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CHAPTER 1
WARM SPRING DAY
With the soft earth pressed into my back, I gazed up to the sky. The sun shone down all around on what was just another warm spring day.
I turned to my friend after hearing the buzz of a bee cut the air between us. We smirked and shook our heads, eventually working each other up to an audible laugh.
No words were exchanged. No words needed be exchanged; we were both thinking the exact same thing.
We are completely fucked right now. There's no way we're getting out of this alive. We're going to die right here, right now, wallowing in this fucking garbage.
I hadn't even finished the thought when three more bullets streaked by, inches from my face, each one again sounding every bit like an angry insect.
Micro-explosions of dirt splashed around randomly, each subsequent impact punctuating just how close we were to death's door. I shimmied to somehow bury my body even deeper in a shallow pile of trash. It reeked in the sweltering heat.
There was nowhere to run. This was all we had for cover.
The day started off worse than the others, but not all that much differently. Instead of bugles greeting us with reveille, we were roused from our slumber by more than two dozen mortars that had been lobbed at our base.
It wasn't a wake-up call so much as an open initiation to meet them out on their turf.
It worked. Multiple skirmishes broke out in the streets before noon. Five outstanding Marines were already dead, including a man I respected and admired as much as any I had met in my entire life.
Hundreds of insurgents had mustered in this apocalyptic wasteland-in-the-making — a shithole called Husaybah that sat on a no-man's border loosely separating Iraq and Syria.
And now they were finally going for it. This was the day they had chosen to execute a ruthless desire to overrun our base.
While they had gathered and planned, it was a battle no one on our side saw coming. Well, nobody but me and my little crew, and no one else seemed all that interested in hearing what I had to say on the matter until it was too late. Clearly.
Our adversaries were fanatics — a different breed from the ragtag Iraqi nationalists and Saddam loyalists that we'd pummeled into submission here just a year earlier. This new enemy was thrilled to sacrifice ten of theirs just for the slightest chance that they might butcher one of ours.
At the time, they were little more than an unidentified scourge — "al Qaeda in Iraq" before we knew there was an al Qaeda in Iraq. Hell, al Qaeda in Iraq before they knew there was an al Qaeda in Iraq.
ISIS waiting to be born.
Earlier in the day, I sent countless rounds of precision fire downrange from our base to slow their advance. But rather than sit in place and wait to get Alamo'd, we chose to strike back. We moved outside the wire in order to beat them to the punch — take out their headquarters before they got ours.
It was audacious but, unfortunately, not unforeseen. Again, there they were, just waiting for us. Minutes earlier, I watched as more of my fellow Marines were cut down by hostile fire. They had been just yards ahead of me in the patrol — the first of us to walk into this latest ambush.
The only response available to those who didn't get stitched by hot lead was to drop into the garbage before they dropped us in it.
As we did, the city opened up on us. Machine-gun fire ripped relentlessly, coming in long bursts and from multiple directions.
Too much blood of my blood had already spilled that day. It seemed unavoidable a whole lot more — including my own — was about to flow into that flood.
Hopelessness threatening to overwhelm my senses, a new thought firmly took hold in my mind:
Time to make these bastards pay.
CHAPTER 2
NEVER-NEVER LAND
The thing is, I didn't have to endure years of rigorous training and get spat out in some hellhole on the other side of the planet to obtain firsthand experience with shocking brutality and senseless violence.
No, that was all too often the "ground truth" in the Bronx back in the 1980s — the environment in which I was born and raised. The symmetry isn't perfect. The South Bronx circa 1988 is not a direct parallel to Husaybah 2004, but it was near enough.
I was the middle child of a Puerto Rican family of five who called 184th Street between Bathgate and Bassford home. We were a bilingual family, although we predominantly spoke English, and in that we fit right in. The surrounding neighborhoods were almost exclusively Hispanic, and that more or less remains the case to this day.
Only a few blocks over was Little Italy — area once controlled by prominent Cosa Nostra figure Salvatore Maranzano and where John Gotti was originally from. The Italians always had beef with the Hispanics.
And then there were the blacks in the projects down in Webster. There were obvious racial divides and rifts in the Bronx, especially in the '80s. Each area was a world unto its own.
My mom, Evelyn, was pretty much the matriarch for our family. Pretty much is the matriarch for our family. She grew up destitute and even then took on the role of the motherly figure for her siblings. She made sure they were all fed and got to school.
So she was well practiced by the time she had kids of her own. And she lived through her kids. We were her outlet. She's just got that heart and would take care of the world if she could.
