The Cold Spot (7 page)

“No, I don’t run.”

“A’ course, you did wind up shooting your own string.”

“Only in their legs. And only for you.”

“Wasn’t much of a getaway.”

“It was for you.”

“So warm, sweetness,” she said and rolled to him.

“I bet the other girls just got flowers and chocolates.”

C
hase began dreaming of his mother and the dead
little sibling, the one who hadn’t had a chance to be born. He’d spent years trying to forget her face, tamping those memories down inside him, but now she appeared before him quite clearly, her voice almost breezy as she spoke his name.

He was back in the house he grew up in. The lawn had been mowed, the edging along the grass done with precision, the hedges perfectly trimmed, the tops as straight as if they’d been laid out with a ruler. Either it was high aesthetic or his father had a touch of OCD.

At the kitchen table, his mother sat calling to him, as if he was in another room. He stepped closer but she couldn’t seem to see him. He noted the way she wore her hair in looping ringlets, a slight reddish tint to it, the same as he got in his beard when he let it grow out. Her lips were full, almost as full as Lila’s. Her belly just a tiny bulge.

He waited to see himself, as a boy, come running by, but it didn’t happen. The dead little kid was in a chair at the other end of the table. Weird to see it and still not know if it was a boy or a girl. It stared at him with its mouth moving, indecipherable sounds emerging and growing louder until he thought he could almost make them out. He moved closer and closer, and the kid leaned forward and spit in his face.

“I dreamed of
my mother again last night,” Chase told her.

“I thought you might be,” Lila said. “The way you twisted in your sleep. I held you and rubbed your chest lightly and you quieted down some after a time.”

She’d been raised on mountain folklore, backwoods myths, and gospel tent revivals. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to lose the superstitious streak that had been spiked into her from childhood. When he spoke of his dreams her face grew very intense and she spooked him a little with how seriously she took them.

“What did your mama tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing. She just kept saying my name.”

Lila nodded, like spirits did this on occasion. He wondered if he should go fire a few rounds into the woods, maybe it would ease his mind a bit. Lila studied him for a moment, her features folding along all the contours of worry. It made his guts tighten, and she laid a hand against the side of his face.

“The dead will find a way to you. They’ll make you listen.”

It took about
four years in Mississippi before he started to lose his cool. He’d done pretty well, all things considered.

They were at a picnic on a lake, all the kids running around down by the shore, skimming rocks and chasing turtles. Molly Mae and Judge Kelton had three little ones by now and were working on a fourth, the old man getting healthier by the year while Molly looked ready to throw herself under a truck.

Chase tried to keep his mind on the conversations circling him, but the accent still threw him off and he laughed inappropriately on occasion. He was never going to get a handle on it.

He knew he’d been getting a little distant and didn’t know how to bring himself back.

Lila came over and sat on his lap. “You want to head home to the East Coast, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

He knew she wanted to leave this place, maybe even more than he did, just to get away from the constant reminder of her family asking about when they were going to have children.

“You think I’ll like it there?” she asked.

“It’ll take some adjustment, but yeah, I think you will.”

“We going to live in Manhattan? I’m not sure I could get used to a big city like that.”

“You could, but I think we’ll be better off out on Long Island. Get a little house.”

“I suppose police work would be a little more action-packed.”

It made him tense up. He hadn’t thought for a minute she’d want to stay a cop in New York.

“I don’t think that’s an especially good idea,” he said.

Her voice grew heavy as she whispered into his ear. “You think those bad New York crews are going to take advantage of my poor countrified ways?”

“You wouldn’t be out there arresting your cousin Ernie.”

“Now you know Ernie was a real villain despite him being blood.”

It was supposed to make him feel like an idiot but instead it alarmed him a touch. She was strong and smart and could handle herself, but New York was a different world from anything she’d known. He thought about trying to talk her out of it, making a real scene if he had to, but there wasn’t any point. She’d hold her course the way she always had, right from the start.

