Chasers (29 page)

“A cab might be a better way to go,” Ash said. “We get on the number two looking like this, caked with dirt and blood with glass sprinkled on our heads and shoulders, it might catch a curious eye.”

Rev. Jim laughed, rested a hand on the small of her back, and pulled out his detective’s shield, which was hanging from a chain under his pullover. “You and me were anywhere else, that might present itself as a problem,” he said. “But we’re in New York City. In this town, the insane and the cops ride free of charge.”

23

Hector Gonzalez and his main muscle man, Robles, stood over the bloody man, his upper body hanging over the side of a grime-filled sidewalk, his legs half wrapped around a dripping fire hydrant. Robles held a small black iron pipe in his left hand and had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He leaned against a parked Ford Taurus and looked over at Gonzalez. “This the third straight week he’s been behind on his payouts and the third straight week he’s caught a beating,” Robles said. “We’re running on a reverse track with this loser, getting nowhere in a hurry.”

“Maybe it’s not him we should be touching,” Gonzalez said. “Man’s got a chubby wife and two fresh daughters. We retool them up a bit, then maybe he would be a lot quicker to cough up the cash he owes.”

“Are you hearing any of this?” Robles asked the bleeding man, whose lips were kissing the street. “You don’t come across with the pesos, we’re going to have to head in there, pull out our muscle tool, and bump bellies with your wife and
chicas.
We do that, then maybe we slice about fifteen percent off of what you owe. If we make you watch, then maybe we shave off another five.”

The man fought to lift his head off the sidewalk and rest it on the rear bumper of a late-model Suburban. “Doing that won’t get you your money,” he said. “Nothing will until I can get my business in the shape it once was, and that’s not going to happen until you get that fucking priest off my back.”

Hector Gonzalez gave a head nod to Robles. “Stand him up and pull him closer,” he said. “I want to make sure I hear all his words.”

Robles grabbed the front of the man’s floral print shirt, thick splotches of fresh blood smeared across his chest and shoulders, and yanked him to his feet, tossing him against the hood of a Chevy Impala. “There, now that’s better,” Robles said. “You feeling comfy now, Quinto?”

“How much a week are you shaving to the priest?” Gonzalez asked, his dark, soulless eyes giving the street around them a quick look. He stood close enough to Quinto to see the blood pour off his wounds and smell the sweat running down his body. “And how long have you been feeding him?”

“He takes the skim,” Quinto said, his lower lip shaking like a faulty brake pedal. “Leaves enough for me to stay even on a good week, fall back some on a slow. Been coming in steady for about a month now, give or take a day.”

“And why you wait till now to pass it on to me?” Gonzalez asked. “He tell you not to say, or did you find that street on your own?”

“He said he would kill me and my family if I put even word one in front of you,” Quinto said.

“And what do you think
I
will do?” Gonzalez asked, grabbing the cheeks of Quinto’s chunky face in his right hand and pressing them together hard.

“Sounds like he wets his pants a lot more when he hears from that ex-priest than he does when the words come at him from our side, Papi,” Robles said, standing now right next to Gonzalez. “We need to change the color of that shit, and fast, before it spreads to the rest of the neighborhood.”

Hector Gonzalez looked over at the shivering Quinto and shook his head. “You know I can’t have that happen,” he said. “It doesn’t take a lot for word to get out that the G-Men lost their grip and let any low-ride pussy with a gun and a posse come in and piss on their land. This starts with you, Quinto, and it’s going to end with you.”

“I won’t let it happen again,” Quinto said. “I won’t give the priest any more of the money. I’ll stand up to him, make him turn away with empty hands. I swear to it.”

“If you had any balls, Quinto, you would have done that the first time he stepped into your place,” Gonzalez said. “Spit in his face and tell him he was one shit shy of a pot of luck. But you covered yourself, made the priest a blanket for you and your family, in case he made a move our way and it paid off.”

“Give me one more chance, Hector,” Quinto said, his hands clasped, his body close to doing a full crumple. “I beg you to please do that, for all the years I have worked for you. I will do anything. Please.”

“Fair enough,” Gonzalez said. “You been with us from day one, Quinto, so it’s only right for me to give your rope less of a tug. Go back inside your shop and bring your two girls out here to see me. I’ll take it from there.”

“This is between
us,
” Quinto said, the panic in his voice taking a back seat to the rising anger. “My family has nothing to do with what goes on out here.”

“We’re all one family, no?” Gonzalez asked. “Me, you, Robles, your wife, your daughters. To make it work, we
all
need to work. And that’s what the girls will do. They will work off the money you owe us, and if they taste anywhere near as good as they look, then you’ll be in the red chips in no time. You should be happy, not upset.”

