
And so Paco Esteban now smiled again, not only for Rosario in particular, but for all that he’d accomplished in general, both for himself and for his people.
They all had risked much, and they all had come far in their lives, and while—God forbid—some mistake they might make could send them back to that which they left far behind, they were being careful and invisible and integrating well in their adopted country. He’d even begun mailing small payments—no return address on the envelope, but his account number on the Western Union money order—to Saint John’s Hospital in Tucson.
One of the workers came up to El Nariz and told him that she had heard a knock on the pair of steel doors at the back of the building.
Esteban looked at his cellular phone’s clock, nodded appreciatively, and thanked her. The six-thirty delivery apparently was early, which meant his crew would have that much longer—nearly an hour—to process it before quitting at eight.
El Nariz went to the back doo
r and looked out the peephole. All he saw was a darkened loading dock. So he went over to the electrical breaker box and opened its door. When he found the breaker, to throw that would power the mercury floodlamps that bathed the loading dock in a gray-white light, he saw that there was no red line on the breaker, indicating that the breaker had tripped. Still, he rationalized that with the recent renovation, anything was possible, so El Nariz threw the switch to the OFF position, then back to ON, then closed the door of the box.
At the steel doors, as he started to look out the peephole again, there came a steady and hard—bordering on impatient—banging. The mercury bulb was still out. El Nariz knew it took them a little time to come fully on, but thought that he could make out the silhouette of the laundry’s minivan and the driver gesturing for him to open the door.
Paco Esteban sighed. He did not want to lose the advantage that the early delivery afforded him. There was a wooden brace, a heavy square timber that rested in U-brackets bolted to the wall on either side of the set of double doors, that secured them shut. With some effort, he removed the brace, then unlocked the lower deadbolt, then the upper one.
The door suddenly flew open, its leading edge striking Paco Esteban in the forehead and causing a great deal of blood to start flowing down his face. He staggered back as in strode a tall muscular Hispanic male in black boots, pants, shirt, and hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up on his head.
Hanging from a thin black sling on his right shoulder he had what El Nariz thought looked oddly like a long pistol or a short rifle. Whatever it was, it was futuristic-looking, unlike any weapon he’d ever seen.
In the man’s left hand, El Nariz saw what looked like a wet brown ball hanging from a black rope—although, with Esteban’s vision blurred, he could not tell if the blood he saw belonged to the object or to him.
“Rosario! Where is Rosario?” the man called out in almost happy singsong Spanish as he trained the muzzle of the weapon on El Nariz, then walked purposely past and on to the front of the building. Then his tone changed. “Rosario! Where the fuck are you?”
When the man reached the big room of washers and dryers, the workers moved to the side, out of the man’s way, in effect creating a path for him. The man looked to the end of this path, to the folding station along the far wall, and grunted at what he saw.
He held up the grotesque ball by its black rope.
“Let this be a lesson to all of you,” he bellowed as he swung it around.
Then he slung it, in a fashion oddly like that of a bowling ball, down the polished concrete floor toward Rosario, then turned to walk out the way he had come.
As he passed El Nariz, who was trying to get up from being down on his hurt left knee, his right hand holding his bloody forehead, the man again waved the muzzle of his futuristic-looking gun at him—but this time let off a burst of fire. The fifteen rounds loudly made a neat arch of pockmarks in the newly painted white brick above El Nariz’s head, pelting him with chips of masonry.
The man went out the door, and moments later the minivan roared off in a squeal of tires.
The bloody object had slid the length of the room and left a long, sloppy trail. As the crew of workers had recognized what exactly it was, they started wailing and shrieking—and running past El Nariz to the back door.
The object had stopped just short of Rosario’s feet, and when she looked down and saw that the rope was a ponytail and the ball was the bludgeoned decapitated head of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez, its lifeless gaze staring up at her, Rosario Flores fainted to the floor.
III
[ONE]
Room 52 The Philly Inn Wednesday, September 9, 6:05 A.M.
“Detective, it’s murder, is what it is,” Javier Iglesia said. “No question in my mind.”
Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, standing outside the motel room and looking in through the hole that once held a plate-glass window, was watching the technicians from the Medical Examiner’s Office work the scene.
The masonry walls and ceiling of the interior—and practically everything therein—had been burned at such a high temperature that there were no distinct colors and almost no shades—just the grayish-white hue of ash everywhere. Harris saw that the mattresses had been scorched to such a degree that only their metal frames and coils remained, and these were melted almost to a point of being unrecognizable.
