El Cheque, El Gato said, as he and the girls later shared a dinner of delivered pizzas, soon would be driving Ana and Rosario north. He explained how they would be permitted to find their family while they were working to repay the costs of their passage. He said it was not uncommon for that to happen quickly.
He saw them smile. “If that pleases you, then we must celebrate your arrival and new lives!”
He went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of tequila, three squat shot glasses, and a small teabag-size cellophane packet containing a fine white powder.
The girls took a sip of the alcohol and made a face. El Gato laughed loudly and shot his down in a single swallow.
El Gato then playfully introduced the cocaine to them. First he rubbed some on his lips, smiled, then reached over and rubbed some on their full lips. After they smiled awkwardly at the funny tingling feeling it caused, he rubbed some of the white powder between the inside of his upper lip and gums—and then on theirs.
It was not long before he had dumped another cellophane packet on the table and they had decided to follow his lead and sniff a little line of it through a short straw.
They all became very comfortable and relaxed. There was much laughter.
The next day, El Gato told the girls he had a special surprise: He took them shopping for new clothes. “For looking nice when you start to work,” he said. And that night he produced more packets of coke. The girls needed no further formal introduction.
After these were consumed and they had the desired effect, and there was more laughter, the doorbell rang. El Gato then announced that he had one very special surprise.
He went to the front door and opened it. There stood an older white man carrying a black hard-plastic box resembling a small suitcase. As El Gato embraced the older man, the girls noticed that he had his long graying black hair pulled back in a ponytail—and that his hands and arms, from fingers on up into his shirtsleeves, were covered in tattoos. The body art even extended onto his neck.
El Gato introduced the man simply as “mi amigo,” and moments later his friend had opened the box on the kitchen table and was pulling from it what turned out to be a tattoo machine.
Not an hour later, both Ana Lopez and Rosario Flores were enjoying another cellophane packet of the white powder. It was to celebrate their newest gift from El Gato: a tiny tattoo, no larger than their smallest fingernail, at the hairline behind the left ear. It was of a gothic black letter D with three short black lines shooting out on either side.
“The whiskers of El Gato,” he said with pride.
Later, after they had all retired to bed, Ana had been grateful for the very numbing sensation caused by the white powder. Particularly when El Gato had come into her bedroom, said that he loved her—then torn off her new panties and forced himself inside her.
The next night, Juan Paulo Delgado had his way with Rosario Flores, too. But without the numbing benefit of the coke, she suffered. Earlier, she’d turned down the drug for fear it would lead to what Ana said had happened to her.
The next night, when the girls thought they might have the power and control to spurn his advances, he beat them. And had his way with them again.
If they weren’t getting the message, he spelled it out for them: They now bore his mark and were his until they repaid him for their passage.
Then, confusing them even more, El Gato went repeatedly to each girl individually, telling her that while the beating had been “necessary,” he was still very sorry, that in fact he loved them both.
The proof of that, he said, was that the next day they would leave with El Cheque to go north. And he, El Gato, would see them at the end of their trip.
El Gato was gone the next morning when El Cheque arrived at the house driving a four-year-old Chevy Suburban with deeply tinted windows.
The three of them loaded up the SUV, including the tan Nike backpacks the girls had brought across the river. These went into hidden compartments in the back.
They drove U.S. Highway 281 the 250-plus miles from Brownsville to San Antonio, then continued on it north another 250 miles through the rolling terrain of the Texas Hill Country.
Over the many miles and hours, the girls tried to engage El Cheque in discussions about something, anything. Except for answering their questions about where they were going—someplace they could not pronounce called “Philadelphia”; it may as well have been the moon—he had no personality and said absolutely nothing. Not even on his cellular telephone, which he used exclusively for sending and receiving text messages.
He simply played the radio and drove.
They hit Fort Worth, then turned east toward Dallas. On the far side of downtown Dallas, they went through an area where the billboards—advertising radio stations, beers, and more—were all in Spanish. They stopped overnight at an East Dallas house. It was surrounded by chain-link fencing and the backyard held a half-dozen utility trailers loaded with lawn care equipment beside a wooden garage.
El Cheque delivered one of the backpacks to a young Latino who came out of the back of the house to greet them.
The next morning, El Cheque went to the wooden garage. It stood separately from the house, freestanding, and looked much newer. He backed out of it another late-model Suburban, nearly identical to the one in which they’d driven up from Brownsville. The only differences were its color, silver, and its Tennessee tag. After transferring their luggage and the two remaining backpacks, he put the Suburban bearing the Texas tags inside the garage, then closed and locked the garage doors.
Just before they left, the young Latino came out with a long black duffle. The girls noticed that it not only looked similar to the one Hector had carried across the Rio Grande into Mexico, but made the same metal-and-heavy-plastic clunking sounds when its contents were jostled.
The spare tire under the rear deck of the Suburban was lowered on its cable hoist. That revealed a sealed compartment that had been added under the far-back flooring. The bag was placed in there, and the spare tire cranked back into place.
