[ONE] Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:10 A.M.
After Matt Payne had gently lowered the screen of his notebook computer, closing it to put it in sleep mode, he’d gotten up from the desk and crossed the room to go into his bedroom. It had been a short trip.
“Small” didn’t begin to describe the apartment, which actually was the garret of a brownstone mansion, 150 years old and recently renovated. The first three floors had been converted to office space, the current occupant being the Delaware Cancer Society. The garret had been turned into an apartment-no more than a bedroom barely able to contain its king-size bed (and nothing more, the few lamps and shelves wall-mounted), a bath not large enough for a bathtub, a kitchen separated from the dining area by a sliding partition stuck half-open, and a living room from which a small area of historic Rittenhouse Square could be seen if one stood high on tiptoe and squinted through one of its two eighteen-inch-wide dormer windows.
Payne pulled on a pair of lightweight khakis, a black T-shirt, and then a short-sleeved striped cotton shirt that he left unbuttoned down the front and the shirttail untucked. He slipped his wallet and badge into the back pockets of his pants, and his cellular phone and two magazines of.45 ACP ammo in the front ones. His bare feet went into a well-worn pair of boater’s deck shoes. Then he pulled back the tail of his striped cotton shirt. He snugged his loaded Colt Officer’s Model semiautomatic pistol-six rounds in the mag, one in the chamber-inside the waistband of his khakis so that it rested comfortably on his right hip. He felt the cold of the stainless-steel pistol through his clothing.
That won’t last long.
There’ll be a sweaty spot there the second I step out of the air-conditioning.
He then took the stairs down to the third-floor landing, where he pushed the button to summon the elevator.
Getting off the elevator in the basement garage, he walked toward his rental car. It was a nondescript Ford midsize sedan that he had come to loathe for its utter blandness, the car’s only redeeming quality being that it was so nondescript, and so white, that no one tended to notice it, making it an unlikely candidate for key-scratched doors and other such abuse afforded nicer cars in the city. He wasn’t sure if the New York State license plates were a plus or a minus. But he had decided that the best thing about the rental car was that his insurance company was paying for it while they decided what to do with-which meant how much they were going to cough up to fix or replace-his shot-up Porsche.
Payne looked somewhat wistfully at the empty parking spot that normally held his 911. He really missed the car-it was a helluva lot of fun driving it hard on Bucks County’s two-lane country roads. Yet even if he had it now, he sure as hell would not use it, as where he was going was not the place for a nearly new sports car of any kind. While Rittenhouse Square had some of the oldest and most expensive real estate in Philadelphia, if not all of Pennsylvania, Frankford Avenue-though only miles away-cut through some rough neighborhoods that were a world removed.
Matt pulled out of the garage, cursing the sloppy feel of the Ford’s front-wheel drive as he drove to Eighteenth Street, deciding at the last moment to take Eighteenth and not Broad Street north, the latter of which would have submitted him to the circle jerk of traffic that was around City Hall. He’d long ago decided it was best to avoid that, even at this very early hour.
His mind wandered as he drove north on Eighteenth through the heart of Center City. Force of habit almost had him turn right on Race Street, his usual route when driving from Rittenhouse Square to the Roundhouse-the decades-old Philadelphia Police Headquarters, at Eighth and Race, which was built in a circle design and was said not to have a single straight wall, including in the elevators.
Payne stopped himself from turning just as he’d flipped the flimsy turn-signal stalk-If it wasn’t for me noticing that, I’d have automatically made the turn, and I really don’t feel like seeing the Roundhouse right now in my frame of mind-then jerked the wheel back left to stay in his northbound lane. This act earned him the wave of the driver in the Chevy sedan behind him-the “wave” consisting of but a single digit and complemented with a burst of horn.
Chalk another one up to Ford.
And maybe score one for the New York tags.
That guy probably thinks I’m just a poor schmuck lost in his rental car.
If I’d been in the Porsche, he’d have ridden my bumper and his horn forever.
Two blocks later, he turned east on Vine Street and followed it to Broad, then hung a left on Broad. A few blocks later, crossing Spring Garden, he glanced to the right at Lodge No. 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police-the cops’ labor union-and wasn’t surprised to see the building dark and the parking lot empty.
Farther north on Broad, however, he was surprised to see that another building was being more or less renovated-residents trying against the odds to seed some good in another neighborhood that long had been and, if history was any indicator, probably would remain blighted.
The decay of the city depressed him, and that caused him to think about the reason why he lived in Philly anyway.
Matt Payne, who had grown up in the wealthy comfort of Wallingford, outside Philadelphia proper, lived in Philly because he had to: It forever had been a rule that in order to apply to be a member of the Philadelphia Police Department you had to show proof that you had been a legal resident of the City of Philadelphia for at least one year prior.
But recently that fifty-year-old rule had been changed somewhat. And there were at least a couple very good reasons for that, not the least of the which was that the Thin Blue Line was getting thinner and thinner in Philly. The city needed not only to recruit more cops-and, it went without saying, more good cops, “good” clearly meaning candidates who were best qualified-but needed to actually hire those recruited and then retain them after their probationary period. Preferably for twenty or more years, until retirement.