“I can’t let you do this,” Quinto said. “No father could.”

“I understand,” Gonzalez said, stepping closer to Quinto. “Believe me, I hear what you’re trying to say. You just didn’t grasp what it is
I’ve
been running off at the mouth about. But that’s okay, it’s not the first time I’ve run into this situation. My man Robles here is right. He’s always telling me I don’t make myself easy to understand.”

The long blade slid down the side of Gonzalez’s jacket and slipped into the palm of his right hand, fingers quick to curl around the thick wood handle. Gonzalez didn’t flinch as he jammed the knife hard and deep into Quinto’s stomach and held him in place with his other hand, watching as he crumpled from the biting pain, his eyes bulging, warm blood oozing onto his hand and jacket, choking on the blood rushing up into his throat. With surgical skill, Gonzalez twisted the blade and pushed it up through artery, fat, and muscle, carving a slow and bloody arc. He held Quinto in check all the way through the death rattle and then stepped away, releasing his grip on the blade handle and watching as the man fell to the ground in a dead heap. “Go inside and bring those two bitches out here,” he said to Robles. “Show them their father and then tell them what they need to do unless they want to find their fat-ass mother the same way.”

“How soon you want them to start?” Robles asked.

“They’re on the clock as of now,” Gonzalez said. “They need to make up the money this piece of shit owed me before I sit down to dinner.”

“Okay if I break them in?” Robles asked, walking toward the store. “Show them what they’ll be expected to do?”

“As long as the money’s on my table before I cut into my steak,” Gonzalez said. He moved toward his parked sedan, the dead man’s blood running down his right arm and hand, dripping onto the sidewalk.

“You want me to save one for you?” Robles asked. “Or bring her out to your car?”

“Not this time,” Gonzalez said. “I got a date of my own, and this is one I don’t want to be late on.”

“You might want to stop and wash that blood off first,” Robles said. “That shit could be a big turnoff for a chick.”

“Not with this Russian,” Gonzalez said, swinging open the door of his black Cadillac. “She’s got the hunger for blood. The two of us together, it’s a marriage made in hell.”

24

The cross-town bus came to a slow stop in the middle of the street in front of Madison Green. The front doors swished open and two men in leather coats, carrying duffel bags, stepped in and paid their fares. They walked down the aisle and sat across from each other six rows deep. There was one other passenger on the bus, a man hunkered down in the corner seat of the last row, hat covering his face, the lip of his jacket serving as a blanket as he looked to sleep off a long night of heavy drink.

The doors closed and the bus slipped out, moving like a tired snake toward Madison Avenue, then taking a left turn uptown. One of the men stared out at the passing street action, his neck arched to catch a glimpse of the next scheduled stop. He smiled when he spotted a man in a white raincoat and a blue baseball cap holding a large gift-wrapped package in his arms. He turned away and gave the man sitting across from him a quick nod. “So far,” he whispered with a slight smile.

The smile disappeared when the bus moved past the stop and ran through a yellow light and kept sliding up Madison, the driver oblivious to the error. “Hey,” the man shouted up to the driver. “You just missed a stop. Weren’t you watching?”

“Too late for that now, chief,” the driver said. “You can get off the next time I stop, not to worry.”

“There was a passenger at that other stop,” the man said, his voice barely under a shout. “You’re
supposed
to pick him up. It’s your fucking job.”

“Maybe so,” the driver said with a chuckle. “But this is only my second day behind the wheel and a man can only learn to do so much so fast, you understand. I think I got the driving part of it down, but the rest of it may take me a little time.”

The bus stopped at a red light, riding in the center of three lanes, far removed from any shelters where small groups of passengers were gathered. The other man, silent until now, leaped to his feet, pulled a heavy-caliber handgun from his jacket pocket, and took several steps toward the driver. “Pull this fuckin’ bus over to the side and do it now,” he said to the driver.

The driver looked in the rearview mirror and glanced at the man with the gun standing less than five feet away. “Tell you what,” the driver, Dead-Eye, said. “I’ll cook you a deal. And I promise I’ll make it one that’s on the fair and square for all four of us.”

“What the fuck are you running off at the mouth about?” the man with the gun said. “There’s no deal and there’s no four of anything in this shit, it’s just the two of us and you.”

“I knew I should have RSVP’d,” Quincy, the man at the back of the bus, said with a shrug. He was standing halfway down the aisle, two .38 Specials in his hands, feet braced against the steel base of the seats. “I always suck at that kind of shit. Chalk it up to bad manners.”