L
ila had never seen the ocean before. The first thing
he did was take her down to the beaches. The water hypnotized her, the ever-shifting terrain and form of it, the endless blue and white fading beyond the vanishing point of the horizon. It took her hours before she went in up to her ankles. The sea terrified and elated her. A couple of times she kneeled and splashed, as if she were playing with a child. The waves rolled in and out, and from second to second, as her eyes widened and narrowed, it appeared to Chase that she had to force herself to remember she didn’t have a lost child rolling in the surf. That the kid had never been there no matter how alive in her mind it might be, calling out to her.

He became a
teacher, like his father, in a town not far from where he grew up and where his mother had been murdered. Auto shop. He didn’t need a master’s degree to show kids how to fix a fan belt. Most of them couldn’t even change a spark plug and were only there because the other elective in the time slot was Home Ec. What you wound up with was all the girls learning how to make waffles and all the guys trying to act manly even though they each had Triple A and would call a towing service before changing a tire.

Only a handful of the boys were destined to be grease monkeys. They didn’t have the grades or the attitude for college and were bound to work in garages for the rest of their lives. A couple would take to it, and the others would probably be hissing in bitterness for decades to come. Chase taught them all the way Jonah and a few of the other string members had taught him, as if there was something mythic and lifesaving hidden within the depths of a car.

The kids liked him because he was young and cared more about life lessons than he did about grades. He’d watch them in the hallways and listen to their chatter. So many of them seemed bent out of shape already, worried about college, their résumés, mortgages they didn’t even have yet. He was astonished by the number of kids who had to go to rehab, had psychiatrists, took antidepressants because they’d already tried to off themselves. For the first time he started to realize maybe he’d been better off without school after all.

He taught the kids a couple of car-boosting tricks. Nothing too serious, just goofing around. But it solidified his reputation. They dug the way he spoke to them, as equals. Unlike other teachers, Chase would never judge or analyze them, and the kids knew it. The rest of the faculty members, trying to relate, would have to sift back through their lives and make an effort to recall what it was like to be a teen.

But they couldn’t quite remember and they didn’t really want to. It was too painful. Resentment would flare. So they wound up looking fake and deceptive despite their sincerity. He saw it happening all the time. Watching some old man make an ass out of himself hoping to sound hip, waving hall passes around, throwing a conniption fit if anyone was still around after the bell rang.

But Chase had never been a kid and had never been to school. He couldn’t pretend even if he wanted to. He talked to his students the way he talked to everyone. They respected him for it. They also knew that if they ever crossed him or gave him too much shit, he wouldn’t send them to the principal’s office. He’d take care of it himself. It kept them on their toes.

Despite already being
a deputy sheriff, Lila had to pay for a couple of academy courses and wound up a Suffolk County cop, which was considered a cush job by the New York City fuzz. She said some of the guys gave her a hard time because of her accent, but she liked her partner, a kid a few years younger than her named Hopkins, and so far there hadn’t been too much rough action.

Hopkins was married and had two baby daughters. He and his wife came over for cake and coffee—that’s what you were supposed to do here, married couples, have cake and coffee—and brought the kids with them. Lila left Chase in the kitchen having the fucking cake and coffee while she played with the girls in the other room the whole time. He didn’t blame her, but hell, enough with the cake and coffee.

Lila told him, “Maybe you should quit teaching them kids how to steal cars. Since you started in on their fertile minds, joyriding in the area’s gone up about three thousand percent.”

She was too damn good at her job, giving the guys on the force a complex. Always getting citations, commendations, and medals for something or other. There were plenty of photo ops, the chief of her division and other public servants standing beside her, smiling, sometimes holding their hands up in a salute. It didn’t hurt to get your photo in the paper next to a beautiful young woman. Chase figured they got a little extra thrill pinning the medal to her chest, going in for a quick grope. They’d put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her ass. He noted their faces.

On occasion, she’d have some kind of a banquet or police ceremony to attend and he’d get a free dinner out of it. When the grinning gropers came around to shake his hand, telling him what a fine officer his wife was, the pride of the order, Chase would pretend to trip and give them a cheap shot to the kidneys. It wasn’t much but you retaliated where you could. The Jonah in his head told him to carry a roll of quarters in his fist next time.