When cops did quit the force, the City of Philadelphia Office of Human Resources approached them with a one-page form, “No. HR-106-B, Questionnaire, Upon Separation of Civil Service Employee,” the ultimate purpose of which was to learn of any possible problems that existed and, it was hoped, could be corrected. While it certainly was too late to stop the man or woman from quitting, the information from the completed form might help fix what had caused their decision to leave the force in the first place.
Or, at least, so went the logic of the HR midlevel bureaucrat who had come up with the idea of the form, which had come to be known as the Don’t Let the Doorknob Hit You in the Ass Exit Interview. It was arguable if the form had effected any genuinely helpful changes in policy, or if it just created some paper-pushing, number-crunching bureaucrat-or bureaucrats, plural-with job security.
Matt had heard time and again that it cost the city significant money to train the new cops. Particularly during the recruits’ time in the academy, where it still managed to surprise even the most hardened of the veteran instructors how many recruits only six months prior had not, for example, ever had a driver’s license, or had not handled a firearm-or both. Thus, the particular recruits had to be taught the basics of driving an automobile and firing a pistol before moving on to more refined skills required of a Philadelphia Police Officer in the execution of his or her duties when using a vehicle or a loaded weapon.
Maybe even, Matt thought with a grin, when using a car and gun at the same time.
Matt also had heard that more than a few of those who either had quit or had turned down offers to join the force, when polled for their reason or reasons why, had said that chief among them was having to live-and try to raise a family-in, as one wrote, “the very crime-infested cesspool of a city” they would have been sworn to protect.
That sort of description was hard to hear, particularly for one who loved Philadelphia as much as Matt did. But hearing the truth often was hard, and Matt knew that the crime-infested cesspool was not limited to the ghettos. There was plenty of crime to go around. People were being robbed and raped and stabbed from South Philly to Far Northeast, even in Center City.
Bad guys are equal-opportunity offenders.
And so the city officials in their sage way found it within themselves to change that requirement for joining the police department-yet, in their usual half-assed manner, went only so far as to waive the one-year prior-residence requirement, allowing the applicant a six-month period after being hired to become a resident.
So every cop still has to reside in the city.
And I’ve never understood that.
A lot of cities allow you to live elsewhere than in the actual city you serve, say within a half hour of your assignment.
That forty-grand salary a Philly police officer recruit gets could stretch further in the suburbs.
Then again, a lot of cities like Philly wanted their cops close and handy to their crime-infested cesspool…
Matt’s mind, as he continued northbound on Broad, wandered back to his conversation with Chad Nesbitt.
Hell, there’re a lot of things I don’t understand.
Starting with what’s going on now with Chad?
And it was Skipper-J. Warren Olde-who jumped into that pool at the Philly Inn. One helluva cannonball.
Now, there’s a real dipshit. Always had some con going, thinking he was more clever than he really was, and sometimes getting bit in the ass because of it.
Not a bad guy, and could be funny, especially drunk, which lucky for him was often.
And he’d really been boozing it up at the motel when he jumped off the roof.
Or, maybe, when he fell.
But his biggest problem was that he couldn’t stick with anything. First they blamed it on his trust fund taking away any motivation. Then they found out he had some slight mental imbalance that pills would fix-if he just took the damned meds and stopped self-medicating with booze and whatever else.
And Chad, for whatever reason, maybe because they were the hotshots on the academy squash team, was always bailing him out.
Always.
Like after that time Skipper drove into the reservoir with that really nice Audi-and that gorgeous Becca Benjamin.
Dad said he’d heard Skipper’s lawyer say that it’d cost a small fortune to make that go away.
An absolutely gorgeous girl.
Still hurts to remember the day I heard they were dating…
Matthew Mark Payne had known Rebecca Stockton Benjamin longer than J. Warren Olde had, though certainly not as intimately. The Paynes and Benjamins had worshipped at the same small Episcopal Church in Wallingford. Its sanctuary physically was more chapel-like than church-size, and its parishioners numbered no more than five hundred. Thus, while growing up, Matt and Becca had seen each other practically every Sunday. They often were in the same youth group meetings, retreats, camps, and the like. Matt had always liked the spunky, outgoing girl-few didn’t-and even thought that there had been some sort of mutual interest.
A crush?
Then, when Skipper took up with the blossoming sixteen-year-old, Matt had been really pissed. Especially when he saw the direction Skipper was taking her… and she was blindly following.
At Cecil Moore Avenue, Matt hung a right, skirting Temple University, then about a mile later he picked up Frankford and followed it north another mile or so-until he saw the flashing emergency lights.
Jesus! Look at all the fire trucks.
Even a HazMat unit.
To the side of that heavy-duty red Ford truck, a fireman was using a fire hose to wash down two men wearing bright orange HazMat “moonwalker” bodysuits, rubber boots, and full-face hoods. Another was respooling smaller HazMat hoses onto the roof of the truck’s equipment box.
What HazMats are at a motel?
And judging by all the cruisers, there can’t be a cop left at the Roundhouse.
His pulse quickened at the sight.
Is my heart beating faster because I want to rush in?
Or because it wants me to run away as fast as my feckless rental Ford can go?
