by Mark Alpert
Cat’s Claw (Uña de Gato), 5 grams
Horsetail, 10 grams
Milk Thistle, 15 grams
Purple Coneflower, 10 grams
“What’s this?” John asked her.
“It’s your shopping list. Some of the herbs may be hard to find. Where are we exactly?”
“In Philly. Kensington.”
“That’s good. There should be health-food stores in the city. If you can’t find the herbs there, go to the botánicas in the Latino neighborhoods.”
Gabe let out a snort. “Herbal medicine? That’s what you’re looking for?” He shook his head. “It’s good for treating a cold. Not so good for bullet wounds.”
Ariel ignored him. She kept her eyes on John. “Will you do this for me?”
She needed his help. Again. And he had every right to say no. But as he gazed into those green eyes, he knew he couldn’t refuse her. He was hooked. Bad.
John folded the note and stuffed it into his pocket. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
The shopping took longer than he expected. It was still early in the morning, and most of the health-food stores weren’t open yet. He had better luck at the botánicas, most of which were run by elderly Mexican women. The shops were tiny and dimly lit, but on their dusty shelves were dozens of sacks containing crushed leaves and roots and powders. By 10:00 A.M. he had collected all the items on Ariel’s list and headed back to Kensington.
John planned to stop at his apartment on Somerset Street to pick up some cash for Gabriel, but when he was two blocks away he saw a crowd outside his row house. Wary, he pulled over to the curb. There were lots of gangbangers in the crowd, from the crews that ran the corners on Somerset Street and Fairhill Square and Lehigh Avenue. That was a bit strange—the drug crews were usually fast asleep at this time of day. Then John saw something even stranger: a pile of familiar-looking furniture on the sidewalk. His furniture. The gangbangers had broken into his apartment, removed his couch and chairs and television and bookcase, and tossed them all outside.
His first instinct was to rush over there and kick some ass. Why were they messing with his stuff? What the hell were they thinking? But instead he stayed in his Kia, furious and fearful, and tried to figure out what was going on. Although the antigang project no longer existed—St. Anne’s Church had cut its funding after Father Murphy died—John had continued doing outreach work on an informal basis. Over the past few years he’d made a deal with the local drug crews: they let him talk to the younger kids in the neighborhood, but not the older ones. He could reach out to the preteens, urging them to stay away from the crews, but he couldn’t say a word to the teenagers who were already working the corners. This was the compromise they’d reached after the disaster three years ago. But now it looked like someone had broken the truce.
John slumped lower in the driver’s seat and peered through the windshield. Some of the gangbangers were stomping on his furniture, breaking the chair legs and ripping the couch cushions. Others picked through his books and DVDs, taking whatever they wanted. Several drunks and junkies wandered at the edge of the crowd, curious and amused, but a few of the older folks on Somerset Street shook their heads in disgust. The old-timers in the neighborhood hated the gangs, and sometimes they were brave enough to make their feelings known. One elderly man in the crowd seemed particularly incensed. He shouted something in Spanish at the gangbangers, then spat on the ground. After a few seconds John recognized the man—it was Victor Garcia, a silver-haired retiree who’d been a friend of Father Murphy. His face was pink with anger.
Victor turned away from the crowd and headed east on Somerset. As luck would have it, the old man was going to walk right past the Kia. As he drew close, John rolled down the car’s window. “Hey, Victor,” he called. “What’s all the fuss about?”
The old man’s eyes widened. He looked around nervously, then approached the car. “You better get out of here, John,” he whispered. “They’re looking for you.”
“Who’s looking? Which crew?”
“All of them. Every punk on the street is trying to find you. What the hell did you do?”
John held out his hands, palms up. “Nothing. I was in New York yesterday.”
“Well, you must’ve pissed off somebody. You should go back to New York. For your own safety.” He glanced at the crowd down the street, then slapped the Kia’s door. “Get going, boy. Head for the interstate.”
