W.E.B Griffin - The Traffickers

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.”

“S?.”

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.