The Cold Spot (11 page)

“Marisa, don’t make me do this.”

“I’m not making you do anything, baby. But it’s all right, we’ll be done here soon anyway, and then you’ll get yours.”

Here it was, finally. He was meeting the worst part of himself. He thought of the men who hurt women. The driver blasting Lila. The animals out there that he’d always despised. The bastard murdering his mother.

Chase raised his fist and punched Marisa in the face, the sound of bone cracking bone making his belly twist. She had guts and she stuck to the rule that you never gave up your crew. She’d never break and he felt an odd respect for her, mixed with all the disgust and hate. How far could he go?

Mouthing Lila’s name, he slugged Marisa Iverson again. She barely rocked back on her feet. Her eyes were beginning to close up. She wobbled and dropped, and then shot to her feet again, moving for her purse. He let her go. When she found that the .22 was gone she hurled the purse at him. It bounced off his chest. She turned to face him, still grinning, she’d be grinning in his dreams, he knew, for the rest of his life.

“The driver.”

“You’ll get nothing out of me, baby,” she said.

The Jonah in his head said, Shoot her in the stomach.

Sneering, Marisa came at him once more and pummeled him twice in the chest. She knew how to throw a punch the right way, trying to stop his heart. Then she drove an elbow in his ribs and he almost went down. It filled her with joy and adrenaline. No wonder she and the driver had paired up. She was a lunatic too.

She ran in and tried to bite him in the throat. He slapped her two, three, four times bringing loud grunts and weird laughter from her. She fell to the carpet, tried to stand once more but couldn’t. The surge of crazed energy was fading.

She started panting and moaning a little singsong that reminded him of the preacher overtaken by the power of tongues at his wedding.

Finally she managed to stand, weaving a bit.

“You think I can’t take a few love taps?” she said. She spit at him, her blood landing on his shoes. “I’ve been getting worse than this since I was seven years old. You can’t hurt me. You can’t do anything to hurt me.”

Jesus Christ, she might be right.

He was teeming with sweat. He wanted to moan or roar. He would fucking beg her if he thought it could work.

She was better than him, much harder than him. As icy and tough as they came. But he couldn’t shake the thought, even now. Why hadn’t she pulled out of town yet? What was keeping her here?

And then he knew why she hadn’t run yet.

He’d botched it.

If only he’d waited and watched a few more days, he could’ve caught them all. He’d messed up, hadn’t been thinking clearly.

The crew planned on scoring the diamond merchant again.

“You’re going to have to kill me now, you know,” she told him. He wasn’t sure that she could even see him anymore. “You don’t have any choice. The minute you leave I’ll just call my boys and they’ll scatter. Or worse for you, they’ll hunt you down.”

“They won’t have to.” He found an unused pad and pen next to the phone and wrote his address down. “They can come find me whenever they like.”

“You’re insane,” she said, the smile gone at last.

“You can’t just walk away.”

“Sure I can.”

“I won’t let you.”

“Tell them I’ll be waiting.”

“Cunt.”

After all of this she still managed to launch herself at him, trying to scratch out his eyes. He caught her in midair easily, held her closely for a moment, and then laid her onto the couch. Her adrenaline finally gave out and she slumped back across the cushions, out cold.

Shadows lengthened across them both. He stared down at her unconscious form as the room grew darker, the sun starting to set. His hands were sticky with her spit and blood. He didn’t move. He didn’t know when he would be able to move again but he knew he couldn’t move now.

She was protecting the one who had squeezed off three shots into his wife.

He should take her kneecaps out.

He should put two in her eyes.

The guns were heavy in Chase’s jacket. He tried to will himself to accept and become a part of their exacting pitiless nature, even while Lila said loudly within him, Oh sweetness, what’ve you done?

C
hase found himself in the dining room drinking a
beer. He finished the bottle and left it in the sink. On the couch, Marisa Iverson gurgled, hissed, and snorted, having a hard time breathing with her face so swollen. He made for the door and another thought hit him.

Carpet steamer service.

Marisa Iverson had only been planning to stick around for a few months at most. Establish an identity at the diamond merchant’s, make the move on the video cameras, stay long enough for the heat to dwindle, and then she and the crew would score the merchant again.

So why the hell would she feel the need to clean the carpets? How dirty could they get that someone in the bent life would care enough to pay to have them cleaned and keep the number on hand?

Chase ran upstairs and got her address book, made a note of the steamer service address and phone number.

Maybe this was her one mistake.

She’d be unconscious for another hour at least. He had that long to see if he could track the crew on his own.