A pair of police cruisers, their roof light bars flashing, was parked at an angle across the northbound lanes of Frankford just south of the Philly Inn. A cop stood in the street beside them directing traffic to detour onto a side street.
Payne looked ahead and saw the neon sign for the All-Nite Diner, then the diner itself and the crowd gathered in front of it. He hit his turn signal to go into the diner parking lot, and when the cop saw it blinking, he motioned approval for the nondescript Ford sedan to take its turn.
[TWO] 1344 W. Susquehanna Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:35 A.M.
Paco “El Nariz” Esteban, a heavyset, five-foot-two twenty-seven-year-old with coffee-colored skin and a flat face whose most prominent feature was a fat nose twice as wide as it was long, stood in the middle of the brightly lit, newly renovated laundromat. He had his stubby fingers splayed on his ample hips as he surveyed his midnight-to-eight work crew feeding motel bedsheets and towels to the machines.
Built into one long white wall were twenty stainless-steel commercial-quality washing machines. Another interior wall held a line of twenty-five commercial-quality clothes dryers. Waist-high four-foot-square thick-wire baskets on heavy-duty casters either were waiting in front of a washer or dryer, or were full and being wheeled by Latina women in jeans and T-shirts from the wall of dryers to a long tan linoleum counter at the back of the room. There, an assembly line of more Latinas folded and stacked freshly laundered sheets and towels before sliding them down the tan counter to be sorted and packed for transport back to the various motels. The large windows and front door to the street were papered over, and milky paint-splattered plastic sheeting sealed off a side room that was still under construction.
Paco “The Nose” Esteban soaked up the atmosphere of the laundry at this early hour-the soft conversations in Spanish of the workers, the Latin music station playing on a clock radio in the back corner, the hum of washers and dryers. It created an almost peaceful sound, the kind of rhythm that came when good people were accomplishing honest work.
El Nariz took a quiet pride in his crews-he also had ones working as housekeepers at the motels-and what he thought of as his role as their mentor and protector-indeed, their paterfamilias, as he could trace his relationship by blood to a majority of his workers.
Like El Nariz himself, those in his handpicked crews were simple hardwork ing people. Almost all had fled the raw-dirt tin-shack squalor of the slums of Mexico City.
El Nariz-whose own formal education would be described as the School of Hard Knocks in a place like South Philly, where he now lived-had no idea about official census numbers. Moreover, he did not give a rat’s ass about them. He simply understood that what he had now was a helluva lot better than what he’d lived in in Mexico.
Had he even the slightest interest, however, Paco Esteban easily could have learned that Philadelphia, founded October 27, 1682, was the largest city in Pennsylvania. That in its 135 square miles the population numbered-officially, not including those such as El Nariz and his illegal immigrant crews, who wished to remain under the radar and therefore went uncounted-nearly 1.5 million, or roughly more than 11,000 people in every square mile, with about one in four in poverty. That Philadelphia was the fifth-largest city in the United States. And that its urban area, with some 5.3 million people, was the U.S.’s fourth largest.
Also with a cursory search, Paco Esteban could have as easily learned that Mexico City had nearly six times as many people (8.8 million) as Philly within an area only a little more than four times as large (573 square miles), or 15,400 people per square mile. And that Mexico City’s metro area swelled with nearly 20 million people-40 percent of whom lived in poverty with no better than a snowball’s chance in hell (or Mexico) of ever enjoying a finer quality of life.
But Paco Esteban didn’t need numbers to tell him what he already damn well knew: that life here, while not perfect, was far better than in Mexico. As it was of course for everyone in his crews. They had come to America via various routes-not a damn one of them legal-most planned and financed by El Nariz himself, as had been done for him seven years earlier.
Esteban had been twenty-two years old when he’d hopped across the U.S. border-literally, as his smuggler had led his group of four Mexican nationals to the flimsy rusty fencing that separated the two countries and showed them how to boost one another over it into Nogales, Arizona. The smuggler had announced that his amigo-like him, another “coyote,” so named because of their wily, evasive traits-waited on the other side to take them to a nearby drop house.
At the small four-bedroom ramshackle house, where coyotes armed with shotguns and pistols guarded doors leading to the outside, they had joined dozens of other illegal immigrants. These were almost all men, but some women and children, too. The majority were dark-skinned ones Esteban recognized as being from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, but there also were ones with much lighter skin who appeared to be European, Middle Eastern, and, clearly, because of their eyes, Asian, all keeping clustered to their own kind and very quiet.
While everyone so far had successfully evaded arrest by the various U.S. agencies policing the border-that alone, El Nariz quickly came to understand, was a significant accomplishment-they still were in danger. He saw that except for mostly moving during the night, not much effort was given to discreetly carrying out the smuggling; this was simply a numbers game to the coyotes, and the coyotes even warned them point-blank that not everyone was going to make it, so they damn well better give it their best shot.
Surveying the groups in the house, El Nariz had comforted himself with the thought: You don’t have to be the fastest-just not the slowest.
Cellular telephones-ones the smuggled immigrants had brought or ones provided by the drop house for an added fee-were being used by the immigrants to call their benefactors in the United States to wire payments of $1,500 to $2,100 via Western Union to the smugglers so that the immigrants could move on to the next leg of their journey.
