The Traffickers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Then he bent over, grabbed the girl by the waist with both of his hands, lifted her completely off the floor, and threw her onto the bed.

  The pretty girl in pink started screaming hysterically. The teenage boy began yelling. The girl kicked at El Gato and flailed with her arms, fighting off his advances with a great effort.

  But El Gato only laughed as he tore off her clothing.

  The great effort of a ninety-five-pound girl proved no match for the strength of a muscular man twice her size.

  When the women in the kitchen heard the screaming from the boy and girl, their crying intensified.

  After a moment, El Cheque sighed disgustedly.

  “Just shut the fuck up!” he shouted.

  They were quiet a moment. Then their sad noises began again.

  El Cheque shook his head.

  Miguel Guilar came back into the kitchen.

  El Cheque walked over to him and without a word handed him the TEC-9. Then he walked back across the kitchen and grabbed two of the teenage girls he’d eyed as they got out of the van, pushing them toward the hallway.

  He said to Guilar, “Your turn to keep watch, mi amigo.”

  Five minutes later, the women in the kitchen heard a girl cry out from one of the smaller bedrooms. From the master bedroom, they could no longer hear the teenage boy’s terrified shouts of “Stop! No!” over and over.

  Now only the muffled cries of the pretty girl could be heard.

  “Someone! Anyone! Help me! No . . .”

  After another twenty minutes, El Gato reappeared in the kitchen, wearing only his desert camouflage cutoff shorts. In his left hand he carried the recording device. His right hand had the roll of duct tape.

  He looked absently at the two mothers and their toddlers who had not yet been locked up in one of the bedrooms. The women glared back at him.

  Miguel Guilar was drinking from the bottle of tequila. He grinned at El Gato and held out the bottle. El Gato grinned back and took it.

  Then El Cheque came into the kitchen and removed the last of the group.

  Delgado looked at Guilar and held up the recording device. “Want to hear? It came out better than I thought. The boy shouting is the better of the two, I think.”

  “I already did hear. . . .”

  Delgado shrugged and said, “Bueno.”

  He looked around the kitchen.

  “Where is the bag of stuff?”

  Guilar pointed to the doorway that led to what originally had served as the dining room.

  El Gato took another swig of tequila, then went through the doorway. Guilar followed.

  The onetime dining room now contained a long folding table with a battered top and rusty steel legs. It had three of the white plastic stackable chairs around it.

  Against one wall were gray plastic storage bins stacked five high. These contained the various paraphernalia—the mixing bowls, the digital scales, the empty packets, et cetera—for the manufacturing of Queso Azul. One bin also held at least a dozen brand-new prepaid cellular phones, all unused and still in their original clear plastic containers.

  “There on the table,” Guilar said.

  On the folding table was a black thirty-three-gallon plastic bag commonly used for the collection and disposal of lawn clippings.

  Delgado went to the table and sat in one of the plastic chairs. As he reached for the top of the bag, he noticed that it had been put on top of an official-looking envelope. The return address of the envelope read: CITY OF DALLAS, WATER UTILITIES DEPARTMENT, CITY HHALL, 1500 MARILLA STREET, DALLAS, TX 75201. Across the envelope in big red lettering was printed: FINAL NOTICE!

  No wonder the damned water’s turned off.

  The idiots didn’t pay the bill.

  The house was still listed under Delgado’s grandmother’s name. The utilities were under a phony name and were supposed to be paid in cash every month. In lieu of proving their creditworthiness, they’d had to put up a five-hundred-dollar deposit in order for the city to agree to begin service. But that had been a helluva lot better than giving a social security number or driver’s license number—genuine or stolen—that would then be part of the City of Dallas database and could somehow come back to bite them in the ass.

  Delgado noted that the envelope also had a familiar stain across the words FINAL NOTICE! And there was some white powder residue.

  He licked a finger, wiped at the residue, and touched it to his tongue.

  Coke.

  No wonder they forgot to pay the bill.

