by Conell, Zach
COLD LOVE
Copyright © 2017 by Zach Connell
All right reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter One
Cillian Cantor had never fallen asleep on the Chicago “L” before. But at exactly six minutes past six on a gloomy Thursday evening in October, the unlicensed private investigator just couldn’t help himself. He had just come back from what would hopefully prove to be his last appointment with a client he had been working for over the last few weeks: a rich, middle-aged housewife by the name of Beatrice Baldwin. She had hired him to “spy on my Bastian for a few days”—as she had put it childishly—in order to find out if her husband, Sebastian Baldwin, a successful stockbroker, was having an affair with his personal assistant; with the barmaid at the local Irish pub; with the young single mother who lived across the street; or with all of the above.
Mrs. Baldwin had seemed irrationally suspicious from the start, and Cillian had only taken the case because he’d needed the money, but that had turned out to be a capital mistake. The more evidence he had shown her of the fact that her husband’s sin was workaholism instead of infidelity, the more paranoid she had become. She had kept on adding names to her list of suspects, including a waitress at Mr. Baldwin’s favorite restaurant for business lunches; a barista at his favorite coffeehouse; and a checkout girl at the local supermarket. With every new name on her list, the unlicensed PI had told her that he wanted out, but she had just kept offering to double his wages until he could no longer reasonably resist the offer and reluctantly accepted. In this way, what should have been a simple gig for some quick cash had turned into a weeks-long, full-time investigation that included many lengthy stakeouts outside Mr. Baldwin’s office, where “Bastian” frequently worked until way after midnight before falling asleep, or collapsing rather, at his desk.
This afternoon, after a marathon stakeout during which Mr. Baldwin had not left his office once in about fifty-one hours, contrary to his wife’s conviction that “Bastian” was getting it on with a voluptuous history teacher at the local high school—suspect eight or nine, Cillian couldn’t remember—the exhausted PI had finally decided to approach Mr. Baldwin and to simply tell him everything. To Cillian’s astonishment, “Bastian” had responded not with surprise, but with cryptic indifference:
“Back to her old paranoid ways, is she? Ah well, I guess it’s as good a time as any for a sabbatical,” he had remarked, more to himself than to Cillian, before asking the unlicensed private detective how much Mrs. Baldwin owed him for his “spy games.”
“Nothing. She paid me upfront,” Cillian had mumbled, hardly able to hide his confusion.
“All right, then consider this a departure bonus. I’ll take it from here,” Sebastian Baldwin had responded, while confidently taking out his wallet and handing Cillian a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills, easily totaling over two grand. Finally, Mr. Baldwin had shared his intention to go home to his “dear, attention-deprived wife” to spend a few months with her, and reassured Cillian that “my darling Beatrice” would never bother him again. And that had been that. Case closed. At last he would be able to get some sleep now, Cillian had thought while entering the subway station on his way back home. (Although the Chicago rapid transit system was known as the “L,” a name derived from the “elevated” parts of the system, Cillian’s line was mostly an underground one.) Once on the train, Cillian had found himself a seat in between a neat-looking, short-haired woman and a scruffy-looking man with long, yellow-gray hair, and had proven himself quite right by instantly dozing off despite the fact that the woman on his left had been talking rather loudly on the phone.
Cillian woke up to the metallic voice of the subway announcer politely requesting all passengers to get off the train, as they had arrived at the final destination of the line. Three stops too far—great, Cillian’s sarcastic inner voice said.
While ascending the escalator leading to the subway exit, he buttoned his long, black, fitted overcoat and tightened the belt. Even though it was only a little over an hour since he had entered the subway, it was now completely dark outside, and he could feel that it was much colder. As he stepped into the street, he furthermore noticed that it had started raining. At least, he thought so at first. But the rain was white and flakey. Snow in the beginning of October; that was early for Chicago.
As Cillian increased his walking speed, he thought of all the conservative pundits and politicians, including Mayor Gullfay, who were going to use this weather as an argument against global warming. He sighed and shook his head. Yes of course, if global warming would be real, the weather should get warmer, always, without exceptions. That’s obviously how it works, at least according to Gullfay and his minions in the city council.
Cillian loathed Gullfay, an independent populist with a business background who had been a dark horse candidate in the election of twenty-two months earlier, which had been held as a consequence of the death of Mayor Alfonso. Patrick Simon Yosef “Pat” Gullfay had managed to beat the rather stale competition by running on a pledge to “do whatever it takes to sweep the filthy streets of the Windy City”—which to Cillian seemed a sinister euphemism for employing drastic measures to lower the city’s crime rate—and a promise to organize a “world-fair-sized event” to showcase what the city had to offer the world in terms of scientific and cultural innovation.