Eventually it got
back to the PTA that Chase was teaching the kids how to boost rides and he was brought up for review. He sat there in a classroom that had been set up to look like a court, with the judge behind the desk and him in a little chair off on his own. He got scolded by a couple of tight-asses, and he had to promise not to do it anymore. The whole review board thing didn’t carry much weight anyway since he was consistently voted one of the most popular teachers in the school district.

Sometimes at night he felt a little guilty stealing Lila away from the life she had always known before. He held her tightly with his face pressed between her breasts, breathing deeply, and she brushed her fingers through his hair and said, “You don’t have anything to feel conscience-struck about. I love it here. You gave me the ocean.”

“Is it enough?”

“Nothing is except for you, love. You’re enough. And that’s all that matters.” She kissed him and looked into his eyes, going deep again, the way she did. “’Sides, if we’d stayed in Mississippi, I’d be babysitting. Molly Mae just had her sixth.”

“Jesus Christ, six! How’s the judge?”

“He’s ready to walk on water, that miraculous sumbitch.”

T
hey hit the city, and Lila fell in love with Broadway.
So did Chase, all over again. Back when he was pulling heists with Jonah just outside of the city, he’d managed to take in a number of shows during their downtime, the scheme time. None of these major musicals playing in the elaborate theaters, but the classics held in smaller 99-seat venues. Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard,
Ibsen’s
Ghosts,
Albee’s
A Delicate Balance,
and an all-female version of Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. He was only fourteen but had appreciated them greatly, as they stirred him toward understanding metaphor and sentiment. He even caught a revival of Shaffer’s
Equus
and was surprised to see nudity on the stage. He’d been embarrassed as hell, slinking down in his seat with his cheeks heating up.

He and Lila started going to the theater as often as they could afford it. Prices were outrageous, and he didn’t know how the other stiffs managed to swing the shows. Two tickets, dinner, and parking ran upwards of three or four bills, but they managed to make a night of it at least once a month, so long as Lila wasn’t pulling night shifts.

One evening, after
The Producers,
which Lila found hysterical and Chase thought was way too broadly acted, they were walking down Seventh Avenue toward a little Italian place they liked when a guy bumped into Chase and said, “’Scuse me, buddy.”

“Sure,” Chase said, knowing something had just gone wrong. It took him a second to check his wallet.

Gone. His pocket had been picked.

Goddamn, that had been a nice brazen, fluid move. A quick dip, lift, and fly. The straight life had made him careless. Getting hit by a nimble, practiced pickpocket, it actually surprised him the way it would a regular citizen. Chase wasn’t sure if he should rush after the mook or ask Lila to go grab him, use her wily police skills all over his ass.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I just had my wallet lifted.”

“You know by who?”

Chase still had his eye on the guy up ahead in the foot traffic. “Yeah.”

“Well? You gonna let him get away with the boodle? Or you want I should do all the work even on my night off?”

“You are the defender of the peace,” Chase said. “My taxes pay your salary.”

“I’m simply a wife expecting to be treated to a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant.”

“Be right back.”

“Don’t take too long, I’m jonesing for some lasagna.”

Pronouncing it la-zanga.

“Get a bottle of Merlot and order me the fettuccine Alfredo,” Chase said and took off down Seventh Avenue after the pickpocket, weaving through the crowd.

He found the guy zipping around the corner, heading for a subway station. Walking hurriedly but without breaking into a run. He was good but not especially smart. He should’ve stayed with the street crowd instead of taking the corner and making for a subway fifteen minutes before the next train. He should’ve had the cash out by now and dumped the wallet.

Chase got up close behind the mook, invading space, and made the guy stop and turn around to see who was breathing down his neck. No one else was nearby.

“I’m curious,” Chase said, “what made you choose me?”

“What?”

Up close, the stealthy mutt didn’t blend in with the urban hordes as much as Chase had originally thought. He was only around thirty but already seriously burned at the edges. Wrinkled, faded, and losing the fight to keep from being swept out to sea. A cokehead but not overly wired at the moment, his eyes a low grade of lethal. What Jonah used to call a skel, a dreg, a bottom-feeder.

“I’m no mark,” Chase told him. “Your kind always go after the tourist trade and folks who are distracted or lost. So why me?”

“What?”

