Chasers

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Andy gripped the gun, cocked the trigger, arms held out in a shooter’s pose, and turned toward the voices. In the flash of an instant, he saw the knife plunge into his father’s stomach and stood helpless as Francesco fell first to his knees and then on his face. He had trouble keeping his footing, the room spinning, a mass of bile forming in his throat, heart pumping loud enough to echo. In less than a second’s time, the safe world that his father had so carefully woven for Andy and his mother was torn aside and stepped on. All by a junkie in need of fast cash and a quick fix.

  “You hearing me, little man?” Pelfrey asked, not comforted by the moments of silence that had passed between him and the boy. “How about I walk away from all this mess, clean and quiet, like I was never here, and you run your tiny ass over and be with your daddy? Might be the best way for the two of us to clear away from something that maybe should never have happened.”

  Andy held the hard gun barrel and the tough look, his body taut, his index finger curled around the trigger. All he needed to do was give the trigger a light touch, a gentle reflex push, and a bullet would warp-speed its way toward the man who had just murdered his father and send him blood-splattered against the wall. Andy wanted so much for the man standing across from him to suffer—to feel the same intense pain that his father had felt, to grasp, during those final, lost seconds, what it meant to die for nothing more than the whim of a stranger. And he would be the only one to bear witness, standing over the dying man, watching as he fought for his final breaths, knowing that his father’s death had been vindicated. This was not the time to consider legal implications. Andy was old enough to have learned that the wheels of justice often spun in favor of the career criminal, and always at the expense of the innocent victim. A savvy street hood like the one who stood less than five feet from him, the soles of his shoes stained with the spilled blood of his father, would know how to manipulate the system as expertly as any seasoned lawyer. His was a sermon that was at its most effective in the presence of a soft judge and a jury whose collective hearts would bleed for yet another damaged soul held hostage by the life-sapping demands of a drug plague now in its third destructive decade.

  Nor did it matter that the loss of James Pelfrey would not be felt by any sector of humanity. He would leave no family behind, no mourning widow or grieving son. James Pelfrey would simply be yet another abandoned craft in a long urban chain of predatory vessels, destined to be moored across a cold slab, a thick white sheet hiding what remained of him. And all it would take for that cycle to be set in motion was for Andy Victorino to squeeze down on the curved trigger and let his anger and pain and sorrow guide his motions.

  Andy took a deep breath and flashed on an image of his father smiling. He knew that he wouldn’t be the one to end James Pelfrey’s life. He and his father had shared many ideas during their many hours alone together, discussions that touched on all the matters that Francesco deemed important to pass on to his only child. Killing a man in cold blood, regardless of the reasons, never entered into any of those long conversations. For Andy Victorino, it was more important to keep the memory of his father intact than it was to exact cold-steel revenge on the man who had just ended his life.

  James Pelfrey caught the look in the boy’s eyes and knew that this was not the day he was meant to die. “I don’t want to ever come back here,” he said to Andy. “So don’t do or say anything to anybody that would give me cause. You tell the cops the same story you’re going to tell your mother. That you walked down them steps behind you and found your daddy the way you did. If you can keep your shit together long enough to do that, then me and you won’t be nothin’ to each other but a bad fuckin’ memory.”

  Andy Victorino lowered the handgun and nodded. “We’ll see each other again,” he said, his voice small and hollow but steady.

  James Pelfrey managed a smile and wiped his runny nose with the front of his right hand. He lowered his head, turned, and did a quick fade into the darkness of the room, heading for the back door that would lead to a dark alley and freedom. Andy waited a few long, lonely seconds and then walked to his father’s desk and rested the gun in a bottom drawer. He sat on his father’s old, creaky wooden chair, the wheels squeaking from his slender weight, and stared across the room at the still body. It was then that the tears began to rain down his face, his chest and stomach heaving from the heavy and painful spasms. It was there, less than an hour later, that his mother found him, her screams only adding to his pain. And it was there that he stayed, through that long night, as the room filled with police and crime-scene investigators, an unfolded black body bag spread out in the corner, two burly men standing off to the side, waiting for the signal that the corpse could at last be removed.

