The Coldest Mile

by Tom Piccirilli

  “So tell me,” Hildy whispered. “Why are you here? What do you really want?”

  It was a good ploy. A pretty young woman's whisper was a hell of an enticement. You didn't have to be weak to go with it, to shut your eyes and fall for it. You could be at your best and still slip up. She'd clipped her nails. He watched her fingers stroke her taut belly, more pink than tan, he thought. The piercing caught the light and flashed it back at him, the blue stones twinkling.

  What else did he want?

  Answers. To find out if Jonah really had killed Chase's mother. To figure out how the old man had been able to murder a four-year-old boy. Sloane had said, You were his rudder, kid. When he lost you, he lost his way. Maybe, in the end, all he wanted was to apologize to everyone Jonah had hurt since Chase had gone his own way.

  “What's the score?” Chase asked.

  “I'll let them explain it. They'll want you to take a dry run, to see if you're any good. You are good though, aren't you? Otherwise you wouldn't have called yourself a driver. It's what you do.”

  “Mostly.”

  He could feel the need to talk rising up in him. It had been a long time since he'd opened up, and he'd still never really talked about Lila and Earl Raymond and Angie and Jonah and what had happened in the Newark parking lot. Her voice was getting to him. The vibrancy, the constant assault of questions and apparently sincere interest. He looked down at his wedding band and wondered how much longer he was going to be able to ride out his silence.

  “Mostly,” he repeated.

  “Along with cards and fighting and pickpocketing and breaking into cars and knowing about the check scam.” It seemed to impress her. “How long have you been at this? You don't seem to be much older than the others, but you've put your time in.”

  “I started early.”

  “Me too,” Hildy said, casually patting the bedspread.

  She seemed to have run through her list of tricks, rejecting one after the other. She started to speak once or twice and thought better of it. He felt a little worried for her. Boze was going to be irked that she hadn't gotten much off him, but then again, Boze would like that Chase had held his own. It would earn him a bit of respect, the same as the card game had. It didn't really matter much. They would either get him to Dex soon or Chase would move on.

  Stymied, she let out a soft sigh, and stood to leave.

  Chase asked, “So did they ever reattach the chubby guy's finger?”

  “No,” she said, “nobody had any ice. We took it to the hospital wrapped in tinfoil, but it was too late. Tons was mad until Boze told him chicks like guys with scars. Now he wiggles it at me all the time. Looks like a cocktail wiener with little black stitches in it. Makes me goddamn sick to my stomach.”

  Georgie called and said, “I got a name for you. Kel Clarke.”

  Clarke had run with Earl and Ellie Raymond. He'd been one of the crew that had boosted the diamond wholesaler where Lila had been murdered.

  “He's on my tail?” Chase said. “Why?”

  “Why do you think? You took out most of his string.”

  “I didn't want anybody but Earl. The others got in the way. I've got nothing against Clarke.”

  “I guess he doesn't realize that.”

  Chase thought of the carefully sliced- open crime-scene tape on the front door of the Dash household. Had Clarke somehow managed to track Jonah? He might've heard that Jonah and Chase were together when they met the rest of his crew in a Newark motel.

  Clarke had already taken a portion of his cut and split for another job. Maybe Clarke knew where Jonah was.

  “How did he get on to me?”

  “I don't know. Maybe you'll get a chance to ask him before he double taps you in the head.”

  “You're not worried about the feebs anymore?” Chase asked.

  “Nah, you were right. I'm sick of sounding like a nitwit. I have the place swept every other day. If they bust me, I'll just pay them off. They're bigger thieves than we are.”

  “If anybody else on the circuit asks, let them know where I'm staying down here.”

  “You want this guy to know where you are?” Georgie asked.

  “Yeah. I've got questions.”

  “You think you'll get a chance to ask them?”

  Boze and the others spent twenty minutes talking over each other, arguing, going through the score, Tony Tons waving his half pinkie around at Hildy. When they were done Chase said, “Wait a minute. Let me see if I have this straight. You mean to tell me that you guys heist dresses?”