Western Union promised, for a fee of about a hundred bucks, that anyone could “Send money in minutes by telephone, online, or from one of our 320,000 Western Union Agent locations worldwide! We accept cash, credit, and debit cards!”
Depending on their funds and desire to do so, the journey’s next leg could mean being taken in a car or a bus-or packed miserably in the back of an eighteen-wheeler trailer-on to California, New Mexico, Texas, or even far across the country.
Paco El Nariz Esteban had made his way, under a tire-topped tarp in the back of a Ford pickup with SMITTY’S ROADSIDE SERVICE, SERVING SOUTHERN ARIZONA SINCE 1979 painted on its doors, up Interstate Highway 19 the forty-odd miles to Tucson, Arizona. There he’d joined his uncle, himself a Mexican national illegally in the United States, and who’d floated El Nariz his smuggler’s fee of $1,700.
El Nariz began working at construction jobs. It was brutal, menial work in the Arizona sun, but in six months he’d scrimped together four grand, more than enough to repay his uncle. El Nariz then made contact again with his smugglers, and used the rest of his savings to bring up his wife from the Mexico City slums and, with a small loan from the uncle to cover the difference, his wife’s brother.
Not two weeks later, they were all celebrating the arrival of El Nariz’s wife and brother-in-law. And not quite nine months later, the reunion that El Nariz and his wife had enjoyed that night found them, courtesy of the Primeros Pasos Clinic at Saint John’s Hospital of Tucson, the parents of a newborn son.
And immediately upon his birth on American soil, Ricardo Alvarado Esteban, in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution-to wit: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside-had become a legal citizen of the United States of America.
When the proud papa, now twenty-three years old, was presented with the “First Steps” clinic’s bill for services rendered to Se?ora Esteban-said bill having been translated to Spanish for him by the bilingual aide from the hospital’s financial office-he could not begin to understand such an enormous dollar figure, never mind try to figure out how to repay it. If it had taken six months to save $4,000, he figured that was looking at five-plus years’ savings just for this one bill.
El Nariz decided his next steps after Primeros Pasos were to pack up the family and move to another state.
He felt bad about not paying the bill. But his uncle-a carpenter’s helper whose wisdom came from being three years older and in America for four more-helped him rationalize it by saying El Nariz should feel even worse about the laws of the United States that had caused him to have to risk his life and that of his family by sneaking into America as a criminal, then for little money sneaking around to do the difficult work that the gringos seemed more than happy to hire him to do.
The uncle rationalized that if they as immigrants were treated better-treated as El Nariz’s son would be as an American citizen-then they, too, could be better paid and more able to repay such debts.
“It is really the fault of the norteamericanos and their unfair laws,” El Nariz’s uncle concluded simply. “Comprendo? ”
The uncle then reminded El Nariz of other family he had in Pennsylvania-ones who’d helped with the uncle’s coming to America-and they were in a place outside Philadelphia that was friendly to immigrants. It was called Nor ristown, and, as in Tucson, there was an established community of Mexican immigrants, but unlike in Tucson, they were more or less left alone by la migra, the various authorities enforcing the laws of inmigraci?n.
And there was plenty of work up there, including construction. Perhaps best, there wasn’t a desert sun to suffer under as he toiled.
In Pennsylvania, El Nariz started out doing day laborer jobs. Then, through a family referral, he’d found work renovating a hotel in Philadelphia’s Center City. He secured the job of swinging an iron-headed sledgehammer to bust out each room’s old bathroom tiling because he agreed to the pay. He later learned that it was next to nothing that the other laborers were being paid, but he did not complain-it was far more than the four dollars a day that the minimum wage in Mexico City had paid, which damn sure was nothing.
The demolition job in the city had caused him to find nearby housing for his family-whom he’d then sent for, wife and son arriving a month later by bus at the Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal in Center City-and that turned out to be a South Philly three-bedroom row house, one in disrepair on Sears Street, between the Mexican markets on Ninth and the Delaware River.
They shared the house with two other illegal immigrant families from Mexico, subletting the place-no signed lease, cash only-from a relative of one of the families. He was a punk, all of twenty-one years old. But he had been born in the United States and thus had the appropriate papers to satisfy the owner-a tough Vietnamese, an immigrant himself who had become a proud nationalized American and who’d moved out near his two shopping-strip restaurants in the upscale suburb of King of Prussia-in order to sign the original lease.
While the living conditions-particularly the crime-of Philly’s run-down neighborhoods were hardly postcard perfect, the Estebans found them no worse than the rough Tucson barrio in which they had lived. And they were, of course, a vast improvement over the hopeless impoverishment of the third-world slum that they had fled. Just having reliable potable running water and sanitary sewer systems was a gift from God. And here there was the availability of free public schooling and, as they had found at Saint John’s in Tucson, medical care at clinics and hospitals.
During the renovation job, the hotel had reopened in stages, and well before its laundry room was complete, thus requiring that the sheets and towels and tablecloths and anything else in need of laundering be taken off site. Paco Esteban was offered-and quickly took, having tired of the pain from swinging a bone-rattling sledge-the job of collecting the large laundry bins, then loading and off-loading them when the trucks came.