They drove Interstate Highway 30 to Little Rock, Arkansas, then I-40 into Tennessee, first passing Memphis, then going on to Nashville. El Cheque covered the six hundred-odd miles—coldly ignoring the girls’ pleas for more bathroom breaks—in just under ten hours.
Outside Nashville, the same thing happened as in Dallas: They stopped overnight at a house in an area that was heavily Latino, then swapped vehicles. This time the garage held a late-model Dodge Durango with darkly tinted windows and Pennsylvania plates.
The next day, down to one backpack and the big black duffle—all secreted in various parts of the vehicle—they drove on eastward, passed Knoxville, then picked up Interstate Highway 81. They took it in a northeast direction, following along the western side of the Smoky Mountains.
The girls marveled at how they had gone from the dusty desert of south Texas to this place with verdant green cloud-topped mountains—all within a couple days’ drive.
Just shy of the Pennsylvania border, they got off on U.S. 15 and drove to Gettysburg. El Cheque always recalled the first time he and El Gato had made this same trip—particularly when El Gato out of nowhere suddenly started dramatically reciting the Gettysburg Address.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . .” Then El Gato laughed and said, “Thank you, North Dallas High, for forcing me to memorize that. Ol’ President Lincoln—I wonder what Honest Abe the Great Emancipator would think of El Gato’s little operation?”
From Gettysburg, they took the Dodge Durango up U.S. 15 the hundred or so miles right into Philadelphia.
It was just after dark when El Cheque pulled to a stop before what looked like an old city warehouse near a river. He killed the headlights. The warehouse had a corrugated overhead door, and after El Cheque sent a text message on his phone, the door began rolling upward with
a clunking sound. The warehouse was darkened, and once the Durango had rolled inside, the overhead door clunked shut.
Interior mercury lights then began to come on with a glow.
And there Ana and Rosario saw a smiling El Gato.
El Cheque delivered the girls and hidden goods, then loaded the Durango’s secret compartments with bricklike objects wrapped in black plastic. He got back in the Durango, the overhead lights were killed, the overhead door opened—and he drove off.
El Gato had welcomed Ana and Rosario to what he said was his home. It was an old warehouse that had been converted to a very nice living space, clean and comfortable and spacious. It had a view of a river and city lights and was much nicer than any place he had had them stay before.
He kept up the act that he loved the beautiful girls. But that did not last long.
There were nights—or early mornings—he would come home, often either drunk or high or both, looking for a sexual release. First it had been himself alone; later, he would bring a friend and allow him his choice of girls.
When they complained, El Gato finally said it was time for them to begin earning money to repay their passage. He took Ana and Rosario to the run-down row house on Hancock Street and coldly explained what they would be doing. They protested that it was nothing like what he’d promised. And he beat them.
Thus, they’d been turned over to El Gato’s men who ran the house, and joined the other girls held there. And the next day, the men had taken Ana and Rosario by van to various convenience stores, where they’d been treated like any of the store’s other commodities—first to be sampled by the store managers, then put on display and made available to customers.
Neither Ana nor Rosario had any idea how much they owed or earned. El Gato simply showed them sheets of paper on which he said he kept track. Yet no matter how much they worked, they never seemed to make any progress.
And one day in a spontaneous act that surprised even Rosario, at the Gas & Go on Frankford she had fled her bondage, leaving behind that awful life.
And leaving Ana to suffer the consequences.
Señora Esteban now sat on the couch with Rosario Flores’s head resting on her lap. She soothingly stroked Rosario’s hair.
“It will be okay,” Señora Esteban said softly in Spanish.
“He did the same thing with Jorgina and Alicia and the other girls!” Rosario sobbed.
Then she suddenly sat upright and wailed.
“And if it wasn’t for me,” she cried out, beating her fists on the sides of her head, “Ana would be alive!”
She sobbed.
“I got Ana to leave Guatemala! I got her to believe El Gato! And then I was the one who ran away from him, leaving her to . . .”
She crossed herself.
“I got Ana killed! It is all my fault!”
Crying, she lowered her head back onto Señora Esteban’s lap.
Madre de Dios, El Nariz thought.
He said a silent prayer for her.
I cannot let this monster continue—but what can I do?
Something, anything . . .
El Nariz put the tequila back on the high shelf above the kitchen sink, then went to his wife. When she looked up to him, he gently kissed her on the forehead.
“I must go,” he said.
She acknowledged that by closing her eyes and nodding.
And he turned and went out the door.
[FOUR]
Cup O’Joe’s Internet Café 4309 Main Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 9:30 A.M.
When Juan Paulo Delgado looked through the windows of the coffeehouse, he saw that the morning rush of business types was gone. The small café had a well-worn painted concrete floor and held ten round wooden tables, each with a pair of wooden chairs. There was a stainless-steel lip wide enough to hold a cup—and not much more—that was four feet off the floor and ran the length of the front picture windows. The windows overlooked the chairs on the sidewalk and, a block farther, offered a glimpse of the Schuylkill River. A wide wooden bar, with a dozen wooden stools, ran the length of the right wall to the rear of the café. And there, at the back, were four cubicles, each containing a desktop computer and flat-screen monitor that the café rented to customers in fifteen-minute increments of Internet online time.
