Chasers (28 page)

22

Rev. Jim brought the dark blue sedan to a stop at the red light, the harsh rays of a setting sun hitting his windshield, the rattle of the elevated subway drowning out a Bob Dylan song playing on the radio. He glanced in the rearview mirror and then turned to Ash, sitting shotgun. “There are four of them in the lead car,” he said. “The white van behind them with the goods should have two in the front and two more in the rear. That means, if nothing else, you better be as good with a gun in your hand as I think I am.”

“Okay if I ask you a stupid question?” Ash asked.

“If this is the part where I’m supposed to say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, then you’re in the wrong car,” Rev. Jim said, inching the car forward on White Plains Road as the overhead light shifted to green. “But ask anyway.”

“I’ll keep it short,” Ash said. “We’re supposed to take their van—which, if our intel is on the money, is jammed tight with the hottest high-grade street coke on the market. Am I right, so far?”

“Perfect score,” Rev. Jim said. “Just as an FYI, though, the street calls the new brand of coke Terminator. A couple of sleigh-ride hits on the pipe and you’ll be back for more.”

“If that’s the case, then why are we in the lead car?” Ash said. “I realize I’m one of the new kids on the Apache block, but wouldn’t it make just a little bit more sense if we were the ones chasing
them
?”

“We
are
chasing them, Ash,” Rev. Jim said, doing a quick eye check on the slow-moving traffic that was working both sides of the wide avenue. “We’re just riding the pace car for now. We’re about three blocks away from the next light, and that’s when I’ll make a quick right-hand that will put us smack in the heart of Gasoline Alley—and that’s when all the fun should start.”

“That’s where the money end of the deal is supposed to be waiting,” Ash said. “Which should put four more guns, at the very least, aimed right at us. And here I sit, up front and all smiles, stuck in the middle with you.”

“Can’t ask for much more than that out of any one day,” Rev. Jim said. “Best seats in the house, action ready to rain on us from both ends of the street, good against bad, and a small bushel of lives on the line.”

Ash looked in the side-view mirror and then turned back to Rev. Jim. “They’re riding so close to the bumper they might as well be in
our
back seat,” she said. “That could mean they’ve already fingered us for trouble or they just drive like shit.”

“Little bit of both is where I would toss my five-dollar chip,” Rev. Jim said. “Not that it matters all that much what the hell they think. In less than a minute, we will remove any trace of the unknown.”

Rev. Jim turned a sharp right at the corner of East 241st Street and White Plains Road and gunned the eight-cylinder engine to full throttle. Overhead, the IRT number 2 train screeched to a halt, making the last stop on the East Bronx line before its return trip to Manhattan. Ash pulled two .38 Specials from her shoulder holster and took a deep breath. “Don’t worry about keeping the wheel steady, which will be hard enough to do on these streets, especially as you rev it up,” she said to Rev. Jim. “I’ll get a clear shot at the driver, and I’ll get it no matter how much you swerve.”

“Good to know, Batgirl,” Rev. Jim said, bouncing from one large crater-size pothole to another. “But keep your head down all the same, because aim won’t mean much once we get in tighter quarters. They’ll be pegging eight shots to your two.”

Rev. Jim shifted gears and turned the car onto a dead-end street, veering toward a double-gated open-air chop shop, three sedans parked in a semicircle two hundred yards beyond the chain-link fence. The two cars and a battered white van were several feet away from his tailpipe, thin clouds of smoke coming off their rear tires, two men holding semis in both hands doing a half-hang outside the back windows and taking shake-and-bake aim at the hard-chugging unmarked just ahead of them. “This isn’t the Indy 500, Ash,” Rev. Jim said to her, “so don’t be waiting for anybody to come out swinging a checkered flag giving you the go sign.”

A stream of bullets sprayed the street close to the car, two of them pinging off the trunk of the unmarked. “Stay cool, Rev.,” Ash said, her voice as calm as her outward demeanor. “Just keep your eyes on the road and give me a shout a couple of ticks before you blast through that chain-link.”