  Too damned coked out. . . .

  Miguel saw what he was looking at and raised his eyebrows.

  “Ramos was supposed to pay that,” he said.

  Delgado shook his head, disgusted at the idiocy of the seventeen-year-old Ramos Manuel Chacón.

  And it’s probably the same stupidity that’s the reason we haven’t heard from him.

  Los Zetas didn’t grab him.

  He’s down there throwing coke at those gringo college girls to get in their pants.

  “It needs to be paid, Miguel. We don’t want the city thinking this is now an abandoned property, and come around for a look. You take care of it tomorrow.”

  “Sí.”

  Delgado grabbed the top of the big black bag and untied the overhand knot that held it closed. Inside he saw almost fifteen individual zipper-top clear plastic bag. In each of the bags was a cell phone or a small address book or a spiral notepad or a wallet—or a combination thereof. Each bag had a number written on it in black permanent marker ink along with a brief description. One, for example, had “#6 Fat girl, 18, w/striped hair.”

  Delgado knew that if he went to the bedroom where the pudgy girl had been taken, somewhere on her body, probably on top of her hand, he would find “#6” written in black ink.

  He dug around in the large bag until he found one labeled “#10 hot teen girl w/pink top.”

  He removed it from the black bag and put it on the table. In the bag was a cellular telephone with a pink face. The back side had rhinestones hot-glued to it in the shape of a heart.

  The phone was on, and he pressed keys until he was scrolling through its address book.

  “Ahhh,” he then said, reading on the small screen: MADRE. “Bueno.”

  He readied the digital recorder in his left hand, putting his index finger on the PLAY button. Then he pushed the green key on the cellular phone’s keypad.

  Three rings later, he heard the cheerful voice of an older woman.

  “Hola, Maria!” she said in Spanish. “How are you?”

  Delgado barked back in Spanish: “We have your daughter!”

  Then he held the digital recorder to the cell phone and played the audio recording. It was the one with both the boy and girl screaming.

  He gave that to a count of five, pushed STOP on the digital recorder, and put the pink-faced phone back to his ear.

  “Do as I say, and you get the girl back alive!”

  He listened for a response. But he heard only silence, and then, in the background, a concerned young voice saying, “Madre? Madre?”

  Delgado looked at Guilar and said, “Shit! I think she fainted!”

  He pushed the red END button on the cellular phone.

  Then he reached across the table and picked up the black ink marker. He wrote on the bag: “1. Called ‘Madre’ 9/9 9:50pm. Woman fainted?”

  Then he stuck the phone back in the bag. And fished out another. And repeated the calling process.

  This time, he speed-dialed the number on the menu linked to the listing that read HOME, and when the man answered, he began their exchange by playing the audio clip of just the girl screaming.

  Delgado knew that it did not matter that the recording was of another girl. When parents heard a female’s voice screaming and were told that it was their child, they tended to believe exactly that. And not believing carried serious consequences. If the receiving telephone had caller ID, so much the better when Delgado called using the girl’s pers
onal cell phone.

  Then he barked in Spanish: “We have your loved one! Do as I say, and you will see her alive again!”

  Delgado carefully explained that he wanted the two thousand dollars that was to be paid to the coyote. He said that it was to be sent to Edgar Cisneros at the Western Union, Mall of Mexico, Philadelphia.

  Delgado had a fake Texas driver’s license with that name and his picture. He’d bought it for three hundred dollars. It had been made by the same counterfeiter who lived in a loft apartment near that expensive private school, Southern Methodist University. He sold to the sorority girls and other students there what the kids simply called “fakes.”

  “If you do not do as I say, and especially if you contact the police,” Delgado said in an angry tone of voice, “your loved one will be dead this time tomorrow. When we get your money, she will be taken to Dallas and released.”

  He put the recorder and the cell phone face-to-face and hit PLAY.

  “Someone! Anyone! Help me! No . . .”

