Chasers: A Novel

1

APRIL, 1985

It took her less than a minute to die.

Two bullets, both close-contact hits, sent her slumping to the black-and-white tiled floor, crystal-blue eyes glazed and watery, staring up at a blue ceiling dotted with red stars. Her long brown hair was heavy with sweat and blood and was forced to one side of what had been a face pretty enough to always earn a smile. During those last few seconds, she lay there whispering a silent prayer, the two plates of hot food she had been holding scattered, white cream sauce from the grilled Dover sole running down the right leg of her black slacks. Her left arm twitched and one of her shoes had somehow landed near her neck, a low-heeled pump resting on its side, black strap snapped off. She had bought the shoes with the money from her last paycheck, paying more than she could afford for a pair of Ferragamos she had always dreamed of owning. She closed her eyes and wondered if she would be buried wearing those shoes.

The main dining room of the large midtown restaurant was now a crime scene.

Men and women, police shields hanging on chain collars around their necks, walked and took notes of all that they saw. The forensics unit was busy snapping photos and bagging biologicals, moving with practiced ease from one body to the next. A medical examiner knelt over one of the dead, a middle-aged man in a designer suit, ensconced in a leather booth, head back, hands flat on a blood-splattered table, tailored white shirt now crimson but dry. Uniformed officers took statements from nerve-shattered waiters, waitresses, patrons, managers, and owners. Thick strips of police tape blocked off a large portion of the area. Outside, lights twirled and TV news crews set up position posts.

It was 2:35 P.M., a clear and warm Thursday afternoon in New York City.

The kind of spring day when the city felt clean, crisp. When couples rode bikes in the park or walked to work and office employees chose to eat their lunch outside.

A day when no one deserved to die.

Get a chance to grab me some coffee? the detective asked. He was young, neatly dressed: a light brown suit, tan loafers.

Been pretty busy in here, the uniformed officer said. He was older, his blues begging for starch and a hot iron, his body a few years removed from giving up the ghost. Haven’t had a chance to take a run outside yet.

The detective turned away from the body and stared with dark eyes at the uniform. You don’t need to run or walk outside, he said. Seeing as how we’re in a restaurant, I’d put odds on better than good there’s a hot pot of coffee in here somewhere. All you need to do is look.

The uniform nodded and headed toward a small workstation tucked in behind one of the back booths, silver pots at rest beside warm burners, his dream of one day ditching the uniform for a detective’s shield doing a slow fade. Nine years on the job and here he was still reduced to running errands, a civil servant in every sense. He reached under the counter for a white cup, and it was then that he noticed the man standing there, his eyes locked onto the crime scene. The man wasn’t flashing a shield and he wasn’t dressed in a suit, but he smelled of it all the same: cop.

I help you with anything? the uniform asked, his voice trying to stay casual but also to establish authority.

Don’t see how, the man said, not taking his eyes off the scene, his words sounding like the street. Unless you pulled in early enough to eyeball the doers.

You working this? the uniform asked, resting the cup on the counter and easing in closer to the man.

Guy in the blue jacket, gray slacks, the man said, ignoring the question. One who sent you on the coffee run. He the primary?

Jenkins, the uniform said, turning away from the man to glare across the room at the detective. If he isn’t yet, he will be by the time the bodies are zippered and tagged. He makes it his business to catch all the multiples in the sector.

The man reached under the counter and pulled out a cup. He grabbed a silver dispenser and filled the cup halfway with lukewarm coffee. He turned away from the uniform and stepped deeper into the crime scene, the fingers of his right hand wrapped around the cup.

You didn’t answer my question, the uniform said as the man brushed past.

And you didn’t get Detective Jenkins his coffee, the man said.

Coffee in hand, Giovanni Boomer Frontieri stared down at the body of the young girl, his eyes hard, his mind racing back through the photo album of her years. He saw her behind thick hospital glass, less than a day old, a six-pound seven-ounce bundle, her skin the color of Sunday sauce. Even back then, Boomer knew this would be as close as he’d ever get to a child of his own—a niece he could dote on and help raise from a distance. He flipped forward to her Holy Communion, thin legs shaky as she made her way down the center aisle of Blessed Sacrament Church, smiling when she caught his eye, finding comfort and confidence in his presence. He remembered sitting at his sister’s kitchen table, sipping a hot espresso, when she walked down the hall steps wearing a flowered dress he had bought her at a J. C. Penney half-price sale, ready to embark on her first formal date. Boomer closed his eyes, felt her head on his shoulder, tears running down her face and onto his leather jacket, minutes after he had told her of her father’s death. Boomer opened his eyes again and this time heard her laughter, the little-girl giggle mixed in with the full-throated chuckle of a young woman, and he swallowed hard, not looking just now to share his own tears.

