The Coldest Mile

by Tom Piccirilli

  A mob princess putting him in his place. Chase felt oddly insulted. He said, “Hey now, is that a nice thing to say?”

  “Let's keep focused, shall we? All right, driver, so are you actually such a moron that you left my brother behind by accident, or is this some kind of a shakedown? Are you abducting me? And please be quick in answering, I do have a .38 pointed at the back of your head. The partition glass isn't bulletproof though the windshield is.”

  He glanced in the mirror again. It wasn't a small, lady's snub, but a nice pearl- handled revolver. No chance of jamming, she went in for practicality.

  Sherry Langan was like nearly every other woman he'd met in the bent life. Hard, calm, and a lot smarter, tougher, and more on the ball than most guys. You could never call her beautiful, or even pretty really, but there was something about her that made you look twice. And not just at the legs.

  Maybe it was self- assurance or icy composure, the way she held herself above and out of reach. Or maybe it was the inherent understanding that some guys liked that sort of woman. Chase was a little afraid he might be one of them.

  He'd been right. Jackie wasn't in the boss's chair. And the real power behind the family since Lenny had taken to living under a plastic tent wasn't Moe Irvine either, it was Sherry. Moe really did care about ties.

  Chase thought it was pretty ballsy, her just coming out and asking, Are you abducting me? Like you'd have an honest enough abductor to tell you flat out, Yeah, I am.

  “I didn't abduct you, and you know it. If you really thought so, you'd stick that thing in my ear.”

  She stuck the revolver in his ear and said, “I planned on doing that anyway.”

  “If you ace me, you'll have a long walk to Pietro's.”

  They entered the tunnel and crossed over toward Manhattan. In the dark now with the interim lights flashing overhead, and that sense of pressure growing over them as they got deeper under the Hudson he focused on the cool gunmetal against his neck. Freezing actually, which made him think of his mother's grave, standing there in the snow with his father drunk and sobbing on the ground, his hair growing thick with ice.

  “What's your name?” she asked, sitting back, placing the .38 on the seat beside her. She poured herself another drink and turned so that she was casually facing the partition, her hair wafting in the breeze from the air- conditioner vents.

  He gave her the name of the fake ID he'd gotten the job under. It would hold up, at least for a while, depending on how hard she pushed it.

  “You've got nerve but that's not enough, you know.”

  “For what?”

  “For being one of my employees.”

  He caught her eyes again, astute as hell, but she wasn't onto him as a heister. She thought he was trying to show off to her, trying to impress her so he could get in her pants, marry her, share in her millions. “I'm just doing my job.”

  “But without the gloves and hat.”

  “I am wearing a tie,” Chase said.

  “I don't like it.”

  “Me neither. You can blame Moe.”

  A crisp smile twisted across her lips. “It's an old man's style.”

  “Yeah, like Jackie's aftershave.”

  “Yes. Our home is draped in ancient history. My father's, the men who've worked there who are dead or in prison now. The families that came before us. My father bought the estate from Jimmy ‘Toots’ Defazo, who was machine- gunned in the living room by his own consigliere. There are still some paintings in the halls of him. My father liked taking the man's home. And his belongings. And his heritage, and then adding it to his own. My brother is trying to do the same thing. Like this incident, for instance. Jackie can get one of the other men to drive him into the city, but he won't allow that. It is, after all, why we have a chauffeur.”

  “Why doesn't he just take the Ferrari?” Chase asked.

  “It doesn't run.”

  “It does now. I gave it a tune- up.”

  “The car doesn't actually matter. He's afraid of it, I think. It's too much style for him to live up to. Did he get angry with you for touching it?”

  “Yeah, he tried to have two of his bodyguards break my appendages.”

  “But they failed,” she said.

  “Mostly.”

  She gave a slow tsk tsk tsk with a pursed bottom lip, making it sexy. “Be careful fooling with someone's conceit, even if it is broken. It's what people fear most. Being forced to face up to their own charade, having their weakness exposed. They'll die with their teeth in your throat before they allow that to happen.”

