Chasers Read Free Page B

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.

4

    Stephanie Torres walked down the burnt-out hallway, the thick and familiar smell of burnt wood and rubber filling her nose and lungs as smoke smoldered off the walls. She moved with seasoned steps, her eyes scanning each crack in the wall, each hole in the floorboards, easing her way from one ruined apartment to the next. She was looking for the one piece of evidence that would allow her to label the fire, which only a few hours earlier was a cauldron that had taken a full New York fire battalion to combat, the work of an arsonist. It cost the lives of three civilians and put two veteran smoke-eaters in an ICU ward. She moved up the landing, stepping over a large, gaping hole and moving past the bodies of a half dozen rats smoldering in a corner. At the top of the steps, she bent down and ran her gloved fingers over a small mound of dust, picking out the burnt remains of a safety pin. She reached into the pocket of her fire coat, pulled out a small cellophane evidence bag, dropped it in, and sealed it shut. She stood up and walked deeper into the second-floor hallway.
    She was an arson investigator assigned to the New York Police Department, working out of a set of precincts in the East Bronx. It was a neighborhood that she knew well, having grown up in a two-story house on Boyd Avenue, the only daughter of a Puerto Rican garage mechanic and a tough-willed mother one generation removed from the streets of San Juan. Back then, the neighborhood was a series of redbrick houses that served as first homes to a working-class enclave of Italian, Irish, and Hispanic immigrants, each of whom found a common ground in rearing children and vegetable gardens. Stephanie was at ease both at school, where she excelled in science and English lit, and on the street in front of her home, where she had mastered the intricate rules of bottle-cap baseball before she lost all her baby teeth. Her father, Hector, a proud and stubborn man and the first in his family to land a civil-service job with the Department of Sanitation, would sit behind the small white gate leading to the basement steps of the two-story house he owned, mortgage-free, and watch his little girl at play. He preferred to work the more demanding eight-to-four morning shift in order to be home to spend time with Stephanie. She was a frail girl, suited more to the leafy confines of suburban sprawl than to the daily give-and-take tumble of the Bronx streets, but he was also confident that what Stephanie lacked in brawn she