Chasers

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “I’m not saying it’s a shoo-in,” Boomer said, wrapping up his proposal. “But with a handful of angel dust on our side and playing off a warehouse full of greed from theirs, we might be able to hold our corner of the court.”

  “Who you figure is your endgame target?” Tony Rigs asked, clearly intrigued by the sheer audacity of the venture.

  “Angel,” Dead-Eye said without any hesitation. “He’s making the hard moves and the overtime plays, which means all the green lights point to him being the one that gave the thumbs-up to the blastout at the restaurant.”

  “And these other two crews?” Tony Rigs asked. “If they don’t mean anything to you, why bring them into a fight that’s one-sided off the first whistle as is?”

  “A lot of innocent bodies have taken a drop since these crews began to blast their way into town,” Boomer said. “My niece wasn’t the only casualty. These hard jaws took a night drop into our city and they’re treating it as if it were just another open sewer for them to toss their shit in. They’re packing the streets with heavy doses of Colombian snow and leaving behind a dust trail of ruined lives. They get to pocket their millions, and we get to bury our dead. I figure somebody’s got to put the pain back into the slap—why not us?”

  “You can’t win, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Tony Rigs said, downing the last of his coffee and nodding toward a curtained window for a second cup. “Shit, the shape you two are in, you plant half a dozen of these cocksuckers in rich soil the Pope would declare it a miracle.”

  “What if we don’t go it alone?” Boomer said, catching the surprised glance thrown his way by Dead-Eye. “I’m not talking a full crew here, just something along the lines of what we put together a few years back.”

  “When you butted heads with that prime-time coke queen is what you mean,” Tony Rigs said. “You went in with six and came out with three, as I recall. And the three of you that were left had more holes than a half pound of Swiss.”

  “But Carney and her gang went belly-up,” Dead-Eye said. “We finished what we went in to do, from our way of breaking it down.”

  “That may well be so,” Tony Rigs said. “But it bears no weight with the door you’re about to open this time. Next to any one of these three outfits, Carney and her bunch wouldn’t have made it to the six o’clock news.”

  “Say we catch ourselves a little luck,” Boomer said. He leaned in closer to Tony Rigs, calm and in command of the situation as it began to take its first steps toward a business offer. “We add to our group one of the guys from the last go-around, plus a few fresh faces to round out the team.”

  “If one of them wears a cape and can fly, then just maybe your chances might go up a few notches,” Tony Rigs said. “But not by all that much.”

  “How big a bite are the SAs taking out of OC pockets?” Boomer asked. “And I’m not looking for an on-the-money quote. Ballpark’s good enough.”

  “Depends on the family and the crew,” Tony Rigs said. “Most of the south-of-the-border crowd like to deal dope and guns. Maybe some track action, but not much of that. They leave us the horses out of the starting gate, and we leave them their cockfights in a Bronx barn. But overall, I’d say business was off about twenty to thirty percent since they rolled. They’re not exactly the group-hug types. They see a piece of action that’s of interest, they make their move. Could give a fuck whose turf it is or who’s spent years working it to get it to a profit point.”

  “That hold true for all of OC, or just the Italian end?” Dead-Eye asked.

  “The Crips’ and Bloods’ idea of doing a deal with the SA crowd is handing cash over the counter at Taco Bell,” Tony Rigs said. “The Chinese Triads don’t work with anyone other than their own kind. The Russians are biding their time and building up their trade, looking to eventually run the whole room. They never deal with who they don’t trust, and they don’t trust the SAs. And the Irish, what’s left of them, can barely stomach being in the same room with the Italians, let alone a bar crammed with guys with thick accents.”

  “Not like any one of those crews just to fold their hands and watch their action get sucked up by strangers with guns,” Boomer said. “Been my experience they turn to bite soon as they hear a bark.”

  “When the time’s good, maybe that’s what they’ll do,” Tony Rigs said. “But for now the smart play might be to buy a sideline pass and watch the game play out for one or two quarters. Learn how the other team plays before you call in your offense. At least that’s what I would do, providing that was the line of work I was in, which as you both know, it isn’t.”

