Chasers

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Then reality intruded, and Father Angel’s dreams were swallowed up by a whirlpool of deceit, corruption, and murder, leaving in its wake only the ruined and the ravaged. It began with a street shooting, a weekly occurrence in an area blighted by drug-related crimes. The victim was named Edgardo Vizcaino, a promising sixteen-year-old, four-hundred-meter track star. His older brother Alberto was a runner for the Diablos de Dios, a local drug gang on the payroll of the big guns in Bogotá. Alberto had grown weary of running drugs in and past an elaborate network of police blockades and federal sting setups, risking a long stretch in prison in return for the short end of the money train. He was looking to start his own shop, and let it be known that he would take down the leaders of the Diablos de Dios if the action called for it.

  In the drug world, as in any criminal endeavor, the road to an early death is paved with indecision. Alberto spoke rather than acted, and that allowed the Diablos to pounce. And their way was a seek-and-destroy quest to rid themselves of any and all potential threats. Alberto’s battered and torched body was left hanging from the low branch of an old tree. Then they pressed their agenda forward and set about murdering each member of the Vizcaino family, saving Edgardo, the youngest and most vulnerable, for last.

  Angel was never sure exactly what it was about the murder of Edgardo Vizcaino, as opposed to any of the other horrible crimes he had seen perpetrated on people too weak or unwilling to fight back, that forced his hand. But that early morning, as the body of a boy he had grown to respect as much as to love was being prepped for burial, he decided that the time for reflection and prayer had ended. The Diablos were not interested in the words of a priest. They would respond only to action.

  The war raged for three years.

  In that time, Father Cortez morphed from a benevolent small-town priest into a man so deadly and ruthless that the local papers began to refer to him as the Black Angel. He still sought out the area’s young and gifted, but instead of putting their skills to the test on a running track he ran them out into the line of fire armed with Mac .9s and turned them into dealers and killing machines.

  By the late fall of 1982, Angel Cortez ruled over a criminal enterprise that stretched from the sandy streets of his small village to the high-rises of Bogotá and into the deep money of Mexico City and South Florida. There were 350 full-time dealers under his domain, 175 mules running cocaine packets across various state and national boundaries, and an army of 200 heavily armed hitters, each quick of trigger and Nike fast on the escape, making police detection close to an impossible task. His determined vow of poverty had now been replaced by a quest for riches, with a stream of offshore sheltered accounts totaling nearly $6 million. And all that gun power sitting on top of the small mountains of cold cash pointed the former priest in only one direction: an all-out takeover of the streets of New York. By the spring of 1985, Angel Cortez was ready to make his move to the big show.

  “How soon you think before they bite us back?” Roberto asked.

  “Not long. A week at the most,” Angel said. “It won’t be a heavy move. Not at first. Not their kind of play. They’ll look to hit us at our softest spot and work their way up from there. It’s how they have worked since they first hit the city, and there’s no reason for them to change their ways now.”

  “Sí, but we have a soft spot?” Roberto asked, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Everyone does,” Angel said. “No matter how prepared they think they are or how much thought they put into their plans. We are no exception. Unless, of course, I choose to eliminate that soft spot myself, saving the Gonzalez brothers a handful of bullets.”

  “And what is ours?”

  Angel Cortez stood, the empty beer bottle inside the paper bag dangling from the thin fingers of his right hand, and stared down at Roberto. “You are.”

  3

  “I’m not looking to talk you out of anything you already set your mind to get into,” Davis “Dead-Eye” Winthrop said. “I’m too old and still too angry to burn my time on getting nowhere. So let me put it out there for you nice and clean. I want in on this just as much as you do.”

  Boomer took a deep breath and raised his face to the late-afternoon sky, which featured a string of ominous clouds. They were standing in a tight and grease-free alley off the Fontana Brothers Funeral Parlor, backs pressed against a redbrick wall. Up the small hill and to their right, they could see the back door to the mourning room partially open, a chubby man in an ill-fitting jacket and tie shoving his head out, letting cigarette smoke filter through his nostrils. Inside, on the second floor, in the middle of three rooms, lay his niece’s closed coffin, surrounded by an array of sobbing friends and family, large bouquets of flowers slowly wilting under the weight of a humid day.