In addition to this, he had repeatedly attacked his opponents on a personal level, calling into question the genuineness of their marriage and hinting at their possible extramarital affairs and potentially illegitimate children. Even by the appalling standards of twenty-first century American politics, Mayor Gullfay was an unhinged character, but the media’s obsession with his unrestrained political incorrectness had only helped him to come out on top. And while most city council members had initially expressed their dislike of Gullfay, many of them had changed their position and joined his campaign once his victory had begun to seem likely, thereby making it inevitable.
Like many other Chicagoans, Cillian was appall
ed by the pace at and manner in which Mayor Gullfay had brought “a wind of change to the Windy City”—another one of his slogans. Gullfay’s effort toward fulfilling his first pledge was centered on the implementation of a “zero-tolerance” policy for the possession of illegal arms and drugs. In practice, this meant that special units of the Chicago police had begun carrying out large-scale incursions into certain Chicago neighborhoods in order to arrest anyone who was found to be in possession of prohibited narcotics and/or unlicensed arms. The policy mainly targeted impoverished neighborhoods with high crime levels in Chicago’s South Side that had been labeled Special Needs Neighborhoods or SNNs by Gullfay’s administration. To Cillian’s surprise, the mainstream media generally applauded these policies. However, Cillian’s favorite news outlet, the Chicago Transparent, and other smaller news agencies were very critical of them and circulated reports describing gross human rights violations that allegedly accompanied the “police sweeps”—as Mayor Gullfay had dubbed them—because anyone resisting arrest could be shot on sight, and certain police officers had purportedly stretched the definition of “criminals resisting arrest” to include any residents caught fleeing or hiding from law enforcement officers, even if no evidence to justify their arrest had been uncovered at that point.
When it came to Gullfay’s promise about organizing the promised “world-fair-sized event,” preparations for the City of Chicago Fair of the Future had begun soon after he had entered office. According to the major news media, the “CCFF”—as Mayor Gullfay had christened the fair that was to be held in December of this year—was going to be a massive, monthlong art and science exhibition displaying a wide range of cultural and technological projects by Chicago residents that would undoubtedly shape the future of the city. However, the smaller news organizations were skeptical and predicted that the event would result in a massive budget deficit for the city administration since the costs for organizing the event were estimated to be more than double the potential proceeds.
As Gullfay would argue: Last year it was relatively warm in October, and there was no snow, Cillian continued in his head. Yet now there is, and it is much colder than last year, so the earth can’t be getting warmer. Ergo, global warming is a lie, and climate change is a hoax. Impeccable logic. And don’t get me started on…
Cillian’s sarcastic internal rant came to an abrupt end when he unconsciously directed his attention to a man walking parallel to him on the other side of the street and was surprised to recognize him as his scruffy neighbor from the subway—although Cillian noticed that this man didn’t actually look that scruffy now that he had zipped up his dark bomber jacket, covered his yellow-gray hair under a black fedora, and lit up a cigarette.
What is he doing here? Cillian wondered, as he slowed down to a leisurely pace and looked intently at the man who had halted at the edge of the pavement to light a fresh cigarette after forcefully crushing the glowing butt of the previous one under the heel of his shoe. When the tobacco caught on, the face under the soft-brimmed hat turned in the direction where Cillian was walking. For a second their eyes met, and the icy glance of the stranger sent an electric pulse through Cillian’s body that left him paralyzed for an instant. Primal fear. He didn’t know why those words popped up in his head. Neither did he understand why he felt so afraid all of a sudden. He tried to rationalize his unusual response by connecting it to the fact that he had felt caught watching the man so closely and had, like a child of abusive parents who is caught spying on a neighbor through an opening in the hedge, irrationally assumed that he had committed a grave crime for which he was now certain to receive a severe punishment. But obviously his “neighbor” on the other side of the road had not taken offence at being stared at, as he had casually moved along without looking back and was presently about to disappear around the corner, into a side street leading away from Cillian’s apartment.
Once his subway neighbor had gone out of sight, Cillian couldn’t help but feel utterly foolish. What was that about? Has Mrs. Baldwin infected me with her paranoid thoughts? Or am I just too beat to think straight? During the remainder of his walk home, he kept trying to convince himself that his panicked reaction must have been the result of one of these two semiplausible reasons, or perhaps both. But deep down he knew this reasoning could at most temporarily distract him from the fact that he had been seriously frightened by the man’s eyes, in which he had read a suppressed rage that terrified him to his core.