You got business here? Jenkins was next to him now.

"I have family here, Boomer said, handing Jenkins the now cold cup of coffee. The waitress is my sister’s kid. Only the start of her third week working here. She liked it enough. Gave her a chance to meet new people, and she was always eager to do that."

Jenkins rested the coffee on a table to his left. You should be waiting down at the precinct, he said. At some point, a uniform will find you and tell you all you need to know.

The target was the one in the booth, Boomer said. The three on the ground, my niece included, are collateral. The hit team couldn’t have numbered more than four: two shooters, a lookout, and a driver. They’re pros, but fudged it to make it look like they weren’t. They used high-caliber bullets and cleared the casings. Picked a visible place at a crowded time. The vic was at the table alone, means his crew was in on the hit, cleared out soon as they spotted the gunners. They wanted this hit to be known, noticed.

Boomer turned and looked at Jenkins. But why the hell am I telling you any of this? You must have figured all that soon as you walked in.

How long you been off the job? Jenkins asked.

Five years, give or take, Boomer said. He gave a quick scan to the activity around them, nodding at several familiar faces, watching the scene develop. There’s never a need to rush a sealed homicide crime scene. The evidence spread across the room as if on a buffet table, and everyone waits for a detective with a sharp eye to mull his choices before making any final selections. You narrow your players down yet?

We really shouldn’t be talking about this, Jenkins said.

We’re not, Boomer said. And if anybody asks, we weren’t.

Jenkins did a slow nod, hands thrust inside his Dockers, and dropped his voice two levels. The Italians look to me to be clean on this, he said. Not their play to do a hit in front of enough witnesses to fill a small theater. And the vic scans way too rich and too connected to be running into any gang-bang action. Besides which, this is not a part of town the brothers be allowed to play in.

Which leaves your eyes where?

Off the top, at either the Russians or the Colombians, Jenkins said. They both may still be toddlers in this town, but they’re hands down the most dangerous. And they eat this kind of shit up with a knife and fork. They love nothing more than to leave behind a room filled with bodies, and us with nothing but theory to prove it was them that did the work.

You connect the vic to any one crew? Boomer asked, tossing a look at the man in the booth, surrounded by three members from the forensics unit.

My guess is we will soon as we get a name from his prints and dentals, Jenkins said. The doers walked out with his ID, including a watch, a ring, and an earring.

Any families been notified yet? Boomer asked.

Way early for that, still, Jenkins said. Then again, you just about beat me to the scene. How’d that come to happen?

I was looking for a cup of coffee, Boomer said, gazing at his niece one final time. Same as you.

The guys did this, they’re not going to be on the loose for very long, Jenkins said, his manner confident. Pros or not, they get sloppy, take a slip and tumble. More often than not, a gun and a badge will be right there, ready to lay down a cuff and convict.

Boomer took the young detective in. That’s no help to the dead, he said.

He walked outside the roped-off parameters, leaving behind the lab techs, uniforms, detectives, photo unit, medical-examiner personnel, and potential witnesses, each in the early stages of processing those who were killed for reasons to be determined. He walked with a slight limp, favoring his right leg, shredded years earlier in a gunfight with a drug dealer. He had his hands balled into tight fists and his upper body was tense and coiled, eyes looking toward the congested traffic outside. He never once glanced back. He didn’t need to see her corpse as it was casually laid inside an open body bag, waiting for two attendants to ease her into the morgue van for the slow ride downtown. He didn’t need any further reason to remember what he could never forget.

He eased past two detectives and stepped out onto a sidewalk crowded with the curious, determined to put his own brand on the justice that needed to be served.

2

The tall man sat on the top bleacher, staring out at the high school track and gazing at the array of students prepping for an afternoon’s practice. He had a sweaty bottle of Corona beer wrapped inside a wet paper bag by his right foot and scratched at three days’ stubble. As the day had stretched on, the weather had turned cool, the sun hiding behind a small battalion of clouds.

The man leaned a set of strong shoulders against a wooden rail. Tell me what is on your mind, Roberto, he said to the young man sitting to his left. And do it before the kids begin their runs.

