The Traffickers

THREE

Reading Terminal Market Center City, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 7:45 A.M.

In a crush of rush-hour commuters, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado stepped off the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s R1 “Airport Line” railcar at the Market East Station. He followed a half-dozen of the commuters as they one by one passed through the Eleventh Street exit’s revolving door. On the sidewalk, El Gato pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, covering his head against the rain that was starting. Two women in business attire and sharing an umbrella walked past, and he trailed them to Filbert Street, then into the Reading Terminal Market.

El Gato had boarded the SEPTA regional railroad at the Thirtieth Street Station, which was about a mile to the west, just across the Schuylkill River. And it had been into that dark river, from the tree-lined eastern shore under the Thirty-fourth Street bridge, that thirty minutes earlier he’d unceremoniously dumped the headless body of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez.

In the back of the rusty white Plymouth minivan, he had put her remains into a fifty-gallon black plastic lawn care bag and tied to the outside, around her ankles, a pair of twenty-five-pound workout dumbbells. Then he had poked a few holes in the bag to vent any trapped air. Once in the water, the bag had floated half-submerged with the river current for less than a minute, air bubbling out the vent holes. Then, when the bag had sufficiently filled with water, it had slipped toward the river bottom, a final series of bubbles popping on the surface.

El Gato then had rinsed off the blood from his hands with river water and thrown his bloody black clothing into the brush, behind a cardboard box long ago vacated by a homeless person. He’d driven the half-mile to the Thirtieth Street Station, and there carried a backpack into the men’s room. After cleaning up at a sink, he’d gone into a toilet stall. He had removed his gun from the backpack, run its sling over his right shoulder, then pulled on a clean hoodie sweatshirt and, over that, a cheap navy blue vinyl raincoat. Finally, he rolled up a Philadelphia Eagles ball cap and slipped it into his pants waistband at the small of his back.

The polymer-and-alloy weapon was a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale submachine gun, Model P90, capable of firing nine hundred 5.7-? 28-mm rounds per minute, though its magazine held only fifty rounds. It was of a bullpup design, the action and magazine behind the trigger allowing for a shorter weapon with a barrel of equal length and accuracy as that of a longer gun. At just under twenty inches long, the P90’s futuristic styling resembled something right out of a science-fiction movie.

He’d taken the gun off the hands, quite literally, so to speak, of a former business associate in Texas, who had acquired it in Nuevo Laredo from a low-level member of the Zetas, the paramilitary enforcement arm of the narco-trafficking Gulf cartel. Despite the P90 having been a prized possession, the former associate had had no further need of it. El Gato, in a crack house in South Dallas, agreed to the associate’s offer of the weapon as collateral against the unpaid debt he owed El Gato for a kilogram brick of sticky black tar heroin. Then El Gato pulled his pistol and shot the associate dead. Or, more accurately, shot up the associate. First with the nine-millimeter pistol, then with the P90. The burst of forty rounds was meant to send a message to others who might consider shorting El Gato.

After he followed the businesswomen into the Reading Terminal Market, the heavy metal door slammed shut behind him.

Juan Paulo Delgado reached inside his raincoat and pulled up on the right side of his sweatshirt. He readied the P90 while keeping it concealed under the raincoat.

Tricia Hungerford Wynne-an attractive fair-skinned blonde of twenty-two years who stood a slender and athletic five-foot-ten-waited patiently in Reading Terminal Market. Tricia, whose family could trace their lineage back to Dr. Thomas Wynne, William Penn’s personal physician and one of Philadelphia’s settlers, was a Swarthmore College senior about to graduate early with a degree in education.

As a teacher-in-training at West Catholic High School, she had already begun what she considered a life of influencing future generations. And it was for that noble cause that she stood on line five back at the busy glass display counter of Beiler’s Bakery. Beiler’s sold homemade Amish delicacies only on Wednesdays through Saturdays (no later than five-thirty each day, three o’clock on Saturday), and she’d come to pick up the shoofly pie she’d ordered. Tricia taught a cultural diversity class for West Catholic freshmen, and today’s emphasis was on the peaceful Amish of Lancaster County.

I should bring some scrapple, too, she thought, grinning mischievously.

Just to watch the boys turn green as they read aloud all the parts of a pig listed in the ingredients.

The Reading Terminal Market had opened in 1893 as a farmers’ market. The massive riveted steelwork of the onetime Reading Railroad train shed now housed nearly a hundred merchants. The shops and restaurants were laid out on a grid, boxed in by Twelfth Street to the west, Eleventh to the east, Arch on the north, and Filbert to the south.

Like every day Tricia could remember, the market was packed. Locals came regularly from their Center City offices; City Hall, with its statue of Willy Penn standing atop, was but blocks way. And tourists poured in from the nearby Marriott and Hilton Hotels and the Philadelphia Convention Center.

And for very good reason, Tricia thought.

She glanced around the market and marveled at the worldly mix it offered.

In addition to the dozen or so merchants representing the Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Reading Terminal Market had many others representing the four corners of the world. Up and down the aisles, hanging shingles advertised Little Thai Market, Kamal’s Middle Eastern Specialties, Hershel’s East Side Deli, Tokyo Sushi Bar. There were Greek souvlaki and gyros, French crepes, Italian hoagies, and the revered hometown favorite not to be forgotten, the Philly cheesesteak.

Then there was the market’s mascot, Philbert the Pig, a life-size bronze pig that doubled as a giant piggy bank. Tricia smiled at the thought of the money that visitors donated to it being used to teach children healthy eating habits.

Maybe next time I’ll just arrange for a class field trip here.