In the year that Esteban’s family had been in Philadelphia, his wife’s brother also had arrived at the Filbert Street bus terminal, and they had pooled their savings and paid for the passage of more of his wife’s family members-a male cousin in his late twenties who escorted his two teenage nieces-up from Mexico City. For various reasons, the first of the other families in the row house had moved out, then the second, and Esteban’s extended family filled their spaces.
The new arrivals found work, but, as El Nariz had experienced, it was spotty and sometimes dangerous, and, if it could get any worse, it wasn’t unusual to work for days-and then never to get paid.
To what authority could they complain and not have to explain their situation?
El Nariz believed that he could do better, especially now that he saw how many damn towels got dirty in one hotel in a single day. He knew he couldn’t personally handle such a large volume-not yet-but maybe he could do the towels and sheets that came from a smaller place.
He’d gotten the idea because one of the cousin’s nieces now worked as a housekeeper at a motel in Northeast Philly. And after learning from her how many sheets and towels the motel needed laundered on an average day, he’d worked up some numbers and put together a proposal. He then approached the head of the motel’s housekeepers, a plump, balding Puerto Rican woman in her forties who, most important, spoke both Spanish and English.
She agreed, after haggling for a handling fee in cash up front, to present El Nariz’s proposal to the motel manager, a white male of sixty who was so morbidly obese that his engorged gut had popped off two buttons on his greasy polyester shirt, and his striped polyester necktie hung only as far as the bottom of his rib cage, unable to cover his sweaty T-shirt exposed by the missing buttons.
El Nariz had had no real idea of what such a job ultimately could bring. But apparently it was more money than his proposal requested. The manager had asked El Nariz a few perfunctory questions, which were translated by the Puerto Rican head of housekeeping. The manager then had grunted, and after some moments declared, “Aw, why the hell not? Less for me to deal with, especially keeping the damn employee books.”
Esteban’s initial excitement was tempered by the fact that the manager had been slow to pay for the laundry services. But Esteban did not complain-he quietly had begun using the motel’s machines to clean the laundry of another motel that had accepted his proposal, this one more lucrative.
Apparently, though, the late-paying manager was nonetheless pleased with Esteban and his crew’s work, as he eventually did pay and, further, offered Esteban the laundry detail of another motel, one across the river in Camden, New Jersey, that he managed.
Not long after that, El Nariz had offers of more work than he could handle. His limitation wasn’t manpower. His stable of available workers continued to grow. And with more in the process of being brought up from Mexico City-including two who’d been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol near Laredo, Texas, and sent back south, only to get across the Rio Grande unnoticed on their next attempt-they soon filled additional South Philly houses, the rent paid of course in cash.
El Nariz’s limitation was, instead, infrastructure. The motel’s old machines, even if they weren’t breaking down, simply could not keep up with demand.
So, as Esteban found himself having to feed coins to the heavy-duty machines of a real laundromat, he came up with another idea. He again worked up a proposal, and not only had the laundromat manager accepted it-leasing the facility during after hours on a cash-only off-the-books basis-the manager, who Esteban learned also was the owner, offered him the same deal with some other laundromats that he had in Philadelphia.
El Nariz suddenly found that he had more machines than he could use in one location, and when ready to expand, he had others that would be closer to the various motels he serviced.
[THREE] All-Nite Diner 6980 Frankford Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:40 A.M.
Matt Payne worked his way through the crowd milling in the parking lot and along the sidewalk outside the diner. He noticed that they appeared to be those displaced from the motel, mostly a mix of black and Hispanic males, as well as a few Anglo families. Some wore night clothing, some had on street clothing, and all looked haggard.
These people really were rudely awakened.
Inside, he found the place packed with more of the same, and it took him a minute to find Chad Nesbitt. That was mostly because Chad was slumped down in a booth by one of the front windows and more or less hiding under a red Philadelphia Phillies National League Champions ball cap, the tip of its brim pulled down almost to his nose.
Chad Nesbitt looked very much like Matt Payne, only a little shorter and a little heavier. He wore faded blue jeans, athletic running shoes, and a gray T-shirt with big black letters spelling BRUUUUUCE! The shirt had been bought six years earlier at a Springsteen show. Matt knew because he’d bought one, too, and that made him think of that well-built, very high-maintenance blond Aimee Cullen wearing his-and damn little else-as she left his apartment one Saturday morning, promising to give it back. But their relationship hadn’t lasted long enough for that to happen.
When Matt reached the booth, Chad did not get up or look up. Instead, he stared out the window at the pulsing red and blue lights. Matt slid onto the red-vinyl bench seat opposite him. On the table in front of Chad, next to his cellular phone, was a cold plate of fried eggs and bacon and toast, all of it barely touched. He had his left hand wrapped around a cheap plastic coffee cup that was nearly empty.
Chad finally slowly turned to look at Matt, and Matt could see that he hadn’t shaved and that his eyes were sleep-deprived.
“Thanks for coming, pal,” Chad said in a flat, tired tone. “I wasn’t sure who to call first.”
Matt tried to lighten the mood. “Nice shirt. I miss mine, but I think losing it when Aimee left was worth the price just to see her go before she bankrupted me.”
Chad glanced down and shrugged. “First damn thing I grabbed in the dark-” He stopped when he looked across the street toward the Philly Inn.