  “Don't laugh,” Mackie said, leaning in a little too far, invading space, still acting pissy. “We steal forty top names, going three grand each on the market. Even with the fence's cut, we can clear thirty or forty g's.”

  Chase thought about it. Dresses. He'd stolen a lot of shit in his time, but this was something new.

  “Go through it again,” Chase said, pointing to Boze. “Just you. You're the brains, don't let others chatter when you're laying the action out. It undermines your authority and muddles the plan.”

  It was obvious that Boze agreed, and he was a little annoyed at the others for talking while he was, but it also bothered him that Chase had called him on it in front of everybody. Chase realized his mistake a moment too late. He wasn't used to working with amateurs, it was a whole different set of dynamics. Being pushy the other day had worked in his favor. Now it wasn't going to. He had to rein it in or risk bad blood with the last guy on the string who might help him get where he needed to go.

  He backpedaled, put a hint of compliance in his voice. “Please, explain it to me once more.”

  That mollified Boze. “All right, from the top. The entire fifth floor of the building is taken up by a fashion wholesaler and designer warehouse. We rented an office on the seventh floor so we have a key to the building. We pop the lock on the warehouse, go in smooth. It's wired, and response time for the cops is under five minutes, but it doesn't matter. We don't make a mess. We never take more than one or two dresses per rack, so to appearance's sake nothing is missing. We lock the door on the way out. Then we take the service elevator up to our floor and wait in the office. The cops show up and check out the place. Nothing's broken. Nothing appears to be touched. So they think it's a false alarm.”

  “Why do you need a driver then? You're already situated in the building.”

  “Purely as a backup. If something goes wrong, we want out of there fast.” He glanced at Tons and said, “It only takes one small mistake and you're burned forever.”

  Chase wanted to ask him why he was crewed up this way. There was something to be said about loyalty to your foster brothers, but he should've been higher up on the chain of the pro career circuit. Or working solo scams taking down major poker players. He could grift the big games and make more money with less hassle.

  Dresses. Chase kept thinking about it. He tried to imagine Mackie up on C-Block, telling the hard cons he was inside for ripping off backless gowns.

  Maybe it was a smart heist, maybe a goofy one, but it didn't have the feeling of a true score. Maybe he was being a snob. If they actually cleared what they said they would, then it was a smart heist.

  But it worried Chase that he wasn't doing enough. That this job was so low- key that nobody else up the chain would be getting a taste, and so it wouldn't get him to the next level.

  “When do we go in?” he asked.

  “Friday night. Everyone in the building leaves early, and the cops are usually busy on the other side of town dealing with brawls in the bars. But before that, we have another small job to take care of first.”

  “Sure,” Chase said, thinking, This is where things might go bad, which is exactly what he needed.

  * * *

  Time coasted by. The small job was in Tampa, an hour north. Supposedly a nice city, but Chase couldn't tell. It was night and they were in the shitty part of town. Every shitty part of town looked like every other town's shitty part of town.

  The crew
was ready to sell their drugs and merchandise, all of it in the trunk. They didn't give Chase any specifics and he was glad. It was nickel-and-dime crap but Mackie seemed tense and hyped and still worried about Chase a little. Chase figured if he didn't show too much interest, Mackie would calm down and he could start taking advantage of Boze's good graces.

  All he had to do was find Dex, then get from Dex to Jonah, and from the old man to Kylie.

  They left Hildy at home. She had a line on some new joe who was eyeing her at a different motel than the one Chase was in. She would pull the whore-with-standards act. Get the fish on the hook, have a few drinks with him, but before the action went down she'd tell him to take a shower. While he was in the bathroom she'd rip off his wallet and make a run for it. Chase thought it was a low- class and dangerous grift, even for someone as sharp as Hildy. You never knew what the mark might do in a position like that. He might refuse the shower and just rape her. Chase let Hildy know his reservations but kept them to himself around everybody else.

