Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra Read Free Book Online Page A

of her, guns drawn, Kevlar vests strapped on over their dark blue NYPD T-shirts. The corridor, cracked and graffiti-riddled, was empty and smelled of dry urine and burnt coke. Loud rap music, mixed with the sound of televisions on high volume, filled the hall. One of the detectives, a young man in his mid-twenties with thinning hair and an Old West mustache, rested a hand on Buttercup’s neck, his eyes focused on the door leading to apartment 4F. “Get ready, sweetie,” the detective whispered. “It’s just about showtime.”
    “That snitch better be on the money about this shit,” the second detective said. He was older, mid-thirties, the routine of daily workouts replaced across the years by a running tab at a local cop bar. “If he’s off by one nickel bag, I’ll have his ass dry-iced to Rikers before rush hour.”
    “Take a breath, Frank,” the first detective said. “The guy’s always been on the square with us. No reason to sense any doubts about him now.”
    “He’s a fuckin’ junkie, Stevie. There’s reason number one with a bullet right there,” Frank said, barely able to contain his voice to the required whisper. “And one of the crew dealers he’s throwin’ our way happens to be his brother-in-law, which, right off the bat, smells to me like a fart in a spacesuit.”
    “There’s three of us and, if the intel is even close to home plate, four of them,” Stevie said, shrugging his shoulders, anxious to bring an end to the talk and a start to the action. “Not like we got ourselves a Butch and Sundance situation here.”
    “I’m gonna try and break this to you gentle,” Frank said, frustration masking his fear. “I only count the ones with two legs as cops. I give a toss to the one that lifts a leg to take a piss and, if the opportunity is there, will jump at the first chance she gets to chew on a hunk of dry shit in the street.”
    Buttercup lifted her massive head and gave a blank look in Frank’s direction, her breath and manner as calm as if she were in the middle of Central Park halfway through a late-afternoon walk. Buttercup was a full-grown Neapolitan bullmastiff topping out at 125 pounds. She was a narcotics dog, trained to sniff out cocaine, heroin, and, if the occasion warranted, large packets of marijuana. She had been assigned to the K-9 unit for three years and was considered the best field dog in any of the five boroughs. “That fucker could find a line of cocaine in the middle of a twenty-inch blizzard,” undercover supercop Jimmy “Eye Patch” Mendoza raved the day he passed Buttercup on to Steve. “I made twenty prime-time busts in my eighteen months working with her. And she wasn’t just a sniff-and-stop hound. The bitch jumps into the line and fights, watching your back better than any partner you ever could wish for. No way she’s a dog. Buttercup is all-star, all-cop, all-the-time.”
    Buttercup was always assigned the high-end takedowns, and possessed an eerie and innate ability to read a situation and react seconds before the trigger click kicked in. Off the job, in the company of other cops or her handlers or, most especially, around children, Buttercup was playful and relaxed, her sweet, puppylike disposition more than negating what, on the surface at least, gave the appearance of a fierce presence. But out in the field, in the heat of the moment, she thrived on the nuances of police work, always on the alert, quick to sense danger, and even quicker to pounce.
    In her three years as a narcotics dog, Buttercup had sniffed out more than $200 million in cocaine hauls, covering a span of two dozen arrests, and was in front of the firing line during a $150 million middle-of-the-night heroin score in a Brooklyn warehouse. Her success rate came with a price tag, though. Buttercup had sniffed out so much cocaine and heroin that cops from other units were leery of working with her, afraid she might go off on a drug-fueled frenzy. “She’s seen way too much shit