  “This one’s different,” Boomer said.

  “Why?” Dead-Eye asked. “Because she’s family? If that’s the line, then you can sell that brand of shit on some other corner. That don’t wash anywhere near me. That girl was as much blood to me as if she were my own kid.”

  “That’s not it,” Boomer said, letting his eyes roll across his oldest and most trusted friend. “Not even close.”

  “Then tell me what is close,” Dead-Eye said.

  “What’s it been since that last job now, three years?” Boomer asked.

  “Month or two, give or take,” Dead-Eye said. “Depends more on how you count the time invested. Way I look at it, job was done when my last wound healed.”

  “And I still don’t know if we won that tussle because we were lucky or because we were better,” Boomer said.

  “Little bit of both,” Dead-Eye said.

  “This time, the coin tosses might not all go our way,” Boomer said. “Then, throw into the mix a new set of crews, colder and harder than what we’ve been up against before. Put it all together and we’re not exactly staring at a Kodak moment.”

  “Bad is still bad no matter what end of the world they call home, Boom,” Dead-Eye said. “And you’re still going in, no matter what the scoreboard reads like.”

  Boomer nodded. “I don’t have much to call my own,” he said. “That’s not a complaint, just a fact we both need to take a long look at. My family pictures are on the spare side, and the only one I ever really loved from that end, the one that owned my heart, is waiting to take a long ride to a small cemetery.”

  “That were my boy in there waiting to get buried instead of your niece, would you step aside even if I told you it was how I wanted it?” Dead-Eye asked.

  “No,” Boomer said.

  “Then let’s move on to the second part of the exam,” Dead-Eye said. “You pick up any intel on the shooters, street or department?”

  “It could be the Russians—the shooting has some of their tire tracks on it,” Boomer said. “But the smart cash is riding on a crew from South America looking to impress the SAs working the coke-and-gun end of town. Now, the only new crew making any noise these last few months has been a kill-crazy band of white-line pistols cherried by a dealer who used to be a priest. My gut is to look their way, but it might be best to do a wash and rinse on both ends just so we lock down on the right target.”

  “A man of God gone to hell,” Dead-Eye said. “I tell you straight, they don’t give themselves much of a shake these days. Take your pick of evil, my man. They either popping caps in some innocent bystander in broad daylight or molesting kids under a white sheet at night.”

  “He didn’t come into town alone,” Boomer said. “Got at least two, maybe three hundred guns within reach, answer only to his words. And he’s not the shy type of padre, kind who works best in the shadows. He’s up front and personal and will put the drop down himself, the mood strikes.”

  “He might think, for now at least, he’s holding a full tray of fresh cookies,” Dead-Eye said. “But just wait until he gets wind of us—two shot-up, beat-up, crippled ex-cops putting a hunt party out on his SA ass. What, my friend, do you suppose the ole padre is going to do once that shit filte
rs through his ears?”

  “If luck is still running our way, he’ll laugh until he dies,” Boomer said.

  4

  Stephanie Torres walked down the burnt-out hallway, the thick and familiar smell of burnt wood and rubber filling her nose and lungs as smoke smoldered off the walls. She moved with seasoned steps, her eyes scanning each crack in the wall, each hole in the floorboards, easing her way from one ruined apartment to the next. She was looking for the one piece of evidence that would allow her to label the fire, which only a few hours earlier was a cauldron that had taken a full New York fire battalion to combat, the work of an arsonist. It cost the lives of three civilians and put two veteran smoke-eaters in an ICU ward. She moved up the landing, stepping over a large, gaping hole and moving past the bodies of a half dozen rats smoldering in a corner. At the top of the steps, she bent down and ran her gloved fingers over a small mound of dust, picking out the burnt remains of a safety pin. She reached into the pocket of her fire coat, pulled out a small cellophane evidence bag, dropped it in, and sealed it shut. She stood up and walked deeper into the second-floor hallway.

