Chasers

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “And step two takes me where, tough boy?” Rodney asked, stepping closer to Rev. Jim, his stance open-legged, hands balled into ham fists resting against his hips, his manner making a move toward menace.

  Rev. Jim lost the smile and leaned in close enough to smell foul breath and sweat. “Step two is the one I look forward to the most,” he said. “Because that’s when I fucking end you.”

  Rev. Jim heard the snap of the switchblade before he saw the knife. He stepped back and dodged a quick slash aimed at his chest. He leaned down and from a crouch position landed two hard body blows against soft flesh. He heard Rodney grunt and gasp for the breath rushing out of his lungs. Rev. Jim stepped back, the attention of the small crowd turned away from the game and squarely on the two men on the outside of the batting cage. He snapped a left jab against the side of Rodney’s face and followed it up with a hard hook to his stomach. The second blow brought the overweight man to his knees, his eyes bloodshot and opened wide enough to pop. The blade in the fat man’s hand fell to the dirt, and his sweaty back rested heavily against the lower end of the cage. Rev. Jim rammed his right elbow just above Rodney’s eyes, causing two streams of blood to rush out his nostrils and cascade down his neck and onto the stained blue of his L.T. jersey. He then leaned down and put his lips close to the stunned man’s right ear.

  “Hear me good, dealer man,” Rev. Jim said. “Find a place that’s anywhere but here, and do it fast as you can. Want to duck and dodge me for a while, that’s your right. But one day, sooner not later, I’ll put eyes on you again. And that’s the day I make your heart stop taking beats.”

  Rev. Jim stood up, kicked the blade toward an empty garbage bin, took one final look at Rodney Phillips, and turned away, walking at a slow pace, ready to enjoy what was left of the afternoon.

  7

  Boomer sat in a back pew of the small empty church, gazing up at the main altar. The flicker and glow of the votive candles that lit the faces of the saints lining the walls cast an eerie quality over St. Mary’s Church. Boomer had, for as long as he could remember, sought comfort in the quiet shelter of the church he had first entered on the day he was baptized. He had spent many hours there since, including three years as an altar boy, helping an array of priests preside over Mass, weddings, and funerals. He preferred having the place to himself—a safe haven where he could be alone with his thoughts, where he was allowed to navigate his way through his many ups and downs.

  Earlier that morning, Boomer had sat in stone silence, listening to a middle-aged priest drone on about the gift of death—one that allowed the body of his niece, her warmth, her smile, and her beauty shuttered forever inside a vacuum-sealed coffin resting in the middle of the aisle, to be brought inside a kingdom that knew only happiness. Boomer kept his eyes on the thick and shiny mahogany coffin, doing his best to ignore the words. His anger was running at a slow sizzle, but he held his temper, keeping his mind locked to the fact that a young woman yet to get a taste of the good that life could offer had been killed for nothing more than the whim and deadly needs of a heartless shooter. Four other innocents had also lost their lives that day, which now seemed so long ago. The story had earned page-one coverage from the tabloids and the local and cable channels, with most of the articles focusing on the escalating cocaine wars between the established Gonzalez Brothers crew, known industrywide as the G-Men, and the rogue priest, Father Angel, who was hell-bent on taking over their trade, one line at a time. Each story reinforced a belief of Boomer’s: the drug trade was doing a shake ’n’ bake on the world of crime, turning it from a universe with a unified, if violent, structure into one in which order of any kind was neither required nor desired. There had been a time, not too long ago, when top-tiered members of organized crime proudly followed the rule that was so flagrantly epitomized by Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the New York shooter and Las Vegas dreamer who once boasted that gangsters “only kill each other.” Today’s new breed of criminal had a much more expansive thirst for blood, choosing to spread their deadly venom to the safest of places, the most civil of spaces, and never giving any thought to where a stray bullet might land.

  The murder-fueled world of organized crime was rapidly being replaced by the drug-injected madness of disorganized crime. And as long as that siege lasted, no civilian would ever be truly safe.

  It was a battle Boomer knew he would soon join.