“Where are you going to be while I’m doing all the heavy lifting?” he asked. “Or you one of those Annie Oakley cops likes to put on a blindfold before she shoots off a few rounds? Just to show me how much better your aim is than mine.”

“It’s a little stuffy in here, with your Taco Bell smell,” she said. “So I thought I’d go out and get myself some air.”

Ash jammed the .38 Specials into her waistband and lifted the door handle, using her right foot to swing it out wide. She eased herself out of the car, stepped on the rocker panels, and then propped her feet on the open windowsill. Three bullets rang past her as she bent her knees and hoisted herself onto the roof of the car, resting flat on the curved surface, fingers stretched out and wrapped around the thin edges of the beat-up Chevy’s upper body. The lead chase vehicle was close enough for her to see the faces of the men sitting up front and the two in the rear hanging out through the open window slots, their semis pointed in her direction. “How’s the weather up there?” Rev. Jim shouted, slicing close to a parked car and avoiding a pothole the size of a moon crater.

“Cut the cute and jam on that horn before you ram the fence,” Ash shouted back, releasing one hand from the upper lip of the car and pulling a .38 Special from her waistband. The harsh wind whipped her hair across her eyes, partially blocking her view. Two-story dump warehouses, with their graffiti-riddled doors rolled open, mingled in working-class discomfort with aluminum-sided mom-and-pops, but they all became blurs as the two ex-cops zoomed past at a hurried clip. “Get ready,” Rev. Jim shouted. “You’re looking at less than a ten-second count.”

Ash closed her eyes and released her other hand from the side of the roof, using her sneakers as leverage to steady her body, the car swinging and swerving down the carved-up street, aimed dead straight for the gates of the chop shop. She pulled the second gun from her waistband and pointed them out toward the chase car. She opened her eyes and pressed her fingers to the triggers.

The car smashed through the gates, sending pieces of lock and links flying, front tires and bumper landing hard against a three-foot break in the ground and setting off a series of sparks as it rose back up. Ash’s legs swung to the right and dangled off the front side of the car, partially blocking Rev. Jim’s view as he kept a hard grip on the steering wheel. Ash had fired off ten rounds and three had found their mark, wounding the driver of the chase car with one and killing the shooter in the front seat with the other two. The chase car veered to the right, slowing its pace, the two men in the back popping open the doors and joining the hunt on foot, semis clutched in their hands. The van came up alongside the unmarked, its back doors open wide, two men with shotguns bracing their bodies against the rusty walls, waiting for a chance to pump out a stream of bullets against the two Apaches.

The unmarked was a few hundred yards away from the three sedans parked in a tight cluster next to one another, their doors open, six men with machine guns standing next to their respective cars. A second chase car was now closing in on Rev. Jim and Ash, the four men inside firing off rounds as if on a clay shoot. “Drop your guns and hang on,” he shouted up to Ash.

“What are you going to do now?” Ash shouted back down, shoving her guns into her waistband.

“You really don’t want to know,” Rev. Jim said.

Rev. Jim slammed on the brake, turned the steering wheel hard to the left, and then gunned the engine, doing a full turn, kicking up rocks and debris, his front end nicking the side of the white van and sending one of the shooters flying out the open rear. He landed headfirst against a row of rusty pilings. Ash hung tight, fingers and the edge of her sneakers wedged into the door sockets, her body bouncing up and down against the roof of the car like a flattened handball, upper body coated in dust, right wrist nicked by a sharp piece of rock and bleeding.

Rev. Jim drove straight for the second crash car, the driver frantically weaving in reverse, doing all he could to avoid the inevitable collision. The other three men in the car continued to rain bullets down on the unmarked, one shot hitting Rev. Jim on his left arm. As blood streamed down the right side of his face from a glass cut to his cheek, Rev. Jim pulled a .44 from his waist and fired off a series of rounds as he inched closer to the chase car.