Juan Paulo Delgado strode in through the wood-framed glass front door. A tan backpack was loosely slung over his right shoulder by one of its two straps. He wore sandals, desert camouflage pants with the lower legs off, making them into shorts, and a black T-shirt. The frames of his dark sunglasses wrapped so close to his face that they completely hid his eyes. The tight-fitting T-shirt accentuated his defined muscles and looked to be brand new. On the back across the shoulders, it was emblazoned with bold white type that read GET SLOSHED AT SUDSIE’S, and under that was a cartoon drawing of foam spewing from an oversize beer mug and a clothes-washing machine.
Delgado quickly but carefully scanned the coffeehouse.
A smattering of students and stay-at-home moms, chatting while their babies snoozed in strollers parked nearby, sat sipping lattes and iced coffees. Some clicked away at their laptop computers, using the wireless connection to the Internet. A paunchy middle-aged man wearing dark blue slacks, work boots, and a baby blue shirt embroidered with PETE’S PEST EXTERMINATORS was getting up from the far right of the four rental computers. He grabbed his paper cup of coffee and stepped out the back door, which led to a parking lot.
Two black teenagers, one male and one female, were working behind the counter. The male, who was six feet tall and rail thin to the point of being bony, took orders and ran the cash register while the girl, slightly overweight with a very round face, prepared the drinks.
There was no one in line, and Delgado walked right up to the register. As he did, he slid off his backpack and put it on the counter.
“Hey, brother,” Delgado said to the young man.
He unzipped an outer pocket on the backpack and pulled out a white fiberboard document-mailer envelope. It had FEDEX LETTER printed on it. Its top flap was sealed and there was an obvious bulge, indicating that it contained something other than a flat stack of papers.
The bony black clerk said, “What up, Cat? What can we brew for you? Maybe some trouble?”
He smiled, showing a mouthful of bright white teeth.
Delgado looked at the girl and said, “Usual, please.”
She nodded, and the coffee machine almost immediately began making the high-pressure hissing of steam being released.
As she worked, Delgado slipped the Federal Express envelope to the clerk. He took it and casually placed it under the counter. He then came back up with a brown paper sack the size of a lunch bag. Imprinted on it was FIND YOUR WORLD AT CUP O’JOE’S INTERNET CAFÉ. The sacks were provided to customers who bought muffins and sandwiches for takeout.
This bag was packed full, its top stapled shut.
“Our specialty sandwich,” the clerk said with another smile, this one suggesting it was an inside joke. “With our compliments.”
Delgado did not return the smile. Without a word, he simply placed the brown sack in his backpack and again slung the backpack over his shoulder.
The pudgy girl delivered his double espresso. Delgado took it, put four single dollar bills on the counter and one in the tip jar, then turned and walked toward the back of the café. In the middle of the room, he came upon an attractive olive-skinned brunette. She sat alone at a round table with her laptop and a coffee in a stoneware mug. She glanced up and smiled, her eyes catching his.
Delgado looked at her, then slowed his steps, as if he was going to stop. After a moment, he smiled back at her and picked up his pace, continuing toward the back of the room.
She cocked her head as she watched him walk away. Then she shrugged and returned her attention to her laptop screen—blissfully unaware of how close she’d just come to having her life turned tragically upside down.
Delgado put the backpack on the floor
beside the chair in front of the far left computer. It was the computer nearest the wall and had a courtesy panel dividing it from the other monitors, affording the most privacy. He turned the monitor so its flat screen was completely out of sight of anyone else. Then he turned his chair so that he had a clear view of the front door.
He pulled out his cellular telephone and placed it beside the computer keyboard. He put his sunglasses there, too.
Then he reached into a pocket of his cut-off camo shorts and pulled out a computer memory device that was half the size of a stick of gum. The USB flash drive held a single file that was a computer program. The program could create a mirror image of the contents of a computer—everything from applications to data files—to use on any other similar computer. It was akin to carrying one’s computer around in the palm of one’s hand.
Delgado had set up the program on his flash drive to mirror a laptop that he kept locked in a safe at his converted-warehouse loft.
He also had the flash drive tethered with a plastic zip tie to a high-intensity butane cigar lighter, of the type advertised as “NASA Space Age Technology Windproof to 100 MPH!” If necessary, he could torch the chip into a molten—and unreadable—mass in seconds.
He inserted the flash drive into one of the two USB slots on the side of the flat-screen monitor, then hit the CONTROL, ALT, and DELETE keys all at once. That briefly shut down the computer, and its screen went black. Then he held the CONTROL and Z keys simultaneously as the computer restarted so it would load the program from the flash drive.
After a moment, the LCD screen lit up. He was looking at the same desktop image and icons that were on the laptop locked away in his loft safe.
The Traffickers Page 15
