The Traffickers

ONE

Mall de Mejico 1118 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 12:16 P.M.

The Mall of Mexico carried on in much the same South Philly tradition as that of the nearby historic Ninth Street Market. Dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, the storefronts and open-air vendors of the Ninth Street Market-roughly the area along Ninth that covered the five blocks between Washington Avenue and Christian Street-served the great masses of immigrants of its neighborhoods. At one time or another-and most often overlapping-there were merchants catering to the tastes of the city’s immigrant families from Italy and Ireland and Germany and Israel and Africa.

The flat-roofed one-story concrete-block building that housed the Mall of Mexico had originally been built for Unity Frankford Stores, one of Philly’s long-time grocery store chains. (And if one looked beyond the gaudy paint, the original signage was still there, painted over countless times.) Each of the Unity Frankford Stores had been individually owned, and got their goods wholesale from the Frankford Grocery Company warehouse at Griscom and Unity Streets.

Then along came the corporate giants, the Great Atlantic amp; Pacific Tea Company (the “A amp;P”) among them. These eventually squeezed out Philly’s Unity Frankford and another grocer, American Stores. American did eventually become Acme, and there was in fact an Acme down around the corner from Mall de Mejico, on Washington.

Unity Frankford, however, was long dead and buried, and a vibrant Latin American marketplace its latest incarnation there on Sixth at Washington.

The Mall of Mexico merchants were arranged on a grid, much like those in the Reading Terminal Market. They offered South Philly’s immigrants the foods and more of Mexico, of course, but also of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, even Cuba.

The mall’s front windows and doors overlooked a small asphalt parking lot. Its cinder-block walls were brightly painted in yellows and blues and reds. There was graffiti tagged at the rear. It had been spray-painted along the Sixth Street sidewalk by the beat-up pay telephone that was lag-bolted to the cinder-block wall. One large yellow section of that wall had a listing of mall merchants and the services that they offered. The lettering was done in black paint by what someone might kindly suggest was a shaky hand holding the brush.

Pacing the sidewalk along Sixth Street were thirty-odd Hispanic males of nearly all ages, starting around twelve and on up to sixty, the majority in their twenties. They were itinerant day laborers, many having just arrived in the city. They watched the passing traffic on Sixth, their interest piquing when a pickup or other work truck approached and slowed.

One or two of the laborers were selected by the others as their representative, mostly for the ability to speak English. The representatives went to the truck and spoke with the driver. After being told the type of work that needed to be done and negotiating a cash price, the representatives then consulted in Spanish with the other laborers. Workers were selected according to various criteria-for example, younger ones for hard labor requiring a strong back-and these workers then jumped in the back of the pickup.

And the rest went back to waiting for another truck to arrive.

On the sidewalk in front of the mall, an elderly Hispanic woman stood under the umbrella bolted to her food vendor cart. She was heavyset, and despite the shade of the umbrella was sweating in the heat of the September sun. The rubber-tired steamer cart was small, its diamond-patterned stainless steel battered. A handwritten menu taped to the front advertised tamales in pork, chicken, or cheese for one dollar each. A can of Coke or Sprite from the plastic cooler she used for a seat between sales also sold for a dollar.

As Juan Paulo Delgado drove into the parking lot in his Chevrolet Tahoe, the meat and corn smells of the tamales came into his vehicle through the open sunroof. He saw the elderly Hispanic woman pulling four aluminum-foiled wrapped tamales from her steamer. She handed them to two stout Hispanic women who appeared to be only a little younger than she was.

To Delgado, the scene had the same third-world feeling he’d found in so many other U.S. cities.

It’s like this just off Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana.

And in East L.A., East Dallas, Fort Worth’s Northside.

And now here.

It could be Calle Nueve at the Mercado Matamoros.

All that’s missing is the damn chickens and goats running wild.

Delgado still wore what he’d had on earlier-the sandals, camo cutoffs, black Sudsie’s T-shirt, and dark sunglasses. As he put the SUV in park and shut off the engine, his cellular telephone vibrated.

