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.
TWO
Terminal D Philadelphia International Airport Wednesday, September 9, 3:01 P.M.
“Yeah, Jason, I do understand that I’m really to keep a low profile and that this time Coughlin really means it,” Sergeant Matt Payne said into his cell phone. He was walking down the airport’s D/E Connector. “I will bring this Texas Ranger by the Roundhouse, and we will work out of Homicide. I got it.”
Due to construction work at Terminal D, which served United and Continental Airlines and others, Payne had had to park his rental Ford near Terminal E, which served Northwest and Southwest Airlines.
He left the car in one of the three parking spaces at Terminal E that were marked OFFICIAL POLICE USE ONLY, and put one of his business cards on the dash. He realized that the rental Ford easily could be ID’d as such-a simple running of the plates would show the name of its corporate owner, never mind the thumbnail-size tracking sticker with the corporate logo in the corner of the rear window. He further realized that an airport traffic cop could jump to the conclusion that it was a rental by some idiot who thought he could get away with parking in a cop’s spot-Philly wasn’t about to run out of idiots anytime soon-who would then call for a Tow Squad wrecker and have it hauled off.