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“Yes. What the hell’s got you upset? And at this hour?”

“Can you meet me?”

“Now?”

“Now. Remember the Philly Inn? On Frankford?”

Remember it?

No way in hell could anyone forget a party like we had that night-what? — ten, eleven years ago.

Damn. Has it been that long? “Sure, Chad, I remember. Who could forget Whatshisface diving off the roof into the pool?”

“What? Oh, right.” His voice tapered off. “Skipper did that…”

“Yeah, that’s who it was. So, what happened? Did Daffy finally have enough and throw you out?”

Daphne Elizabeth Browne Nesbitt was wife to Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, and Matt was godfather to their baby girl, Penelope Alice Nesbitt, named after the late Penelope Alice Detweiler, with whom, before she shot up her last vein of heroin, causing her to breathe her last breath, Matt had fancied himself in love.

Payne heard only silence, then said, “What’s the room number?”

“No. I’m at the All-Nite Diner, by the shopping strip just south of it. Thanks, pal.”

“Be there in-” Matt began but stopped when he realized the connection had been broken.

FIVE

2512 Hancock Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:01 A.M.

Hancock, off Lehigh Avenue, was only a couple miles southwest of the Philly Inn. It was in the section known as North Philly, which of course was due north of Center City-downtown proper-hence North Philly’s name. If the area around the Philly Inn could be described as seedy and sliding to worse, then it would be no less than a kind and charitable act to call North Philly, particularly the more and more Latino neighborhood containing Hancock Street, a miserable godforsaken slum with zero to zilch chance of redemption.

And in a dilapidated row house on Hancock, Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez-a petite pretty seventeen-year-old Honduran with light-brown skin, long straight black hair, dark eyes, and soft facial features, including a smattering of freckles across her upper cheeks and pixie nose that made her appear even younger-was startled awake from an uneasy sleep by sounds outside her open second-story bedroom window.

Ana was lying with two younger girls from Mexico on a dirty mattress on the wooden floor of the bedroom. She first heard the familiar rattling of a lawn care utility trailer, then the squeaking springs of the dirty tan Ford panel van pulling it over the curb, across the sidewalk, and through the open gate of the vacant lot next door-where two abandoned row houses once stood before burning and being torn down-and then the white rusty Plymouth minivan with its darkened windows that followed the van and trailer into the lot.

Ana’s pulse quickened as she then heard Latin music coming from another vehicle that was accelerating up Hancock Street. While she was not surprised, she was scared. This had happened nearly every night for the two months she’d been here: One of two vans would bring the girls and others back to the house-she wasn’t sure why they had the trailer of lawn mowers out so late-and El Gato would be right on their heels to collect the cash. If everyone was lucky, he then would just take the money and drive off into the dark humid night.

At five feet eleven inches tall and 180 pounds, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado moved with the grace and power of a big cat-thus his nickname, “El Gato.” He had the toned, muscular body of one who worked out regularly with gym weights, which he’d learned to perfect during a short stint in the prison system. He was as fastidious as a cat in his appearance, keeping his black hair cut short and neat, his face clean-shaven, his body-with one exception-absolutely unmarked.

The exception was a small black tattoo-a gothic block letter D with three short lines on either side representing whiskers-at the base of his palm. The location made it more or less unnoticeable to the casual observer unless El Gato chose to show it. It was the same tattoo he convinced each of the girls to get when he first met them-“To show my love of family,” El Gato told them. But each girl’s whiskered D was tattooed on the neck behind the left ear, at the hairline.

The girls-at first, while they still were under his influence, desperate to believe his bullshit ruse of “love of family”-had enjoyed flashing the tattoo by pulling back their hair and smiling appreciatively, if not seductively, at El Gato.

And Juan Paulo Delgado had another catlike trait: He carried himself in such a way that one moment he could be all charm, his deep, dark eyes almost smiling-then the next moment his short Latin temper turned him intimidating, his eyes cold and hard. When his anger erupted, it made him seem much older than his twenty-one years.

Ana felt the two other girls, Jorgina and Alicia, both fourteen years old and with attractive features somewhat similar to hers, snuggle in closer for protection. Yet they all knew that there would be no protection from whatever was to come.

Of course they know, she thought. And they, too, are scared.

My bruises are almost gone.

Theirs are still dark, still fresh and with much pain…

There was the grating of the wooden slats of the gate as it was being slid closed on the vacant lot. And when that was done-and only after the gate was closed and its chain locked-there came the slamming of the van’s front doors and the sliding open of the rusty side doors of the minivan for the half-dozen girls to exit.

Footsteps could be heard as the girls were herded through the backyard to the back door of the row house, then into their bedrooms. There they, like Ana and Jorgina and Alicia, were kept more or less warehoused, guarded under lock and key until sent out to work-which could be any hour of the day or night.

Ana did not think that the round-the-clock watch was really necessary. If the fear of being beaten again was not enough to keep the girls from trying to get away, then the threats made against their families certainly was. Proof of that was that almost no one tried to get away.