The Traffickers

ONE

4606 Hatcher Street, Dallas Wednesday, September 9, 9:06 P.M. Texas Standard Time

There were only the women and children and teenagers now with Jorge Ernesto Aguilar and his TEC-9 in the kitchen of the old wooden house.

Almost all were either whimpering or outright sobbing. Each toddler, in nately understanding that something was terribly wrong with Momma, cried uncontrollably. The mothers made what limited efforts they could to try to soothe them. They could see that El Cheque was becoming more and more agitated by all the commotion.

Minutes earlier, Miguel Guilar, after grabbing the older male by the back of the shirt collar, had taken him and a length of medium-size chain and a lock back to the smallest of the house’s five bedrooms. Juan Paulo Delgado had done the same with the teenage boy, but had gone to the master bedroom, which he considered to be his room when in town. Both handcuffed men had protested loudly and made some effort to resist being moved. And both men had been quieted when struck on the side of the head with the black Beretta semiautomatic pistol.

And so began the women’s whimpering and sobbing and uncontrollable crying.

While it was the least of their immediate problems, the women could see that the house was squalid. It clearly had been a long time, easily years, since there had been any kind of upkeep-never mind preventative maintenance-performed on the sixty-year-old house. The same could be said for any house-cleaning. The dirty appliances in the kitchen had last been replaced when the fashionable color had been a dark avocado green. The single kitchen sink, chipped and rusty, was filled with filthy dishes and glasses. The countertop suffered the same misfortune as the floor-both had linoleum that had separated at the glued seams and both had places where the linoleum had been ripped away long ago, revealing the raw plywood beneath.

Dirt had actually piled up in the corner of the kitchen by the back door, where there was an industrial-size thirty-gallon plastic garbage can. The trash was overflowing.

The women had found that the bathrooms were no better. Worse, there was no running water. The toilet tank, which had no top, had to be filled manually from a heavy plastic ten-gallon water bottle.

And soon they would learn the same was true, if horribly worse in other ways, in the bedrooms.

In the master bedroom, Juan Paulo Delgado led the teenage boy to a back corner. The room was furnished with a somewhat new queen-size bed-it was Delgado’s bed, after all-a bedside table, and an older set of dresser drawers. A crudely cut sheet of plywood was nailed over the window.

Delgado kicked the boy’s feet out from under him. The teenager, unable to break his fall because his wrists were still zip-tied behind his back, yelled as he fell and struck the floor forcefully, smacking his head on the matted green shag carpeting. It stunned him to the point where he just lay there groaning softly.

Nearby, there was a black iron natural gas heater bolted to both the floor and the wall. Delgado began threading the chain around one of the heater’s iron feet, then took the two ends and made a single wrap around each of the teenager’s wrists. Then he took the small steel padlock and, removing all the slack in the chain so that the links squeezed the boy’s flesh, ran its hasp though the two loops of chain and snapped it shut.

He turned and walked over to the dresser, which had three rows of two drawers. He opened the bottom right one and was relieved that no one had touched his stuff. He removed a handheld digital voice recorder and a roll of duct tape.

He tossed the roll of tape over by the boy’s head.

He then walked over and put the recording device on the bedside table.

I’ll make two, Juan Paulo Delgado thought.

One with him making noise and one with his mouth taped shut.

Then Delgado went back out into the kitchen.

All eyes turned to him. He saw that the pretty girl in the tight jeans and pink shirt had fire in her eyes. Others’ eyes showed a mix of anger and fear. Clearly, everyone had heard the teenage boy’s yell and the sound of his fall, and then the quietness.

El Gato smiled at them.

They watched as he walked over to a kitchen cabinet beside the dirt-smudged faded-white Kenmore refrigerator, opened the cabinet, and took out a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila. He uncapped it and took a long swallow, then held out the bottle, waving it as an offering to the women. There were no takers. He shrugged and took another pull.

Miguel Guilar walked into the kitchen and wordlessly looked around the group for the next person to be chained in the bedroom. He shook his head out of annoyance and grabbed the nearest girl by her upper right arm. It was the pudgy eighteen-year-old with the streaks of bleached hair. She pulled back from him, but when Guilar used more force, and El Cheque motioned menacingly with the TEC-9, she reluctantly went with him.

Delgado walked over to the very attractive girl in the tight jeans and pink lace blouse. She narrowed her eyes at him.

He smiled, reached out with his index finger, and stroked the soft skin of her throat on up to her chin.

The fire in her eyes grew, and she made an angry face and slapped away his hand. Then the look on her face and the fire in her eyes changed to fear as she recoiled at the thought of his response.

El Gato laughed aloud.

“Come,” he said, holding out his hand for her to take. “Let us go show your boyfriend a thing or two.”

She stood frozen. He grabbed her by the upper left arm and jerked, herding her toward the hallway that led to the master bedroom. She shook free of his grip and walked ahead of him.