  “These fuckers are here to stay,” Dead-Eye said, his eyes doing a quick scan of the quiet street. “They’re buyers, not renters. They want what you got and then some. You’ve been around long enough to smell it yourself, don’t need me to spoon-feed you. And I don’t give a shit what line of work you like to pretend you’re in, they’re going to come at you like wolves on a deer and swallow you.”

  “But that’s not going to happen, because if I heard it right you and Boomer here are going to hook up with a few more crippled cops and tangle with the SAs and Batman them out of town,” Tony Rigs said with a wide smile. “Which means to my ears that I don’t have need for any worries. At least not when it comes to my new friends with the thick accents.”

  “Shave off the cute,” Boomer said, staring hard at Tony Rigs. “You know what I’m asking here. I don’t need to go through it letter by letter. But I want to walk away from this meeting with something other than heartburn. I want an answer. Whichever way you go with it, you and me will still be good. This is a big decision, I realize, and we’re only coming to you. Where you bring it from here is your business.”

  “Can you give me some think time at least?” Tony Rigs said. “Not like you come in here asking for a lower hit on a weekly vig. This is major-league play here, and I need to make sure it’s right for all involved.”

  “We need our answer now,” Dead-Eye said. “You’ve been thinking about moving on the SAs since long before we sat here and spun our tale. We’re just helping to speed up the process, like putting a little STP in your gas tank. But before we make our first move we have to know no other crews will get in our way. If we’re going to slam into roadblocks, be best if we knew about them before we got on the road.”

  Tony Rigs shook his head and rested a hand on Boomer’s right shoulder. “Put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t be able to finger which one is the crazier of the bunch,” he said. “The two of you or the SAs and their posse? But you know, that’s just what it might take, a band of busted badges with nothing to lose but bullets. You might not win the all-out, but you could dent them enough to give the other crews in town the idea to do the same. And then, if that happens, we got ourselves a nice little war.”

  “I’ll get word to you when we’re ready to move,” Boomer said. “I won’t weigh you down with details, just the bare bones. And if you pick up any intel from your way, you can spread it to me on the quiet. The rest of it, you’ll either read about in the papers or hear about on the street.”

  “You need anything from this end?” Tony Rigs asked. “Those police-issued water pistols you two still carry not going to be much help pointed at the artillery these guys jam inside their pants. Might be nice to have something with a bit more kick to it.”

  “How would you go about getting equipment like that for us?” Dead-Eye asked. “Especially since, as you’ve said on more than one occasion, you’re not involved in any illegal activities.”

  “That’s simple,” Tony Rigs said, smile back in place. “I spend a lot of time in prayer. And the Lord above must care an awful lot about me, because he sees to it that my prayers are always answered.”

  15

  Stephanie Torres held a mound of black dust in her gloved right hand and sifted through it with the fingers of her left. The room was crammed with the acrid smell of spilled gasoline and smoldering pieces of old furniture. The wall’s paint had bee
n burnt away, leaving in its wake thin, dark slabs of wood that would break to the touch. The charred floorboards creaked under the weight of Stephanie’s light step. The faulty wiring in the room was seared and hanging off the sides of each wall, the skeletal remains of a fiery wreck. Stephanie walked over to a cracked window and gazed out at the rooftop of the next building, close enough for her to reach out a hand and touch, its brown-brick façade turned black, the tar that overlapped the sides bearing melt dents from the heat of the recent blaze.