  “You ready to do this, Quincy, or what?” Bennett said in his thick baritone, snapping Andy Victorino back into the present. “Not like this poor bastard’s gonna up and fill us in on who it was did him in.”

  “You go on ahead,” Andy said. “I want to go over the body once more, make sure I didn’t overlook something easy to miss. Check in with me in a few hours. I’ll have a bone for you to chew on by then.”

  “That’s a call for you to make,” Bennett said with a slight shrug of a pair of massive shoulders. “And it’s not in my nature to tell people how to go about their business. If you find anything sooner than you figure, give me a blow and I’ll head down your way. In the meantime, I’ll deal with his bios and kick-start the paperwork.”

  Andy Victorino waited until he was alone with the victim. He knelt down over the man, slapped on a pair of latex gloves, and probed the fatal wounds once again, looking for the one mistake that would eventually lead to the track and takedown of a killer.

  He was where he knew that he truly belonged.

  Alone, in the company of the dead.

  13

  The Boiler Man listened and nodded. Nothing the tall man standing across from him in the empty men’s room at the rear of the midtown steak house was saying was new to his ears. In the end, after you broke it all down, his business was a very simple one. There was a price, a target, a preferred date of execution, and the clean walkaway. It had been his experience that anything beyond those basics that was added to the mix was done either because the client was looking to impress or because what was being tossed on the table wasn’t as clean a deal as he was expected to believe. The Boiler Man had been around the murder track enough times to have learned that if either of those two factors entered into play, it was a clear signal for him to turn his back on the deal, regardless of the sum of money being dangled.

  “Three hundred thousand in cash just to put to waste a fuckin’ accountant with millionaire taste and a turncoat’s instincts,” the tall man said, his voice thick with disdain, the attempt at the tough talk more wholesale than retail. “And they say I’m in the money end of the pool. I did your kind of work, I’d be wiping my ass with a handful of hundred-dollar bills. Hear what I’m saying?”

  “There’s no one here but you saying you can’t do my kind of work,” the Boiler Man said, his tone laid-back and matter-of-fact as he gave himself a quick glance in the large bathroom mirror. “It would save you all that cash you jammed into that little satchel over there, not to mention give you the total satisfaction of taking out your own garbage. Of course, if you in any way fuck up and either botch the job or get pinched hard by a young badge eager to make homicide first grade before his hair starts to thin, then, first offense or predicate, you would no doubt be staring down hard at natural life. And you don’t have the balls, the money, or the head to handle that kind of weight. Which is why here I stand, in a fucking men’s room, talking to you instead of hanging my dick over a urinal.”

  “I didn’t mean to set off your alarm,” the tall man said, the bravado behind his words taking a long step down. “I was just making conversation before we got down to it, is all. Didn’t mean to offend.”

  “If I’m lonely for conversation I’ll dial one of those all-nigh
t radio stations,” the Boiler Man said. “Or maybe see a shrink and figure out why it is I visit my father’s grave once a year and piss all over the headstone. Or, better still, I’ll find an Irish bartender. What I would never fuckin’ do, no matter how desperate I might be, is seek you out and start to shoot the shit. Now, are we ready to get on with the business at hand?”

  The tall man nodded and kicked the satchel closer to the Boiler Man. “It’s all in there,” he said. “I took the cash out of the office safe late last night, long after the place had cleared. I didn’t go home, as I was told not to do, but got a room at a motel in Queens over by LaGuardia.”

  “You check in under your own name?” the Boiler Man asked.

  “Look, I know I don’t play in your league. But a moron I’m not. I have this alias I’ve used as far back as when I first started stepping out on the wife. It’s a character from a favorite book of mine.”