However, the peculiar meeting with the yellow-haired man—for it had been a meeting of sorts, Cillian thought—slipped entirely from his mind the moment Cillian entered his stuffy shoebox-sized apartment in a poorly maintained, scarcely lit, and badly ventilated building with the cozy charm of an underground parking garage, at the end of a narrow alley just outside downtown Chicago. The moment he set foot in the living room, breathing in the musty smell and looking through the only window, which faced the brick wall of another poorly maintained, scarcely lit, and badly ventilated complex of shoebox-sized apartments, his thoughts turned to the pathetic state of his life and the cause of his utter wretchedness, which was the disappearance of Amanda Greenfield, the love of his life.
Chapter Two
If this is supposed to be my “living room,” he thought to himself as he dropped onto his sagging sofa, I guess I’ve been using it all wrong, because I sure as heck have never felt alive in here. The reality was worse than that. He hadn’t felt alive anywhere, in any way, since that hellish spring night in his hometown in northwest Indiana about two and a half years ago, when his fiancée had gone missing, just two days before they were supposed to get married. He had not really lived since then; at most he had been surviving, while doing everything in his power to look for the woman with the chestnut-brown hair and the bright green eyes who had brought an unprecedented, profound joy to his life from the moment she had entered his world by “miserably failing to save his clumsy ass”—as she used to refer to the silly, slapstick manner in which they had been introduced to one another.
They had met at the beginning of summer. After a hectic week during which Cillian had handed in his graduate research paper for his journalism studies in Chicago and moved out of his student dorm room, the young aspiring journalist had taken a long-distance coach back to his hometown to await the result of his thesis at his parents’ house and at the same time begin a traineeship at the Riverside Inquirer, the local newspaper where his father worked as editor-in-chief. Amanda was on the same bus, but they hadn’t noticed each other until their arrival at Riverside, Indiana. When he was disembarking the coach, Cillian had tripped on the stairs, and Amanda, who happened to walk behind him, attempted to grab his arm to prevent him from falling headfirst out of the bus. However, she only managed to catch hold of the left sleeve of his worn checked shirt, and under the pressure of Cillian’s full weight it had almost instantly torn off, providing him with just enough momentum to jerk his body a few degrees to the left so as to land mostly on his right side instead of flat on his face.
“Touchdown for the Riverside Raccoons,” Cillian managed to produce in between grunts of pain, while rolling on his back and grabbing his right elbow with his left hand in order to massage it. “What an unexpected comeback.”
Amanda had not understood the reference to the local football team, but that didn’t discourage her from laughing louder than any of the other passengers, mostly because she could tell that Cillian was going to be okay. She stepped forward and offered him her hand, while trying to come up with the apology she somehow thought was in order.
“I’m so sorry, I only wanted to…”
“Save me?” he suggested, while taking her hand and using it to pull himself up. “I am pretty sure you just did, by finally convincing me to throw away this shabby fashion crime of a shirt.” He grinned. “Besides, you did manage to stop me from pulling off a spectacularly painful faceplant, and a sore elbow sure is better than a broken nose. So thank you.”
“You are most w
elcome.” She smiled back. And that was when he’d noticed her sparkling green, almond-shaped eyes. Before he realized what he was doing, he had invited her to get a drink in the notoriously unappealing bus station café, and to his complete surprise, she didn’t hesitate to accept. And so it had been in that dilapidated coffeehouse, possibly the least romantic establishment in town, that they had fallen in love while sharing an unspeakably disgusting cup of coffee.
About nine months later they were pregnant, not with a girl or a boy, but with the idea of marriage. It was crazy—everybody who heard about it had thought so—but whoever saw them together had instantly changed their mind on the matter. They were perfect for each other. So why wait, indeed? Amanda had never meant to stay in Riverside, Indiana, for longer than an afternoon. She had told Cillian in the coffeehouse that her next destination was Pittsburgh, where she would transfer on a coach to New York. There she wanted to see the sights for a day or two, after which she would go on to Vermont to look for a job in a ski resort. When Cillian pointed out that summer had just arrived and no ski resort would be open, she added that she wanted to get a hotel job for the summer, but that she hoped to work at a ski resort during the winter season and take ski lessons there. It had never come to that though, for Cillian kept coming up with convincing reasons for her to stay in his hometown. First he had offered her to stay in a local motel for one night just to get some rest before her long bus trip to New York. Then he had persuaded her to stay for another week because Vermont “isn’t going anywhere” and he could help her pay for everything. Finally, after it had already become plain as day to Cillian and Amanda that neither one of them wanted to part, he had managed to get her to stay indefinitely by helping her to get both a job at the best hotel in town—the housekeeping manager was a friend of his mother—and an affordable apartment in a decent neighborhood.