  The fire in the building had been set. Stephanie Torres knew it, felt it, believed it, and now needed to find the evidence to prove it. She had a gut feel for the cause of fires and would spend hours, days, weeks sifting through mounds of dust large and small until she found the one clue that would back up her initial theories. The other cops in her unit had long ago learned not to dissuade her from her quest, that the arson investigator they had nicknamed Ash was always spot on the money when it came down to the cause of a burnout. “I’ve worked with the best, but I’ve never crossed paths with anyone like her and I been on this job closing in on twenty-five years,” Captain Peter Perelli once told two detectives fresh off hauling in a suspect wanted in the arson deaths of three children, based solely on evidence dug up by Stephanie “Ash” Torres. “She sees not only what’s there but what isn’t. When she’s at a fresh crime scene, it’s almost as if she can visualize what happened and how. Play it out in real time, like she’s standing there, with the smoke and the stench, watching a fucking video reel off in her head.”

  “She just might be really good at what she does,” one of the detectives, Richie Monroe, said. “Credit her that and forget about the watching-the-dead-burn bullshit.”

  “She’s not good, she’s Hall of Fame great,” Perelli said, jabbing his finger in the air. “But what I’m digging at is what it is that makes her great. How in the hell can she walk into a burnt shell and see something that an investigator with ten years more experience than her just up and misses? She can enter those dark places most of us fear and find her comfort there. I don’t know much about her doings off the job—few of us do—but my sense is that she’s most at home when she’s surrounded by the rubble and ruin of a fire. It’s the one place she knows she belongs.”

  “She’s a pretty hot-looking plate,” the other detective, Tommy Rolo, said. “Even if you just went and made her sound like that fucking chick from Sybil. She into men, do you know, or she a muncher?”

  “That’s on a need to know, and none of us need to know,” Captain Perelli said. “I’m talking here about pure police work and on-the-scene gut instincts, which, it’s now clear to me, travels down a lonely road with the two of you. So I’ll just end by telling you that hands down, for my money at any rate, Stephanie is the best arson investigator to ever pin on the NY tin.”

  “If I ever get close enough, Cap, that would be one of my top-five whispers in her ear,” Rolo said with a fast and easy grin. “Swear it on my mother’s grave.”

  “And now let me whisper a few words of sweet in your ear,” the captain said, his anger directed at both detectives. “Make your case and make it stick. Torres practically hand-walked you through the evidence and threw in motive and method as a side dish. So if either of you two Wonder bread wonders fucks it up, I hope you can make your way to the front entrance of the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, because that’s where your asses will be standing, come snow or sun, until you put in your full twenty.”

  Stephanie stood on the fire escape, the railing and the steps covered in soot, and honed in on the burnt butane lighter. She held it as gently as a newborn in her right hand, running her fingers across its scarred surface. The apartment, a two-bedroom railroad with a tub off the kitchen and a shared bathroom down the hall, was a known drug drop used by the local dealers to make buys to their regulars and bag fresh quantities of the cheap crack and coke shipments that arrived on a weekly basis. It had little in the way of furniture except for a leather couch, a wide-screen television, and a foldout cot. But it did have three full-size, double-door self-defrosting fridges—no doubt, she surmised, used to keep the drugs cool and the vodka and beer cold. There was no food in the cupboards and no clothes folded in a bureau or hanging in the closets. This was not a residence. This was pure and simple a place of business—what passed in the drug world for an office, complete with two-way radios and spotters positioned on the four corners of the street below. Which meant that this fire, the one hundred and tenth she had been assigned in her three years of working the burn beat, was tied into the drug trade. She placed the butane lighter inside a clear plastic bag and dropped it into her evidence kit, the first solid piece of a puzzle that, once complete, would lead her in the direct path of the primary. She took a deep breath and stared up at a cloudless blue sky, the rooftops around her littered with empty beer cans, discarded condoms, and scrunched-up cigarette filters. She could follow the illegal cable hookups flowing from one Tar Beach antenna to the next as they snaked down the sides of the building and into a series of open windows.