When they entered the master bedroom, the pretty girl in pink saw her boyfriend lying on the carpet at the far end of the room and ran to him. He was still somewhat groggy from hitting his head on the floor.

Delgado went to them, grabbed the boy by the shirtsleeves at his shoulders, pulled him into a seated position, and leaned him against the gas heater. Then he slapped him.

The girl whimpered.

The boy opened his eyes, dazed. But it was clear that he recognized the girl and, when he made a face, Delgado, too.

“Bueno,” Delgado said.

Then El Gato stood.

The eyes of the boy and girl followed him as he walked over to the small table between them and the bed, then picked up a small electronic device and pushed a button on it. A pinhead-size red light came on. He put the device back on the table and walked back over.

Then he bent over, grabbed the girl by the waist with both of his hands, lifted her completely off the floor, and threw her onto the bed.

The pretty girl in pink started screaming hysterically. The teenage boy began yelling. The girl kicked at El Gato and flailed with her arms, fighting off his advances with a great effort.

But El Gato only laughed as he tore off her clothing.

The great effort of a ninety-five-pound girl proved no match for the strength of a muscular man twice her size.

When the women in the kitchen heard the screaming from the boy and girl, their crying intensified.

After a moment, El Cheque sighed disgustedly.

“Just shut the fuck up!” he shouted.

They were quiet a moment. Then their sad noises began again.

El Cheque shook his head.

Miguel Guilar came back into the kitchen.

El Cheque walked over to him and without a word handed him the TEC-9. Then he walked back across the kitchen and grabbed two of the teenage girls he’d eyed as they got out of the van, pushing them toward the hallway.

He said to Guilar, “Your turn to keep watch, mi amigo.”

Five minutes later, the women in the kitchen heard a girl cry out from one of the smaller bedrooms. From the master bedroom, they could no longer hear the teenage boy’s terrified shouts of “Stop! No!” over and over.

Now only the muffled cries of the pretty girl could be heard.

“Someone! Anyone! Help me! No…”

After another twenty minutes, El Gato reappeared in the kitchen, wearing only his desert camouflage cutoff shorts. In his left hand he carried the recording device. His right hand had the roll of duct tape.

He looked absently at the two mothers and their toddlers who had not yet been locked up in one of the bedrooms. The women glared back at him.

Miguel Guilar was drinking from the bottle of tequila. He grinned at El Gato and held out the bottle. El Gato grinned back and took it.

Then El Cheque came into the kitchen and removed the last of the group.

Delgado looked at Guilar and held up the recording device. “Want to hear? It came out better than I thought. The boy shouting is the better of the two, I think.”

“I already did hear…”

Delgado shrugged and said, “Bueno.”

He looked around the kitchen.

“Where is the bag of stuff?”

Guilar pointed to the doorway that led to what originally had served as the dining room.

El Gato took another swig of tequila, then went through the doorway. Guilar followed.

The onetime dining room now contained a long folding table with a battered top and rusty steel legs. It had three of the white plastic stackable chairs around it.

Against one wall were gray plastic storage bins stacked five high. These contained the various paraphernalia-the mixing bowls, the digital scales, the empty packets, et cetera-for the manufacturing of Queso Azul. One bin also held at least a dozen brand-new prepaid cellular phones, all unused and still in their original clear plastic containers.

“There on the table,” Guilar said.

On the folding table was a black thirty-three-gallon plastic bag commonly used for the collection and disposal of lawn clippings.

Delgado went to the table and sat in one of the plastic chairs. As he reached for the top of the bag, he noticed that it had been put on top of an official-looking envelope. The return address of the envelope read: CITY OF DALLAS, WATER UTILITIES DEPARTMENT, CITY HHALL, 1500 MARILLA STREET, DALLAS, TX 75201. Across the envelope in big red lettering was printed: FINAL NOTICE!

No wonder the damned water’s turned off.

The idiots didn’t pay the bill.

The house was still listed under Delgado’s grandmother’s name. The utilities were under a phony name and were supposed to be paid in cash every month. In lieu of proving their creditworthiness, they’d had to put up a five-hundred-dollar deposit in order for the city to agree to begin service. But that had been a helluva lot better than giving a social security number or driver’s license number-genuine or stolen-that would then be part of the City of Dallas database and could somehow come back to bite them in the ass.

Delgado noted that the envelope also had a familiar stain across the words FINAL NOTICE! And there was some white powder residue.

He licked a finger, wiped at the residue, and touched it to his tongue.

Coke.

No wonder they forgot to pay the bill.

Too damned coked out…

Miguel saw what he was looking at and raised his eyebrows.

“Ramos was supposed to pay that,” he said.

Delgado shook his head, disgusted at the idiocy of the seventeen-year-old Ramos Manuel Chac?n.

And it’s probably the same stupidity that’s the reason we haven’t heard from him.

Los Zetas didn’t grab him.

He’s down there throwing coke at those gringo college girls to get in their pants.

