Chasers (2 page)

2

The tall man sat on the top bleacher, staring out at the high school track and gazing at the array of students prepping for an afternoon’s practice. He had a sweaty bottle of Corona beer wrapped inside a wet paper bag by his right foot and scratched at three days’ stubble. As the day had stretched on, the weather had turned cool, the sun hiding behind a small battalion of clouds.

The man leaned a set of strong shoulders against a wooden rail. “Tell me what is on your mind, Roberto,” he said to the young man sitting to his left. “And do it before the kids begin their runs.”

“The way the hit went down today was not right,” Roberto said. “It could have been and should have been a lot cleaner. How are we going to be respected by the other gangs in this city if the best we can do is botch a restaurant hit?”

The man picked up the paper bag and took a long swig of the Corona. He looked over at Roberto and smiled. “I don’t want their
respect,
” he said. “All that ever gets you is a sympathy card and fresh flowers at your funeral. I want them to
shiver
when they hear my name. I want them to think that I will do
anything
at
any time
to
anyone.
Who are we to fear? The police? You think they give a shit about a dead spic? To them, it’s one less player they need to concern themselves over. This job was our first success, my young friend. And one of many more that will come our way.”

“The police may give it only a shrug, but the Gonzalez brothers will care,” Roberto said, holding tight to his concern. “They will care very much about that one dead spic.”

“I expect nothing less,” the man said. “It was one of their own we put down. So the first instinct will be to bite back. They’ll call out their guns and aim them our way. And they will hold their own, at least for a while. But they, too, will meet their day. It’s only a question of when.”

Roberto stared out at the runners, a sprint team from Holy Angels High School, going through a series of warm-up exercises, a coach in a sweatshirt carrying a stopwatch, clocking their every move. “Do you miss it much?” he asked.

“It was my life,” the man said, leaning forward, thin arms at rest on steady legs. “For thirty years all I knew, all I loved, was my religion and my sport. I began each day with a short prayer and ended it with a long run. I thought it would go that way until it was my time to die.”

“Were you a good coach?” Roberto asked, knowing that he was stepping into the older man’s comfort zone, an arena where he more closely resembled a saint than a stone killer.

“Some years, yes,” the man said, throwing Roberto a relaxed smile. “Those years, we won many meets and took home trophies by the armful. Other years, when my squads lacked discipline, were not so kind.”

“I came to one of your meets,” Roberto said. “Went with my older brothers up to Mexico City to see their school race against yours. They were favored that day, a much faster group than the one you bused into town.”

“And?” the man said, his eyes focused on a tall, lanky boy with a high-end leg kick. “Was their school better?”

“Maybe they were, but not on that day and not on that track,” Roberto said. “They were run to the ground by Father Angel Cortez and his squad.”

“Even back in those years I hated to lose,” Angel said. “A bad trait, I suppose, in a priest, no matter how good the intentions. But one that has served me well in my second cycle.”

Roberto nodded.

“I won over a hundred gold medals in the years I coached,” Angel said. “If I put them all together, I couldn’t buy my way into a minor-league ballpark. You reach my age and you come to realize the foolishness of a vow of poverty. It does nothing except help to line the pockets of other men.”

Angel finished the last of his beer and leaned back, letting what was left of a setting sun illuminate his tanned face. He was a slight man, kept thin by a diet that consisted of one small meal a day, usually a mixture of steamed rice and carrots. Angel’s vices were limited to cold Coronas and chilled rosé at the ready. He was sixty-one, the only son of a Colombian shepherd with a religious bent and a Mexican mother who taught him to say his first Mass in the small kitchen of their two-bedroom farm. At fourteen, he was signed over to the priesthood, destined to serve out a life devoted to God and little else. He took full advantage of the educational avenues open to him, earning top honors and entry to the best schools in South America. The Church was more than willing to fund his way, eager to nourish the passions of a young and zealous priest. And he took to his calling, earning degrees in English literature, music, and art history, passing his newfound knowledge down to his eager and attentive students at the high school where he was assigned to teach. The students of the small town, less than a fifteen-minute drive south of Bogotá, were poor, undernourished, and possessed of little hope for the future. The one road leading out of town, the one path promising something—anything—could be seen from the windows of their homes and classrooms day and night, and the poppy fields that dotted the landscape might as well have been layered with dollar bills, for they, more than books or sports, were the enticement that drove the young men and women of the town who were looking to line their pockets.

Father Angel Cortez knew the odds were bad, but he bet against the house.

He worked with the kids, preaching and teaching a better way. “I know more than my share of old doctors, lawyers, and teachers,” he would tell his students. “But I don’t know any old drug dealers. Most, if at all lucky, live only as long as an abandoned dog.”

He fought against the encroachment of the drug cartels by keeping the children under his domain constantly busy. He helped to organize baseball and basketball tournaments, got some of the town businesses to kick in money and build a new track and grandstands for the school. He then took a handful of teenagers, used to running up and down the rugged mountain terrain surrounding the town, and turned them into one of the most élite track-and-field teams in South America. Before long, college recruiters and professional scouts from as far north as Detroit and Chicago ventured down, looking to offer fast and easy money along with full-ride four-year scholarships to the young padre’s crew. Father Angel’s dreams for a better world and a safer and more rewarding life for the students under his care seemed on the verge of a hard-fought victory.

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 filters through his ears?”

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