Ash reached for a .38 she kept in an ankle holster and did a slow crawl off the roof of the car, slithering down toward the windshield, her hands sliced and diced from the maneuver. Rev. Jim watched as she eased herself down the front of the bullet-riddled glass, smearing it with her blood, the front end of his car following the chase vehicle as it revved in reverse, looking to steer it against a pile of cars resting on the back end of the chop shop. Bullets were coming at them from all directions, and the front seat was riddled with holes, the engine block smoking and hissing, a rear tire running flat and on its rim. Rev. Jim tossed aside the .44, reached under his seat for a double-pump sawed-off, and aimed it out his window. He and Ash did a quick eye exchange and both nodded as Rev. Jim came nose to nose with the chase car, both doing about forty and moving fast and steady toward a small mountain of smashed cars.

Ash fired first, getting off two rounds and clipping the driver in the shoulder, causing him to lose control of the wheel. Rev. Jim unloaded his shots and blew out the right side of the windshield, killing the shooter on the passenger side. He eased his foot over to the brake and slowed the unmarked down, watching as the chase vehicle, now with a badly wounded man behind the wheel, slammed into the shaky mound of rusty hulks. A half dozen of them collapsed on top of the crash car, pinning the surviving passengers deep inside.

Ash threw herself to the ground and slowly rose to her feet, her head and body thick with soot and smeared with blood. Rev. Jim put the car into park and left it running, stepping out of the glass-and-blood-strewn front seat and walking over to where Ash stood. “I have to figure you feel a lot better than you look,” he said to her. “Am I right on that?”

“There is just no end to your charm,” she said. “I’m fine, for now. But I’m down in bullets and we still have that van to worry about.”

“Don’t lose any sleep over it,” Rev. Jim said. “Or blood.” He turned, looking past the glare of the sun at the white van, now surrounded by the shooters from the three parked sedans. “Especially since that van is of no concern to us.”

“Is there a part of this plan you didn’t share?” Ash asked. She looked back and saw the men from the sedan tossing bodies out of the van and stepping inside to pop open a few of the stacked crates to check on the merchandise.

“What’s a party without a surprise?” Rev. Jim said. “The hired guns in the sedans were supposed to be G-Men holding the cash to transfer to Angel’s crew in return for the stash of drugs inside that van. That would have been the start and the finish of a mid-six-figure transaction. In other words, a nice paycheck for one side and a big street score for the other.”

“Looks like the Donner Party beat them to it,” Ash said. “How about I take a guess?”

“I
always
let a lady go first,” Rev. Jim said. “And if you put the last piece to the puzzle the right way, then dinner will be my treat—soon as you shower and get all that glass out of your hair.”

“You tipped off Tony Rigs as to the where and the when of the give-and-take,” Ash said with a smile, wiping blood off her lips with the sleeve of her jean jacket.

“Ready for the Double Jeopardy round,” Rev. Jim said, doing a quick return on the smile.

“And he arranged for the G-Men to fade while we were leading the chase cars and the van his way,” Ash said. “Now, for my money there’s no better spot anywhere in this city than a chop shop if you’re looking to rid yourself of a few dead drug dealers.”

“It’s a low-end risk for a high-end score,” Rev. Jim said. “The kind of deal Tony Rigs wouldn’t turn down if his own mother was driving one of the crash cars.”

“And none of the heat flows his way,” Ash said. “Angel and the G-Men aren’t going to cast blame on anyone but us. Meanwhile, Tony Rigs takes a walk with both the drugs and the cash.”

“The drugs, yes,” Rev. Jim said. “We don’t touch that end of it. But the money comes to us. We’re not Mobil Oil, baby. We have to pay for this little party of ours somehow, and who better than Angel to cough up into our empty pot?”

“Then we’re done here,” Ash said. “You okay with me doing the driving on the way back?”

Rev. Jim turned and started walking toward the shattered fence and out to the East Bronx streets. “If we had a ride, I would be all-for-one on it,” he said to Ash. “But we need to leave the cars and the cash behind. Rigs will have the money delivered our way when the time is right, along with a fresh set of wheels. Which means it’s the subway for us.”