  Telling him this after cleaning his ear out with a gun barrel.

  “When I was a girl my father once took us to Asbury Park, before the renovations began, when it was nothing but a dead boardwalk in a mostly lifeless city. Autumn. But without the colors, or the leaves, or anything else, really, just the empty sand. It was very cold, a dark day, overcast, but with no wind. More than that it was bleak. You couldn't touch anything without getting covered with splinters. All the buildings creaked and complained. Broken glass everywhere. You could feel how motionless and lonely and corrupted the pier was, the ocean barely rippling. The birds already gone.”

  She took a sip, rattled the ice in tune to her own memory. “Jackie started crying as we looked out over the park, our backs to the water. He thought the corpses of drowned sailors were going to grab hold of his ankles between the slats of lumber. I believed our father was angry with us for some reason, even though he seemed in a happy mood. He'd invested in some property there as a tax write- off, and knew that in the years to come the city would rebuild itself and his interests would pay off in a big way. It was something for him to be proud of on every level. Outfoxing the IRS, contributing to the community, investing in the future. It's one of the few things he'd ever done with his money that he felt was truly clean, but he had to do it in a murdered place.”

  She stopped then and Chase waited for the rest of the story. But she stalled there, adrift in her memories. “And what weakness did you expose of Dad's on that day?”

  “Not a weakness, just a hidden aspect. I asked him if he was going to be sad when they rebuilt the park. I could see that he enjoyed the place exactly as it was. Decrepit and desolate. It was probably because he'd been chopping up snitches and feeding them to the fish.”

  She let out a hum that was part laughter. “But Daddy didn't like me knowing that about him, seeing through his talk and knowing in my heart he was lying, perhaps even to himself.”

  These Langans, they liked to do things fast and out in the open. No wonder they were losing to the other syndicates.

  “And that's when Lenny threw you into the water and told you to swim,” Chase said. “Said that you had to be strong, that you had to prove yourself worthy of the Langan name.”

  “Of course not. My father doted on us. We went out for ice cream.”

  They found each other's gaze in the mirror again. Chase didn't know if it was a tell or not, but the thickest vein in her throat pulsed and shivered.

  “You're lying.”

  Smiling without any humanity now, her hot eyes completely iced over. It was a very slick maneuver, throwing spooky truths out there that were meant to unnerve, but pulling back on everything else. She walked every inch of the walk.

  “Attempting to expose my secrets too?” she asked. “Didn't I just tell you it was dangerous to try that?”

  “That's the thing about secrets,” he said, “they have a way of exposing themselves.”

  They entered the city. Traffic was heavy crosstown, but the Super Stretch really sliced up the lanes. It maneuvered easily and had an intimidation factor that even the taxi drivers picked up on.

  Sherry Langan said nothing more and he wondered if she was deciding to leave him with a king-size exit wound in his temporal lobe.

  He drew up to the bank on Madison Avenue, double- parked in the street, and undid his safety belt. He got out, opened the limo door for her, offered his hand again, an
d helped her out of the back. Sherry moved to the bank door and he followed.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Your well- being is my responsibility. I'll walk you inside.”

  Chase escorted her in and watched the manager and the other employees kowtow while Sherry took it all in. She shook hands like Marie Antoinette, holding it out there palm down, high in the air, forcing the other person to reach up to take it.

  Chase stood behind her trying to act like a bodyguard. He scanned the tellers and thought about the one bank job he'd been involved in as a kid.

  He was only supposed to drive the getaway car but at the last minute one of Jonah's string had gotten pulled in by the cops and Chase had been forced to cover. The boost had gone off perfectly, Jonah grabbing the drawer counts, careful of all the secret alarms. Chase wasn't armed, he just ran around the place grabbing people's wallets. The next day Jonah bought Chase a thirty-five-dollar hooker in celebration. If he thought too long about that moment, seeing what a thirty-five-dollar hooker looked like and what was expected of him, Chase could still get red-faced over it.