  He would not hesitate this time, not give it a great deal of thought, not as he had done before he last journeyed into the war zone, engaged in a long-odds fight against a ruthless cocaine queen that cost the lives of three good friends and brought further ruin to his already damaged body. He would gladly go it alone now if it fell that way, but he knew that once he was inside the heat of the fight, he would turn to find Dead-Eye by his side. And there would be others to join in their potentially fruitless cause, much as there had been three years earlier. Small squadrons of wounded warriors eager to return to a street fight they had been pulled away from long before its completion. Back in 1982, Boomer and the others had dubbed themselves the Apaches, because they were cops who had been forced into retirement by their scars and ailments, left to fend only for themselves.

  He saw no reason now to change the name.

  Boomer stared at the coffin of his niece and thought of the moments so brutally taken from her reach. There would be no man to steal her heart, no children to love and nurture, no job to perform with passion and commitment. She would not grow old and be burdened with the good and bad weight that the passage of years brings. She wouldn’t laugh at silly jokes or cry at sad movies. She was now a statistic in a drug war, as much an innocent victim in this battle against the dealers as the hopped-up single mother selling her soul and her child for the next warm rush of the needle. Or the wasted skells he had seen huddled inside doorways and hallways, seeking the next score. All had been brought to their dark place by the greed of the men and women who turned white powder into power and money, leaving in their wake ruined lives, decimated families, and crumbled cities. Boomer knew he could not clean it all away, regardless of how many ex-cops he could muster into a force. But what he did pray for, on that sad and soul-crunching morning, sitting close enough to his niece’s coffin to touch it, was that his ravaged body had the inner strength needed to take down the gangs that had brought about this death, which had reached deep into his heart.

  He was free now, no path ahead of him except the one that would lead him straight into the enemy’s scope. He would go into this last battle unburdened by the rules that bound a cop to society. A bullet in the night would serve as his Miranda warning. A hard kick against a wood door would make up his search-and-seizure warrant. A gun jabbed into a dealer’s mouth would stand in for the right to legal counsel. The non-rules of the drug lords were now the only ones Boomer would follow, the justice to be dispensed as he saw fit. And he would allow them only one right: the right to die by his hand.

  He heard heels clicking in his direction, and when he looked up he saw his sister standing next to the pew, her face smeared with the tears she had shed since he had sat at her kitchen table and told her the words it tore at him to utter—that her only child was now dead. Maria was the younger of his two sisters and had always, in his eyes, been the toughest member of the family.

  It was Maria who had held them all together in the years after their father’s senseless murder in a New York subway car. Despite her youth, Maria had kept their mother, Theresa, from crumbling from the sheer weight of the sadness she bore, and made sure that he and his older brother and sister stayed on a path that their father would have approved. Now here she was, years removed from that self-imposed obligation, standing before him, a young widow and a mother stripped of her own child.

  “I figured this was where I’d find you,” Maria said, sliding in beside him, a trembling hand reaching out to grip his arm. “Everybody else is up at the house having coffee, not really knowing what to say.”

  “That’s because there
’s nothing left to say,” Boomer said. “I couldn’t sit through that. Watching her get lowered into the ground was about all I could take.”

  “I know you well, Boomer,” Maria said. She turned toward him, her face thin, her dark eyes shadowed by tears, her black hair hanging loose across her cheeks. “Better than anyone except maybe for Dead-Eye, and even he hasn’t seen you on your darkest day. And I know what you’re sitting here thinking of doing.”

  “And you left a house filled with your friends and family to find me and talk me out of it,” Boomer said.

  “If I could, I would—believe me when I tell you that,” Maria said. “As much hate as I have for the people who killed our Angela, I would never ask you to put yourself at risk in order to get back at them.”

  Boomer leaned closer to his sister and rested a strong arm across her small shoulders.

  “You don’t need to say any more,” he whispered into her ear.

  “I’ve been to too many funerals,” she said, lowering her head, the words mixing with sobs. “Buried too many people I loved. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

  “It’ll be different with me,” Boomer said, his voice calm, assured, and confident. “The way I’ve lived, it’s bound to happen sooner than later.”

