Free Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra Page B

breathing loud enough for it to echo in the empty room. “All right, then,” he said, his voice, tone, and manner as relaxed as if he were in the middle of a Sunday-afternoon golf outing. “You leave me something behind, something that means the whole planet to you but would show how serious you are about working for me alive as opposed to not working for me dead. You willing to do that, to take it that far down the road, then we might have ourselves a solid deal.”
    “Anything, Carlos, I swear it,” Walter said. “You just name it and whatever it is, if I got it, it belongs to you. All you need do is tell me what it is you want.”
    Carlos stared at Walter for a long and silent stretch of time. He then took a deep breath, smiled, and rested his hands against the cool cement of the wall at his back. “Your legs, Walter,” Carlos finally said in a low voice. “You leave behind both your legs. You work for me, you’ll do it from a wheelchair. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to keep them. I’ll have them left for you in your apartment. You’ll see them again once you’re out of the hospital.”
    Tears streamed down Walter’s scarred face and he choked back a mouthful of vomit. His heart was beating so loud that it made him dizzy, his mind filled with a vision of pain and bloodshed. He didn’t turn to watch Carlos leave, unable to either speak or move his head, trembling hard enough to rattle the wooden slats of his chair.
    “Welcome to my crew,” he heard Carlos say.

11

    Boomer waited as the woman walked toward him, the lights from the Whitestone Bridge overhead helping to guide her way. The ground was wet, the middle-of-the-night dew settling in and turning the brown dirt at his feet into soft mud. “I was starting to think you might not show,” he said as she stood across from him, hands shoved inside the pockets of an expensive black coat, the shine on her boots strong enough to reflect the glare of the passing headlights from above.
    “I’m always late,” she said, her voice coated with a rich Eastern European accent. “A family habit, I’m afraid.”
    “Late or not, I’m glad you’re here,” Boomer said. He handed her a container of deli coffee, the lid jammed down tight. “I took a guess as to how you like it.”
    “Which is how?” she asked.
    “I had a nun when I was in grammar school used to say she took her coffee black and bitter, just like her life,” Boomer said. “That’s how I take it, figured you for the same.”
    “Good call,” she said. She lifted the lid of the container and took a long sip of the hot coffee. She was in her mid-twenties, dark hair flowing long and straight down the sides of her face and shoulders.
    “Do you know why I wanted to meet with you?” Boomer said.
    “Our friend said you had something important to ask,” she said. “He thought it would be best if it was done face-to-face. And I agree with that thinking. It’s always best to be able to look in the eye of either a friend or an enemy.”
    “He tell you anything about me?” Boomer asked.
    “He didn’t need to,” she said. “I’ve always done my own homework. So I know you’re a cop, or were. And who I am should be no secret to you.”
    Natalie Robinov was Russian organized-crime royalty.
    She was the only daughter of the feared and respected Viktor Robinov, known to both cops and criminals as the Red Wolf, a thug and killer who ruled the Russian underworld from the Cold War through the odd dance of détente by murdering upwards of fifteen hundred men and women who sought to block the growth of his empire. Viktor was the Charles “Lucky” Luciano of the Russian mob, moving it out of its simple nineteenth-century mind-set, in which tribal gangs were happy and content to rule over the small villages within their domain and share the profits only among themselves, and into a national crime syndicate where the nation was sliced up like a thick oven-fresh pie and all factions gathered