  She was an arson investigator assigned to the New York Police Department, working out of a set of precincts in the East Bronx. It was a neighborhood that she knew well, having grown up in a two-story house on Boyd Avenue, the only daughter of a Puerto Rican garage mechanic and a tough-willed mother one generation removed from the streets of San Juan. Back then, the neighborhood was a series of redbrick houses that served as first homes to a working-class enclave of Italian, Irish, and Hispanic immigrants, each of whom found a common ground in rearing children and vegetable gardens. Stephanie was at ease both at school, where she excelled in science and English lit, and on the street in front of her home, where she had mastered the intricate rules of bottle-cap baseball before she lost all her baby teeth. Her father, Hector, a proud and stubborn man and the first in his family to land a civil-service job with the Department of Sanitation, would sit behind the small white gate leading to the basement steps of the two-story house he owned, mortgage-free, and watch his little girl at play. He preferred to work the more demanding eight-to-four morning shift in order to be home to spend time with Stephanie. She was a frail girl, suited more to the leafy confines of suburban sprawl than to the daily give-and-take tumble of the Bronx streets, but he was also confident that what Stephanie lacked in brawn she more than made up for with grit and sheer force of will. Across many years of lazy spring and fall afternoons, Hector would sit in an old garden chair, a cup of iced tea resting next to the folded sports pages of the New York Post, and allow the gleeful sounds of laughing and shouting children to transport him back to the streets of his native land.

  Those afternoons also transported him back to a life he missed and a woman he could never forget. Hector Torres first laid eyes on Maria Espinoza on a side street just off the crowded main drag in Old San Juan. He was a week shy of sixteen and she couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, but it took only a second for the full, blunt force of love to give them each a hard jolt. They married less than a year later and were bound for New York a month after the wedding, not in the pursuit of wealth and dreams but in search of a steady job and a good home and a good school for the daughter they would soon call their own.

  Those early years in 1950s New York were not an easy time for a young and ambitious couple, the available jobs being menial and on the low end of the pay scale. But working-class dreams die a slow death and Hector and Maria struggled on, determined not to live their lives in a cold-water, third-story walk-up where the radiators stopped hissing heat at ten at night, causing the windows to crack by morning. In the summer, the unforgiving humidity of the stifling days and nights turned the rooms into saunas. Hector, who found work as a school custodian, a gas-station attendant, a member of a park cleanup crew, and a boiler duster, all of them off-the-book and temporary jobs with no upside, sought and found the mother lode of middle-class stability. A two-year stint in the military, followed by a civil-service exam, gave him safe passage to a new world, one filled with low-cost housing and better schools. This allowed them a final break from the shackles of cash-by-the-day employment and the fast-money lure of the dark side of the street.

  Hector and Maria saved as much as they could from each paycheck, putting small chunks away for a down payment on a new home and for Stephanie’s school, the rest going to meet both the daily demands and the pleasures of their new world order. They took their first vacation—a four-day stay in Bermuda—with Christmas-bonus and tip money Hector earned hauling and tossing garbage from the high-end, door-manned buildings along Park and Madison Avenues. And he doted on Stephanie, as did his Maria, the husband and wife eager to shower the bright young girl with all of their love and attention.

  There were weekly ice-skating lessons in the fall months for Stephanie, dance lessons in the spring, and piano lessons year-round. She acted in school productions, helped to organize the annual church canned-food giveaway, and, along with her mother, worked one weekend a month as a volunteer, bringing meals and other necessities to those in the neighborhood who were either too poor or too infirm to provide for themselves.

  Their life was a dream that was never meant to end, but it did, on a late-summer morning with a hint of fall in the crisp air. It was September, 1970.