He looked at its screen. Omar Quintanilla had sent: 609-555-1904 JESUS WENT 2 TEMPLE… DEAL DONE… BUT HE GOT SHOT

“What?” Delgado said aloud.

He punched the keypad with his thumbs and sent the text: HOW BAD?

The phone vibrated, and the screen read: 609-555-1904 BULLET WENT IN ABOVE LEFT KNEE amp; OUT FRONT OF LEG…

Delgado replied: THAT ALL?

There was a long moment before the cellular vibrated. He read: 609-555-1904 THAT ALL?? HE WONT STOP YELLING!!!! BUT SI… THAT ALL… JUST STILL BLEEDING

Delgado exhaled audibly.

Bueno.

That could have been worse… especially if the bullet had hit bone. Or a big vein.

He had a mental image of the self-styled tough guy Jes?s Jim?nez.

The badass is being a crybaby.

Delgado thumbed: CALM DOWN… TELL EL GIGANTE HE WILL LIVE PUT CLEAN SOCK OVER HOLES amp; WRAP W/TAPE GET ANGEL 2 FIX HIM

Delgado then had a mental image of the frail-looking Angel Hernandez in his West Kensington “clinic.”

The gray-haired sixty-year-old had been confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-two years. He had been a medical technician working for an ambulance company. On his last call, he had been working on a car wreck victim in the back of an ambulance en route to University of Pennsylvania Hospital. The ambulance itself had been broadsided by a stolen Lincoln Town Car.

There had been a twelve-year-old African-American male at the wheel of the swiped Lincoln. He was fleeing at a high rate of speed from a Philadelphia Police Department squad car, its siren screaming and lights flashing. The investigators at the scene of the accident found it practically impossible to estimate accurately the Lincoln’s speed at impact. There had been no skid marks going into the intersection-the kid never braked.

The collision had been spectacular. The Lincoln opened up the box-shaped back of the ambulance. The car wreck victim inside had been ejected and thrown against the side of a building. He died instantly.

Angel Hernandez had not been ejected, but he had been trapped in the mangled metal of the wreckage. He had suffered a spinal cord injury, one that left him paralyzed from the waist down. The kid-who could barely see over the dashboard-split his head open like a ripe melon on the steering wheel. He died at the scene.

The ambulance company paid for Hernandez’s doctors and subsequent rehabilitation therapy. But he would never walk again, and as he could no longer perform his duties from a wheelchair, the company eventually let him go.

There were suits against anybody and everybody, including the cops for carelessness. The claim was that their hot pursuit of a juvenile had made a more or less harmless situation go from bad to worse. That lawsuit, of course, had done nothing but enrich Hernandez’s lawyers. They made off with most of the out-of-court settlement that the city had paid out to Hernandez.

All of which had left Hernandez with a bitter outlook, particularly toward the city and the cops-never mind that it had been the lawyers who’d made out like bandits.

Regardless, the end result was that Hernandez found himself trying to find a way to earn a living somehow. He did still have a fine skill set, even if he was stuck in a goddamn wheelchair.

And as there were plenty of brothers in Philly too quick to settle their disagreements with fists and knives and guns, and as hospitals crawled with cops looking for homeys showing up in the ER with some bullshit story about their wounds being accidentally self-inflicted, Angel Hernandez became the man for someone to get patched up on the QT.

Juan Paulo Delgado had Hernandez take care of his girls when there were problems with them, from a flu to the rare occasion some john got abusive. (El Gato ensured that the johns never made that mistake again-nor any others henceforth.) Getting prescription drugs, though very expensive, was no problem; someone was always willing to rob a pharmacy for the right price.

For that matter, everything about Hernandez was pricy. Delgado knew that it was going to cost him at least five hundred bucks for Angel’s services to mend Jes?s Jim?nez in his West Kensington living room that he’d converted to a makeshift clinic.

But he also knew that that was the price of doing business.

At least that fucking thief Skipper finally got what was coming to him.