  When Sherry Langan was done, he accompanied her out again, opened the limo door, all that. He slid back into traffic and headed toward Pietro's.

  “Forget the restaurant,” she said. “I don't dine alone. Just take me back home.”

  An oppressive stillness filled the car. He swung back toward the tunnel, turned the oldies station up.

  “It's proper to ask your passengers what music they wish to listen to rather than putting on your own,” she told him.

  “I'll remember that,” he said and started humming along.

  Jonah said, You're an idiot to keep pushing her.

  When they drew up to the estate, Sherry moved to the partition window, leaned in close, got right up to his ear again, this time without the pistol. But her voice was just as chilly and inflexible as metal.

  “You won't always be so strong and gritty,” she said. “So durable. There'll come a time when your guts are gone, when you'll end up like my father, dying and feeling every inch of it. I hope I'm there to see it.”

  “It's already happened,” Chase told her.

  Moe Irvine was waiting for him. Chase expected some heat but didn't know how much might come down. He helped Sherry Langan out of the limo, did the fake hat tip thing again, then hovered near the driver's door in case he had to blow now. He kept one hand on the stolen switchblade in his pocket, keeping an eye out for Bishop. It wouldn't be much, but if he was fast, it might be enough for him to live into the next minute.

  He watched her walk into the house, the gams striking in the afternoon light.

  Moe glared, trying to cut Chase's legs out from under him. Chase turned to him and said, “What? You don't like the tie? You're the one who picked it out, Moe. You want I should get some others?”

  Smoothing back the point of his widow's peak, Moe kept his composure, making the effort to smile, the teeth shining in that maple- brown face.

  “You drove off without Jackie this morning.”

  “I didn't know he was coming.”

  “You were specifically told that he and his sister were going into the city.”

  “I don't remember that.”

  “Regardless, you failed in your duties.”

  “My duties are to protect the well- being of my passengers. Words from your own lips. Miss Sherry was my passenger, and her being continues to do well.”

  Moe just stared. “I think I may have made a mistake with you. Until I decide whether I should terminate your services here, I want you to restrict yourself to your room and the garages. Stay out of the main house.”

  “Sure.”

  “You'll also apologize to Jackie as soon as you see him.”

  “Okay.”

  With a nice flourish, Moe turned his back, started to walk into the mansion but stopped short. He spun back and said, “You've done a good job with the cars,” then marched inside.

  Chase waited, expecting Jackie to come running out ranting, but no, that was it. No one else said anything to him so he walked back to his room, sat on the bed, and gave himself a time limit.

  Two weeks. He could deal with these people that long. Then he'd split with or without a score. He pictured a two-year-old girl standing at Jonah's knee, and he nearly doubled over.

  * * *

  He worked on the other vehicles and kept his eyes open. The older capos kicked up their payments in cash, sometimes in paper bags or manila envelopes, sometimes in nice leather briefcases. These were the guys still out there hijacking trucks and materials from construction sites, not the whiz kids who'd turned identity theft and e-mail scams into a four-billion-dollar-a-year franchise, hacking into bank accounts and snatching direct- deposit social- security checks. Paper money was still coming in.

  Chase watched but couldn't pick up on any system. Sometimes the thugs were all around acting like security while somebody brought a package in, like he was handing off diamonds. Sometimes a white- haired little wiseguy might bring his payoff rolled up in a newspaper and just hand it to Moe Irvine without a word.

  Sherry Langan was hardly ever around, but Chase figured she knew where every dollar was, when it was coming in, and where it was going. He could walk over and maybe nab a briefcase full of cash but he had no idea how much might be in it. A grand? Five? Twenty? He had no way to tell. A smash and grab had to be worth the risk.

