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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 JESUS WENT 2 TEMPLE… DEAL DONE… BUT HE GOT SHOT
“What?” Delgado said aloud.
He punched the keypad with his thumbs and sent the text: HOW BAD?
The phone vibrated, and the screen read: 609-555-1904 BULLET WENT IN ABOVE LEFT KNEE amp; OUT FRONT OF LEG…
Delgado replied: THAT ALL?
There was a long moment before the cellular vibrated. He read: 609-555-1904 THAT ALL?? HE WONT STOP YELLING!!!! BUT SI… THAT ALL… JUST STILL BLEEDING
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: CALM DOWN… TELL EL GIGANTE HE WILL LIVE PUT CLEAN SOCK OVER HOLES amp; WRAP W/TAPE GET ANGEL 2 FIX HIM
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 showin
g 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.