  “Are you packed?” Mackie asked from the backseat.

  Chase thought of luggage. “What?”

  “Are you strapped, do you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I'm a driver.”

  “So?”

  “So drivers don't carry guns.”

  Mackie held a .32, tapped Chase's shoulder with it, and Boze said, “Put it away.”

  “He should be carrying.”

  “Not if he doesn't want to. And you shouldn't be waving the damn thing around while we're on the road.”

  When they got to Tampa, Boze gave Chase directions and they turned into a block lined with bars and third- rate clubs. People milled out onto the street. There were a couple scuffles going on, lots of noise. Bouncers bookended most of the doorways. High- pitched laughter slit the night. Drunk twen-tysomething women walked arm in arm, trying to hold each other up.

  There was way too much action on the scene. It went against Chase's grain. You didn't fence stolen property with so many eyes around. He turned to Boze and said, “You do this out in the open?”

  “Hiding in plain sight. Everybody's loud and drunk and there's pussy all over the place. Nobody's going to notice us. Pull over up here.”

  Chase looked around one more time and tugged the Goat to the curb in front of a club called the Curse of Nature. “You expecting trouble?”

  “Not really. This fence is something of a prick. Name's Arno. He manages the place and does his own business out the back office. Sometimes he deals with the syndicates, old fat Italians on the down slide who come here to go out on his boat and get blowjobs and go fishing. Arno pushes his deal as hard as he can, we push back, it ends up in the middle. You'd think we could just start there and walk away with no hard feelings, but it's not the way this guy does it. He's surrounded by his entourage, usually has one or two toughs on hand and a couple of girls and prettyboy fags who laugh at all his jokes. He's only in this to feel like a hot shit.”

  Tony Tons murmured, “I don't like Arno. He's got a wise mouth, and he can't say a word without being insulting.”

  “You're right, Tons.”

  “He's said some shitty things about me.”

  “But you're strong, Tony Tons, you're rugged and staunch, and you don't let him rattle you.”

  “Hell no.”

  Chase asked, “How much do you expect to net off this guy?”

  “Worried about your cut?” Mackie said. “You didn't do anything a cabbie couldn't have.”

  “Not much,” Boze said. “Four, maybe five grand. But you know how it is. Not all the scores can be big ones. You do minor grifts from time to time to keep yourself in beer and hamburgers.” He turned and grinned, reading Chase's face. “You've done it plenty yourself, haven't you?”

  Not for more than ten years, Chase thought, but he remembered the times well. When Jonah would be planning a big take and he'd send Chase out to pick up seed money. A little burgling, a quick three-card monte setup for the afternoon. As a kid he'd loved the life.

  “How long will this take?” he asked.

  “No more than five minutes.”

  Twenty minutes after the crew had carried the merchandise through to the office of the Curse of Nature, Chase shook his head and thought, Well, here we go.

  Inside him, Jonah said, Leave them and hit it. A wheelman never gets out from behind the wheel.

  Lila told him the same thing.

  Sometimes you could cut and run and sometimes you just had to see the thing through for no reason you could name. He didn't owe this string anything. The longer he stayed with them, the better the chance that the sneaky shit Mackie would slip Boze's leash and ambush Chase. The setup had been precarious from the beginning.

  But he was their wheelman. Boze had shown trust, and Chase couldn't just leave the guy inside without knowing if something was wrong. You gave your word, you followed your course.

  The moment he hit the sidewalk he felt the music pounding. Lots of steel kettledrums, the kind of noise that made your fillings hurt. If you wanted to listen to that sort of thing, you might as well climb into a garbage can and roll down a hill.

  Moonlight engulfed him and he let it hold him for a moment.

  College kids out on the street danced arm in arm and drank from huge liquor bottles, guys making moves, girls half- out on their feet. Neon flamingos and cockatiels buzzed and flashed on both sides of the road, casting baby blue and pink colors that nobody used except in Florida.

  Chase walked into the club and the sultry heat and music hit him like a fist in the chest.