Matt Payne glanced around the crowded noisy diner, and when he saw a waitress, a plump black woman in her forties snapping orders to a young Latino busboy, he waved and got her attention, then pointed at Chad’s plate and coffee, then pointed at himself. She curtly nodded her understanding of his order.
“Oh, Christ,” Chad exclaimed.
Matt looked to see what caught his attention.
At the motel, one of the Philly cops was walking to undo from a light pole one end of a length of yellow and black POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS crime-scene tape.
Behind the tape, next to a fire department hazardous materials unit, waited a flatbed unit from the Philadelphia Police Department Tow Squad, the doors of its white cab having the same scheme of the police cruisers, bold blue and gold stripes running diagonally up the door with a large blue-and-gold Philadelphia Police Department crest centered on the door. The wrecker’s light bar on its roof was flashing red and blue, as were the wigwag strobes at the front and back of the vehicle. Chained down on the flatbed was a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV, the nose of which showing burned paint, the windshield missing, and the front and rear right-side passenger doors cut completely free, revealing the interior of the vehicle.
“Ouch,” Matt said. “Besides being outrageously expensive, I’ve always thought that that Generalissimo Benz-it looks like something the dictator of some sub-Saharan country would drive-could not get any uglier. Yet it appears that it can.”
“That’s Becca’s,” Chad said.
“ ‘Becca’s’?” Matt parroted, his shocked tone evident. “Becca Benjamin?”
Chad nodded.
“What the hell’s it doing here, Chad? Stolen? What?”
Nesbitt shook his head but didn’t reply. He just watched as the tow truck pulled out of the motel parking lot and onto Frankford, then headed north.
He took a sip of his coffee, then put the cup on the table. “I don’t know where to begin, Matt. There’s a lot I just don’t know myself. Didn’t want to know.”
Matt looked at him and said, “Well, the beginning’s always a good start.”
Chad looked out the window and appeared to be considering that.
The plump waitress appeared with a steaming pot of coffee and a cup for Matt, then wordlessly filled both of their cups as she glanced out the window at the motel before moving on to the next booth.
“Okay,” Chad said, turning and looking at Matt. “You know Skipper.”
“Not really very well, but, yeah, enough to know he could be funny-”
Chad nodded.
Matt went on: “-and a real dipshit.”
Chad cringed.
“You know, Matt, I’ve known you all our lives and sometimes you can be a real asshole, too.” He paused. “Sorry. I’m just upset about this whole thing.”
“Well, you’ve been bailing out the bastard since we were at the academy. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ Ever hear that?”
Chad made a face of frustration.
“We were teammates, Matt. And I couldn’t say no to him; he’s just got that kind of personality. Endearing, you know? I should have, but didn’t. You may remember that he had a real tough time with his father, who cut him absolutely no slack, often unfairly. Anyway, I didn’t hear much from him after he put the Audi in the reservoir-”
“The Audi and Becca,” Matt interrupted.
“-and he took off for school in Texas,” Chad went on, nodding his agreement. “But a little more than a year ago, out of the blue, he called me at the office, said he’d be back in Philly that week, and wanted to get lunch. Said he had a business proposition.”
“Tell me you didn’t buy it.”
“No, I didn’t,” Chad said, somewhat smugly. Then he added, “Not what he wanted to start, anyway.”
“Which was?”
Chad Nesbitt looked cautiously around the diner and its patrons, then with a low voice said, “He wanted to supply me with migrant workers.”
“For what? Last I looked, you and Daffy had domestic help. And whatever yard work that needs doing gets done by the building management.”
The Nesbitts lived east of Matt’s Rittenhouse Square place, in Society Hill, at Number 9 Stockton Place, a triplex constructed behind the fa?ades of four of the twelve pre-Revolutionary brownstone buildings.
“No, Matt. Large numbers of laborers. For Nesfoods International. He thought we needed workers for harvesting the vegetables and fruits, and more workers for the processing lines at the plants. He said he could supply as many as we needed, at a price that was unbeatable.”
“And?”
“And I wanted to tell him he was speaking out of ignorance again. He’s the type who gets excited about something, decides it’s the absolute best thing since sliced bread-but then doesn’t think it through.”
Matt was nodding. “Yeah, I remember.”
“But I told him, instead, that I didn’t do that, that Nesfoods didn’t do that. The farms supply their own labor; we simply buy the product to process. And our processing plants, due to the various federal laws, are very careful in strictly hiring only those who were legal, with the proper papers. He said that that wasn’t a problem, that he had it set up. He’d been doing it for years in Texas, running crews building custom houses for his father’s company there, and now bringing them to do it here. I told him I wasn’t interested-my job is sales, expanding the company internationally-but made a few calls and gave Skipper the names of some of the managers of the farms we buy from.”
Nesfoods International had a few manufacturing facilities in the Philadelphia area, but many more Nesfoods establishments elsewhere in the United States-including one in San Antonio that made Tex-Mex salsa, a condiment far hotter in both taste and sales than ketchup-as well as outside the country.
The waitress approached with Matt’s breakfast of bacon and eggs and a fresh pot of coffee.
“Here you are, sweetie,” she said, sliding the food before him.
