The Traffickers

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  There was silence on the phone for a moment. Then Nesbitt saw the brown paper on the glass of the door pull back just enough for someone to peer out. There then came the sound of the front door being unlocked.

  Nesbitt hit the END key, put the phone back in his pocket, and scanned the area. About all he saw were students coming from the Southeast Philadelphia Transportation Authority’s Susquehanna-Dauphin Metro stop. Some of them crossed the street, headed for McDonald’s before class.

  The door, its hinges squeaking, opened not quite halfway.

  Nesbitt saw standing there a five-foot-two Hispanic male. He was heavyset, with an enormously wide, flat nose. He looked to be maybe thirty.

  “Come, come!” the man anxiously told Nesbitt, waving him in.

  Nesbitt did. The man looked nervously up and down the sidewalk before closing and locking the door.

  Chad Nesbitt looked around the brightly lit, newly renovated laundromat. It was obvious to him that this was Skipper Olde’s work, that this was one of the locations they had acquired in the package deal. There were lines of brand-new commercial-quality washers and dryers in the walls, and positioned neatly against the back of the room at a long tan linoleum counter were waist-high thick-wire baskets on heavy-duty casters.

  The man walked up to him and held out his hand.

  “Señor Nesbitt, mucho gusto. I am Paco Esteban.”

  “Paco,” Nesbitt said shaking his hand, “you want to tell me now what the hell’s going on here?”

  “Here?”

  Nesbitt looked around the room. “Okay. Start with that. Why are we here?”

  El Nariz looked him in the eyes, then nodded.

  “Sí. I have agreement with Meester Skeeper,” he began, “to use his machines for my laundry service . . .”

  “. . . And as the evil man was leaving, he shot holes,” Paco Esteban said, as he finished his five-minute explanation. “And so everyone, all of my crew, they run for their lives. I come back here to clean up the place. I could not leave it the way it was.”

  “This evil man shot holes?” Nesbitt repeated.

  “Sí. Come. I show you.”

  El Nariz led Nesbitt to the rear room. He pointed to the arch that was the bullet-riddled masonry wall.

  “My God!” Nesbitt exclaimed.

  “Sí.”

  “Why did he do that? I mean, to scare you?”

  El Nariz nodded. “Sí. Muy scary.”

  “And you have a head in your freezer?”

  “Sí.”

  Chad Nesbitt could not believe what he was seeing and hearing.

  The gunfire was bad enough—gunfire in a business he partly owned.

  But the barbarism?

  Jesus!

  That’s the kind of thing you hear about those animals committing in faraway backward countries!

  He pulled out his cellular phone and hit the speed-dial number of Matt Payne. The phone beeped in his ear, and when he looked at the screen, he saw:

  NO SERVICE

  Then he saw that the signal bars were low.

  “Shit!”

  Nesbitt typed out a text message to Matt and sent it:

  CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS . . . MORE TROUBLE

  “Paco,” Chad Nesbitt said anxiously, “you must not tell anyone about this! Understand? Not until I figure out what to do.”

  He nodded, and said, “Sí. Muchas gracias.”

  [THREE]

  Temple Burn Unit Temple University Hospital North Broad and West Tioga Streets, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 10:43 A.M.

  Police Officer Stephanie Kowenski came pounding down the third-floor corridor, her hands on either side of her ample hips. One held her police radio and the other her Glock pistol, both in their respective holsters, in an attempt to keep them from banging against her as she ran.

  She turned the corner. Just as she glimpsed what looked like a scuffle at the southeast end of the corridor, she ran smack into a gurney that was being pushed up the corridor. When she hit it, both she and the gurney went flying.

  The Hispanic orderly who had been pushing the gurney got knocked on his ass.

  After a second, Police Officer Stephanie Kowenski regained her footing. Ignoring the gurney, and not saying a word to the Hispanic orderly, she rushed toward the two men scuffling. She recognized now that one was Joseph Olde.

  The orderly righted the gurney, then calmly continued pushing it up the corridor. He got to the corner and made the turn.