It took him fifteen minutes to get there. The address was real. He drove by it and found an industrial park. She knew the area and had gotten just a touch too clever trying to cover every detail in order to make her sham life seem authentic. She was organized and compulsive. She couldn’t put a number down in the book without an address too. She couldn’t put an address down if it wasn’t an actual place.

The number would belong to a cell phone. It would be untraceable, and it would be ditched a minute after he called.

He had only one shot at this, and he had to make it count.

T
here was probably a code they stuck to when contacting
each other. Two rings, hang up, three rings, hang up, some kind of shit like that. A lot more discriminating than on Jonah’s circuit.

Chase called the number. After it rang twenty times, he disconnected and tried again.

They weren’t a twitchy bunch but there would be rules to follow. No matter what though, even if they figured the cops were on the line, they’d eventually have to answer. It was Marisa’s phone, they’d need to find out what happened to her and see how badly their action was blown.

After another twenty, a dead-calm voice said, “Yes.”

“Are you the getaway man?” Chase asked.

Silence.

Let him roll it around for a while, get the questions burning, but without being able to ask any of them. Give nothing.

Chase said, “Are you the driver? All I want is the driver. I left a message with Marisa Iverson. I’ll leave it with you too. I don’t care about your knockoffs or what happened inside the ice merchant’s. I just want the driver. Don’t tell me he was your regular guy. A maniac like that firing out a car window on a heist is a wild dog. The cop killing has got to have put a lot of heat on your ass. Give him to me and the rest of you can walk.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll take you all down. You the driver?”

Silence.

“If not, pass the word on.”

Chase broke the connection and threw the phone out the car window. He got onto the Long Island Expressway heading east and put the hammer down until he hit 110. The world blurred around him but not enough. Traffic parted before him like flesh opening before the intent of a knife.

He shut his eyes and drifted, hearing Jonah telling him he’d fouled up again, leaving the girl alive and warning the crew. When Chase opened his eyes again and checked the rearview he had three cruisers trying to box him in, the sirens and lights suddenly surrounding him. He smiled his first real smile in weeks, squeezed out 135 from the engine and watched them fade behind him as he jockeyed around family SUVs. Before any more backup showed he took the next exit off, parked behind a firehouse until all the sirens dissipated in the distance, and stole a fresh pair of plates. He took back roads toward home. Every time he looked in the rearview and saw his own eyes he got a minor jolt. He kept thinking someone else was in the backseat, scrutinizing him.

H
e called Murphy in Fort Wayne and found out the
man was dead—heart failure, six hours on the table, ten weeks in a coma before finally giving it up—but the elder son, Georgie, had taken over the crime line while the younger son ran the used-car lots. Georgie knew who Chase was and said, “You still a grease monkey?”

More stupid-ass code. The old men had been using it since 1958. They still said “dropped a dime” and never knew how much a phone call cost. If the feds were listening, how hard would it be for them to fucking reverse the numbers?

Chase said, “Georgie, listen closely. Forget the double-talk. Tell me where Jonah is. I need to see him.”

G
eorgie gave him a phone number, in reverse. The
guy was going to carry tradition right to the end.

Turned out Jonah’s current home base wasn’t that far away, only an hour upstate in White Plains. Chase couldn’t figure the attraction in White Plains unless Jonah was using it as a headquarters just to be close to Connecticut, maybe the Indian rez casino. It wasn’t Jonah’s usual type of score, all those people and the serious security, but Chase had no idea what kind of heists his grandfather was putting together now.

He called the Deuce and asked a lot more questions, got a few answers. He needed to scrape together whatever facts or rumors he could find out about Jonah’s dealings over the last decade. Deucie said he’d get back to him after he talked to a few other guys, but the information was going to cost and yes, he took credit cards. Chase ran off his Visa number.

A day and a half went by before Deucie phoned back. He’d talked to a lot of people who still liked Jonah and a lot more who didn’t. There was even more bad blood out there now. He told Chase what he’d wanted to know and said, “If you’re getting back into the life I think I’ve got someone who could use you.”

“No thanks.”

“He’s a don’s son, has a pretty solid crew. Good money and he likes guys who can handle cars and trucks.”

That meant the mob was back to doing a lot of big-rig hijacking. Send out crews to work the highways, the syndicate bosses robbing from each other. It was low-class, the families must be having a lot of troubles with each other lately.

Chase told him, “I’ll think about it.”