  “She was a lot like you in so many ways,” Maria said. “My husband used to tease her when she was a teenager, tell her he fathered Uncle Boomer’s kid minus the gun and the shield. Angela had your spirit, your courage, kept her fears to herself. She put a hundred percent into anything she tried, and even when it didn’t go her way she never let it get her down. And she had heart.”

  “She saw the good side of people,” Boomer said, his strong voice easing into breaks, tears sliding down his face. “No matter who they might be or where it was they hailed from. I figure that’s how it’s supposed to be when you’re her age and looking at life through her eyes. She never got a close-up glimpse of the evil that’s out there. Not until that last day. And by then it was too late. And I wasn’t there to keep it away. I had sworn to her that I would always be around to keep her safe, keep her world clean. I couldn’t and I didn’t. Those were nothing more than wasted words said to make a little girl feel safe.”

  “There was nothing you could have done to prevent what happened, Boomer,” Maria said. “You should know that better than anybody.”

  “I could have told her the truth instead of hiding it in a corner,” Boomer said. “Show her the world through my eyes. Give her a better feel of what really stands outside our walls. Have her be ready for anything, anyone, at any time.”

  “And it still wouldn’t have been enough to save her,” Maria said. “She would have been a girl going through her day-to-day afraid to live her life. Our Angela would have hated to live that way.”

  The two sat in silence for several moments, lost in their private thoughts. “I need to get back,” Maria said, starting a slow slide out of the pew. “Would you walk with me?” Boomer nodded, genuflected, and then stood and followed his sister. They walked down the main aisle, their backs to the altar, his right hand gently holding on to her left elbow. “Would you do me one favor, Boom?” Maria asked, her head bowed and her voice low.

  “Name it,” Boomer said.

  “Don’t keep me in the dark on this,” Maria said, slowing her step. “These people killed my daughter. If I can’t stop you from going after them, then I think I deserve to know who they are.”

  “You’ll know,” Boomer assured her. “And you won’t need me to tell you.”

  Maria stopped and stared at Boomer, chilled momentarily by the dark weight of her brother’s words. He looked back, his hard eyes telling her all she needed to know about his vengeful intent. “This is a side of you I had once hoped would be buried away,” she said. “I hate to see it keep coming back. And I just don’t know how many more of these wars you can go out and fight and how many more you can walk away from.”

  “With luck and a few prayers, this one,” Boomer said, leading his sister by the hand out of the darkness of the empty church. “This last one.”

  8

  Buttercup crouched against the cold side of a cement wall, head tilted to her left, her thick paws curled under her muscular brown hide. Her tongue hung low and lapped against the sharp teeth on her lower jaw, and her droopy cocoa-colored eyes gazed down the tenement hall with a look of casual indifference. Two detectives were braced on either side of her, guns drawn, Kevlar vests strapped on over their dark blue NYPD T-shirts. The corridor, cracked and graffiti-riddled, was empty and smelled of dry urine and burnt coke. Loud rap music, mixed with the sound of televisions on high volume, filled the hall. One of the detectives, a young man in his mid-twenties with thinning hair and an Old West mustache, rested a hand on Buttercup’s neck, his eyes focused on the door leading to apartment 4F. “Get ready, sweetie,” the detective whispered. “It’s just about showtime.”

  “That snitch better be on the money about this shit,” the second detective said. He was older, mid-thirties, the routine of daily workouts replaced across the years by a running tab at a local cop bar. “If he’s off by one nickel bag, I’ll have his ass dry-iced to Rikers before rush hour.”

  “Take a breath, Frank,” the first detective said. “The guy’s always been on the square with us. No reason to sense any doubts about him now.”

  “He’s a fuckin’ junkie, Stevie. There’s reason number one with a bullet right there,” Frank said, barely able to contain his voice to the required whisper. “And one of the crew dealers he’s throwin’ our way happens to be his brother-in-law, which, right off the bat, smells to me like a fart in a spacesuit.”

  “There’s three of us and, if the intel is even close to home plate, four of them,” Stevie said, shrugging his shoulders, anxious to bring an end to the talk and a start to the action. “Not like we got ourselves a Butch and Sundance situation here.”