Victor walked away quickly, looking over his shoulder. John stepped on the gas and made a left on Hope Street, but he didn’t drive toward I-95. Instead, he returned to Gabe’s house, taking a roundabout route that avoided Somerset.
He parked his car by the chain-link fence again and called for Gabe. As he stood in front of the gate, waiting for his friend, he pondered Victor’s question, “What the hell did you do?” The only thing he’d done was run into Ariel. And maybe that was it. Maybe the gangs in Philly were coming after him because of what had happened in New York.
He had to yell for two whole minutes before Gabe came out of the house. As soon as he emerged, it was clear why it had taken him so long. His mouth hung open and his eyes were glassy. He wore only his boxer shorts now, and on his left arm was the reddish imprint of the belt he’d tied around his bicep not so long ago. Without a word, he opened the gate and led John into the house. This time, though, they didn’t go to the operating room in the basement. Gabe stumbled into a dark, stuffy room on the ground floor and sprawled on a filthy brown sofa. Scattered on the floor were the works he’d just used to shoot up: the belt, the syringe, the spoon, the cigarette lighter.
John frowned. He’d seen this kind of thing a million times before, but he still couldn’t understand it. He had to remind himself that this skeletal junkie on the sofa was his old friend Gabriel, the smartest kid in the class, the boy who used to love to play with firecrackers. John waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, and then he stepped toward the couch. The smell was horrible.
“How’s your patient?” John asked. He had to breathe through his mouth. “When was the last time you checked on her?”
Gabe was silent and motionless. Then he nodded drowsily. He moved as if he were underwater. “She’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“Great. Glad you’re on the case.” John turned away and faced the wall. He couldn’t bear to look at the guy.
The room went silent again. Then Gabe slowly extended his arm and held out his hand. “You got it?”
“Got what?”
“The money. My money.” His eyes darted. He seemed to be shaking off his stupor. “You owe me. Remember? Four hundred dollars.”
“I couldn’t get into my house. Some assholes from the corner crews were there, waiting for me.”
This got Gabe’s attention. He sat up on the sofa. “What did they want?”
“No idea. I didn’t stick around to talk.”
“Why not?”
“They were already trashing my apartment.”
“That’s weird, don’t you think? The bad boys showing up at your place all of a sudden?” He craned his neck, trying to look John in the eye. It was amazing how quickly he’d sobered up. “You think it has something to do with the girl?”
Gabe was good at guessing things. He had a talent for ferreting out secrets. It was a useful skill for a junkie to have. Desperate people needed all the help they could get.
John shook his head. “I don’t see the connection,” he lied.
“Well, I do.” Gabe scratched his bare chest and leaned back on the sofa cushions. “The girl has enemies, right? After you left New York they could’ve figured out who you are. Maybe they saw your car’s license plate and ran the number. It’s easy to do if you have the connections. And once they found out your name and address, they made a call to the drug bosses in Kensington, offering them big money to grab someone named John Rogers. And the girl too, of course.” He grinned. “That would explain it, wouldn’t it?”
It certainly would, but J
ohn wasn’t going to agree with him. This was a dangerous subject. “Look, I’ll get your money. You know I always pay my bills. In the meantime, I’m going downstairs to see how she’s doing.”
“Sure, go ahead.” Gabe kept grinning. “Take your time.”
John didn’t like the look on his face. There was a threat behind it. He could feel Gabe’s eyes on his back as he went down the steps to the basement. The guy was his oldest friend, but first and foremost he was a junkie. And now he had a chance to make some serious money, maybe enough to buy a month’s supply of heroin. If the payoff was big enough, Gabe would betray him in a second.
Ariel was awake when John marched into the operating room. She seemed happy to see him. “Did you find the herbs? I was worried you might—”
“Shh.” He raised his index finger to his lips. “We gotta go. I’ll carry you back to the car.”
“Why?” she whispered. “What happened?”
“Gabe’s gonna turn us in. He’s probably on the phone right now.”