  Stephanie Torres was thirty-one years old and already a ten-year veteran of the NYPD. She had a college degree from Fordham University, having worked her way through the four-year program in six and leaving with dual degrees in English and science. She ran five miles every morning on the small treadmill she kept in the foyer of her one-bedroom Corona, Queens, condo. She was a vegetarian, meditated three times a week, and spent her free time renting 1930s and ’40s gangster movies and watching them deep into the night with her best friend and next-door neighbor, Vivian Marsalla, a thirty-three-year-old curvy widow who worked at the downtown post-office depot. Her antique night table was always packed with thick stacks of crime thrillers, true-crime tales, crossword-puzzle magazines, and forensic and arson-related textbooks—all resting alongside a tall, chipped statue of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes and cops. She had no steady boyfriend, no desire for a pet, and hadn’t taken a vacation in three years. She drank two glasses of red wine most nights of her life, stayed away from hard booze, and suffered from chronic bouts of insomnia, sustaining herself on three half-a-doze hours of sleep each night. On those rare occasions when she did manage to close her eyes long enough to earn a rest, Stephanie Torres would wrap herself in the warm dreams of the happy childhood she had enjoyed before tragedy redefined her reality. But when the nightmare of the horrible deaths of her grandfather and her mother crept into her float-away moment, Stephanie would jolt herself awake and step away from either the couch or the bed and spend the rest of the hours until dawn sitting upright in front of her television set. There, in the blue glow of her favorite movie hoods, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, she would be able to regain the lost strands of her composure.

  And she would once again find peace.

  Stephanie smelled the gasoline before she felt it fall across her back and shoulders. She reached behind her thin leather jacket and grabbed for her .38 Special, spinning in a semicircle as she did, her eyes following the shadow that hovered over her from the rooftop. The gas flowing from the full canister coated her jacket and splattered her slacks and soft black loafers. The rest fell through the open slats of the fire escape, landing in the cement garden five stories below. She jumped back into the burnt-out apartment, landing chest hard against a mound of dust and splintered wood. She lay there, cocked gun in her right hand, in silence for several moments, her breath coming out in slow spurts, her mind racing in an attempt to put all the pieces on the board and map out what would happen next. Her thick dark hair was matted against the sides of her face, filled with gasoline as it dripped off her fingers and onto the burnt rubble of the floor. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, her throat and nostrils burning with the aftertaste of fumes, and knew that in a few moments she would need to kill a man.

  “I’m glad it was you,” the male voice coming up from behind her said. The words were spoken in a soft and polite manner, like a young student chatting with a favorite teacher. �
�You’re the one I most wanted.”

  Stephanie didn’t move, her mind doing laps as she tried to place the voice and put a face and a connection to it. She held the grip on her handgun, not knowing if the man behind her was armed with anything more deadly than a match. “Do we know each other?” she asked, making a strong attempt at staying calm.

  “Let’s just say you’re aware of me,” the man said, shifting his feet slightly across the ruined floor. “At the very least, you should be more than familiar with my work. After all, you’ve seen so much of it down the years.”

  “You’re a torcher,” Stephanie said, her cop confidence back, her radar at full power. “Gas and electric are your way to go, based on the work in here.”

  “If one doesn’t get you, the other will,” the voice said, adding a low chuckle. “The method has been around forever, and is practically foolproof. I’m afraid in that regard I get no points for creativity. It is most effective in firetraps such as this building, but not exactly a true test of my skills.”

  “What would be?” Stephanie asked.

  “There was a fire about a year back,” the voice said, the man stepping closer toward Stephanie. “It was in one of those odious new downtown high-rise buildings. You know the ones, don’t you? All glass and steel, with a security system out of a James Bond movie. But if you and I share any common ground it’s in knowing the very basic and simple fact that everything can and will burn. It’s all in the execution. At any rate, I know you weren’t the one assigned to that masterwork, but I’m more than certain you read as much about it as you could, practically marking to memory the full details of the case file.”

  “Eighteenth-floor corner office,” Stephanie said, doing a full-speed recall on the still unsolved arson investigation that took the lives of an on-the-come stockbroker and his even younger intern. “It was a flash fire contained in the one room, probably started off a timing mechanism, hard-tick explosion working off a gas-soaked detonator. Very professional work, and a long way removed from a tenement torch like this one.”