The way the hit went down today was not right, Roberto said. It could have been and should have been a lot cleaner. How are we going to be respected by the other gangs in this city if the best we can do is botch a restaurant hit?

The man picked up the paper bag and took a long swig of the Corona. He looked over at Roberto and smiled. "I don’t want their respect, he said. All that ever gets you is a sympathy card and fresh flowers at your funeral. I want them to shiver when they hear my name. I want them to think that I will do anything at any time to anyone. Who are we to fear? The police? You think they give a shit about a dead spic? To them, it’s one less player they need to concern themselves over. This job was our first success, my young friend. And one of many more that will come our way."

The police may give it only a shrug, but the Gonzalez brothers will care, Roberto said, holding tight to his concern. They will care very much about that one dead spic.

I expect nothing less, the man said. It was one of their own we put down. So the first instinct will be to bite back. They’ll call out their guns and aim them our way. And they will hold their own, at least for a while. But they, too, will meet their day. It’s only a question of when.

Roberto stared out at the runners, a sprint team from Holy Angels High School, going through a series of warm-up exercises, a coach in a sweatshirt carrying a stopwatch, clocking their every move. Do you miss it much? he asked.

It was my life, the man said, leaning forward, thin arms at rest on steady legs. For thirty years all I knew, all I loved, was my religion and my sport. I began each day with a short prayer and ended it with a long run. I thought it would go that way until it was my time to die.

Were you a good coach? Roberto asked, knowing that he was stepping into the older man’s comfort zone, an arena where he more closely resembled a saint than a stone killer.

Some years, yes, the man said, throwing Roberto a relaxed smile. Those years, we won many meets and took home trophies by the armful. Other years, when my squads lacked discipline, were not so kind.

I came to one of your meets, Roberto said. Went with my older brothers up to Mexico City to see their school race against yours. They were favored that day, a much faster group than the one you bused into town.

And? the man said, his eyes focused on a tall, lanky boy with a high-end leg kick. Was their school better?

Maybe they were, but not on that day and not on that track, Roberto said. They were run to the ground by Father Angel Cortez and his squad.

Even back in those years I hated to lose, Angel said. A bad trait, I suppose, in a priest, no matter how good the intentions. But one that has served me well in my second cycle.

Roberto nodded.

I won over a hundred gold medals in the years I coached, Angel said. If I put them all together, I couldn’t buy my way into a minor-league ballpark. You reach my age and you come to realize the foolishness of a vow of poverty. It does nothing except help to line the pockets of other men.

Angel finished the last of his beer and leaned back, letting what was left of a setting sun illuminate his tanned face. He was a slight man, kept thin by a diet that consisted of one small meal a day, usually a mixture of steamed rice and carrots. Angel’s vices were limited to cold Coronas and chilled rosé at the ready. He was sixty-one, the only son of a Colombian shepherd with a religious bent and a Mexican mother who taught him to say his first Mass in the small kitchen of their two-bedroom farm. At fourteen, he was signed over to the priesthood, destined to serve out a life devoted to God and little else. He took full advantage of the educational avenues open to him, earning top honors and entry to the best schools in South America. The Church was more than willing to fund his way, eager to nourish the passions of a young and zealous priest. And he took to his calling, earning degrees in English literature, music, and art history, passing his newfound knowledge down to his eager and attentive students at the high school where he was assigned to teach. The students of the small town, less than a fifteen-minute drive south of Bogotá, were poor, undernourished, and possessed of little hope for the future. The one road leading out of town, the one path promising something—anything—could be seen from the windows of their homes and classrooms day and night, and the poppy fields that dotted the landscape might as well have been layered with dollar bills, for they, more than books or sports, were the enticement that drove the young men and women of the town who were looking to line their pockets.

Father Angel Cortez knew the odds were bad, but he bet against the house.

He worked with the kids, preaching and teaching a better way. I know more than my share of old doctors, lawyers, and teachers, he would tell his students. But I don’t know any old drug dealers. Most, if at all lucky, live only as long as an abandoned dog.

He fought against the encroachment of the drug cartels by keeping the children under his domain constantly busy. He helped to organize baseball and basketball tournaments, got some of the town businesses to kick in money and build a new track and grandstands for the school. He then took a handful of teenagers, used to running up and down the rugged mountain terrain surrounding the town, and turned them into one of the most élite track-and-field teams in South America. Before long, college recruiters and professional scouts from as far north as Detroit and Chicago ventured down, looking to offer fast and easy money along with full-ride four-year scholarships to the young padre’s crew. Father Angel’s dreams for a better world and a safer and more rewarding life for the students under his care seemed on the verge of a hard-fought victory.

