The mall’s front windows and doors overlooked a small asphalt parking lot. Its cinder-block walls were brightly painted in yellows and blues and reds. There was graffiti tagged at the rear. It had been spray-painted along the Sixth Street sidewalk by the beat-up pay telephone that was lag-bolted to the cinder-block wall. One large yellow section of that wall had a listing of mall merchants and the services that they offered. The lettering was done in black paint by what someone might kindly suggest was a shaky hand holding the brush.
Pacing the sidewalk along Sixth Street were thirty-odd Hispanic males of nearly all ages, starting around twelve and on up to sixty, the majority in their twenties. They were itinerant day laborers, many having just arrived in the city. They watched the passing traffic on Sixth, their interest piquing when a pickup or other work truck approached and slowed.
One or two of the laborers were selected by the others as their representative, mostly for the ability to speak English. The representatives went to the truck and spoke with the driver. After being told the type of work that needed to be done and negotiating a cash price, the representatives then consulted in Spanish with the other laborers. Workers were selected according to various criteria-for example, younger ones for hard labor requiring a strong back-and these workers then jumped in the back of the pickup.
And the rest went back to waiting for another truck to arrive.
On the sidewalk in front of the mall, an elderly Hispanic woman stood under the umbrella bolted to her food vendor cart. She was heavyset, and despite the shade of the umbrella was sweating in the heat of the September sun. The rubber-tired steamer cart was small, its diamond-patterned stainless steel battered. A handwritten menu taped to the front advertised tamales in pork, chicken, or cheese for one dollar each. A can of Coke or Sprite from the plastic cooler she used for a seat between sales also sold for a dollar.
As Juan Paulo Delgado drove into the parking lot in his Chevrolet Tahoe, the meat and corn smells of the tamales came into his vehicle through the open sunroof. He saw the elderly Hispanic woman pulling four aluminum-foiled wrapped tamales from her steamer. She handed them to two stout Hispanic women who appeared to be only a little younger than she was.
To Delgado, the scene had the same third-world feeling he’d found in so many other U.S. cities.
It’s like this just off Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana.
And in East L.A., East Dallas, Fort Worth’s Northside.
And now here.
It could be Calle Nueve at the Mercado Matamoros.
All that’s missing is the damn chickens and goats running wild.
Delgado still wore what he’d had on earlier-the sandals, camo cutoffs, black Sudsie’s T-shirt, and dark sunglasses. As he put the SUV in park and shut off the engine, his cellular telephone vibrated.
He looked at its screen. Omar Quintanilla had sent:
609-555-1904
“What?” Delgado said aloud.
He punched the keypad with his thumbs and sent the text:
The phone vibrated, and the screen read:
Delgado replied:
There was a long moment before the cellular vibrated. He read:
Delgado exhaled audibly.
Bueno.
That could have been worse… especially if the bullet had hit bone. Or a big vein.
He had a mental image of the self-styled tough guy Jes?s Jim?nez.
The badass is being a crybaby.
Delgado thumbed:
Delgado then had a mental image of the frail-looking Angel Hernandez in his West Kensington “clinic.”
The gray-haired sixty-year-old had been confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-two years. He had been a medical technician working for an ambulance company. On his last call, he had been working on a car wreck victim in the back of an ambulance en route to University of Pennsylvania Hospital. The ambulance itself had been broadsided by a stolen Lincoln Town Car.
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.