Okay, so no reminiscing over the bent life with this one. Chase would have to settle on getting just a brief whiff of the old days. “Give me my wallet.”

“Get the fuck away. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Come on, let’s have it.”

“You don’t want a piece of me.”

“You’ve got that right. Just hand over my wallet.”

“I’m not kidding with you, man, go back to fucking Kentucky or wherever you’re from.”

Now that was just mean-spirited. “New York born and bred, fucker!”

The guy drew his chin to his chest, eyes narrowing, squeezing out the world. He went deep, calling up anger and hate and letting it wash over him. You could see it happening, how the guy was just letting himself go, drifting with the worst that was inside him. All of this for what? Chase had maybe eighty bucks in the wallet, two credit cards he could cancel in sixty seconds.

But the mook had skilled hands all right. One second there was nothing in his fist, and the next he was holding a fold-out blade. It snapped open with a dramatic click. Chase hadn’t been expecting a blade or pistol. Most pickpockets went into the trade because of its relative safety. No confrontation, no muscle, nobody gets hurt. No weapons were used so any jail time was light.

But this one, he’d worked a lot with his knife. Maybe it was the coke. It kept him up three days straight with nothing to do but practice.

He kept the blade down low, out straight before him. He did everything right so far as Chase knew. A couple of strings he’d been a part of had had knife fighters on them. Guys who did nothing but sharpen blades and throw them into dart-boards between scores. Almost all of them went down after carving up someone in a barroom brawl.

You saw a guy with a knife in this day and age and you knew you were looking at a serious asshole.

The mutt unleashed a nice speedy move, and suddenly the knife was coming in at a nasty angle. None of this slashing shit, not even the usual stabbing motion. A low-slung swinging arc coming up from the groin. If it hooked into Chase’s belly it would yank out his guts.

The fuck was wrong with these antisocial sons of bitches? You could rob a man without butchering him.

Chase barely avoided the maneuver, got his left arm up to block and shot off two rapid-fire punches to the guy’s nose. It brought blood but didn’t slow the mook down any. He made another low, slicing action.

“You’re fast but you don’t know when to call it quits,” Chase said.

The guy was too focused to respond, on a complete burn with his heart rate up. He looked like he just didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, like he might as well kill or die as soon as walk away.

Chase was only twenty-five and in prime shape, but the straight life had worn him down a little, made him soft. He saw what might happen. Imagined himself snuffed on the curb, with Lila eating breadsticks for the next hour thinking what the hell had happened to him, and wondering when she could crack the wine and get some pasta.

“Shit,” Chase said.

The blade came upward toward Chase’s groin and he caught the guy’s wrist, squeezed and bent it back, feeling the little bones grind into sand. The knife dropped and clattered on the cement. Chase tugged forward and sidestepped. The mook let loose with an outraged yelp as he passed by Chase’s shoulder, the light stir of breeze sort of singing, and Chase spun and elbowed him hard in the back of the head.

The pickpocket went down like he was dead.

Bathed in cold sweat, Chase staggered against the side of a building, gasping for air. It took him a minute to get back his cool. He went through the mutt’s pockets. Tore open a folded envelope and poured out a gram of coke on the sidewalk. Found a tightly rolled wad of eleven hundred bucks and took it. Got his wallet and five others. Another grand or so, not including his own eighty bucks. He pocketed it all.

Fuck off for the night, straight life.

Turning the corner, he found a mailbox and tossed the other wallets in.

At the restaurant, Lila had already ordered and was digging into a plate of lasagna, a hunk of buttered bread on the side of her plate, an open bottle of Merlot in the center of the table. God he loved to see her eat. His fettuccine was still steaming. Perfect timing. He sat and poured two glasses, downed his own quickly, and poured another.

She said, “Go wash, there’s blood on your hands.”

He hadn’t noticed. It took him a minute in the men’s room to scrub a stain out of his cuff. He knew she’d never ask him anything about it, giving him plenty of room to move. When he got back, the waiter was passing by, and Chase ordered Dom Pérignon.

She said, “Champagne?”

Why the hell not, he was twenty-one big ones ahead. “It’s a celebration.”

“My. And just what are we celebrating, sweetness?”

“That you’re not a widow,” Chase told her.