“Thank you,” Matt said, and moved his cup closer for her to refill it.
She did, topped Chad’s cup, placed the check upside down on the table midway between them, then said, “Let me know if you need anything else,” and left.
Payne picked up two strips of bacon, made them disappear in a few bites, then said: “And that was the first proposal he made?”
“Yeah. The next one was better. It had promise. It made sense. But I couldn’t get involved with anything that might embarrass Nesfoods, even as only an investor. So my lawyers vetted it, said that if it were set up properly in a Limited Liability Corporation, it’d pass the arm’s-length and smell tests and clear some other hurdles. And it required only a fairly small investment on my part. When it started to take off, I mean really generating serious income, I was both happy for him and not unhappy with myself. Not that I was going to get rich from it, but I felt good that Skipper was finally finding himself successful and that I was able to help him do it.”
“What was it?”
“Something he’d started with one location just off his school campus in Texas. ‘Sudsie’s’?”
He looked at Matt, who was polishing off his eggs, to see if that registered.
After chewing and swallowing, Matt said incredulously, “That sports bar with the laundry machines? ‘Get Sloshed With Us’?”
“Actually, for legal purposes it’s technically a laundromat that has been sexed-up with a sports bar-TVs, beer on tap, snacks. But you’re right. That’s the place. And the concept-the LLC had only two here to start-rang all the bells with hitting the target choice demographic of young adults eighteen to thirty-five. It proved to be an unbelievable cash cow.”
Matt raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He said, “Fancy buzzwords, Mr. Corporate Man. You always did talk in tongues, even in preschool.”
Chad shrugged. “I’m in sales. It comes with the territory. Anyway, then Skipper found a package of real estate for sale that had a half-dozen laundromats.” He glanced out the window. “It also had three motels.”
Matt looked out the window, then at Chad. “You own the Philly Inn?”
He nodded. “The LLC does.”
“What the hell are you doing with seedy motels?”
“Hey, don’t be so fast to judge. Ever hear of PEGI?” Chad said, pronouncing the acronym phonetically.
“ ‘Peggy’?” Matt repeated, then shook his head.
“Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative. Big money, both local bonds and fed matching funds. The LLC’s going to put up one hell of an upscale condominium when the Philly Inn’s gone. When it’s time, I’ll get you in on the predevelopment pricing.” He looked at all the emergency vehicles at the back of the inn. “Which now may be sooner than later.”
“So, what’s the problem, Chad?”
He shrugged. “It all just looks so bad. I just don’t know. Skipper called around nine last night, said he was going out of town-”
“So then it was Skipper driving Becca’s Mercedes?”
Chad shrugged again. “Maybe. But he said, ‘Becca and I,’ so she could’ve been with him. Anyway, he wanted to drop off a check, which was my quarterly payment on the LLC investment.”
“Guess ole Skipper hasn’t heard of the United States Postal Service. Or, for that matter, electronic bank transfers.”
“That’s not how Skipper is, Matt. He takes it personally; when he promises to give you something, he wants to hand it to you personally.”
Matt took a sip of coffee, then said, “My recollection is if he hands it to you. I seem to recall he has trouble with following through on things. You just admitted he doesn’t think things through.”
Chad made a face, then said, “True. But his intentions-”
“Intentions my ass. Come on, Chad. You’re covering for him. It’s what the shrinks call ‘enabling.’ ”
Chad sighed, sipped his coffee, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, Daffy put Penny in her crib and then went to read in bed. I clicked on the late-night news, waiting-and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, it was after one-there was some rerun of a late-night comedy on the TV-so I called his cell phone. He apologized-”
“He’s good at that,” Matt interrupted. “Lots of practice over many years.”
“Are you finished?”
Matt slowly said, “Enabler,” then made a grand gesture for him to continue.
“He apologized, said he was running late, but he’d be over ‘in ten’ with the check. He said it was still in the motel safe. I tried to tell him it was already late and could wait till this morning. But Skipper insisted he wanted it done before he-they-went out of town.”
Chad looked toward the motel office and added, “Who knows when I’ll get in there.”
“So I gather he didn’t show in ten minutes?”
“Or in four hours, when I woke up again, this time from a sore neck from the way I’d fallen asleep in my chair. Then I couldn’t sleep. So, half pissed and half worried, I decided to go see if he was maybe passed out in one of the rooms here. Figured I’d bang on his motel room door and wake him up. What’s good for the goose…”
“But you never found him?”
Chad shook his head, then touched his phone. “And I tried calling at least a half-dozen times.” He paused. “The cops wouldn’t let me near the place, so I came in here, tried to think of who to call-”
“And I won.”
“You’re a cop, Matt. You understand this better than I do, than anyone I know does.”
Matt Payne didn’t say anything.
Chad went on: “Two ambulances, sirens blaring, came out from the back of the motel right before I called you. For Christ’s sake, Matt, did you not see her vehicle?”
Matt suddenly had a mental image of what horror could have happened to the gorgeous Becca, and it was clear from the looks of the right side of the SUV that the rescue crew had had to use a powerful hydraulic Jaws of Life metal cutter to remove the B-pillar and the front and rear doors in order to rescue-or, if dead, to recover-whoever was inside the SUV.