“You guys are on the salary end of the business, not the profit end,” Dead-Eye said, easing the bus forward, careful not to veer too close to an off-duty taxi shifting lanes. “Same holds for the fool lugging that heavy gift box of cocaine a few stops back. So play it smart and give yourself a chance to live and breathe a few more days. I drop you off at a safe and cozy spot on my route and you walk off free and with a breeze to your back.”

“Just so long as you leave the two duffel bags behind,” Quincy said. “You have to throw that into the mix as well.”

“Oh, right,” Dead-Eye said. “I forgot to mention that one tiny little detail. What the money boys like to call the deal breaker.”

“We can’t leave the bags,” the man with the gun said. “And we won’t.”

“Take a second,” Dead-Eye said, letting go of the steering wheel, his eyes off the road and on the two men, the bus parked in the middle of a busy avenue, his voice as serious as an illness. “Take a long, hard second before you make that your final call.”

The man sitting, the duffel bag resting against his left leg, made the first move. With his left hand he threw the bag toward Quincy, pulled a.44 bulldog out of his jacket with his right, and started firing shots at Dead-Eye. The man standing whirled and fired off two quick rounds at Quincy.

Dead-Eye did a quick duck behind the driver’s barrier, heard the bullets ping against the front end of the bus and then lunged out of his seat, guns in both hands, firing at the two men. Quincy jumped into the rear stairwell and shot off rounds from both his guns at the sitting man. The inside of the bus was now a hot and shuttered fire zone, as a dozen bullets flew in four different directions. The four men held their ground, each prepared to die.

The man standing in the middle of the bus, his back to Quincy and pegging rapid-fire shots at Dead-Eye, was the first to go down. The gun slipped away from his hand and he fell slowly to his knees, a large dark hole in his cheek holding the fatal slug. He rocked back and forth for several seconds, bringing the action around him to a halt, then dropped flat on his face, a blood mass forming around his neck.

Quincy did a quick clip reload, and Dead-Eye moved away from the driver’s side and down the aisle, their guns aimed at the remaining man, sitting now with his back pressed against a cracked window. “You don’t need to die,” Dead-Eye said to him. “You only need to drop your piece and get your ass off this bus.”

Police sirens exploded around them, traffic and crowds swarmed and stalled around the bus, locking it in place. “He’s not the only one,” Quincy said. “We got less than two minutes to get lost before we’re pinned in for good.”

Dead-Eye walked down the aisle, stepped over the body of the first shooter, and rested the barrel of his gun on the man’s chest. “If I’m going to get arrested on this bus, it’s going to be for
two
murders,” he said to the man, his voice low and direct. “It’s your call to make, but you need to make it now.”

The man nodded and slowly slid his weapon back inside the front flap of his jacket. “You win, at least for today,” he said, watching as Dead-Eye backed away, moving to the rear doors next to Quincy. “We’ll be back for our money. Only next time, you’ll be facing more than two of us.”

“Good,” Quincy said. “I’m always up for a party.”

The shooter stood and ran toward the front doors, his left hand reaching for the lever that slid them open. He jumped off the bus, gave one final look to his fallen partner, and ran out into the crowd and the traffic.

Dead-Eye grabbed one of the duffel bags and tossed it to Quincy. He picked up the other and together they pushed open the rear rubber doors and stepped out onto the crowded street. “Is there any plan if one of us gets nabbed?” Quincy asked.

“You’re holding two hundred thousand in neatly bundled bills in a duffel bag,” Dead-Eye said. “That should be more than enough to buy you a sweet-talking lawyer and still have some left over to skim a few held-out palms.”

“Is that the best you can offer?” Quincy asked.

“You can always float your way over to Plan B,” Dead-Eye said, making his way around a blocked cab and three stalled pedestrians.

“Which is what?” Quincy asked, stepping over the bumper of a UPS truck landlocked alongside a battered Chrysler Cordoba.

“Bust your way out of Rikers,” Dead-Eye said. “You may not make it, but we would be more than impressed by the attempt.”

Quincy laughed, waved, and disappeared into the thick fog of cars and people, black-and-whites and fire engines flooding the outskirts of the area. Dead-Eye watched him fade away as he slowly made his way east toward Lexington Avenue. He looked back, smiled, and shook his head. He stopped at a corner, waited for a red light to turn green, and gave a nod to two uniformed patrolmen heading toward the chaos at his back. The duffel bag in his right hand, he walked away with another dent in Angel’s daily cash flow.