“It needs to be paid, Miguel. We don’t want the city thinking this is now an abandoned property, and come around for a look. You take care of it tomorrow.”

“Si.”

Delgado grabbed the top of the big black bag and untied the overhand knot that held it closed. Inside he saw almost fifteen individual zipper-top clear plastic bag. In each of the bags was a cell phone or a small address book or a spiral notepad or a wallet-or a combination thereof. Each bag had a number written on it in black permanent marker ink along with a brief description. One, for example, had “#6 Fat girl, 18, w/striped hair.”

Delgado knew that if he went to the bedroom where the pudgy girl had been taken, somewhere on her body, probably on top of her hand, he would find “#6” written in black ink.

He dug around in the large bag until he found one labeled “#10 hot teen girl w/pink top.”

He removed it from the black bag and put it on the table. In the bag was a cellular telephone with a pink face. The back side had rhinestones hot-glued to it in the shape of a heart.

The phone was on, and he pressed keys until he was scrolling through its address book.

“Ahhh,” he then said, reading on the small screen: MADRE. “Bueno.”

He readied the digital recorder in his left hand, putting his index finger on the PLAY button. Then he pushed the green key on the cellular phone’s keypad.

Three rings later, he heard the cheerful voice of an older woman.

“Hola, Maria!” she said in Spanish. “How are you?”

Delgado barked back in Spanish: “We have your daughter!”

Then he held the digital recorder to the cell phone and played the audio recording. It was the one with both the boy and girl screaming.

He gave that to a count of five, pushed STOP on the digital recorder, and put the pink-faced phone back to his ear.

“Do as I say, and you get the girl back alive!”

He listened for a response. But he heard only silence, and then, in the background, a concerned young voice saying, “Madre? Madre?”

Delgado looked at Guilar and said, “Shit! I think she fainted!”

He pushed the red END button on the cellular phone.

Then he reached across the table and picked up the black ink marker. He wrote on the bag: “1. Called ‘Madre’ 9/9 9:50pm. Woman fainted?”

Then he stuck the phone back in the bag. And fished out another. And repeated the calling process.

This time, he speed-dialed the number on the menu linked to the listing that read HOME, and when the man answered, he began their exchange by playing the audio clip of just the girl screaming.

Delgado knew that it did not matter that the recording was of another girl. When parents heard a female’s voice screaming and were told that it was their child, they tended to believe exactly that. And not believing carried serious consequences. If the receiving telephone had caller ID, so much the better when Delgado called using the girl’s personal cell phone.

Then he barked in Spanish: “We have your loved one! Do as I say, and you will see her alive again!”

Delgado carefully explained that he wanted the two thousand dollars that was to be paid to the coyote. He said that it was to be sent to Edgar Cisneros at the Western Union, Mall of Mexico, Philadelphia.

Delgado had a fake Texas driver’s license with that name and his picture. He’d bought it for three hundred dollars. It had been made by the same counterfeiter who lived in a loft apartment near that expensive private school, Southern Methodist University. He sold to the sorority girls and other students there what the kids simply called “fakes.”

“If you do not do as I say, and especially if you contact the police,” Delgado said in an angry tone of voice, “your loved one will be dead this time tomorrow. When we get your money, she will be taken to Dallas and released.”

He put the recorder and the cell phone face-to-face and hit PLAY.

“Someone! Anyone! Help me! No…”

After a few seconds, he broke off the call.

Delgado looked at Miguel Guilar. Guilar smirked. He knew damn well that Delgado had no intention whatever of releasing the girls. They were all, or at least the more attractive ones, going to be moved to Philadelphia.

Miguel Guilar’s phone then buzzed once. He pulled it from the clip on his belt, then read the text message.

“Uh-oh!” Guilar said. “Look at this! And a Mexico City number.”

He held out the phone for Delgado to read it.

“What do you think that means?” Guilar said.

011-52-744-1000

ramos here… i borrow amigos fone… am in houston jail… u bail me out?… police want me 2 say i live on hatcher… y is that?

Juan Paulo Delgado’s eyes went to the envelope.

His stomach suddenly had a huge knot. He had to consciously squeeze his sphincter muscle-he thought he might have shit his pants.

Why? Because you didn’t pay the water bill, you fucking idiot!

And they obviously found it in your car, then bluffed you!

Right about then, El Cheque walked in, holding up his cell phone. He had a confused look.

“Ramos just sent me a text…”

Dammit!

Delgado bolted out of the chair and grabbed the black plastic bag.

“Throw everything important into the trucks!” he said.

“What? Why? And about them?” El Cheque said, gesturing in the general direction of the bedrooms.

Delgado nodded at the black plastic bag.

“This is all we need. We leave them. Let’s go.”

Holding the top of the black plastic bag, Delgado spun it to make a gooseneck, then secured it closed with another overhand knot. When he picked it up, he saw the envelope with FINAL NOTICE! “Fucking moron!”

From inside the black plastic bag, the pink phone with the heart of rhinestones began ringing.