  After a few seconds, he broke off the call.

  Delgado looked at Miguel Guilar. Guilar smirked. He knew damn well that Delgado had no intention whatever of releasing the girls. They were all, or at least the more attractive ones, going to be moved to Philadelphia.

  Miguel Guilar’s phone then buzzed once. He pulled it from the clip on his belt, then read the text message.

  “Uh-oh!” Guilar said. “Look at this! And a Mexico City number.”

  He held out the phone for Delgado to read it.

  “What do you think that means?” Guilar said.

  011-52-744-1000

  ramos here . . . i borrow amigos fone . . . am in houston jail . . . u bail me out? . . . police want me 2 say i live on hatcher . . . y is that?

  Juan Paulo Delgado’s eyes went to the envelope.

  His stomach suddenly had a huge knot. He had to consciously squeeze his sphincter muscle—he thought he might have shit his pants.

  Why? Because you didn’t pay the water bill, you fucking idiot!

  And they obviously found it in your car, then bluffed you!

  Right about then, El Cheque walked in, holding up his cell phone. He had a confused look.

  “Ramos just sent me a text . . .”

  Dammit!

  Delgado bolted out of the chair and grabbed the black plastic bag.

  “Throw everything important into the trucks!” he said.

  “What? Why? And about them?” El Cheque said, gesturing in the general direction of the bedrooms.

  Delgado nodded at the black plastic bag.

  “This is all we need. We leave them. Let’s go.”

  Holding the top of the black plastic bag, Delgado spun it to make a gooseneck, then secured it closed with another overhand knot. When he picked it up, he saw the envelope with FINAL NOTICE!

  “Fucking moron!”

  From inside the black plastic bag, the pink phone with the heart of rhinestones began ringing.

  [TWO]

  Society Hill, Philadelphia Thursday, September 10, 8:36 A.M.

  Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV drove up South Third Street in his cobalt-blue BMW coupe. He’d just left his home at Number 9 Stockton Place in Society Hill and was headed for his office at the corporate headquarters of Nesfoods International. He wore expensively tailored slacks and blazer, a custom-made French-cuff dress shirt, and a fine silk necktie.

  Nesbitt was talking on the telephone with his secretary, Catherine Taylor, going over his calendar of appointments and meetings for the day. She had just said, “You have a nine o’clock with Feaster Scott, the art director on the new international line of organic soups.” Then, as he approached Lombard Street, he heard the phone beep in his ear and he checked the screen.

  It read: CALL WAITING—PACO ESTEBAN.

  He said, “Let me call you right back, Cate. Or I’ll see you in a minute.”

  Then he hit the button and took the incoming call.

  “Hello?”

  “Meester Nesbitt, this is Paco Esteban.”

  I know that. But it would take more time explaining I have caller ID than it would to ignore the obvious.

  “How are you, Paco? Better? Is everything okay?”

  “Is bueno,” Paco Esteban said. Then, in a tone that revealed both his pride and his determination, he added, “I have found the evil man.”

  “What!” Nesbitt said, the news causing him almost to drive off the street. “Hold on.”

  He braked heavily, came almost to a stop, then, because there was no on-street parking, gently rolled up over the low curb and onto the sidewalk to get out of traffic.

  He had stopped shy of Pine Street, right across from the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial. The Polish-born soldier had bitterly battled the Russians—in the Kosciuszko Uprising—before coming to fight in the American Revolutionary War. As a colonel in the Continental Army, he became a hero—later rising to a one-star general—and then had become an American citizen.

  Wonder what ole Thaddeus would think of this craziness that’s come to the country he fought so nobly for?

  These new immigrants only seem to fight and kill among themselves. . . .

  “Okay, Paco,” Nesbitt said somewhat calmly. “Tell me all that again.”

  “I know where El Gato is,” El Nariz said.

  “This is the evil one?”

  “Sí. The evil one. El Gato. Means ‘The Cat.’ ”

  “And you have seen him?”

