The Traffickers

TWO

2480 Arroyo Avenue, Dallas Wednesday, September 9, 7:56 P.M. Texas Standard Time

Juan Paulo Delgado stepped carefully as he went through the six-foot-tall wall of red-tip photinias that grew thickly beside the convenience store. He had his Beretta semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistol out, and slowly thumbed back its hammer.

He heard and smelled the grimy man before he saw him in the shadows.

The coyote was humming as he took one helluva piss on the bare dirt.

He’s dirty and he stinks!

El Gato pounced.

His right arm outstretched, he brought up his pistol to shoulder level and smoothly closed on his target. Just as the muzzle of the weapon touched the back of the man’s skull-and the man suddenly realized that he was not alone-El Gato squeezed the trigger.

The hollow-point copper-jacketed lead bullet made a neat entrance hole and mushroomed. It traveled through the soft gray matter, then made an exit wound that fractured so much bone it tore off the flesh of the man’s right cheek.

He immediately fell forward, making a soft splash as he landed in his own pool of urine. Blood drained from the head wounds, mixing with the pool.

Shit! Delgado thought, wiping at the blood spatter on his hands.

And I don’t want to have to dig around in that mess!

Then he saw light reflecting off something metallic in the man’s left hand.

The keys!

He grabbed them. Then he ran a finger through the right back pocket of the man’s blue jeans. He pulled out a wallet and stuck it in his left front pants pocket.

He kicked the man, checking for any sign of life.

The man’s body responded with an extraordinarily long final act of flatulence.

El Gato began stepping back to the wall of bushes. As he went though the bushes, he decocked the Beretta and slipped it back in his waistband. The barrel was still warm, almost uncomfortably so against the sensitive skin of his groin.

He looked around. No one seemed to be paying any attention to him or to the side of the convenience store.

Delgado walked up to the driver’s door of the Expedition. He motioned for El Cheque to roll down his window.

“What the hell was that about?” El Cheque said.

Delgado didn’t reply. He was pulling the dead man’s wallet from his pocket. He thumbed through it. He found a state of Texas driver’s license with the man’s picture on it. On the license was the name Salvador Zamora.

He handed it to El Cheque.

“That coyote won’t be needing this anymore. Hang on to it. We might be able to use it for a fake, if it’s not already a fake. Or sell it.”

El Cheque took it.

“Follow me to the house,” Delgado then said. “We can send someone for the Suburban later. Anyone at the house?”

“S?. Miguel.”

“Get on the phone and call him. Tell him to be ready to open the gate when he sees that van. Describe it to him, okay?”

El Cheque began, “Okay. But what-?”

El Gato was already on the way to the fuel pump island.

El Cheque put the Expedition in reverse. He backed up, then stopped and waited, watching Delgado return the pump handle to the pump then get in the driver’s seat of the van.

“Good evening, everyone!” Juan Paulo Delgado said cheerfully in Spanish as he sat in the driver’s seat of the white Dodge van and closed the door. The front passenger seat was unoccupied.

Hoping to project an air of comfortable confidence, he went on, “I am El Gato! And I’ll be taking you to the final stop.”

He pulled on his seat belt. Then he slipped the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine turned over very slowly, then finally rumbled to life.

He looked into the rearview mirror on the windshield. A sea of surprised and curious faces looked back at him. He counted eighteen heads. There were only two males, both older than maybe fifteen. The age range seemed to go from a couple of toddlers with their young mothers to one of the males who looked to be in his forties. The majority were in their teens and twenties.

And the old guy right behind me looks angry as hell.

They all also looked road-weary. The van reeked of human sweat and greasy fast food.

Juan Paulo Delgado turned on the charm.

“Se?or Zamora asked me to remind you that he would catch up at the next stop. He told you I would be helping, yes?” He didn’t wait for a reply. But he could tell they were not convinced. “Where we are going is only ten, maybe fifteen minutes away. Very close. You will see him soon. Meantime, I’ll start helping you get in touch with your families.”

Delgado smiled broadly into the mirror.

Mentioning family brought smiles to those younger faces.

So there’s no question they’re illegal-and tired from that long trip.

There’s also no question not everyone is convinced I’m their new friend.

But they’re also not trying to run.

Maybe because they are exhausted.

As he reached for the gearshift, he glanced at the instrument cluster. The needle of the fuel gauge showed full. The engine temperature needle was in the red but just starting to move back toward the green. The odometer read 218,990.

Not its first trip.

Hope it makes it to the other side of downtown.

He put the van in gear and drove away from the convenience store fuel pump island.

Juan Paulo Delgado, with Jorge Ernesto Aguilar following two car lengths back in the brown Ford Expedition, followed all the laws of the road as he drove the Dodge Ram passenger van. He did not go faster than the speed limit-as best he could tell, because the needle of the worn-out speedometer tended to bounce occasionally-and he faithfully used the blinker when changing lanes and making turns.

He knew that that was not a guarantee he would not get pulled over by the police. They could stop a vehicle for damn near anything if they wanted. But it was better than being careless and stupid by drawing their attention.