Because of the way that the line had bent in the aisle, Tricia now stood almost exactly in front of the counter for the Mercado-The Reading Market Market, she thought, amused at the translation. She eyed the exotic variety it offered. Everything from homemade Mexican cheeses to burritos to even a chicken mole.

Who knew a chicken dish could actually have chocolate in it?

Behind a short wall that was the kitchen food-prep line, she noticed a black male of about twenty. He wore a white T-shirt and apron. He had his black hair in thick ropelike dreadlocks, a hairnet ridiculously overstretched on them, and Tricia then realized that he was Jamaican.

A Jamaican working in a Mexican caf?.

Now, that’s really what you call a melting pot of worldly people.

He smiled at her, and she returned it as she reached over to a display. She picked up a jar and began to casually inspect it. It was salsa, which she knew to be a spicy sauce of chopped tomatoes, onions, jalape?o peppers, and more. The festive red lettering of the label read HOLA! BRAND HOT amp; TASTY TEX-MEX SALSA, A TASTE OF OL’ MEXICO VIA SAN ANTONE, TEXAS.

The line for Beiler’s moved forward, and she returned the jar to the display, once more smiling warmly. The thought of such a product-one having originated in a country so distinct and different-being readily available in the urban belly of a city like Philadelphia was wonderful. (Her warm feeling would have been somewhat tempered had she turned the jar and read the tiny print on the back of the label: HOLA! BRAND IS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF NESFOODS INTERNATIONAL, INC., PHILA., PENNA.) Tricia made brief eye contact with Kathleen Gingerich, who stood behind the counter at Beiler’s. The shy and sweet sixteen-year-old was of slight build and light features, and of course, being Amish, wore absolutely no makeup. She was dressed in the traditional Amish conservative clothing-a simple ankle-length tan cotton dress, white cotton blouse, and a tan cotton head cover, its spaghetti straps tied in a tiny bow beneath her chin.

When Kathleen’s light-brown eyes met Trish’s blue ones, her gentle face glowed.

Kathleen pointed to say that the shoofly pie was waiting there on the glass display in a white cardboard box. Tricia nodded, then reached into her purse, a purple Pravda knockoff she’d bought the previous weekend from a sidewalk vendor in New York City’s Chinatown. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill to have it ready when she got to the front of the line.

That’s so sweet of her.

If there’s any place in Philly that better exemplifies its motto of the City of Brotherly Love than this market, I just don’t know what it could be.

Tricia Wynne then heard one of the heavy metal doors to Filbert Street slam shut. It was fifty or so feet down the aisle, beyond Beiler’s. She looked there and saw two businesswomen. They turned and walked down a side aisle.

Then Tricia saw a young man in black jeans and boots and a navy blue raincoat standing at the door.

A Latino, Tricia noted approvingly.

She saw that the black hood of his sweatshirt was pulled over his head. It at first struck her as odd, but then she remembered the rain had just started and the chill it could cause when one entered an air-conditioned room.

The Latino began moving with a determined stride in her direction.

Then, behind her, Tricia heard a commotion at the food-prep counter of the Mercado.

She turned in time to see the Jamaican, now with a stricken expression, quickly moving out from behind the short wall. He went to a table in the corner of the Mercado and pulled out from under it a brown paper grocery bag, its top folded over and stapled shut.

He began carrying the bag toward the Latino. He forced a smile as he came closer to him, holding out the bag in his left hand.

The next moment, everything happened so fast that Tricia could not comprehend it all.

The right side of the Latino’s navy raincoat opened and out came what looked like some sort of firearm. It certainly had what looked like a barrel. Then the Jamaican threw the brown paper bag toward the Latino at the same time that he produced a small black semiautomatic pistol from the waistband behind his white apron.

She saw that the Jamaican held the pistol awkwardly, as if uncomfortable with it, and not in what one might call a traditional-or even natural-manner, which was to say with the grip of the pistol up and down, vertical. Instead, he held it sideways, the grip horizontal to the floor.

Then there came two series of deafening gunfire, the sound of which seemed to rattle around the heavy iron beams of the terminal. One series, from the Latino’s weapon, made a steady and pounding stream of braaaaaps; the other, from the pistol, of much slower and irregular bang-bang-bangs.

Tricia and those who’d been in line with her were on their knees, cowering, as the Latino strode past. He continued toward the Jamaican, who now lay on his right side on the concrete floor of the market with his pistol appearing empty. There were holes pierced in the upper part of his white apron, dark crimson stains spreading between them.

The brown paper bag had been shredded by bullets. Spread on the concrete near the Jamaican’s feet were its contents, what looked to Tricia to be two bricklike objects wrapped in butcher paper and a lot of small sugar packets, maybe thirty or forty, all scattered.

With an amazing speed and grace, the Latino effortlessly bent and grabbed the butcher-paper-wrapped objects, then, ignoring the sugar packets, moved to a heavy steel door-and was gone.

Then there immediately came a woman’s hysterical screams from behind the Beiler’s Bakery counter.

And it wasn’t until a woman beside Tricia wordlessly pointed to Tricia’s bloody upper left sleeve that she first felt the burning sensation in her arm.

After exiting the steel door onto Filbert, El Gato began walking purposefully in an effort to blend in with the morning crowd moving along the rain-slickened sidewalk.

As he went, he peeled off the navy blue vinyl raincoat, balled it up, then stuffed it in the trash receptacle at the corner of Filbert and Twelfth. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt from his head and put on the ball cap he’d tucked in his pants. Then, keeping his face down, he passed through the revolving door at the Market Street Station.

At the Thirtieth Street Station, El Gato disembarked the train and walked out to the lot where he’d left the white rusty Plymouth minivan. He drove it back to Hancock Street, then, exhausted, took his Tahoe home to Manayunk.

Police cars rocketed past him, headed toward Center City.