Delgado’s phone vibrated just as West Kensington made him think about the van getting tigertailed.

He read the text: 609-555-1904 OK… WE GO 2 ANGEL NOW

Then he sent to Quintanilla: WHAT ABOUT MINIVAN?

Quintanilla replied: 609-555-1904 GONE… IT amp; CHEVY

What Chevy?

Delgado thumbed and sent: CHEVY?

Delgado sat staring at his cellular phone screen. And waited.

What the hell is he-

The phone vibrated, and he read: 609-555-1904 SORRY… WAS TAPING LEG JESUS JACKED A CHEVY… AFTER COP SHOT HIM

Delgado said, “Cop?”

He wrote: COP? U SURE? HOW U KNOW IT WAS A COP?

There was another long delay.

This time when Delgado finally got the reply, he decided the delay had been because Quintanilla had been trying to figure out what to say.

The text read: 609-555-1904 MAYBE CAUSE THATS WHAT JESUS SAID THE FUCKING COP YELLED AT HIM??

Shit.

Delgado thumbed and sent: OK… OK… LET ME KNOW IF ANYTHING ELSE COMES UP

After he hit SEND, he stared at the phone for a long moment.

What else can go wrong?

Then he thumbed a text and sent it to Jorge-El Cheque’s name was Jorge Ernesto Aguilar-in Dallas: STILL COMING 2NITE… ANY WORD ON THE KID?

El Cheque replied: 214-555-7636 NOTHING… GETTING CALLS FROM HIS STOPS ASKING WHEN HE COMES U THINK ZETAS?

Zetas! Shit! I hope not.

Maybe he just took off?

I thought he could be trusted.

He replied: NOT ZS PROBABLY NOTHING… C U 2NITE…

Delgado’s phone vibrated with El Cheque’s reply: 214-555-7636 OK… HOPEURRITE

Delgado then put the phone in his pocket, reached down and grabbed the tan backpack with the Nike logotype from the passenger-side floorboard, then got out of the Tahoe.

Inside the front door of the Mall of Mexico, Juan Paulo Delgado found that he had to step around two long lines of Latino men and women in order to get deeper in the building. He’d never seen it this busy.

The lines almost wound out the front doors. He started walking, following the lines to the right and down around the corner. He saw that they led to a yellow-and-black Western Union counter.

There were two teller windows there, and next to them a couple dozen yellow fiberglass bucket chairs bolted to an iron rail painted a glossy black. At least half of these were filled with more Latinos, people either waiting for a cell phone call to say that their money had been sent and they could join the queue to collect it, or those who had just sent or collected their funds.

As Delgado continued toward the back of the mall, he noticed that few of these people were making much effort to conceal from anyone the fact that they were handling wads of cash, in some cases hundreds of dollars each.

Might have to get someone to check this out.

Figure out what day and time the line’s the longest.

Why send all that remittance money south when it can go in El Gato’s pockets?

Delgado passed a vendor selling pay-as-you-go, no-long-term-contract cellular telephones featuring inexpensive calling rates to Central America. Then he reached the back of the mall. He stopped at a storefront with a wooden sign etched with TITO’S TORTILLA FABRICA.

He went inside the “factory,” then to the stand with the register in the right corner.

A teenage Latino perked up when he saw Delgado coming his way. He had a white fiberboard box imprinted with TITO’S TORTILLAS already on the stand when Delgado got there.

“Hola, El Gato,” the teenager said.

“Hola,” he replied as he pulled a bulging FedEx envelope from the outside pocket of the tan backpack.

“Gracias,” the teenager said as he took it.

Delgado nodded once and grabbed the box of corn tortillas.

As he walked purposefully back to the Tahoe, he scanned the mall for anyone who might have an interest in his unleavened pancakes, ones covering U.S. Federal Reserve notes.

He also made one last inspection of the lines for the Western Union.

Got to be an easy way to get a piece of that…

Then he got in the Tahoe, picked up I-95 south, and drove along the Delaware River the five or so miles to the Philadelphia International Airport.