Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra Read Free Book Online Page B

for any K-9,” Mendoza reminded Steve. “She could snap, crackle, and pop any second for any reason. She can be sweet as a nursed baby at five to the hour. And then, before you can unzip your pants for a late-night piss, she can take a dealer’s head off with one chomp and roll it down center lane. She’s no different and no worse than any other undercover narc. But I tell you, when the nasty turns ugly and you can smell the gunpowder coming your way, Buttercup is who you want standing next to your ass.”
    Detective Steve Ramoni had learned to take those words and tuck them close to his heart. In their months together, he had grown not only to love Buttercup as a dog but to admire her as a partner. Despite her size, she was a gentle dog and would easily adapt her moods and manner to the moment. In the squad room, she sauntered through the cramped floor space, littered with old arrest warrants, wanted posters, and crumpled-up papers, as if she belonged, pausing to accept a gentle rub of the head from a cop working the phones or grab a nibble on the cold remains of a hot hero left behind by an undercover off on a buy-and-bust. On the streets, free to strut alongside Ramoni without the burden of a leash, a replica of his detective tin hanging on a thin chain around her neck, she walked with the confident strides of a cop on the job, primed and ready for whatever action might head her way. She always let the local kids pet her and rub the bottom of a jaw thick as a barbell, her head lifted, her eyes closed, and her tongue lapping up against the fingers and palms of the tiny hands pressed to her flesh. But, as Ramoni learned in the time it takes for a traffic light to go from red to green, Buttercup was at her cop best when she stood paw to toe up against the hard drug dealers working the streets of what she had grown to consider her turf.
    “I remember this one time,” Ramoni once told a cluster of fresh undercovers, standing around the edges of a dimly lit cop bar, empty bottles of beer lined up like bowling pins on top of the wood, Buttercup sleeping it off at his feet. “Me and Buttercup were working an operation against a dealer named Fernando Chin. Hand to God, that was the fucker’s real name. Half Chinese, half who the hell knows what else. Guy had himself a small crew of about a dozen or so wack-outs, moving that double-cut shit they sprayed with Raid to give the junkies a fake kick, hide the fact that it was about as primo as sauce out of a jar.”
    “This was in our sector or somewhere else?” asked a young cop with a face out of a high school yearbook.
    “No, up in the East Bronx,” Ramoni said, his shoulders tossing a who-gives-a-shit shrug. “Dominican turf and, as you will soon learn, those bastards like to play fair and share about as much as two homeless mutts do over an empty can of Seven Up. Anyways, we had set up shop, with me posing as a buyer for a heavy pocket user living in some ass-pimple town upstate, working this half-breed and his crew one dead worm at a time. Made like the dog was part and package of the price of me doing business, sweating down a heavy-vig gambling loan. We started our run with small buys, couple of bags a week—nothing that would make Chin raise an eyebrow. It was moving at a nice, downstream pace, each day me getting closer to the Chin man, connecting the dots on where he got his dope and who it was asking him to wax the lower floors. We were about a week, maybe two, from a middle-of-the-paper bust.”
    “He got wise he was being played by a hidden badge?” one of the cops asked.
    “Or some stool toss a finger at you?” a voice from the middle of the bar shouted. “You know, caught your act from some other job?”
    Ramoni sipped from a fresh bottle of beer and shook his head. “You guys need to get your ass out of the movies and into the real deal,” he said. “That shit you’re talking works for Hollywood, not the Heights. No, it was Buttercup that moved our