  The Boiler Man held up his right hand. “Save the details for your obit,” he said. “All I need to be sure of is no one saw you take the money or leave with the money, and no one knows where you’ve been for these last twenty-four hours. And if the answer to all of the above is a yes, I can die happy.”

  “Hand to God, nobody’s seen me since I took that dough out of the safe, not unless you count the dim-bulb clerk working the front counter at the motel,” the tall man said. “And I wouldn’t, not since the guy was so fuckin’ stoned he couldn’t pick Ronald Reagan out of a police lineup.”

  “We can move on then,” the Boiler Man said. “What else do you have for me other than the money?”

  “What else do you need?” the tall man asked with a hint of surprise. “All I was told was to get the cash, bring it here, and hand it over to you.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what you were told,” the Boiler Man said. “That may be due to the fact that those in the know weighed you in as smarter than you turned out. In all of these situations, the less said is always the cleanest path to go, which, by nature, leaves a lot of unresolved issues. It’s then left out there for the buyer to figure out what else there is to be done. You then, using the old pasta bowl, provide us the answers without being told to do so.”

  “I didn’t know,” the tall man said, the concern on his face real enough to touch.

  “That’s as clear as that fucking mirror staring back at us,” the Boiler Man said. “What isn’t clear is what I need to know in order to bring the job full circle.”

  “Can I get a for instance?”

  “You want someone dead,” the Boiler Man said, keeping his temper in check, confident that this part of his evening would soon draw to an end. “You set up a meet with certain people, settle on a price and all that followed which put us both here in this shithouse. You still on the same channel as me?”

  “Right next to you.”

  “You delivered the dough, covered your tracks better than an old Indian scout, and got as hot as an Indy 500 engine over it all going down as planned,” the Boiler Man said. “You were in the fucking end zone, money man, getting ready to slam down that ball and do yourself a TV time dance.”

  “So what’s the fucking problem, then?” the tall man asked, surrendering to his feelings of frustration.

  “Here it is, slow and simple,” the Boiler Man said. “You need to tell me who the fuck is it that’s supposed to get iced. I got everything I need but the fucking name. And if I have to guess, it’s going to cost you a lot more pesos.”

  The tall man gave a nervous laugh. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck was I thinking? I suppose I never mentioned it since no one ever bothered to ask.”

  “In my line, that’s not the sort of information you seek,” the Boiler Man said. “You just expect it to be given, after all the details have been worked out.”

  “Okay if I give it to you now?”

  “Be better if you wrote it down on a slip of paper,” the Boiler Man said. “Otherwise, there’s a good chance I’d forget, and then we’d be back on first base.”

  The tall man pulled a thin silver pen from his shirt pocket and reached behind him and grabbed a thick paper towel from the dispenser. He leaned over the sink and, with the paper against the wall, scribbled two words across it. He then turned and handed the paper to the Boiler Man.

  The Boiler Man glanced down at the name and smiled, shoving the paper into the pocket of his thin leather jacket. “I know this man,” he said. “I met him two nights ago. In this very same shithole, truth be known.”

  “You met him?” the tall man said. “Why the hell would you meet with him?”

  “He offered me a job and the money was good, a hundred larger than what you put on the table,” the Boiler Man said. He walked two steps closer, his eyes in full focus, his body relaxed but poised.

  “Who was the job?” the tall man asked.

  “You are,” the Boiler Man said.

  The first shot put the tall man down. The second, landing right above his nose and crashing through the bone and tissue of his forehead and lodging in the center of his skull, killed him. The Boiler Man bent over, picked up his two shell casings, and shoved them into his pants pocket. He opened the satchel, checked to see if the money was all there and tossed the gun in, then locked it shut.

  He opened the bathroom door, turned left, and walked out of the quiet restaurant. The Boiler Man’s long day had finally reached its end.