John slipped one arm under Ariel’s back and the other under her splinted legs. She winced as he picked her up, but didn’t make a sound. Holding her as gently as he could, John headed up the stairs. She held her notebook against her chest, just like she did last night.
Gabe wasn’t on the sofa anymore. He’d probably gone to another room to make the phone call. John burst out the front door with Ariel and ran to his car. As he dashed through the gate he looked down Hancock Street, expecting to see all of Kensington’s gangbangers swarming toward them. But the street was empty.
John rested Ariel in the Kia’s bloodstained backseat. “We got a two-minute head start,” he said. “Have any ideas about where to go?”
He didn’t expect an answer but Ariel nodded. “Go west, young man,” she said. “Take the Roosevelt Expressway to I-76.”
“You have a destination in mind?”
“I do. But I have to warn you. It’s a long drive.”
FOUR
Agent Larson heard the motorcycle coming long before he saw it. The noise of its engine echoed against the concrete pillars that supported the New Jersey Turnpike above the Meadowlands. Although hundreds of cars and trucks sped along the turnpike every minute, the parking lots and rail yards below the causeway were almost always deserted. Larson had been standing beside his SUV for half an hour before he heard the rumble of the Harley-Davidson. A minute later Van came in sight, slaloming his bike between the pillars.
Larson hated this part of his job. Six years ago he’d transferred to the FBI’s field office in New York, where he’d hoped to rise through the ranks of the counterterrorism division. Instead, he got assigned to the Violent Gangs Task Force, specifically the squad that monitored motorcycle gangs in New York and New Jersey. Although the biker gangs were involved in drug dealing and gun trafficking, the assignment was a lot less prestigious than tracking down terrorists. Larson spent most of his time looking for informants who were willing to rat out their friends. He couldn’t stand dealing with the scumbags. They were, for the most part, outrageous bullshit artists.
Van, though, was an exception to the rule. A few weeks ago he told Larson about an upcoming heroin shipment, and that tip resulted in one of the biggest drug busts of the year. So when Van called the field office this morning, saying he had information about the shootings in Brooklyn last night, Larson was willing to listen. He agreed to meet the biker in the Meadowlands.
Van coasted to a stop but stayed on his Harley. He was tall and solid, in his late forties or early fifties but still in good shape. He had a face like a drill sergeant’s, hard and lined and angular, but it was topped with long, messy hair that had turned dirty gray. His clothes were a mess too: ripped jeans, scuffed boots, and a grease-stained bomber jacket. All in all, he looked like an aging veteran who’d decided to spend his retirement on a long, debauched joyride. And for all Larson knew, that’s exactly who Van was. The biker had refused to reveal his last name or any other particulars. He belonged to a gang called the Riflemen, which was a new club, much smaller than the established ones—the Hell’s Angels, the Pagans, the Outlaws, and so on. Still, he had a lot of connections in the other gangs and seemed to know everything that was going on.
Larson stepped away from his SUV and cautiously approached the motorcycle. He’d met Van in person before and knew that he carried an old pistol in a shoulder holster. To defuse the tension, Larson grinned and put a jaunty tone in his voice.
“You’re late,” he said. “You get stuck in traffic?”
Van didn’t smile back at him. “What are the cops saying about Bushwick?”
He was all business today. And that was all right with Larson. No sense in dragging it out. “They found six dead at the scene. One was the night clerk at the hotel, the other five are John Does. But there’s evidence of more casualties. It looks like whoever attacked the place pulled out their wounded.” For a moment he pictured the scene on Evergreen Avenue, which he’d visited earlier that morning at the request of the New York police, who’d discovered motorcycle tracks on the streets near the hotel. Blood and gore were spattered all over the hotel’s roof and in the alley below. “The crime-scene techs collected a shitload of shells. There was a hell of a lot of shooting, that’s all they know for sure.”
“That’s because it’s a war. This was the first battle.”
Larson waited for more, but Van fell silent. He looked up and stared at the concrete underside of the turnpike.
“You want to explain that?” Larson asked. “Who’s fighting this war?”