  About the time that Police Officer Stephanie Kowenski reached the end of the corridor and the altercation, the other uniform and a young male civilian had managed to pull apart Olde and the other older man, who were on the ground. The young male civilian now stood between them as they started to regain their composure and get up.

  “That, Benjamin,” Joseph Olde said indignantly as he attempted to straighten his necktie, “was completely uncalled—”

  From far down the corridor, there suddenly came the sound of a rapid series of shots. At least ten of them.

  “What the hell?” Payne said as he automatically pulled out his black Officer’s Model Colt .45.

  “You can’t use that in here!” Dr. Law said.

  Payne looked at her incredulously. “What would you have me use, Doc, a fucking tongue depressor?”

  “Drop the gun!” Police Officer Stephanie Kowenski ordered as she reached for her Glock. She did not yet have it drawn from her holster.

  Payne blurted, “Three-six-nine!” using the old Philadelphia Police Radio code for police officer. He pulled back his shirt to show his badge on his belt.

  Police Officer Stephanie Kowenski, finally with her weapon out, looked at the male blue shirt, who nodded. He already had his gun drawn. And he had his left hand on the police radio microphone on his shoulder, his head cocked toward it, calling for backup—“Assist officer! Shots fired! Temple Burn Unit. Third floor. Broad and Tioga.” Then he repeated it.

  “You four!” Payne ordered, herding Dr. Law, the Benjamins, and Jason Olde toward the swing doors. “In there and get down. Bolt the doors if you can!”

  He pointed to the blue shirts. “You two cover this door! No one gets in after the Benjamin girl or anyone else!”

  Then Payne ran up the corridor, stopped at the corner, and carefully checked down that corridor. All he saw was the empty gurney. It was standing by the stairwell exit door.

  He turned the corner and ran in a crouch, holding his pistol up and ready. His elbows were bent, the gun close to his chest.

  He was halfway down the corridor when the left swinging door to Skipper Olde’s ICU flew open. Out ran the Hispanic male orderly in the blue scrubs. He had a black semiautomatic in his hand.

  Did he pop Skipper? Shit!

  “Police!” Payne yelled. “Drop the goddamn gun!”

  The orderly did not slow. And he damn sure did not drop the gun. In a flash, he ran right to the steel door of the stairwell, leaning his shoulder into it as his hip smacked the horizontal bar that unlatched its lock.

  The door flew open. And the Hispanic male went through the doorway. “Shit!” Payne said.

  He took off after him.

  The steel door was starting to swing closed when Payne reached it. Payne kicked it open, his right foot slamming the horizontal bar. He stopped and checked to see if it was clear to continue, then heard the fast footfalls echoing down the concrete stairwell. He could see the man’s left hand sliding down the inside handrail as he went.

  Payne looked down the stairwell to see if there would be an opportunity to get a clear shot. There wasn’t.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” he muttered as he started down the steps, taking two at time.

  As he passed the steel door to the second floor, he saw that he was gaining a little on the man, whose hand was sliding on the handrail only half a floor below him.

  Payne tried to take three steps at time and damn near rolled his ankle. It twisted, a flare of fire burning deep in his muscle. He went back to taking
only two steps at a time.

  He heard the metallic bang of the horizontal bar getting hit on the first floor’s steel door.

  “Police!” he yelled again. “Stop!”

  Maybe he doesn’t understand English?

  “Police” is—what?—something like “policía”?

  But what the hell is “stop” in Spanish?

  Shit. Who’s kidding who?

  He knows what the hell I want. . . .

  Payne reached the door and kicked it open. The door swung open onto the sidewalk on Tioga. The Shriners Children’s Hospital was across the street. He looked left and saw people running away, clearly in fear. He started to look around the leading edge of the open door when he heard two shots being fired—and the unmistakable sound of bullets impacting metal.

  Payne dropped to his knees.

  A glance up the door revealed two exit holes, the thin sheet metal with two ragged holes roughly resembling a king’s crown.

  “You sonofabitch!” Payne said.

