Chasers Read online

  Maria slid the key into the lock and turned it to the right, listening for the click of the deadbolt shifting loose. She turned the rust-stained doorknob and eased the thick and dented wood door open. A heavy odor of gas filtered through the foyer, causing her eyes to burn. She stepped deeper into the apartment, shades and curtains drawn tight, leaving the two grocery bags in the outside vestibule. “Grandpa,” she said, her lungs aching from the smell. “Grandpa, are you in here?”

  The walls on both sides were covered with family photos and framed childhood drawings. The furniture that filled each room was as familiar to her as the lyrics of an old song. It was as if she had entered a time capsule, one that transported her back to the night before her twelfth birthday, when she was allowed to stay up until the midnight hour, baking cake and cookies in the kitchen with her Grandma Elena. The same night she caught a peek at her new bike, red with a white basket and a blue bell, hidden in the hall closet, just off the living room. Maria would never forget that night and that very special birthday, and she always looked forward to a time when she could do something that would be as memorable for her own child.

  The smell of gas grew stronger with each careful step Maria took. She moved quietly past the small dining room. The table, chairs, and overhead fixtures, not used during the passing decades, maintained their store-bought shine and glow, helped by her grandfather’s weekly hand wax. Her eyes were tearing now, and her throat had an acid burn with each swallow as she turned into the large living room, where the radio was tuned to an all-news station. She stood in the center of the room, across from the three-seat couch that was still covered with her grandmother’s hand-stitched embroidery, and stared at her grandfather. Olmeda was in his recliner, slippered feet stretched out, a copy of the Post half open across his thin chest. His head was tilted back, at rest against the soft green leather, his eyes open and glistening with tears, thin lines of spittle coursing down the right side of his mouth. Maria fell to her knees and cupped her hands to her mouth, swallowing a scream along with the bile. She didn’t need to step any closer or check his vital signs to know the truth.

  She shook her head, the room growing blurry, her vision dimming, her breath coming in gasps. Rising once again to her feet, she moved toward a shuttered window, anxious to bring fresh air into the rank apartment. Her hands reached for the thin brown cord that sealed shut the thick drapes. She wrapped two shaky fingers around the cord and pulled it down. That was when she saw the black fuse and heard the click of the timer snap into place. She turned her head to the right and caught a glimpse of her communion photo, her rich black hair done up in curls, her white dress crisp and new, matching the folded-down socks and the short veil. Her hands were clasped together in prayer, black rosary beads wrapped around her fingers.

  It was the last image she would ever see.

  The massive blast shook the building down to the base of its shaky foundation, sending hunks of brick, shards of wood, and slices of glass flooding out into the busy Bronx street. A large mountain of dust billowed out of the basement like a derailed tornado and stretched its brown tentacles across the face of the tenements dotting the blighted avenue. A half dozen parked cars were lifted off the ground and tossed onto their sides, windows shattering and tires exploding from the heat. Three men and a child were knocked to the ground, and an elderly woman was slammed against a light pole, cutting her head and face. In the distance, car alarms and police sirens went off almost in unison, black-and-whites rushing to respond to the blast, called in by a dozen locals.

  Inside the apartment, there was nothing but ruin. The bodies of Grandpa Olmeda and Maria lay mangled and destroyed—two innocent souls blinked out of existence at one end of the Bronx.

  At the other end, three miles to the north, a young girl sat in a classroom listening with full attention to her English teacher dissecting Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She did not yet know it, but at that moment the life she had known had ended and a journey had begun. A journey that would lead her to the hard hands that planted the bomb that erased her mother and her grandfather from her world—and created in her a hurt and an ache that she could do nothing to ease.

  From that day forward, Stephanie Torres would never again be able to refer to herself as innocent.

  5

  The young man jogged down the empty sidewalk. He was looking to better his eight-minute mile and glanced occasionally at the stopwatch clutched in his right hand. It was a cool morning, light barely breaking across Washington Heights, the riot gates on the bodegas and the candy stores he passed lifted and morning newspapers taken in, the smell of fresh coffee filling the foggy air. Julio Aguilera was two months past his twenty-third birthday and had lived in the Heights for all of those years, venturing outside his neighborhood only once, for a weekend trip to Miami with his parents when he was six. He was a high school dropout and had held a series of one-way jobs before latching on to eyeball work for a Colombian crew new to the area, paying get-by cash for any street information he passed their way. The money he was given was more than enough to cover the expenses on the one-bedroom third-floor walk-up whose kitchen window faced out onto a thin alleyway where a dozen years earlier the body of his brother, Miguel, a low-end drug dealer, was found in his own blood. It was Julio who had identified the body for the police on the scene, gazing down at the gaping wounds that had torn open his brother’s back and the top of his skull. Miguel had thrown the money he earned into a heroin habit he could ill afford, which marked him as an easy prey for a street-corner takeout. It was on that humid night, watching Miguel’s body get bagged and tagged in an alley, that Julio vowed that any cash he took in from the lucrative Heights drug trade would be tossed deep into a bank account—not slipped into a bent needle with little give.

