Free Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

adds on top. My hand to my mother’s grave, I’m talkin’ truth here.”
    “I’d bet better than even money you never even laid eyes on your mother or any woman claiming such,” Carlos said. He pushed his chair aside, walked around the table, and stood behind Walter, who was trembling so hard now that his bare feet shook on the cement floor. “And I don’t give a fuck about the where and the how my drugs ended up in your greasy little hands. But I care, and I care a great deal, that you moved my brand out on my streets. I let shit like that stand without a Western Union going back the other direction, soon enough my name is ground down to what yours is now. A flat nothing with a target large enough for the blind to see splattered on my back. Even someone as shit-sure stupid as you can see the bind that puts me in.”
    Carlos McEntire was a seven-figure drug dealer, running hundreds of kilos a month from the hills of Bogotá to the streets of New York each and every month. He had set up shop in a candy store on East 233rd Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx while he was still in his freshman year at a local Catholic high school. He worked four-hour shifts behind the counter and used his time there as a base to sell marijuana packets to the older students who flocked in after class to buy cold sodas, small bags of chips, and enough weed to get them through the week. Every Saturday, he split the cash profits with an elderly Irish couple who didn’t care how the money supplementing their monthly income came through the door. Within six months, Carlos had taken over the candy store and partnered with a narcotics detective with a habit of his own who was working out of the local precinct. The cop offered both protection and connections and, in return, had asked for a 15 percent cut and all the free coke he could jam up his nostrils.
    Carlos had diversified his inventory to include pills and small vials of weak coke cut and danced on so many times it ranked just above Johnson’s baby powder for a full-tilt buzz. He would spray a few hits of Raid ant and roach killer over the dope to give it an extra boost. “Raid is, like, the fuckin’ Gatorade of dope,” he once told a rival dealer. “It gives it that energy kick to get you over the top of the hill. Until you hit the big time and land your ass in prime-time heaven, you got no choice but to swear by that shit. Anything that’s strong enough to kill bugs has got to be more than good enough to milk the flakes we’re moving on these losers.”
    The increase in Carlos’s street activity brought him to the attention of two equally young and hungry drug runners, Hector and Freddie Gonzalez. For a few brief months, the trio circled around one another like circus cats in a cage, watching and waiting, deciding when and where to make the first move. But in a unique show of restraint that is seldom witnessed in the drug world the three on-the-rise dealers decided to unite their small forces and move as one against the stronger and better equipped coke lords of the city. Across a two-year period, starting in the summer of 1982, the three hoods and their ruthless G-Men, numbering no more than twenty-four strong at the outset, lashed out against rival gangs with a viciousness not seen on New York streets since the Gallo-Profaci wars of the early 1960s.
    “Every day on the job, I knew I could count on finding another body tossed in a garbage dump or left burnt as a slab of bacon on a rooftop,” Sonny Rottillo, a detective working the narcotics beat during those twenty-four brutal months, recalled. “And they never hid the fact it was them that did the killing. They wanted us all to know, especially the other gangs. We just could never get enough on them to tag them with the hits. Sooner turned to soon, and the other gangs got tired of having their wives start their cars or looking both ways when they walked out of one of their social clubs. They didn’t have the same