Two shiny black vinyl body-transport bags—open on the floor in the middle of the room, each containing a charred body—were a stark contrast to their surroundings, as were the technicians methodically documenting the scene.
One representative of the Medical Examiner’s Office was a photographer, an attractive black female in her midtwenties wearing slacks and a dark blouse. She had slender features, and stood right at five feet, maybe a hundred pounds. She moved with her camera—a bulky professional-grade Nikon digital model, its strobe firing off flashes that washed the room in a pulsing light that bordered on the surreal—in such a graceful fluid manner that it looked to be a natural extension of her.
Harris had worked crime scenes with Javier Iglesia, the lead technician, and was aware of his well-earned reputation for being somewhat loquacious. He was a beefy but fit thirty-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry. He wore black jeans, a white knit polo, and a frayed and stained white thigh-length lab coat with two big patch pockets on the front. Both he and the photographer had transparent blue plastic booties over their black athletic shoes and tan-colored synthetic polymer gloves on their hands.
“It’s Shakespearean, is what it is,” Iglesia then announced.
Harris shook his head, not understanding. “It’s what, Javier?”
“ ‘Cut his weasand with thy knife.’ From The Tempest. William Shakespeare. Weasand’s another word for the windpipe, which is the trachea.” He paused. “Of course, it’s for Dr. Mitchell to decide if death was ultimately caused by loss of breath. Or by loss of blood. Or by the blast.”
Dr. Howard Mitchell was the medical examiner. Harris knew the balding, rumpled man, usually found in a well-worn suit, likely would be the one performing the autopsy. Or certainly overseeing it.
Iglesia squatted between the body bags. He pointed to the one on his right.
“But I can tell you that that one died from the blast,” he said, then reached over to the body bag on the left. He pulled down on its opening so that Harris, standing outside the window, could have a better view of the remains. “And this one had what I call a circumcision.”
The photographer chuckled.
Harris said, “What the hell are you talking about, a circumcision?”
Iglesia put two gloved fingers under the dead man’s chin and applied pressure. It caused the head to tip back and reveal the grotesque gap that was a slit across the neck.
“See?” Iglesia said with a grin. “A circumcision, ’cause he’s a damned dickhead.”
The photographer snorted her agreement.
The gash was so big that Harris could easily see that the carotid artery had been neatly severed, too.
That certainly meets the Latin meaning of “homicide”—homo for “human being,” caedere for “cut to kill.”
So then the fire was a cover for a murder?
But who did it?
So far as we know, only one person came out alive.
And he’s not looking like he’s going to make it to lunch.
Iglesia pulled back his fingers and the head bobbed back forward.
He then reached into one of the patch pockets of his lab coat.
“I’m betting,” he said, “that the cut pattern of the flesh will be consistent with the wavelike serrations on the blade of this. And of course that makes it murder.”
He held up a heavy clear plastic bag that contained what was left of a folding pocketknife. It was open, and its blade looked to be about three inches long, the sharpened edge serrated the whole length. The intensity of the heat had discolored the metal of the knife and turned the plastic handle into a melted blo
b of black goo, at least what remained of it.
Good luck getting a print off that, Harris thought.
“Me, personally?” the talkative Latino went on without prompting, “I’d like to see more of them die, is what I’d like. These drug dealers, they’re all scum—”
“Amen to that,” the photographer chimed in as she fired off another series of shots.
“And you know what they’re doing now, man?” Iglesia went on. “These damn dealers?”
Harris realized that Iglesia had paused, and then it occurred to him that the reason for the pause was that Iglesia was trying to engage him. He wanted Harris to answer.
Which I really don’t want to do, because it’ll only encourage Javier to go on.
And on and on . . . .
After a moment, Harris reluctantly said, “What, Javier?”
With more than a little anger, Iglesia said: “They’re now getting teens, young ones, hooked on horse, is what they’re doing. Kids in my neighborhood doing Mexican black tar heroin, man. And not knowing it, ’cause it’s mixed with candy sugar.” His face showed genuine disgust as he shook his head. “I hope these bastards kill each other, every last one of them. And I can’t think of a better way for them to go down than getting blown up in their own damn meth lab.”
Harris nodded and, not wanting to get into details, said, “I’ve heard something about that.”
“Damn right,” Iglesia said. He sealed the body bags, then looked at Harris. “And you know what else, man?”
Jesus, he’s not going to stop.
Harris suddenly had an inspiration, and held up his left index finger in a Hold that thought one second gesture.
As if responding to the vibrating of his cellular telephone, he pulled it from its clip on his belt, put it to his head, and a little louder than normal said to absolutely no one, “Harris.”
The Traffickers Page 8