My father, Edwin, was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York when he was seven. That guy has been a ninja with his hands as far back as I can remember. He made a name for himself as a skilled mechanic, carpenter, and electrician — your versatile multipurpose handyman. Anything you could tear apart, he could put back together. People in the neighborhood would come to him with all sorts of projects that needed doing.
Besides my brother, Eddie, and my little sister, Melanie, my aunt, uncle, and cousins were also very much part of the picture growing up.
In fact, Manny, Daisy, and Mickey were cousins in biology only. Anywhere other than a family tree diagram, we were siblings. We'd meet up at my grandmom's building every single day and just hang out.
It sounds almost idyllic until you delve a little deeper into the surrounding environment. New York's crack epidemic destroyed lives on all sides throughout the '80s. It didn't matter how deeply entangled or innocent you were, there were more than enough random atrocities to go around.
I saw the blood of my blood spilled for the first time when I was just five years old, before Melanie was even born.
I was with my cousins (imagine that), and we were across the street from my father's auto garage. While my old man was out of sight in the garage, Tony was out front with his head buried deep in the carburetors of my dad's mint-green Cadillac.
A flash of motion attracted my attention, and my eyes went wide just in time to see a junkie dash up behind Tony. In horror, I realized he was brandishing a sawed-off shotgun. The junkie leveled it to the back of my uncle's head and yanked the trigger.
There was no warning. It all happened so fast that it would have felt more nightmare than reality if it hadn't been accompanied by that deafening boom.
Startled by the shocking noise — and the gaping, immediate sense of loss that came with it — all we could do was shake. My mom and aunt rushed to us and immediately herded us down the block and back to the real and symbolic shelter of home.
We bawled the entire way.
With us removed from immediate harm, our mothers finally joined in, spilling out in their overwhelming grief. I can still remember that hysterical screaming in the aftermath of my uncle's senseless murder.
*
Even the home we escaped to that day was less than an impenetrable fortress. That fact was hammered home a few years later. Not yet even ten years old, I was awoken by static and intermittent chirping, along with the occasional tinny voices emanating from down the hall.
Groggy and confused, I rubbed my eyes, looking for clarity. Gradually, the dark silhouettes of two police officers racked into a tight focus while police radios barked out from behind them. The two hovered over my mother, who I could see was clearly agitated even in my half-awaken state.
Furious might be a more apt description.
"Mom ... what ... what's going on?"
"Some stupid motherfuckers had a shootout!"
Another turf war had flared up outside our home. Apparently, our house bordered the urban battlefield and ended up riddled with bullets during the night.
My mother came within centimeters of being rendered "collateral damage." A stray round grazed her hair as she slept on the couch before embedding into our living room wall behind her head.
For nearly anyone, the sort of dread that comes along with nearly losing one's mother at that age is easily understood. But it's impossible to truly comprehend it unless you've been there.
And I was probably more vulnerable to the threat than most. I was a constant presence at my mother's side during those formative years. I think that's pretty understandable considering the repeated reminders of the very real dangers that we faced together.
In fact, most of the atrocities that I've witnessed — at least the ones I've witnessed on American soil — have been at her side.
One afternoon, we were on our way to visit my father at a local hangout when we happened across someone we knew. I'm guessing for most people, doing so would involve a wave or polite hello. In our case, we watched as that someone attacked a passerby with plans of snatching a gold necklace.
The intended target refused to back down easily and was slashed across the face for his bravery ... stubbornness ... stupidity ... whatever you want to call it.
In one fluid motion, the chain was yanked free, and the victim was sent sailing through the huge storefront window of the local Laundromat.
The man staggered back to his feet in confusion, his gashed face bleeding profusely. He attempted to reacquire his bearings as the thief escaped down the street. I could read the shifting expressions on his face. He was struggling to internalize what had just happened.
But it was simple enough for me to process.
Shit. All that for a small-ass gold chain?
*
But it wasn't all bad. Actually, most of the time the Bronx was a pretty awesome place to grow up.
You know what you know, right? And this was the normal I was raised in — the normal I flourished in. If you don't have an alternative, and you don't know any other way, you figure out a way to thrive inside whatever chaos surrounds you.
My only glimpse of the world outside the Bronx came from television. The peek at the larger world that had the greatest impact at the time came in the form of images of chaos overseas rather than outside my window. When Desert Storm kicked off, I was glued to that screen.
CNN broadcast visuals of war as they unfolded. Emerald-green hues of night-vision optics showed armed men on the move and tracer rounds smashing into buildings.
Oh my god. This is like the real deal.
That was enough to flood my veins with a sense of patriotism. I felt a raw, unfiltered sense of obligation to my nation even as a child.
But when you're nine years old, your world is still barely more than a few blocks wide. Fantasies of waging war generally end up put aside with other unrealized childhood dreams like scoring the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl or walking on the moon.