  “I’m gonna try and break this to you gentle,” Frank said, frustration masking his fear. “I only count the ones with two legs as cops. I give a toss to the one that lifts a leg to take a piss and, if the opportunity is there, will jump at the first chance she gets to chew on a hunk of dry shit in the street.”

  Buttercup lifted her massive head and gave a blank look in Frank’s direction, her breath and manner as calm as if she were in the middle of Central Park halfway through a late-afternoon walk. Buttercup was a full-grown Neapolitan bullmastiff topping out at 125 pounds. She was a narcotics dog, trained to sniff out cocaine, heroin, and, if the occasion warranted, large packets of marijuana. She had been assigned to the K-9 unit for three years and was considered the best field dog in any of the five boroughs. “That fucker could find a line of cocaine in the middle of a twenty-inch blizzard,” undercover supercop Jimmy “Eye Patch” Mendoza raved the day he passed Buttercup on to Steve. “I made twenty prime-time busts in my eighteen months working with her. And she wasn’t just a sniff-and-stop hound. The bitch jumps into the line and fights, watching your back better than any partner you ever could wish for. No way she’s a dog. Buttercup is all-star, all-cop, all-the-time.”

  Buttercup was always assigned the high-end takedowns, and possessed an eerie and innate ability to read a situation and react seconds before the trigger click kicked in. Off the job, in the company of other cops or her handlers or, most especially, around children, Buttercup was playful and relaxed, her sweet, puppylike disposition more than negating what, on the surface at least, gave the appearance of a fierce presence. But out in the field, in the heat of the moment, she thrived on the nuances of police work, always on the alert, quick to sense danger, and even quicker to pounce.

  In her three years as a narcotics dog, Buttercup had sniffed out more than $200 million in cocaine hauls, covering a span of two dozen arrests, and was in front of the firing line during a $150 million middle-of-the-night heroin score in a Brooklyn warehouse. Her success rate came with a price tag, though. Buttercup had sniffed out so much cocaine and heroin that cops from other u
nits were leery of working with her, afraid she might go off on a drug-fueled frenzy. “She’s seen way too much shit for any K-9,” Mendoza reminded Steve. “She could snap, crackle, and pop any second for any reason. She can be sweet as a nursed baby at five to the hour. And then, before you can unzip your pants for a late-night piss, she can take a dealer’s head off with one chomp and roll it down center lane. She’s no different and no worse than any other undercover narc. But I tell you, when the nasty turns ugly and you can smell the gunpowder coming your way, Buttercup is who you want standing next to your ass.”

  Detective Steve Ramoni had learned to take those words and tuck them close to his heart. In their months together, he had grown not only to love Buttercup as a dog but to admire her as a partner. Despite her size, she was a gentle dog and would easily adapt her moods and manner to the moment. In the squad room, she sauntered through the cramped floor space, littered with old arrest warrants, wanted posters, and crumpled-up papers, as if she belonged, pausing to accept a gentle rub of the head from a cop working the phones or grab a nibble on the cold remains of a hot hero left behind by an undercover off on a buy-and-bust. On the streets, free to strut alongside Ramoni without the burden of a leash, a replica of his detective tin hanging on a thin chain around her neck, she walked with the confident strides of a cop on the job, primed and ready for whatever action might head her way. She always let the local kids pet her and rub the bottom of a jaw thick as a barbell, her head lifted, her eyes closed, and her tongue lapping up against the fingers and palms of the tiny hands pressed to her flesh. But, as Ramoni learned in the time it takes for a traffic light to go from red to green, Buttercup was at her cop best when she stood paw to toe up against the hard drug dealers working the streets of what she had grown to consider her turf.

  “I remember this one time,” Ramoni once told a cluster of fresh undercovers, standing around the edges of a dimly lit cop bar, empty bottles of beer lined up like bowling pins on top of the wood, Buttercup sleeping it off at his feet. “Me and Buttercup were working an operation against a dealer named Fernando Chin. Hand to God, that was the fucker’s real name. Half Chinese, half who the hell knows what else. Guy had himself a small crew of about a dozen or so wack-outs, moving that double-cut shit they sprayed with Raid to give the junkies a fake kick, hide the fact that it was about as primo as sauce out of a jar.”