Read Online Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra - Free Book Online

Monster hit. Everybody from me and you to the corner pimp paid or swayed their way in to see it. Within a month of the movie earning money, there was a gang in Detroit and a second one in Brooklyn calling themselves ‘The Godfathers.’ Another gang, Hispanic crew up in the Bronx, tagged their group ‘Sonny’s Boys.’ They’re not rocket launchers, is all I’m trying to get across to you. They’re crooks. Beat them at their own game and you’ll always come out at the long end of the stick.”
    Boomer made it his business to know his business.
    He learned to separate the neighborhood players both by routine and skill sets. The drug business didn’t begin its day until late afternoon, when the runners and dealers took to the streets, which left the morning free to the numbers action, car boosters looking for a quick sale, and payback send-offs. Most of the organized mob crews kept to a standard schedule. The Italians did their daily business inside social clubs, with the windows either heavily shaded or painted black. On cool spring or fall days, they preferred to sit outside, gathered around small tables large enough to hold espresso cups and sambuca bottles. The Hispanic gangs mingled at the local bodegas, while black outfits spread their action inside the neon lights of after-hours night spots, booming background music blasting out any attempt at a wiretap. In those early years, as Boomer rose up the PD ranks—from beat patrol in Harlem to plains-clothes work in Brooklyn and undercover stings in Queens, until he hit the main event and was pinned with a detective’s tin, rotating between homicide and narcotics—it seemed a simple task to decipher good from bad. The arrival of crack cocaine, coupled with the emergence of street gangs and the influx of ruthless gangsters from Colombia and Russia, forced the criminal leagues to toss out the rule books and ply their trade free of any of the time-honored traditions. What had once been so clear and organized that an aggressive cop could follow ongoing criminal activity with a flow chart was now a chaotic crime scene, and that left the terrain wide open for new crews to enter the fray and dominate the street action, amassing fortunes in less time than it took to buy a Manhattan co-op. As the dollars mounted, so did the dead bodies, leaving behind ravaged and ruined families and a city that would never again be the same. The Wild West had arrived in New York, and it gave no indication of leaving anytime soon.
    Boomer slowed his run to a fast walk, body washed down in sweat, aches and pains slapping at his legs and lungs, his body rebelling somewhat against a daily habit it was no longer fully equipped to handle. He leaned against a rusty fence, breathing heavy and gazing up at a cloudless sky.
    “I keep telling you the treadmill would be a better idea.” Dead-Eye was standing next to him, two cold protein shakes in his hands, his sweatshirt drenched through with sweat. “You go at your own pace and stop when you feel the need. Keep going at it this way, one day or the next you’re bound to fall flat.”
    “Remember Augie Petrocelli? That undercover working out of the two-eight?” Boomer asked, taking one of the shakes from Dead-Eye. “Took to a street chase like he was in the middle of a gold-medal run?”
    Dead-Eye sipped his drink and nodded. “Worked with him on a few jobs back when I was on the Black Liberation Task Force. Good cop, even better when there was some heat coming his way. What about him?”
    “He retired about five, maybe six years ago,” Boomer said. “Took a large chunk of his savings and borrowed against his pension and invested in a gym upstate, less than a mile from his house.”
    “I can just tell this is not going to be a happily-ever-after tale,” Dead-Eye said.
    “Bet your ass it’s not,” Boomer said, finishing off the protein shake with one long swallow. “In less than a year’s time, he was flat broke—on the balls of his