  The place was packed, and from a quick scan he saw that a lot of the patrons were underage. Arno didn't much care for running a respectable establishment, and having kids around him all the time probably just enhanced his self- image. Surrounding himself with an extended teen entourage, it was one way to play king shit of the castle.

  Jonah telling him, Turn back now, or I'll have to kill you. Don't come after me.

  Chase checked the corners, found what he thought might be an office, and moved to it through a gauntlet of gorgeous girls gyrating across his path. But it was just some kind of cordoned- off private alcove where VIPs were supposed to sit. A handful of well- dressed people were hunkered in each other's laps trying their best to appear indifferent and superior.

  He made his way along the nearest wall past bra-less waitresses wearing T-shirts two sizes too small. One smiled at him and he smiled back, slipped in close and said in her ear, “Arno's office?”

  She pointed to the opposite end of the club and he saw a door guarded by a huge, bald bouncer who stood with his hands open at his sides. Chase suspected this mook might actually be trouble. Other bouncers crossed their arms or carried drinks, compromising their hands. But this guy was waiting, revved.

  Chase thought about it and tried to make a decision—go in easy or go in hard.

  What the hell. He put his hands in his pockets, stepped up to the strongarm, and said, “Heya, how are you tonight? I'm here to see Arno.”

  Sometimes the world whipped against you and sometimes it went your way. The bouncer grinned, reached for the doorknob, opened the door, and politely ushered Chase inside.

  The office looked like the newlywed suite in a really tawdry motel. Lots of chintz and maroon and teal and shag. A large desk took up nearly one- half of the room and a massive round sofa took up the other. On the wall hung a flat- screen TV with porn running on it. Chase looked at it for a minute, cocked his head one way, then the other, and still couldn't quite figure out what he was watching.

  On the floor, leaning back against the desk, was the crew. Mackie's nose bled freely and he was holding his left arm like it might be broken. Tons's pinkie had been torn open again and he was gripping it tightly with his other hand but it was still spritzing against his chest. Boze's features were contorted into a disgusted expression as if he couldn't quite believe that a guy as smart as he was had found
himself in the middle of this situation.

  Boze nodded to the sofa and said, “Meet Arno.”

  Arno was a serious fatcat. He tipped at about three- fifty, all of it soft pink and stretched, moist flesh. He lay back on an enormous sofa, surrounded by his attendants. Three not-so-beautiful chicks covered in glitter and wearing shiny clothes drooped in various states of drug- induced repose. A couple prettyboys stood behind him, massaging his back and stroking his greasy black hair. It all made Chase think of some of the really twisted Roman emperors right before the big fall.

  Something happened on the screen and the entourage oohed. Chase looked and still couldn't make out what was going on. He was starting to think that maybe he wasn't as cosmopolitan as he'd previously believed.

  Chase said, “Hello, Arno. What's the problem?”

  Arno wasn't eating peeled grapes but he was sipping some kind of fruity frosted drink, holding it lightly in one hand and clutching some serious hardware in the other. Looked like a .44. He took his time, swallowing with such verve that his jowls jiggled and shook. When he finally lowered his glass he focused on Chase and said, “Who are you?”

  “Just someone stopping by to say Hi.”

  “You with these dinks?”

  “Sort of, for the moment.”

  “I see.” Arno examined the bottom of his glass. “Voorman, grab him.”

  Chase had never been a weapons man, really. But he had to admit he was liking the switchblade.

  He snapped it from his pocket, just as fast now as he had been before the recent wounds and setbacks. He held the point of the knife to the inside seam of Voorman's thigh. Pushed just hard enough to tag flesh, going maybe an eighth of an inch into the muscle. A small circular stain of blood appeared through the bouncer's pants. Voorman let out a cute little puppy yelp. The noise made one of the stoned girls giggle.

  Chase said, “Voorman, you know what a femoral artery is?”

  The bouncer's bald head had such a nice shine to it that the action on the TV was reflected in it. He whimpered, “Yes.”