The biker didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be lost in some profound meditation. Finally he stopped staring at the highway and lowered his head. “They’re connected to methamphetamine dealers in the Midwest. One gang is based in Michigan, the other in Ohio. Both of them are branching out, trying to sell their shit farther east. They already got operations in Philadelphia, and now they’re coming to New York.”
“So this is a turf war?”
He nodded. “Yeah, and both sides have plenty of soldiers. Some are gangbangers from Philly, but most are white dudes from the sticks. For the past year or so, they’ve been loading up on weapons. They got some military hardware, M16s, M4s.”
Larson perked up when he heard this. Most of the shells collected at the scene were from 5.56-millimeter M4 cartridges. This fact hadn’t been revealed to the news media, so Van couldn’t have learned it from watching TV or reading the paper. “How do you know about these guys?”
“The gang from Michigan did some business with the Pagans in upstate New York. They bought a few dozen assault rifles that the Pagans had smuggled out of Fort Drum. Ammunition, too. If you check the headstamp codes on those shells you found, I bet you’ll find they came from Drum.”
By this point Larson was very interested. This kind of activity went way beyond the usual gang crimes. If midwestern drug cartels were stealing M4s from U.S. Army bases, that was pretty damn close to domestic terrorism. And if Agent Larson uncovered a terrorist plot, it could definitely resuscitate his career. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said, trying to sound casual. “So who won the battle last night?”
Van shrugged. “Hey, I don’t know everything. I’m just telling you what I heard on the street. What people are saying.”
“Do you know how they got out of Bushwick so quickly? By the time the NYPD got to the scene, only the corpses were still there.”
“Well, a lot of these fuckers are ex-army. So they have some training.” He raised his eyebrows, which were as gray as his hair. “But the word on the street is that one of them screwed up. He parked his car right in front of the hotel, then took off once the shooting stopped. He was in a beat-up old Kia with Pennsylvania plates. Some neighborhood kid saw the license plate and remembered the number.”
“Did he tell the police about it?”
“Are you kidding?” Van looked askance. “The kids in Bushwick aren’t big fans of the cops. But he told his friends, and it
spread from there.”
Larson felt a rush of adrenaline. “Do you know the plate number?”
The biker reached into the pocket of his bomber jacket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “It wasn’t easy to get. I had to talk to a lot of people. Ask a lot of questions. It was a fair amount of work.”
“So I guess you’re looking for some compensation?” Larson had to be careful. If he sounded too eager, the price would go up. “What do you want?”
Van thought it over. He looked up again and scrutinized the underside of the highway. It looked like he was doing some arithmetic in his head. “Five hundred,” he finally replied.
The price was steep but not prohibitive. Larson went to his SUV, opened the passenger-side door and reached into the glove compartment. That’s where he kept his petty cash envelope, which held a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Larson removed twenty-five of them, then returned to Van. “Here you go.”
The biker handed him the slip of paper and took the money. “They’re vanity plates,” he added. “That’s what made it easy for the kid to remember the number.”
As Van turned his bike around and gunned the engine, Agent Larson unfolded the paper. The plate number was written in pencil: IVY4EVR
FIVE
The first thing Ariel did in the car was prepare her dose of herbal medicine. While John drove across North Philly toward the Roosevelt Expressway, she mixed the crushed leaves and powders in a half-full bottle of Poland Spring water she’d found in the backseat. He watched her in the rearview mirror as she raised the bottle to her lips and drank the concoction. She made a face, closing her eyes and twisting her mouth in disgust, but she downed the whole thing. Then she looked at him in the mirror.
“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “But I’m afraid you won’t like it.”
She got right to the point, as always. John liked her directness. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her. And now it convinced him to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she’d led him into a shitload of trouble, He should’ve been fuming at Ariel—he was on the run because of this girl, his apartment had been trashed—but he couldn’t get angry at her. Despite everything that had happened, he sensed she was innocent. “Give it a shot,” he said. “Go ahead and try me.”