He pulled onto Stemmons Freeway and took it south, skirting the shiny tall buildings of downtown Dallas. He picked up Thornton Freeway eastbound. A mile later, he took the exit that went past Fair Park-or what he called Gringo Park. It had the nice open-air concert shell where the rock bands and country music singers performed, mostly on weekend nights. It also had the football stadium that every New Year’s featured the Cotton Bowl college championship game and every October, during the Texas State Fair, hosted the Texas-Oklahoma college rivalry game.

Delgado knew that all kinds of gringos gravitated to this part of town for those events. And then, when the events ended, promptly got the hell out of the rough neighborhood.

A half-mile later, he turned off Hatcher Street into the driveway of an older one-story house.

Across the street from the house was Juanita Craft Park. It was what Delgado thought of as a more representative park for those who lived in these parts. The football games played there used a soccer ball, not the pigskin kicked around in the Cotton Bowl. Spanish-language billboards advertised fast-food restaurants, Latino radio stations, various brands of booze. And Juanita Craft Park abutted a stream, one that was more of a rancid drainage ditch and flowed under the train track trestle two blocks south.

The one-story older house sat by itself well back from Hatcher Street. Its wooden siding had white paint that was chipped and peeling. It was surrounded by chain-link fencing that blocked any view of the backyard.

In the backyard were usually a half-dozen utility trailers loaded with lawn care equipment, as well as a detached wooden garage. Beyond the back fence, a thick tree line separated the house and its property from a children’s play-ground, on the far side of which was another line of trees and thick shrubbery, which grew along the train track.

All of which served to further isolate the house, though there were some houses far across the four lanes of Hatcher.

The headlights of the Dodge Ram van lit up the chain-link gate.

Out of the shadows there suddenly appeared a man.

Good man, Miguel. You’re here.

Now get the damned gate open.

Miguel Guilar physically looked a lot like Delgado. He wore black jeans, a dark T-shirt, and black athletic shoes. They had grown up together and graduated from North Dallas High School, which was across the freeway and a couple miles away. At almost ninety years old, the school had outgrown its name. Realistically, present-day North Dallas was the sprawl of suburbia much farther north.

Guilar pushed on the chain-link gate and it swung inward. Delgado eased the van through the gap and into the dark, unlit backyard. When he looked toward Guilar, he saw that Miguel held a black pump shotgun, its butt on his hip. Then Guilar stepped back into the shadows. El Cheque rolled the Expedition in behind the van, and Guilar closed the gate.

Except for one of the toddlers repeatedly saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” it was deafeningly quiet in the van. Delgado thought he could feel the tension, if not some terror.

“Welcome!” he said cheerfully in Spanish as he pulled the van to a stop and shut off the engine. “You have made it! Your journey is over! My associates will help you bring your things into the house. And then we can get you on your way.”

He opened the driver’s door and hopped to the ground.

Miguel Guilar was walking up to him with the gun. Delgado saw that it was his black Remington Model 1300 pump-action twelve-gauge. He knew that Guilar kept his “Defender” loaded with six rounds of double-ought buckshot.

Delgado said, “You have the zip ties?”

Guilar reached into the back pocket of his black jeans and pulled out the two-foot-long plastic strips that were generally used to quickly and securely bind damn near anything they would fit around. There were at least twenty in the bundle, held together with a rubber band. Delgado stripped two from the bundle and slipped them into his pants pocket.

“We separate the women from the men first, okay?” Delgado said in English as he pulled the Beretta from the waistband of his pants. “Just follow my lead.”

“Okay,” Guilar said, then walked with Delgado to the large sliding door on the other side of the van.

Guilar and Delgado were standing in front of the sliding door when Aguilar walked up to them, holding the TEC-9 that had been in the Expedition’s console with his Beretta.

No surprise that he would like that gun.

He likes looks.

Delgado said to him, “El Cheque, you take the females into the house.”

“S?” he replied. “One minute.”

He trotted to the back door of the house and opened it. The lights from inside backlit him. Then he trotted back to the van.

“Okay,” El Cheque said.

Delgado, keeping his Beretta along his right thigh, opened the sliding door with his left hand.

“Women and children first!” Delgado said in Spanish, his tone upbeat. “Come, come! Follow El Cheque. He will show you to the house.”

Delgado looked at the woman sitting at the end of the second-row bench seat nearest the door. She was at least forty, overweight, and wholly unattractive. Slowly, hesitantly, she slid to the edge of the seat and stepped to the ground. She pulled a dirt-smudged silver backpack out from under the seat.

That is all of her possessions, Delgado thought.

Amazing.

Then El Cheque gestured toward the open back door of the house.

The woman did not move. She looked in the van to the dark-haired girl of about eight who’d been sitting beside her. The woman waited until the girl exited the van and collected her small vinyl overnight bag. The girl walked to the woman and took her hand. And they stood there.

The angry man Delgado had seen in the rearview mirror was the last one on that bench seat. He started sliding across the seat toward the door.