  “I have seen his evil house. Where he keeps the girls prisoner.”

  Nesbitt glanced at the clock on the instrument cluster. It showed eight forty.

  I’m going to be late. I’ve got that nine o’clock. . . .

  “And I have pictures,” Esteban added.

  “Pictures? Of what?”

  “Of the girls who El Gato forces to have sex for money.”

  Nesbitt could not believe his ears.

  This is getting worse by the moment.

  How much of this is going to stick to me?

  “Where are you, Paco?”

  “I am at my house. On Sears Street.”

  “Over by the Mexican Market?”

  “Sí.”

  That’s really not far from here, Nesbitt thought.

  Nesbitt glanced at the clock again: eight forty-five.

  He sighed, then reached for the pen and gasoline station receipt that were on the console near the hand brake.

  “Give me your address,” he said, turning to the back of the receipt. “I’ll be right there.”

  Ten minutes later, Nesbitt turned off South Eighth Street and pulled the shiny M3 to the curb across the street from 823 Sears Street. On the way, he’d just had time to call back Catherine and ask her to reschedule his nine o’clock with Feaster Scott and put anything else on hold.

  He looked around.

  Jesus, that wasn’t even a mile—but here it’s a world away from Society Hill.

  He was well aware that the sports car and his clothing contrasted sharply with the neighborhood. He was more than a little worried about leaving the car unattended—at best it might get keyed, at worst it might disappear altogether.

  He hit the master locking button on his car key, locking the doors with an audible click and arming the alarm with an electronic chirp.

  He glanced up and down the street, and thought:

  Thanks a lot, Skipper, ol’ pal.

  What was it that Matt said? Right . . .

  “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  Nesbitt knocked on the painted metal front door of the row house. He heard footsteps on the other side of the door and, after a moment, the sounds of multiple locks being opened.

  The door swung inward, and Paco Esteban greeted him with a warm smile.

  Looking at the short, heavyset man with coarse coffee-colored skin, Chadwick Nesbitt would never have guessed they were the same age.

  “Come in, please, Meester Nesbitt.”

  Inside, Chad Nesbitt saw that there
was a small gathering at the back of the house, four Hispanic women in what appeared to be a parlor. It was sparsely furnished, and the majority of the chairs looked as if they belonged outdoors. The women stopped talking to look toward him, then looked away and went back to their conversation.

  “Come into the kitchen, please,” Esteban then said.

  The kitchen was still a mess from the making of breakfast. Nesbitt could hear the coffeemaker burping steam as it finished brewing a fresh pot.

  Esteban had two cheap coffee mugs in his hand. He did not ask if Nesbitt wanted any; he simply poured coffee in both, then handed one to him.

  Nesbitt didn’t feel he could refuse.

  “Milk? Sugar?” Esteban said.

  “Black is fine. Thank you.” Then he said, “You said you had pictures?”

  “Sí. I thought that a smart man like you could get them to someone who could help.” He hesitated as their eyes met. “I am not comfortable speaking with authorities.”

  Nesbitt nodded.

  Esteban brought out his cell phone. He punched a few keys, then handed it to Nesbitt.

  “Push this one here to go from one to another,” El Nariz said, indicating a particular key.

  As Nesbitt keyed through the images, El Nariz gave him a running commentary as to how he’d gotten the pictures and who was in them. He got to one that had been taken inside the convenience store, the bottom of the frame cut off, showing, barely, the two young Hispanic girls sitting at the folding table and flipping through old magazines.

  “Rosario said those two are from Mexico.”

  “They don’t even look fourteen years old!” Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV said indignantly, almost spilling his coffee.

  He felt shocked to his very core.

  “Si.” El Nariz said softly. “Fourteen, Rosario says.”

  Nesbitt clicked again. The next image was shot at a forty-five-degree angle, but the subject miraculously was completely within the frame.

  “That is their guard, who watches over them. And, sometimes, forces them to have sex with him.”