Then reality intruded, and Father Angel’s dreams were swallowed up by a whirlpool of deceit, corruption, and murder, leaving in its wake only the ruined and the ravaged. It began with a street shooting, a weekly occurrence in an area blighted by drug-related crimes. The victim was named Edgardo Vizcaino, a promising sixteen-year-old, four-hundred-meter track star. His older brother Alberto was a runner for the Diablos de Dios, a local drug gang on the payroll of the big guns in Bogotá. Alberto had grown weary of running drugs in and past an elaborate network of police blockades and federal sting setups, risking a long stretch in prison in return for the short end of the money train. He was looking to start his own shop, and let it be known that he would take down the leaders of the Diablos de Dios if the action called for it.

In the drug world, as in any criminal endeavor, the road to an early death is paved with indecision. Alberto spoke rather than acted, and that allowed the Diablos to pounce. And their way was a seek-and-destroy quest to rid themselves of any and all potential threats. Alberto’s battered and torched body was left hanging from the low branch of an old tree. Then they pressed their agenda forward and set about murdering each member of the Vizcaino family, saving Edgardo, the youngest and most vulnerable, for last.

Angel was never sure exactly what it was about the murder of Edgardo Vizcaino, as opposed to any of the other horrible crimes he had seen perpetrated on people too weak or unwilling to fight back, that forced his hand. But that early morning, as the body of a boy he had grown to respect as much as to love was being prepped for burial, he decided that the time for reflection and prayer had ended. The Diablos were not interested in the words of a priest. They would respond only to action.

The war raged for three years.

In that time, Father Cortez morphed from a benevolent small-town priest into a man so deadly and ruthless that the local papers began to refer to him as the Black Angel. He still sought out the area’s young and gifted, but instead of putting their skills to the test on a running track he ran them out into the line of fire armed with Mac .9s and turned them into dealers and killing machines.

By the late fall of 1982, Angel Cortez ruled over a criminal enterprise that stretched from the sandy streets of his small village to the high-rises of Bogotá and into the deep money of Mexico City and South Florida. There were 350 full-time dealers under his domain, 175 mules running cocaine packets across various state and national boundaries, and an army of 200 heavily armed hitters, each quick of trigger and Nike fast on the escape, making police detection close to an impossible task. His determined vow of poverty had now been replaced by a quest for riches, with a stream of offshore sheltered accounts totaling nearly $6 million. And all that gun power sitting on top of the small mountains of cold cash pointed the former priest in only one direction: an all-out takeover of the streets of New York. By the spring of 1985, Angel Cortez was ready to make his move to the big show.

How soon you think before they bite us back? Roberto asked.

Not long. A week at the most, Angel said. It won’t be a heavy move. Not at first. Not their kind of play. They’ll look to hit us at our softest spot and work their way up from there. It’s how they have worked since they first hit the city, and there’s no reason for them to change their ways now.

"Sí, but we have a soft spot?" Roberto asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Everyone does, Angel said. No matter how prepared they think they are or how much thought they put into their plans. We are no exception. Unless, of course, I choose to eliminate that soft spot myself, saving the Gonzalez brothers a handful of bullets.

And what is ours?

Angel Cortez stood, the empty beer bottle inside the paper bag dangling from the thin fingers of his right hand, and stared down at Roberto. You are.

3

I’m not looking to talk you out of anything you already set your mind to get into, Davis Dead-Eye Winthrop said. I’m too old and still too angry to burn my time on getting nowhere. So let me put it out there for you nice and clean. I want in on this just as much as you do.

Boomer took a deep breath and raised his face to the late-afternoon sky, which featured a string of ominous clouds. They were standing in a tight and grease-free alley off the Fontana Brothers Funeral Parlor, backs pressed against a redbrick wall. Up the small hill and to their right, they could see the back door to the mourning room partially open, a chubby man in an ill-fitting jacket and tie shoving his head out, letting cigarette smoke filter through his nostrils. Inside, on the second floor, in the middle of three rooms, lay his niece’s closed coffin, surrounded by an array of sobbing friends and family, large bouquets of flowers slowly wilting under the weight of a humid day.

This one’s different, Boomer said.

Why? Dead-Eye asked. Because she’s family? If that’s the line, then you can sell that brand of shit on some other corner. That don’t wash anywhere near me. That girl was as much blood to me as if she were my own kid.

