Jos? relieved the girls of their backpacks, then showed them the two bedrooms where they’d be staying. The girls beamed when shown a closet full of girls’ clothing in various sizes. They were told to pick their outfits from the closet and return the brown uniforms they were wearing to him.
After they had gotten cleaned up and were getting dressed, they heard the front door open and close, and then voices speaking in English. They pulled back the thin curtain and looked out the window. Out by the KIDDIE KASTLE PRE-SCHOOL minivan was parked a bigger vehicle, a Chevrolet Suburban.
Then they thought they recognized one of the voices, and when they went out into the living room, they found El Gato and another young Latin male drinking beers on the couch. The tan Nike backpacks that they had carried across the river were on the coffee table.
The girls were nervous at first, even somewhat scared, but Juan Paulo Delgado, switching back to Spanish, had been all charm. He played up the friendly El Gato, and introduced the newcomer wearing black jeans and T-shirt as “El Cheque.” The Check was no bigger than either Ana or Rosario, but looked meaner than a snake. He was twenty-five with dark features and had a scar on his cheek in the shape of a check mark.
El Cheque, El Gato said, as he and the girls later shared a dinner of delivered pizzas, soon would be driving Ana and Rosario north. He explained how they would be permitted to find their family while they were working to repay the costs of their passage. He said it was not uncommon for that to happen quickly.
He saw them smile. “If that pleases you, then we must celebrate your arrival and new lives!”
He went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of tequila, three squat shot glasses, and a small teabag-size cellophane packet containing a fine white powder.
The girls took a sip of the alcohol and made a face. El Gato laughed loudly and shot his down in a single swallow.
El Gato then playfully introduced the cocaine to them. First he rubbed some on his lips, smiled, then reached over and rubbed some on their full lips. After they smiled awkwardly at the funny tingling feeling it caused, he rubbed some of the white powder between the inside of his upper lip and gums-and then on theirs.
It was not long before he had dumped another cellophane packet on the table and they had decided to follow his lead and sniff a little line of it through a short straw.
They all became very comfortable and relaxed. There was much laughter.
The next day, El Gato told the girls he had a special surprise: He took them shopping for new clothes. “For looking nice when you start to work,” he said. And that night he produced more packets of coke. The girls needed no further formal introduction.
After these were consumed and they had the desired effect, and there was more laughter, the doorbell rang. El Gato then announced that he had one very special surprise.
He went to the front door and opened it. There stood an older white man carrying a black hard-plastic box resembling a small suitcase. As El Gato embraced the older man, the girls noticed that he had his long graying black hair pulled back in a ponytail-and that his hands and arms, from fingers on up into his shirtsleeves, were covered in tattoos. The body art even extended onto his neck.
El Gato introduced the man simply as “mi amigo,” and moments later his friend had opened the box on the kitchen table and was pulling from it what turned out to be a tattoo machine.
Not an hour later, both Ana Lopez and Rosario Flores were enjoying another cellophane packet of the white powder. It was to celebrate their newest gift from El Gato: a tiny tattoo, no larger than their smallest fingernail, at the hairline behind the left ear. It was of a gothic black letter D with three short black lines shooting out on either side.
“The whiskers of El Gato,” he said with pride.
Later, after they had all retired to bed, Ana had been grateful for the very numbing sensation caused by the white powder. Particularly when El Gato had come into her bedroom, said that he loved her-then torn off her new panties and forced himself inside her.
The next night, Juan Paulo Delgado had his way with Rosario Flores, too. But without the numbing benefit of the coke, she suffered. Earlier, she’d turned down the drug for fear it would lead to what Ana said had happened to her.
The next night, when the girls thought they might have the power and control to spurn his advances, he beat them. And had his way with them again.
If they weren’t getting the message, he spelled it out for them: They now bore his mark and were his until they repaid him for their passage.
Then, confusing them even more, El Gato went repeatedly to each girl individually, telling her that while the beating had been “necessary,” he was still very sorry, that in fact he loved them both.
The proof of that, he said, was that the next day they would leave with El Cheque to go north. And he, El Gato, would see them at the end of their trip.
El Gato was gone the next morning when El Cheque arrived at the house driving a four-year-old Chevy Suburban with deeply tinted windows.
The three of them loaded up the SUV, including the tan Nike backpacks the girls had brought across the river. These went into hidden compartments in the back.
They drove U.S. Highway 281 the 250-plus miles from Brownsville to San Antonio, then continued on it north another 250 miles through the rolling terrain of the Texas Hill Country.
Over the many miles and hours, the girls tried to engage El Cheque in discussions about something, anything. Except for answering their questions about where they were going-someplace they could not pronounce called “Philadelphia”; it may as well have been the moon-he had no personality and said absolutely nothing. Not even on his cellular telephone, which he used exclusively for sending and receiving text messages.
He simply played the radio and drove.
They hit Fort Worth, then turned east toward Dallas. On the far side of downtown Dallas, they went through an area where the billboards-advertising radio stations, beers, and more-were all in Spanish. They stopped overnight at an East Dallas house. It was surrounded by chain-link fencing and the backyard held a half-dozen utility trailers loaded with lawn care equipment beside a wooden garage.
El Cheque delivered one of the backpacks to a young Latino who came out of the back of the house to greet them.
The next morning, El Cheque went to the wooden garage. It stood separately from the house, freestanding, and looked much newer. He backed out of it another late-model Suburban, nearly identical to the one in which they’d driven up from Brownsville. The only differences were its color, silver, and its Tennessee tag. After transferring their luggage and the two remaining backpacks, he put the Suburban bearing the Texas tags inside the garage, then closed and locked the garage doors.
Just before they left, the young Latino came out with a long black duffle. The girls noticed that it not only looked similar to the one Hector had carried across the Rio Grande into Mexico, but made the same metal-and-heavy-plastic clunking sounds when its contents were jostled.
The spare tire under the rear deck of the Suburban was lowered on its cable hoist. That revealed a sealed compartment that had been added under the far-back flooring. The bag was placed in there, and the spare tire cranked back into place.
They drove Interstate Highway 30 to Little Rock, Arkansas, then I-40 into Tennessee, first passing Memphis, then going on to Nashville. El Cheque covered the six hundred-odd miles-coldly ignoring the girls’ pleas for more bathroom breaks-in just under ten hours.