Dad said he’d heard Skipper’s lawyer say that it’d cost a small fortune to make that go away.

An absolutely gorgeous girl.

Still hurts to remember the day I heard they were dating…

Matthew Mark Payne had known Rebecca Stockton Benjamin longer than J. Warren Olde had, though certainly not as intimately. The Paynes and Benjamins had worshipped at the same small Episcopal Church in Wallingford. Its sanctuary physically was more chapel-like than church-size, and its parishioners numbered no more than five hundred. Thus, while growing up, Matt and Becca had seen each other practically every Sunday. They often were in the same youth group meetings, retreats, camps, and the like. Matt had always liked the spunky, outgoing girl-few didn’t-and even thought that there had been some sort of mutual interest.

A crush?

Then, when Skipper took up with the blossoming sixteen-year-old, Matt had been really pissed. Especially when he saw the direction Skipper was taking her… and she was blindly following.

At Cecil Moore Avenue, Matt hung a right, skirting Temple University, then about a mile later he picked up Frankford and followed it north another mile or so-until he saw the flashing emergency lights.

Jesus! Look at all the fire trucks.

Even a HazMat unit.

To the side of that heavy-duty red Ford truck, a fireman was using a fire hose to wash down two men wearing bright orange HazMat “moonwalker” bodysuits, rubber boots, and full-face hoods. Another was respooling smaller HazMat hoses onto the roof of the truck’s equipment box.

What HazMats are at a motel?

And judging by all the cruisers, there can’t be a cop left at the Roundhouse.

His pulse quickened at the sight.

Is my heart beating faster because I want to rush in?

Or because it wants me to run away as fast as my feckless rental Ford can go?

A pair of police cruisers, their roof light bars flashing, was parked at an angle across the northbound lanes of Frankford just south of the Philly Inn. A cop stood in the street beside them directing traffic to detour onto a side street.

Payne looked ahead and saw the neon sign for the All-Nite Diner, then the diner itself and the crowd gathered in front of it. He hit his turn signal to go into the diner parking lot, and when the cop saw it blinking, he motioned approval for the nondescript Ford sedan to take its turn.

[TWO] 1344 W. Susquehanna Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:35 A.M.

Paco “El Nariz” Esteban, a heavyset, five-foot-two twenty-seven-year-old with coffee-colored skin and a flat face whose most prominent feature was a fat nose twice as wide as it was long, stood in the middle of the brightly lit, newly renovated laundromat. He had his stubby fingers splayed on his ample hips as he surveyed his midnight-to-eight work crew feeding motel bedsheets and towels to the machines.

Built into one long white wall were twenty stainless-steel commercial-quality washing machines. Another interior wall held a line of twenty-five commercial-quality clothes dryers. Waist-high four-foot-square thick-wire baskets on heavy-duty casters either were waiting in front of a washer or dryer, or were full and being wheeled by Latina women in jeans and T-shirts from the wall of dryers to a long tan linoleum counter at the back of the room. There, an assembly line of more Latinas folded and stacked freshly laundered sheets and towels before sliding them down the tan counter to be sorted and packed for transport back to the various motels. The large windows and front door to the street were papered over, and milky paint-splattered plastic sheeting sealed off a side room that was still under construction.

Paco “The Nose” Esteban soaked up the atmosphere of the laundry at this early hour-the soft conversations in Spanish of the workers, the Latin music station playing on a clock radio in the back corner, the hum of washers and dryers. It created an almost peaceful sound, the kind of rhythm that came when good people were accomplishing honest work.

El Nariz took a quiet pride in his crews-he also had ones working as housekeepers at the motels-and what he thought of as his role as their mentor and protector-indeed, their paterfamilias, as he could trace his relationship by blood to a majority of his workers.

Like El Nariz himself, those in his handpicked crews were simple hardwork ing people. Almost all had fled the raw-dirt tin-shack squalor of the slums of Mexico City.

El Nariz-whose own formal education would be described as the School of Hard Knocks in a place like South Philly, where he now lived-had no idea about official census numbers. Moreover, he did not give a rat’s ass about them. He simply understood that what he had now was a helluva lot better than what he’d lived in in Mexico.

Had he even the slightest interest, however, Paco Esteban easily could have learned that Philadelphia, founded October 27, 1682, was the largest city in Pennsylvania. That in its 135 square miles the population numbered-officially, not including those such as El Nariz and his illegal immigrant crews, who wished to remain under the radar and therefore went uncounted-nearly 1.5 million, or roughly more than 11,000 people in every square mile, with about one in four in poverty. That Philadelphia was the fifth-largest city in the United States. And that its urban area, with some 5.3 million people, was the U.S.’s fourth largest.

Also with a cursory search, Paco Esteban could have as easily learned that Mexico City had nearly six times as many people (8.8 million) as Philly within an area only a little more than four times as large (573 square miles), or 15,400 people per square mile. And that Mexico City’s metro area swelled with nearly 20 million people-40 percent of whom lived in poverty with no better than a snowball’s chance in hell (or Mexico) of ever enjoying a finer quality of life.

But Paco Esteban didn’t need numbers to tell him what he already damn well knew: that life here, while not perfect, was far better than in Mexico. As it was of course for everyone in his crews. They had come to America via various routes-not a damn one of them legal-most planned and financed by El Nariz himself, as had been done for him seven years earlier.

Esteban had been twenty-two years old when he’d hopped across the U.S. border-literally, as his smuggler had led his group of four Mexican nationals to the flimsy rusty fencing that separated the two countries and showed them how to boost one another over it into Nogales, Arizona. The smuggler had announced that his amigo-like him, another “coyote,” so named because of their wily, evasive traits-waited on the other side to take them to a nearby drop house.

At the small four-bedroom ramshackle house, where coyotes armed with shotguns and pistols guarded doors leading to the outside, they had joined dozens of other illegal immigrants. These were almost all men, but some women and children, too. The majority were dark-skinned ones Esteban recognized as being from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, but there also were ones with much lighter skin who appeared to be European, Middle Eastern, and, clearly, because of their eyes, Asian, all keeping clustered to their own kind and very quiet.

While everyone so far had successfully evaded arrest by the various U.S. agencies policing the border-that alone, El Nariz quickly came to understand, was a significant accomplishment-they still were in danger. He saw that except for mostly moving during the night, not much effort was given to discreetly carrying out the smuggling; this was simply a numbers game to the coyotes, and the coyotes even warned them point-blank that not everyone was going to make it, so they damn well better give it their best shot.

Surveying the groups in the house, El Nariz had comforted himself with the thought: You don’t have to be the fastest-just not the slowest.