That’s not it, Boomer said, letting his eyes roll across his oldest and most trusted friend. Not even close.

Then tell me what is close, Dead-Eye said.

What’s it been since that last job now, three years? Boomer asked.

Month or two, give or take, Dead-Eye said. Depends more on how you count the time invested. Way I look at it, job was done when my last wound healed.

And I still don’t know if we won that tussle because we were lucky or because we were better, Boomer said.

Little bit of both, Dead-Eye said.

This time, the coin tosses might not all go our way, Boomer said. Then, throw into the mix a new set of crews, colder and harder than what we’ve been up against before. Put it all together and we’re not exactly staring at a Kodak moment.

Bad is still bad no matter what end of the world they call home, Boom, Dead-Eye said. And you’re still going in, no matter what the scoreboard reads like.

Boomer nodded. I don’t have much to call my own, he said. That’s not a complaint, just a fact we both need to take a long look at. My family pictures are on the spare side, and the only one I ever really loved from that end, the one that owned my heart, is waiting to take a long ride to a small cemetery.

That were my boy in there waiting to get buried instead of your niece, would you step aside even if I told you it was how I wanted it? Dead-Eye asked.

No, Boomer said.

Then let’s move on to the second part of the exam, Dead-Eye said. You pick up any intel on the shooters, street or department?

It could be the Russians—the shooting has some of their tire tracks on it, Boomer said. But the smart cash is riding on a crew from South America looking to impress the SAs working the coke-and-gun end of town. Now, the only new crew making any noise these last few months has been a kill-crazy band of white-line pistols cherried by a dealer who used to be a priest. My gut is to look their way, but it might be best to do a wash and rinse on both ends just so we lock down on the right target.

A man of God gone to hell, Dead-Eye said. I tell you straight, they don’t give themselves much of a shake these days. Take your pick of evil, my man. They either popping caps in some innocent bystander in broad daylight or molesting kids under a white sheet at night.

He didn’t come into town alone, Boomer said. Got at least two, maybe three hundred guns within reach, answer only to his words. And he’s not the shy type of padre, kind who works best in the shadows. He’s up front and personal and will put the drop down himself, the mood strikes.

He might think, for now at least, he’s holding a full tray of fresh cookies, Dead-Eye said. But just wait until he gets wind of us—two shot-up, beat-up, crippled ex-cops putting a hunt party out on his SA ass. What, my friend, do you suppose the ole padre is going to do once that shit filters through his ears?

If luck is still running our way, he’ll laugh until he dies, Boomer said.

4

Stephanie Torres walked down the burnt-out hallway, the thick and familiar smell of burnt wood and rubber filling her nose and lungs as smoke smoldered off the walls. She moved with seasoned steps, her eyes scanning each crack in the wall, each hole in the floorboards, easing her way from one ruined apartment to the next. She was looking for the one piece of evidence that would allow her to label the fire, which only a few hours earlier was a cauldron that had taken a full New York fire battalion to combat, the work of an arsonist. It cost the lives of three civilians and put two veteran smoke-eaters in an ICU ward. She moved up the landing, stepping over a large, gaping hole and moving past the bodies of a half dozen rats smoldering in a corner. At the top of the steps, she bent down and ran her gloved fingers over a small mound of dust, picking out the burnt remains of a safety pin. She reached into the pocket of her fire coat, pulled out a small cellophane evidence bag, dropped it in, and sealed it shut. She stood up and walked deeper into the second-floor hallway.

She was an arson investigator assigned to the New York Police Department, working out of a set of precincts in the East Bronx. It was a neighborhood that she knew well, having grown up in a two-story house on Boyd Avenue, the only daughter of a Puerto Rican garage mechanic and a tough-willed mother one generation removed from the streets of San Juan. Back then, the neighborhood was a series of redbrick houses that served as first homes to a working-class enclave of Italian, Irish, and Hispanic immigrants, each of whom found a common ground in rearing children and vegetable gardens. Stephanie was at ease both at school, where she excelled in science and English lit, and on the street in front of her home, where she had mastered the intricate rules of bottle-cap baseball before she lost all her baby teeth. Her father, Hector, a proud and stubborn man and the first in his family to land a civil-service job with the Department of Sanitation, would sit behind the small white gate leading to the basement steps of the two-story house he owned, mortgage-free, and watch his little girl at play. He preferred to work the more demanding eight-to-four morning shift in order to be home to spend time with Stephanie. She was a frail girl, suited more to the leafy confines of suburban sprawl than to the daily give-and-take tumble of the Bronx streets, but he was also confident that what Stephanie lacked in brawn she more than made up for with grit and sheer force of will. Across many years of lazy spring and fall afternoons, Hector would sit in an old garden chair, a cup of iced tea resting next to the folded sports pages of the New York Post, and allow the gleeful sounds of laughing and shouting children to transport him back to the streets of his native land.