While the madness on TV grabbed my attention, the immediate focus remained its nearest equivalent outside my front door.
I was caught up seeking outlets to help deal with that madness on a daily basis. And, in the beginning, those outlets were innocent enough.
*
The kids in the Bronx were resourceful. Money was tight for all our families, but we never let that stop us from having fun. We just had to get creative.
Much of the time, all I needed was a pencil and paper. By the time I was in second grade, I was constantly doodling cartoon strips and comic book characters. It was just for fun — what isn't when you're at that age?
But already I thought it might be something I'd like to do when I was older. And I guess, it turns out I was right — in multiple ways, in fact — but probably not quite the way my preteen brain originally envisioned it.
But I wasn't content to stay inside drawing all day. I also had to be creative to kill time outside.
The neighborhood kids would take milk crates and cut out the bottoms: instant basketball court.
We'd also take quarter waters — you know, those twenty-five-cent juice bottles for sale at the local bodega — and stuff them with newspaper. There you go: instant baseball.
And if we wanted to get a bit more ambitious, we'd cut the bottoms off the quarter water bottles and fashion them into bean shooters by attaching balloons around their lids.
We also used juice caps for pieces in a makeshift game called "skelzies." It was kind of like a scaled-down version of shuffleboard or curling or something, only for city kids instead of the elderly or ... Canadians, I guess.
When we were thinking really big, we'd modify cans to help channel the flow of opened fire hydrants. You guessed it: instant water park.
Growing up in the Bronx in those days was like growing up in Never-Never Land. Crews of kids would band together, with each group laying claim to at least one abandoned building or junkyard for use as their clubhouse.
Like many other wild-child packs, we befriended a stray dog and fed him. In turn, he repaid us with his loyalty by standing guard over our secret dominion.
Our clubhouse even boasted its own "rec center." It consisted of a set of discarded box springs completed with a diving platform fashioned from a refrigerator we dragged out of the trash.
What most might see as the perfect recipe for a broken arm (or worse), we saw as endless hours of entertainment, not to mention an opportunity to one-up each other with our burgeoning acrobatic skills.
It was like a big jungle gym. It was nuts. It was also incredibly fun.
*
Like I said, while admittedly a bit unconventional, the mischief was largely innocent at first. But that was enjoyed on borrowed time before the environment finally caught up with us and twisted our boredom into something more sinister. As I got older, the typical evils of the streets slowly seeped into my life.
The kids who grew up in those conditions had trouble negotiating all that freedom and temptation. Moral compasses were allowed to spin freely. Mine spun just as readily as the others.
Our naïveté and basic need to belong made us vulnerable — and valuable — to certain sorts of people. It was far too easy to fall into that stuff. You could simply be walking through the neighborhood when someone called you over to ask for a favor. Before you knew it, you were doing them a shitload of favors.
Some Chinese food or a bit of pocket change to buy junk food was all the crack dealers needed to entice us into their service as police lookouts.
I guess we made for good entertainment too. Bored dealers turned us into their child gladiators, manipulating us into fistfights with one another. That didn't even require the prospect of sweet and sour pork to get us swinging, just a bit of goading and a few petty words of instigation.
It. Was. Awesome.
None of us ever wanted to go home.
*
Over time, any number of those cliques matured into drug-running crews in their own right. Whether we knew it or not ... whether the dealers knew it or not ... we were being groomed, and we learned by example.
The same way we made our basketball courts, baseballs, and water parks in the absence of the genuine article, we made role models out of the examples we had available to us.
During the '90s, the Bronx was littered with small gangs that were associated with larger ones. It seemed like everyone I knew was in a gang.
It was a badge of honor — one made real through elaborately decorated bead necklaces. Just in my neighborhood there were the Latin Kings, Zulu Nation, Nietas, and any number of smaller groups like Salsa 183 and my older brother's crew, America's Most Blunted (AMB).
It was the modern golden age for the gangs of New York. But it was one nearing the end of its reign. It was around this time Rudy Giuliani became our mayor and New York initiated a radical change for the better.
Giuliani had previously made a name for himself as a federal prosecutor during the '80s by effectively crushing New York's Five Families — indicting numerous Mafia bosses under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act.
Upon being elected mayor in the mid-'90s, he immediately went after crime. He took a particular interest in clamping down minor offenses like graffiti or recreational drug possession that fostered an environment where more serious crimes could take hold.
This would eventually prove to be the downfall of the cult of extravagant, saintlike drug dealers in New York.
But it took some time for Giuliani's broader initiatives to really clean up the city. And, at least as far as we were concerned, the gangs still ran things on a local level.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bounty Hunter 4/3"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jason Delgado.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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