  Which led him to his current position as a street stool, spying for the new set of cocaine cowboys in town, Father Angel’s hard-dealing fresh-off-the-runway crew. They rolled into the city little more than six months ago, looking to break into the crowded upper tiers of the white-line traders, flashing wads of green and packing heavy artillery in case the money wasn’t enough to catch someone’s interest. Julio signed on from the get-go and fed the higher-ups enough street news to keep the cash rolling in, but not enough to chart his name on anyone’s radar panel. The hours were light and sea-breeze easy, giving Julio more than enough time to devote to the one true passion in his life: running.

  Julio never missed a day’s run, regardless of weather or time of year. He kept to a steady routine, hitting the streets in the slow-tick minutes just before dawn to scale the hills of the Heights, logging a steady eight to twelve miles each day. He always aimed to up his speed or add a few more blocks to the day’s tally. He kept his sneakers clean and looking as new as the day he bought them, and he changed his PF Flyers every three months, always going for the black low-cuts with red laces. He ran without a headset or a radio tuned to any particular station. The only sounds he wanted around him were those of the neighborhood shaking itself awake after yet one more night of gunplay and mayhem.

  Julio Aguilera lived for his daily run.

  Now he was running at his fastest clip, gliding over a large crack in the pavement, when the door of a parked car swung open and caught him flush in the center of his belly and legs. The force of the hit sent him spinning, arms out like wings, legs lurching toward the sky, his body free of breath and bristling with pain and confusion. He took a hard landing to the sidewalk, the back of his head knocking the concrete.

  Through a set of glazed and glassy eyes, Julio made out the figure of a man stepping from the passenger door and walking closer to where he lay. The man had on what looked to be a black leather jacket, and there was a slight limp to his gait. He stood over Julio and stared down at him, his head doing a slow shake.

  “I always heard running really wasn’t that good of an exercise,” the man said. “That across the long haul it did a fella more harm than good. I guess maybe there’s some tru
th to that after all.”

  “I was just hitting my stride until you door-jacked me, shithead.” Julio hissed out the words, the pain in his lungs causing his throat to clench.

  “You must of taken a harder blow than I figured,” the man said, holding a container of coffee in his right hand. “Scramble-egged your brains. That happens, you start to see things that you only think happened.”

  “Think, my ass,” Julio said, his voice fast regaining its strength. “You could have killed me for real. Get my hands on a solid lawyer, sue your ass for any cash you got.”

  A second man walked over from the driver’s side of the car and stood staring down at Julio. He had one foot on the curb and the other on the sidewalk, a half-eaten buttered roll in his left hand. “Shame he didn’t run into the door with his mouth,” he said with a shrug.

  “Little early in the day for a Five-O shakedown, you ask me,” Julio said, lifting himself on his elbows. “And I carry no cash when I walk, forget about it when I run.”

  “This little fucker’s like 1010 news,” Dead-Eye said as he slipped the last of the buttered roll into a corner of his mouth. “You give him twenty-two minutes and he’ll give you his world.”

  “You good enough to stand?” the first man, Boomer, asked. “Maybe even walk it a few feet?”

  “Do I got me a choice in it?” Julio asked.

  “I could say yes,” Boomer said, looking past Julio and down the silent street. “But it would be a lie.”

  “And I could step up and cap both your asses,” Julio said, getting to his feet and wiping the blood from his mouth on his left forearm.

  “Cap us with what, running man?” Dead-Eye asked, moving up to the sidewalk, his voice calm and polite, his eyes hard enough to bend iron.

  Julio did his best to match that stare, held it for several seconds, then backed down. “I still got my ears, and I know you two Kojaks got more than enough lip,” he said with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “So give me what you came to spread. What do you want to jab to me about?”

  “A priest,” Boomer said.

  6

  Bobby “Rev. Jim” Scarponi sat on the park bench and snapped open the lid to a can of Coke. He took two long gulps and rested the can between the soles of a pair of tan low-cut desert boots. He was on the west side of Central Park, just a long throw from a Broadway Show League softball game going on to his left. A small throng of people, some sitting in garden chairs with coolers by their side, cheered their team on while taking in what was left of the late-afternoon sun.

  Rev. Jim leaned back against the bench’s wooden slats, stretched his arms out, and checked the time on his watch. He was wearing a jean jacket over a dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt and an old pair of Macy’s slacks. His body was still workout lean, kept that way by a vegetarian diet and three-times-a-week yoga classes that he attended with a fervor bordering on the religious. He was closing in on his fortieth birthday and, for the first time in memory, had finally landed in a good place both mentally and physically. Of course, the burn scars remained etched across his chest and neck, constant reminders of his years working the decoy beat for the New York Police Department, a short span in his life when his work was considered the best in the cop trade. But he had resigned himself to the handful of concessions he needed to continue his day-to-day without being haunted by the fire that had brought his career as a cop to a hard-brake end. The steady flow of nightmares had now been reduced to a few stress-induced occurrences a month, and the once strong-enough-to-touch urges to take his own life had all but dissipated. The salve to his wounds had been helped along by twice-a-week counseling sessions with a Lower East Side therapist and weekly visits with his father, Albert, a Korean War veteran who long ago had learned the harsh lessons of wrapping his world of pain inside a cocoon of silence.