  Jackie gave Chase some shit in the limo while they drove into Manhattan. Jackie bitched him out for leaving him behind, not wearing the cap and gloves, not calling Jackie “sir.” The litany continued for ten minutes, with Jackie's voice getting higher and higher, and even cracking a couple times. The Ivy League accent came and went. Chase apologized. He worked it hard and called Jackie “sir.” He'd also filled one of the glasses in the back with two cubes of ice. It seemed to steady Jackie some.

  The threat of rain filled the sky. A few drops spattered across the windshield every minute or two but it never opened up and poured down. The water added a throbbing sheen to the world. It reminded him of his wedding day, when the crazy preacher had started speaking in tongues and jumped into the river. Chase had dived in after him and dragged him up on the shore, and stood there looking at Lila's family and all his guests with the sweet water dripping into his eyes.

  “Hey—” Jackie said.

  Chase said, “Yes, sir?”

  “You're good, you know how to work the roads.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jackie was visiting a high- class Japanese massage parlor in Soho to get stepped on by a lilliputian woman in teak sandals before making it in a boiling hot tub. Chase didn't need to know about it, but Jackie liked to talk about his action.

  “You ever had a chink girl?” Jackie asked.

  For a second Chase was confused, unsure if Jackie was talking about this Japanese parlor or not, but then realized it was all the same to Jackie. “No.”

  “They're very subservient.”

  “I think I've heard that.”

  “They're trained damned near from birth in the art of pleasing a man. It's part of their culture. For them it's not about the money, it's about finesse and expertise.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mastering technique. That's what satisfies them. They live for their man. It takes all the pressure off. It's very liberating.”

  “I see,” Chase said.

  His years on the road with Jonah had been educational ones, and Chase had met a lot of Asian girls on the job. He suspected their lives had little to do with finesse and mastering technique, or about satisfying any of their johns either. They were about as subservient as any other woman in the life, and they'd slash your face up with a straight razor if you tried to rip them off.

  Easing through SoHo, Chase slowed and found the place. He pulled up out front, but Jackie wouldn't let Chase drive off, and the sumo- sized doorman wouldn't let Chase double- park out front and wait in the limo. The big guy badgered h
im with offers of exotic geisha who would crack his spine for him and dip his crank in warm sake.

  “You like sake?” the big dude asked.

  “I like drinking it, anyway,” Chase said.

  You had to say the cultural differences were at least very interesting.

  He wound up sitting in the corner of the lobby. He watched the johns walk in looking eager and breezy and watched them walk out looking like they needed a chiropractor. The madam came over and offered him a free massage, meaning she'd tack the price onto Jackie's bill and let Chase explain it later. She seemed to take it personally that he was just sitting there minding his own business, as if she was failing at her job. He sent out a vibe that she should leave him the fuck alone and she eventually picked up on it and let him be.

  She and the sumo wrestler forgot about him and soon Chase got up and went to look for Jackie so he could lift the boss's wallet.

  The parlor was split up between the legal trade and the actual trade. Rooms to the front offered real massages, oil baths, hot tubs, maybe a little handjob action, but in the back was where the little bedrooms were and where all that sake was being put to use the wrong way.

  Opening doors at random in a place like this wasn't a good idea, but Chase could feel the hours drifting through his hands. The girl Kylie was becoming more and more present in his mind.

  He put an ear to the thin wooden doors to see if he could hear Jackie whining about too much ice in his glass, the wrong kind of edible lotions. The cinnamon, not the vanilla, not the cranberry.

  He picked up on lots of grunting, but it didn't sound like happy sex. More like physical therapy, guys straining their muscles and bones back into shape after a car accident. Daring to take a peek, he caught sight of a fat businessman on his belly, lots of vanilla pudge wobbling around while one of the girls laid into him with her elbows, sort of body slamming him like they were in the ring. Working on the joints, really digging into his soft tender spots. Chase grimaced and drew his chin back. The guy was damn near barking. The girl kept chopping away. Chase was curious but not curious enough to keep watching.