  He quickly stuck his head around the edge of the door and back again.

  His split-second view had shown him the man running down the middle of the street, holding his right hand up as he fed the pistol a fresh magazine of ammunition.

  Payne popped to his feet and gave chase, running along the sidewalk to use the cars parked at the curb for cover and concealment.

  The man cut the corner at Germantown Avenue and started running up it. Payne started to cross Tioga to follow, but the loud horn of a taxicab he hadn’t seen coming forced him back on the sidewalk. He checked again for any traffic, then bolted up Germantown Avenue.

  Payne kept looking for an opportunity to shoot. But there were people on the sidewalks and vehicles beyond the running Hispanic male, all of them in what would be the field of fire.

  As the man approached the intersection of Germantown and Venango, the traffic light changed. The vehicles started moving east and west, effectively blocking the male’s path. At the corner, he made a right onto Venango, and Payne, looking over his shoulder, crossed over Germantown Avenue to follow.

  Two blocks later, at Camac Street, the man again got caught by the changing of the traffic light. This time he cut down an alleyway behind the row houses there.

  Payne, breathing heavily, turned down the alley. But when he got there, he saw that the only row houses there were the ones facing acing Venango Street. Behind them, the alleyway opened up for more than half a block. The other row houses had been torn down, leaving a huge vacant area.

  And the man was running right down the middle of it, wide open.

  Payne could hear the sirens of squad cars in the direction of the burn center. But he had no way of directing them to his location.

  Payne once more shouted, “Stop! Police!”

  Surprising him, the man did stop—only to turn and fire off two shots.

  The shots struck the pavement near Payne. He dropped to one knee and, trying not to let his heaving chest botch his aim, squeezed off one round, then a second one.

  The second shot found the Hispanic male. He went down, rolling as he hit the ground, holding his left thigh with his left hand.

  Payne stood and started toward him cautiously, shouting, “Drop the goddamn weapon! Now, goddammit!”

  From where he lay, the Hispanic male rolled and fired another round at Payne, causing Payne to seek cover behind a tree. Then the man popped up and took off, running with a bit of a limp.

  “Sonofabitch!” Payne muttered to himself. “The fucker just won’t quit.”

  Up ahead, Payne saw that vehicles were again stopped at a traffic light, this time at Old York Street. And the light was about to cycle from red to green.

  Good! I can close the gap again.

  But then Payne watched in surprise as, just before the lights changed, the man ran up to the first car in line. It was an older silver Chevrolet Caprice sedan—The Whale Car, Payne thought, for whatever reason remembering its nickname. The man grabbed the handle to the driver’s door, flung it open before the driver—a fat middle-aged black male—even knew that anyone was there, put the muzzle of the pistol to the driver’s left cheek, and started shouting at him.

  Payne could not hear what he was saying, but it was obvious what was happening. And the fat driver clearly understood he was being carjacked. He was frantically rushing to undo his seat belt.

  Payne ran with what energy he had left.

  The Hispanic male grabbed the fat driver by the shirt collar and yanked him to the street. The Chevy Caprice, having been in gear, started to roll on its own, and the man then ran alongside and jumped in, hitting the accelerator. There was a squeal of tires and then the driver’s door slammed shut.

  Payne ran over to the man on the ground, who appeared dazed as he tried to sit up.

  “Are you okay?” Payne said.

  “Don’t shoot me!” the terrified black man said.

  Payne shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m police.”

  He then looked down Tioga and saw the tail of the Caprice disappear in the distance. He shook his head.

  His mind wandered back to the Platoon Leader’s Program at Marine Base, Quantico.

  What’d that wise guy crack in the tactical course at Quantico?

  “When in doubt, empty the fucking magazine!”

  [FOUR]

  Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 11:30 A.M.

  “Okay,” Police Commissioner Ralph Mariani said to First Deputy Police Commissioner Denny Coughlin. “Who wants to get me up to speed on where we stand? The mayor is screaming bloody murder, if you will pardon the phrase.”