  Maria Espinoza, her arms filled with grocery bags, stepped into the dank basement vestibule of her grandfather’s three-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on East 138th Street in the Bronx, the imposing shadows of the Cross Bronx Expressway noticeable in the distance. Grandpa Olmeda, eighty-four and still feisty, always refused any calls for him to move out of a building that had long ago dismissed any hopes of a return to glory days. Most of the other tenants had evacuated their apartments, goaded by a landlord desperate to sell to a consortium of city power brokers eager to put up a string of low-income houses on the street. On her last weekly visit, Grandpa Olmeda told Maria that the landlord had just left the apartment, having made what he had called his final offer. “The slick little bastard thinks he can get me out of my home with a check,” Olmeda said, his words, as always, coming in a great rush just before a coughing fit, his decades-long bout with damaged lungs now entering its final rounds. “I chased his ass fast out the door. And, if I were a few years younger, would have kicked it out to boot.”

  “How much was the check for, Papi?” Maria asked. She never lost the warmth of her disposition, no matter how frustrating it was for her to see anyone suffer—especially the elderly man to whom she owed so much of the good in her early life.

  “Does it make a nickel’s worth of difference?” he asked. “Dirty money never turns clean, I don’t care in whose hands it goes.”

  “Maybe you should move out,” Maria told him. “All your friends are gone to live with family or are in better neighborhoods. No reason you couldn’t do the same. It doesn’t matter if you take the landlord’s check or not, even though, whatever the amount, it would help with your move. Then you could come and live with us. We have plenty of room. Hector is the one who always brings it up to me, and Stephanie would be so happy to have her papi there for her every day.”

  “This is my home, Maria,” Olmeda said, fighting back another urge to cough. “It was my home when I was young and had a family, and it will stay my home for as long as the good Lord wants me to keep taking a breath. And the house you and Hector and Steph have, that is your home. That is as it should be. The bastards want me out, they have to learn patience. Once I’m dead, and they carry my body out that front door, they can do whatever the hell they want. But not one second before that day.”

  Maria rested the grocery bags by her feet and searched her open purse for the key to the front door. She closed her eyes for a brief moment. The bus ride down from her home in the Wakefield section had taken longer than usual, the driver forced to make his way around a number of main streets under fresh repair; Con Ed and construction crews were hard at work coiling wires and crackin
g pavement. She had nodded off halfway through the stop-and-go twenty-minute ride as the bus snaked its way through the Bronx streets, crammed with the old and the weary, who were so content to reach their eventual destination in due time. Maria was wearing a blue jean jacket over a floral print dress. The dress was a two-year-old birthday gift from her grandfather, and she knew that wearing it was one of the few things she could do that would bring a smile to his face.

  She got off two stops before her grandfather’s building, under the El and across from the Met supermarket. She walked into the poorly stocked store, moving up and down the disheveled aisles, filling her cart with her grandfather’s weekly list. It had taken three full months of pleading before he finally relented and allowed her to shop for his groceries. “You want the damn job so bad, it’s yours to take,” he told her, surrendering one more vestige of his freedom to the insatiable demands of old age. “But you come back in here with one thing that isn’t right, just one is all, and I pull the job right out from under you.”

  He wasn’t angry at her—never was, truth be told. He had simply turned sour on the life he was now locked into, knowing that death was his only escape route. His days and nights had evolved into routines chiseled in stone, always accompanied by the sounds of an old television blaring too loudly in the background. He fed the cat—an overweight and elderly animal he had named Roberto in honor of his favorite baseball player, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates—and put on the morning coffee. He read a few select passages from the tattered pages of a Bible that had been in the family for two generations and then moved on to the few domestic chores he was still capable of completing. Summer afternoons and evenings were spent next to his old Philips radio, tuned in to either a Yankees or Mets game, eagerly rooting both teams home to victory. In winter, he followed the same pattern, listening to the Knicks, the Jets, and the Giants. He never watched any of the games on his eighteen-inch television. “If I can’t go to the games and see them with my own eyes,” he once said to Hector, “then I’m a lot happier and better off seeing them play out in my head. Makes me feel like I used to feel when I took the train to the stadium or the Garden and watched them up close. Besides, you listen to those TV voices for too long, you’re close to ready to reach for a knife and shove an end to your day. I tell you the Lord’s truth, no lie, but they can be an annoying group of bastards.”