Those afternoons also transported him back to a life he missed and a woman he could never forget. Hector Torres first laid eyes on Maria Espinoza on a side street just off the crowded main drag in Old San Juan. He was a week shy of sixteen and she couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, but it took only a second for the full, blunt force of love to give them each a hard jolt. They married less than a year later and were bound for New York a month after the wedding, not in the pursuit of wealth and dreams but in search of a steady job and a good home and a good school for the daughter they would soon call their own.

Those early years in 1950s New York were not an easy time for a young and ambitious couple, the available jobs being menial and on the low end of the pay scale. But working-class dreams die a slow death and Hector and Maria struggled on, determined not to live their lives in a cold-water, third-story walk-up where the radiators stopped hissing heat at ten at night, causing the windows to crack by morning. In the summer, the unforgiving humidity of the stifling days and nights turned the rooms into saunas. Hector, who found work as a school custodian, a gas-station attendant, a member of a park cleanup crew, and a boiler duster, all of them off-the-book and temporary jobs with no upside, sought and found the mother lode of middle-class stability. A two-year stint in the military, followed by a civil-service exam, gave him safe passage to a new world, one filled with low-cost housing and better schools. This allowed them a final break from the shackles of cash-by-the-day employment and the fast-money lure of the dark side of the street.

Hector and Maria saved as much as they could from each paycheck, putting small chunks away for a down payment on a new home and for Stephanie’s school, the rest going to meet both the daily demands and the pleasures of their new world order. They took their first vacation—a four-day stay in Bermuda—with Christmas-bonus and tip money Hector earned hauling and tossing garbage from the high-end, door-manned buildings along Park and Madison Avenues. And he doted on Stephanie, as did his Maria, the husband and wife eager to shower the bright young girl with all of their love and attention.

There were weekly ice-skating lessons in the fall months for Stephanie, dance lessons in the spring, and piano lessons year-round. She acted in school productions, helped to organize the annual church canned-food giveaway, and, along with her mother, worked one weekend a month as a volunteer, bringing meals and other necessities to those in the neighborhood who were either too poor or too infirm to provide for themselves.

Their life was a dream that was never meant to end, but it did, on a late-summer morning with a hint of fall in the crisp air. It was September, 1970.

Maria Espinoza, her arms filled with grocery bags, stepped into the dank basement vestibule of her grandfather’s three-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on East 138th Street in the Bronx, the imposing shadows of the Cross Bronx Expressway noticeable in the distance. Grandpa Olmeda, eighty-four and still feisty, always refused any calls for him to move out of a building that had long ago dismissed any hopes of a return to glory days. Most of the other tenants had evacuated their apartments, goaded by a landlord desperate to sell to a consortium of city power brokers eager to put up a string of low-income houses on the street. On her last weekly visit, Grandpa Olmeda told Maria that the landlord had just left the apartment, having made what he had called his final offer. The slick little bastard thinks he can get me out of my home with a check, Olmeda said, his words, as always, coming in a great rush just before a coughing fit, his decades-long bout with damaged lungs now entering its final rounds. I chased his ass fast out the door. And, if I were a few years younger, would have kicked it out to boot.

How much was the check for, Papi? Maria asked. She never lost the warmth of her disposition, no matter how frustrating it was for her to see anyone suffer—especially the elderly man to whom she owed so much of the good in her early life.

Does it make a nickel’s worth of difference? he asked. Dirty money never turns clean, I don’t care in whose hands it goes.

Maybe you should move out, Maria told him. All your friends are gone to live with family or are in better neighborhoods. No reason you couldn’t do the same. It doesn’t matter if you take the landlord’s check or not, even though, whatever the amount, it would help with your move. Then you could come and live with us. We have plenty of room. Hector is the one who always brings it up to me, and Stephanie would be so happy to have her papi there for her every day.

This is my home, Maria, Olmeda said, fighting back another urge to cough. "It was my home when I was young and had a family, and it will stay my home for as long as the good Lord wants me to keep taking a breath. And the house you and Hector and Steph have, that is your home. That is