  Coughlin made a motion with his hand, effectively passing the request on to Deputy Commissioner Howard Walker, the two-star Chief of Science & Technology. Walker had not been Denny Coughlin’s first choice to work directly under him, but Mariani had said he’d had his reasons for installing him in the job.

  Walker was a very tall and slender black man of fifty. He had a cleanly shaven head, a long thin nose, and wore tiny round Ben Franklin glasses. He spoke with a soft intelligent voice like that of a cleric, with a somewhat pious air about him. His domain of Science & Technology included the Forensic Sciences, Communications, and Information Systems Divisions—the latter two, of course, with oversight of the Executive Command Center.

  The ECC was the nerve center of the Philadelphia Police Department Headquarters. It was situated between the offices of the police commissioner and the first deputy police commissioner, in an area that had once been another office and a large conference room, the wall between them now torn down.

  Also present in the ECC were Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, commanding officer of the Detective Bureau; Captain Henry Quaire, Chief of the Homicide Unit; Homicide Lieutenant Jason Washington; and Corporal Kerry Rapier, an impossibly small white man with soft features who looked far younger than his twenty-five years. All wore coats and ties, except Rapier, who was in his police uniform, a pair of silver-outlined blue chevrons on each sleeve.

  The cost of the ECC had been paid in large part with federal dollars. It had been built just before the City of Philadelphia hosted the Democratic National Convention. The politicians coming from Washington, D.C., fearing a terrorist attack with so many of them being present in one place at once, wanted proper protection in the City of Brotherly Love. And they were more than happy to let taxpayers from Boise, Idaho, to Tupelo, Mississippi, help pay for the best technology that Philadelphia could acquire.

  The room was carpeted in a charcoal-colored industrial carpet, in the center of which were two T-shaped, dark gray, Formica-topped conference tables. Each table seated twenty-six and had accommodations for that many notebook computers beside a small forest of black stalk microphones and the multiline telephone consoles. Gray leather office chairs on casters ringed the table, and forty black armless leather chairs along two walls formed somewhat of a long couch.

  On the ten-foot
-tall walls opposite the line of armless chairs were banks of sixty-inch high-definition LCD flat-screen TVs, frameless and mounted edge to edge. One bank of nine created a single giant image. Two other banks of nine TVs had different images on each, or eighteen different picture feeds.

  These consisted of live video. Broadcasts of local and cable news shows were on a half-dozen. Another half-dozen cycled feeds from the cameras of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. These somewhat grainy black-and-white DOT shots showed traffic on major arteries—such as Interstate Highway 95 along the Delaware River and the Schuylkill Expressway along that river—and on heavily traveled secondary streets. If the Philadelphia Police Department’s Long Rangers were flying, the DOT images would rotate with those of the thermal and standard color videos sent from the Aviation Unit’s Bell 206 L-4 helicopters.

  In addition to the network of telephones, the Executive Command Center had secure communications networks with other city and state police departments, as well as the federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service, and all those agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. There was even assigned seating for the liaisons from those agencies.

  It was indeed an impressive mass of high technology. So much so that Police Commissioner Mariani was prone to hold all of his press conferences in the ECC just for the gee-whiz backdrop it provided for photo ops.

  While it was true that the Executive Command Center served to aid in the collection, assimilation, and analysis of information, not everyone blindly believed the great wizardry of the room to be all that magical in the catching of criminals.

  Denny Coughlin, for example, was a devout believer that nothing beat the basics for gathering intel—and the basics meant shoe leather pounding the streets, cops talking with citizens. Or what was in many circles now called “humint,” short for human intelligence.

  But Coughlin and his peers were willing to admit that the eyes in the sky (and everywhere else) of the ECC did serve a purpose. Pulling together so many different things in one place did manage to communicate the information of people and places and events in an effective manner. And the ECC also met a political component, that of interagency cooperation. Despite the fact that many felt the term “interagency cooperation” more often than not was an oxymoron akin to jumbo shrimp, working with the feds was necessary, and the ECC provided an appropriate environment for that.