“Alto! ” Delgado said forcefully, holding up his left hand palm outward.

The man stopped. He made an angry face.

“That is my family,” he said, gesturing toward the woman and child.

You poor bastard, Delgado thought, glancing at the woman.

Love is blind.

“Women and children first,” Delgado said again. He looked to the next row back, which held four teenage girls. “Come, ladies. You’re next.”

As they stepped off, Delgado caught El Cheque out of the corner of his eye. El Cheque was watching with growing interest as the teenage girls exited.

Taking your pick, are you?

Your pick of one?

Or of which one first?

Three of the four were about fifteen and somewhat attractive. The third was maybe eighteen and, Delgado thought, not exactly unattractive. But she was a bit pudgy, and had badly bleached streaks in her hair. There were tattoos on her arms. They were not gang symbols, as far as he could tell.

Delgado looked back inside the van. He decided he wouldn’t have trouble with the other male. He looked to be about seventeen, and sat on the last bench, up against the window. He naturally would be the last off. Sitting next to him was a very attractive girl wearing a pink lace blouse. She looked a little younger than the boy, maybe sixteen. By their body language, they appeared to be more than just seatmates.

He motioned for Aguilar to come over.

“When you get them in there, collect all their phones and whatever address books or papers they have. Strip them of everything, especially any weapons or anything that could be used as a weapon. If they’re difficult, use that TEC-9 if necessary. Then let me know when it’s done.”

Delgado waited until Aguilar had herded all the women into the house before he let the two males in the van even move.

They had of course protested. But Delgado quelled that by raising his pistol. He said in Spanish, “I can use this now, or you can do as I say-and find out if I let you live later. Right now, I don’t need either of you or this van.”

Then Delgado said, “What you’re going to do to stay alive is step out of the van one at a time.” He pointed the pistol at the teenage boy in back. “You first.”

The boy slowly worked his way from the back of the van to the open sliding door.

“Okay,” Delgado said, “now step out and lean against the van’s hood, hands on your neck.”

Delgado had had some experience with this series of motions. However, he’d been the one taking orders from the police.

Delgado then pulled one of the zip ties from his pocket. He looked at Miguel Guilar and said, “Get my back.”

Guilar nodded, and aimed the shotgun at the van, the muzzle pointing between the boy on the hood and the man inside.

Delgado then decocked his Beretta and put it in his waistband. He stepped over to the teenager and with his right hand grabbed the boy’s right wrist. He brought it down to the small of the boy’s back and held it there. Then he started to do the same with the left. But when he grabbed the teenager’s left wrist, the kid spun on him, striking Delgado in the cheekbone with his elbow.

“Motherfucker!” Delgado yelled in pain, and wrestled the teenager to the ground.

Guilar stepped in closer, swinging the muzzle of the shotgun toward the two, trying to get an aim that didn’t include Delgado.

Then he saw the man in the van start to move. Guilar quickly pointed the shotgun at him, and the man cowered back in his seat.

Guilar looked back down at Delgado.

He saw that Delgado now had the teenager on his belly, a knee on the back of his neck that forced his face into the grass. Delgado’s other knee pinned the teenager’s right arm against his back. With some effort, he got the boy’s wrists crossed. He pulled out the other zip tie from his pocket and looped it around the wrists. He threaded the tag end of the tie into the box end and pulled tight. The kid screamed as the plastic banding cut into his flesh.

Delgado stood-and kicked the kid in the face.

The teenager’s nose began bleeding profusely.

“Pendejo!” Delgado said, gently touching his injured cheek. He spat on the boy’s back. “Try that again and you’re dead!”

Delgado then turned to the man in the van. His eyes were wide, and he had his hands up, palms out, in surrender.

Delgado went to the mirror on the door of the van and tried to inspect his injury. In the dim light, he could not see anything obvious. But it hurt like hell.

He looked at the teenager, who was trying to sit up.

“I’m not through with you,” Delgado said.

The teenager glared back defiantly.

El Cheque then stuck his head out the back door of the house.

“Done!” he called to Delgado.

After the older male had been zip-tied without incident, Delgado looked at Guilar.

“Okay,” he said, “now put the van in the garage, then get some chain and locks off the lawn trailers and bring them inside.”

When Delgado approached the back door of the house, he held the two zip-tied males by the back of their shirt collars. He pushed them through the open doorway and into the kitchen.

The women and children were sitting in mismatched chairs, some old broken ones made of wood, but the majority white molded plastic.

The girl in the pink lace shirt saw the teenage boy’s bloodied face and began screaming. She ran to the boy.

She looked back at El Gato, her eyes wide with fear.

“Why did you do this?” she wailed.

“He is a very lucky boy,” Delgado said in Spanish. “He could be dead right now.”

Guilar came in with the chains and locks that normally were used to secure the lawn mowers and other tools to the trailers.

“Okay,” Delgado said in English, looking between Guilar and El Cheque, “you know what to do next.” He nodded at the teenage boy and the girl in the pink lace shirt. “I’ll handle these two.”