Chasers Read Free Page A

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