“Hey,” Deucie said. “I was sorry to hear about your wife. Really, I got to tell you. I mean, if it was my wife, it would be a blessing if she got taken out, you know? The way she’s an anchor around my neck, what with the leather shoes and the Gucci purses and the jewelry, and always with the Mexican pool boys. I turn around, there’s another fucking Mexican un-clogging the filter, she wears these guys out. Me, I let it slide, I don’t know why, maybe one day I’ll hire a torpedo to bury her in the Pine Barrens with all the goddamn shoes and purses. But you, I remember what you did when she got hurt couple years back. You, I can tell, you actually loved—”

Chase hung up.

He dreamed of
his father and called out his name. Michael. Chase was nearly as old now as his dad had been when he’d offed himself. It made them brothers of a sort, a part of the same fraternity of pain. He wanted to hear his father’s voice, and more than that, he wanted his father to hear his. A powerful urge swept through him to offer whatever guidance he had to his father. Maybe it would be enough to save him, even now, fifteen years too late. Keep him from taking the boat out in a storm and capsizing this time.

The past drew at him in a way it never had before. His childhood before Jonah seemed to be swarming up, loud and prevalent, trying to yank him backward. He kept watching his father in the snow, cheek pressed to the frozen marble tombstone, wanting to be dead.

Chase knew he was dreaming because his old man suddenly entered the room. It was too dark to see but he knew the body language, the expression of sorrow in every movement. So this was his dad after his mother’s murder. He called out the man’s name again and told him to leave. He barked like a wounded dog in his sleep because his father was sitting on the end of the bed, weeping.

Chase phoned the
number that Georgie had given him and got a genderless voice mail. He left his home address, set up the meet for three days from now, and named a busy family restaurant near the LIE where two parkways intersected. It would offer Jonah four directions to run in case he smelled a trap. Chase couldn’t think of anywhere safer that his grandfather might feel secure enough to meet with him after all this time. Jonah’s first thought would be that Chase was still in the life, had been arrested, and was now setting him up on a plea-bargain.

Chase wondered what else he should say—
Hey, why the hell didn’t you at least send a wedding card?
—but nothing sounded right.
How’s it been going, you doing okay?
Besides, Jonah wouldn’t want to hear any sappy shit. He’d either show or he wouldn’t.

He’d set the
meet for noon, but knew Jonah would leave him sitting alone at the site, checking him out from afar to make sure it wasn’t a sting, making certain no cops had followed. Jonah wasn’t about to come out from cover here. Chase parked at the restaurant, climbed out of a beat-to-shit ’72 Plymouth Gold Duster he’d stolen that morning, sat on the hood, stretched back over the windshield and took in the sun, thinking of Lila.

Forty-five minutes later he got up, slid into the car, and started back toward his house. Jonah would’ve checked out Chase’s story and made sure he knew where Chase lived. The old man would have the route back all mapped out with a good ambush site already chosen.

Jonah never followed anyone else’s rules. He always made sure he got the drop.

It was all right. Chase knew exactly where Jonah would make his play. There was a wide exit down the parkway that opened up onto a service road near a community college, bordered by wooded acreage. Jonah would cut him off, shove him onto the shoulder, and grab him right there. Chase had planned it this way from the start.

Behind him, way back on his left but beginning to speed up now, a white van jockeyed forward. Chase slowed down right as the exit lane came into view, thinking, Here it comes, here it is.

He wondered if his grandfather would hit him. He thought the old man was going to get at least a couple of free slugs in. Jonah didn’t feel things like other people did, but somewhere inside him he must’ve still experienced a small sting of betrayal about how they’d parted.

The van tore out from behind, speeded up alongside the Duster, and crashed into the left front quarter panel, forcing Chase over the curb and into the pine trees. It was a skillfully executed move, pinning the car in the brush and giving him nowhere to run.

His jaws snapped together painfully, and his head rang. He tugged the wheel hard to the left and tried to bump back, but the Duster was already a buckling rust bucket and the crumpled metal blew the left front tire. He stabbed the gas and allowed himself to smash into a tree. The seat belt tore against his chest and he swallowed down a shout. There was an insane uproar of noise as the front end buckled and the windshield caved.

Pretending to be dazed, Chase slumped over the steering wheel, glass in his hair. He quietly un-buckled himself because his ribs hurt like hell and he didn’t want Jonah to haul him against the belt a few times before thumbing the button. The car door swung open and rough hands yanked him from the seat.

Chase offered no resistance. He went down on his back in the grass. The van door slid aside and he was yanked to his feet. Chase tightened the muscles in his belly, waiting for the old man’s fist. He raised his chin and there was his grandfather.