  14

  “The both of you should mourn your dead and count your blessings,” Tony Rigs said, sitting back against the strained sides of a lounge chair, late-morning spring sun warming a tanned face topped by razor-cut silver hair. “You dug down and hit the mother lode, fuckin’ policeman’s lotto, for Christ’s sake. You land a tax-free three-quarter pension plus health coverage till the day you drop like you two did, you go to church and light a fuckin’ candle and tip the first priest you see. You think I got anything close to that kind of shit in my line of work? Even our fuckin’ life insurance comes with a two-bullet deductible.”

  “I thought when you guys retired you headed off to Florida,” Boomer said. “Buy a boat, fish for marlin, and hope you don’t reel in a floater by accident. Yet here you still are, soaking up the Ozone Park rays, sitting in front of your little candy store, just waiting for the results of the first race to come in and your action to start.”

  “Sun up here is just as hot as the one down there,” Tony Rigs said. “The restaurants are better, and I don’t have to wait in line behind a bunch of oldies who’d put a pin in me just to jump-start the early-bird special. But you two busted tins didn’t drag your asses all the way here just to check on my day-to-day. You came with empty ears, looking for me to fill them. So, knowing that, how about I have Gracie make us a fresh pot of her heart-stopping coffee and you tell me what’s up?”

  Tony Rigs was an old-school gangster, the kind of hood who ran his businesses and his neighborhood with wide eyes and closed lips. He had been a hard-earning capo in the Banelli crime family back since both Boomer and Dead-Eye were fresh out of the Police Academy. And despite all the wiretaps, surveillance photos, witness-relocation deals, and stool bustouts, neither the Feds nor the locals had yet to come even close to typing in his name on an indictment. Tony put as little as possible on paper, treated any phone as if it were a radioactive device, and kept his own counsel, having seen more than his share of crime bosses head off to triple-digit slamdowns on the courtroom testimony of a trusted adviser.

  “Know what a right-hand man is?” he asked Boomer and Dead-Eye the last time the two came looking his way. “That’s a guy who’s biding his time, walking next to you, acting like he lives only to make you happy. Sooner than later, your right-hand man will make a move to being a two-hand man. In order for that to happen, he needs for the boss, the guy he no doubt named his fuckin’ son after, to go down. And that’s when he makes the call and does his flip. As quick as that judge hits his hammer to the wood, his ass is in the boss’s seat, talking to his own right-hand man. Meantime, the f
ormer hombre sits in a top-tier bunk over at Allenwood just off a fake egg, Wonder bread, and some cherry Jell-O, waiting for his one-hour stretch in the yard. And that holds true for whatever line of work you fall into, criminal or not so. You think the vice president of the United States doesn’t hit the pillow at night dreaming up ways for the top guy to fall flat on his ass?”

  Tony Rigs knew the rules and followed them. If he could lend a hand to a tough street duo like Boomer and Dead-Eye, he knew it would come back his way. He steered clear of the drug trade and earned his take-home with the daily numbers action and a clear and steady stream of betters who always laid their money down, convinced it would be worth twice that by end of day. Neither of those crimes ever surfaced on the radar of any action cop working the streets. “You should nail a bookie, but you have to turn your back if it’s an OTB parlor,” Boomer once said to Dead-Eye. “Explain the logic on that to me. One haul goes into the pocket of some wiseguy trying to make a go of it on the street. In return, he helps keep trouble off his turf. Not because he’s the Mother Teresa type but because he knows anything that hurts the people hurts him and his business. OTB, on the other hand, sends their haul up to Albany and there it lands in the hungry pockets of a pack of assemblymen whose names we don’t even know. And they don’t look to keep trouble off their elected turf, since they don’t give a shit about it and wouldn’t know the how and when even if they did. So if I’m put to the wall and need slapping the cuffs on one or the other, I’ll make for the assemblyman. That’s a bust that’ll stick and hold.”

  Tony Rigs poured three sugars and a half shot of sambuca black into his espresso cup and let it sit to cool. He sat back and listened as Boomer and Dead-Eye began to walk him through their initial plan, step by step, working within the comfort zone of trust, no matter which end of the table Tony Rigs chose to rest his ample arms.