Then Matt’s mind suddenly flashed a Technicolor image of another beautiful young woman who’d suddenly been horribly mutilated-Susan Reynolds, her head grotesquely opened by a.30-caliber carbine round in that diner parking lot, blood and brains blown everywhere.
Matt immediately felt himself get clammy and tasted bile in his throat.
Dammit, not that now!
Don’t lose it.
He took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and drained his coffee cup.
Then he looked out at the motel and all the police activity.
Behind the yellow Police Line tape, he saw a familiar cop, one in plain clothes and his usual well-worn blue blazer. Detective Anthony C. Harris was slight and wiry, not at all imposing, but was, Matt knew, one of the best homicide detectives, right up there with Jason Washington, who was the best of the East Coast’s best, from Maine to Miami.
Jesus, that’s not a good sign.
If Tony is working the job, something big is up.
He looked back at Chad and bluntly said, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll do it. Do whatever. But not for Skipper. For you. For Becca.”
“Matt, you can hate him-”
“Dammit, Chad, I don’t hate him,” Matt interrupted with more anger than he expected. He lowered his voice: “However, if he hurt Becca, that is subject to absolute immediate fucking change.” He sighed. “I’ll find out what I can.”
“That’s all I’m asking. Thank you, pal.”
Chad reached out for the check and slid it back to himself.
“I’ll get the tab. The LLC owns this diner, too.”
Matt just shook his head at that as he pulled out his cellular phone, scrolled down its list of phone numbers, and then hit the CALL button.
He looked back out the window as he put the phone to his ear and listened to the sound of ringing. He saw Homicide Detective Anthony C. Harris begin shuffling the pen and notepaper pad he held so that he could reach with his left hand and retrieve his cellular phone from its belt clip.
“Hey, Tony,” Matt said after a moment. “Matt Payne.”
Then: “Yeah, sorry to bother you. I know you’re more than ‘a little busy’ with a job. I’m at the diner next door.”
He saw Harris, still holding the phone to his ear, turn and scan the diner.
Matt went on: “Inside the diner. I can see you. Look, I might be able to give you some information on the scene.”
He listened, then said: “Sure. Of course. But can you answer me one quick question?”
Then: “I know. Did you get a positive ID on who was in the Mercedes?”
Matt saw that Chad was watching him closely for any sign.
Matt met his eyes but remained stone-faced as he said, “Thanks. I’ll be over. Tell ’em to pass me through, will you?”
Then: “Yeah, ‘should’ isn’t the same as ‘would,’ and for all I know rumor in the Roundhouse and around the FOP lodge is that I wimped out and quit a long time ago. See you in a moment.”
Then he hung up and waved for the waitress.
“Well?” Chad said.
Matt watched out the window as Tony Harris signaled for one of the officers standing at the crime-scene tape to come over to him. The cop did, at a half-trot.
The waitress appeared, and Matt told her, “I need a couple large black coffees to go, please.”
After she walked away, Matt looked at Chad and said, “You were right: It was her Mercedes, or at least one leased to Benjamin Securities. And-” He forced back the lump that appeared in his throat, and his tone turned colder. “And it was her driver’s license in the purse. So there’s no reason not to believe it was her in the vehicle. They’ll confirm it at the hospital. But he said it’s hard to tell right now-she got hit pretty badly.”
Matt saw that Chad was on the edge of tears.
[FOUR] 1344 W. Susquehanna Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:46 A.M.
Walking around the laundromat and surveying his workers, Paco Esteban considered himself a very lucky man indeed. Assembling his crews had not only gotten easier, the quality of his workers, being family, of course, had gotten better.
Yet he well knew that so many other immigrants were not so lucky. There were those who were devoutly grateful for a chance to better themselves, yet they just did not enjoy what El Nariz considered the opportunities that he and his extended family had.
And then there were the truly unlucky ones who were preyed on by other immigrants, some legal and some not, unbelievably mean bastards with evil intentions who shamelessly-without any conscious whatever-took obscene advantage of their own.
Treating them like animals, profiting from them, worse than the gringos, who could be bad enough.
Esteban had seen examples with his own eyes-occasionally he suffered the nightmares, the vivid flashbacks of the bloated sunbaked bodies in the desert-and had heard of so many other examples. The worst were the coyotes who simply stole the smuggling fees they were paid-leaving the males to wander and die in the desert, and raping the females, sometimes selling them into prostitution-never intending to fulfill that for which they’d agreed.
He found those particular bastards despicable beyond description and made a quiet oath that if he could-within reason, of course, as he could not jeopardize his family and all that he’d worked for-that he would save the needy from the evil ones.
And El Nariz had done just that. As he glanced around the room, his eyes fell on his most recent rescue, a teenage girl who now was working at the folding station.
It all had happened the previous Thursday afternoon, when El Nariz had been driving the minivan with a load of dirty laundry he’d just collected from the Liberty Motel in Northeast Philadelphia.
On Castor Avenue, the engine of the minivan had started to sputter. Despite the needle of the fuel gauge resting past the F, he knew that the tank was not full-it never was filled more than halfway, for fear the fuel would be stolen-but instead was bone damn dry.
He had seen Gas amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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 door 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.