  But the scars were always there to serve as a reminder. It didn’t matter that he hid them from public view by wearing long-sleeved shirts with high-rimmed collars, regardless of the time of year. Or that he never bared his chest to a woman, determined to avoid the look of pity he knew would be in her eyes—or, worse, the look of horror. But Rev. Jim had made his peace with the demons that raged within. He realized that his was, at best, a shaky truce, one that required a determined focus, but so far he was making it work.

  Rev. Jim was, for payroll purposes, a drug counselor for a West Side not-for-profit clinic. He had been with the small storefront outfit in the Eighties off Broadway for close to three years, starting as a volunteer and offering advice to any teenager who walked through the glass-paneled door with the look of the lost in his eyes. Soon enough, even the well-meaning couple who ran the clinic, Jeffrey and Annie Parsons, realized Rev. Jim could be a much more useful tool in their losing battles against the onslaught of the drug trade. He had made some impact with a few of the kids, but not enough of them to alter the balance scales. He wasn’t at his best or most comfortable in such situations, and they sensed his frustration at not being able to stem the problem. “Maybe we have you reaching out to the wrong group,” Jeffrey said to him late one morning as the two of them sat in a small back room with an overhead fan and a window facing an alley. “You’re good with the kids, don’t get me wrong. I just think you might be better talking to the ones we can never talk to—and, even if we did, wouldn’t care to listen.”

  “Who you got in mind?” Rev. Jim asked, already sensing the answer to his own question.

  “The dealers,” Jeffrey Parsons said.

  Rev. Jim stood and nodded down at Parsons, the street juice of the adrenaline-junkie cop starting its mad dash through his veins. “I’ll start in the morning,” he told him. “On one condition.”

  “Name it,” Parsons said.

  “You feed me the names of the kids in trouble,” Rev. Jim said. “I put a hand out to their street connection and take that to wherever it leads. The results will be there—trust me on that end. Just never ask me how I get those results.”

  Rev. Jim saw the overweight white man in the Lawrence Taylor football jersey lean up against a side of the batting cage. He had on a sweat-stained Raiders cap, baggy shorts, and high-top black sneakers with no socks. The back of his flabby neck was a runway of thick, red, connect-the-dot pimples that snaked down his back and hid beneath the stains and shine of the tattered jersey. Rev. Jim left the park bench and walked up to the batting cage, stopping just a few feet short of the man, who looked to be in his mid-thirties and smelled like a rain dog.

  “Got a minute for me?” Rev. Jim asked in his most polite tone.

  The overweight man kept his eyes on the batter in the box, bat held high above his shoulders, neck muscles tight, arms ready to swing the wood against the fast-pitch softball coming down his way. “You a cop, flash me some tin,” the overweight man said. “If not, take it back where you came from while you still got the legs.”

  Rev. Jim smiled and rested his shoulders against the cage, arms folded across his chest. “You guys take classes to learn tough talk like that?” he asked. “I mean, is there a drug-dealer training school where you all go to listen to some bent-over, smack-addled scumbag run you through the paces?”

  “You been warned,” the overweight man said. “There won’t be a rerun.”

  Rev. Jim pulled a small photo from his jean jacket and held it up for the overweight man to see. He gave it a side-glance and then turned back to the game. “Her name’s Rachel,” Rev. Jim said. “Been on the street about two, maybe three weeks, a month tops. You know the drill. No place to go, nobody to see, and before you can say needle and spike some lard-ass loser who looks a lot like you has her living off the pipe.”

  “Don’t mean shit to me,” the overweight man said. “Not you and for sure not that skank.”

  “Rodney Phillips,” Rev. Jim said. “Boys High honor student back when those zits on your neck first took root. Altar boy, decent family, father maybe put his lips to a bottle more than he should, but nothing more to it than that. You were excellent in both hist
ory and science, had your shit down cold as a keg. Could have gone to a decent middle-tier school, but somewhere along the way you lost the directions. Ended up where you are now, dealing and dialing little girls to morning highs and late-night scores.”

  Rodney turned and glared over at Rev. Jim, his cheeks puffed out and red as tree apples. “I find out who it is been feeding you that shit about me, I’ll slap his tongue on a bun and have it for my lunch,” he said. “And then I’ll get to wastin’ your sorry ass.”

  “Any play you want where I’m concerned is fine by me,” Rev. Jim said. “But your days with Rachel ended the second I showed up. You need to think of me like AA, only instead of twelve steps my plan only comes with two. The warning you just heard was step one.”