The Cold Spot

by Tom Piccirilli

  It made her lips stiffen. “I don’t like to talk about that.”

  “Scars look pretty fresh.”

  You never mention such things to a woman, and he knew it. But he needed more info and hoped she had enough vanity left to let something slip.

  Angie just breezed out a giggle. “You bastard.”

  Yeah, she was definitely hard, with that same sharpness and ability to take pain that Marisa Iverson had. He wondered if she’d picked it up on her own or if Jonah had helped her find it along the way.

  She grabbed up a photo of Lila and Chase sitting beneath a wild maple with a blur of children rushing by in the background. “She was pretty.”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks like a picnic.”

  “Down the road from my in-laws’ house. They had a lot of family.”

  “The way you say that, I can tell you never considered yourself a part of it.”

  “I did my best.”

  Brushing a fingertip over the edges of the photo, tapping with that red nail where the river jutted just into frame. “Where was this taken?”

  “In Mississippi.”

  That surprised her. “You spent time down south?”

  “Seven years or so.”

  “Usually when someone’s there for that long they pick up a hint of accent. You don’t have any.”

  “I’ve been back in New York for a while.”

  “That’s not the answer. You’ve never had an accent of any kind, have you. Not even a New York one.”

  Chase shrugged. He’d been a lot of places and talked how he talked.

  “You really going to kill this crew?”

  “If I have to. If I can. I only want one of them.”

  “I don’t see it in you. I’ve known guys who could put down their own mothers, but you—” Her eyes searched his face, looking for every character flaw, each weakness and desperate intent. The lips turned up in a soft kind of sneer, the scars dimpling back into view. “I don’t think you could put down a dog.”

  “Depends on the dog.”

  “I think the old man will have to get it done for you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He’d found where she’d stashed the Bernadelli. There was a small extra pocket right at the bend of her left hip. Easy to reach and draw from, and the subcompact showed almost no bulge as she moved. The pocket fit a regular seam in her jeans. She knew how to sew too.

  Chase’s hand flashed out and he snatched the .25 from her.

  “Hey!” she said.

  Only nine ounces, he couldn’t believe how light it was. Less than a toy weighed, no wonder these people liked to pull them so often and keep them so close. There was a sense of power without the burden of potential murder.

  He said, “You use too much oil.”

  “I get overzealous. I like things clean.”

  “No use hiding it so well if someone can sniff it out on you. You walk into a score posing as a lady just doing her banking or shopping and one of those retired cops turned security guards will know you’re carrying.”

  “I’ll remember to dab on more perfume. Now give me my sweet little cap gun back. You don’t want me throwing a tantrum.”

  He handed her the pistol and watched her slip it back into the secret pocket, where it vanished once more. “That’s a clever hideaway.”

  “And you’re a naughty boy, dipping your hand in there like that. If you want something, all you need do is ask.”

  “I’d like to know how you hooked up with Jonah.”

  Her eyes deadened for an moment and then brightened again almost instantly. “It’s simple enough. I was with somebody else and now I’m with him.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it.”

  “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not.”

  “You can always move on.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He decided to drop that. “What happened to the somebody else?”

  “He left.”

  “On a gurney or by his own free will?”

  “He made a mistake and died for it.”

  “Who snuffed him?” Chase asked.

  The smile again, the near-invisible scars adding some mystery and strength to her features, and something else he couldn’t name but which made the muscles in his back tighten. “Who do you think?”

  Jonah poured the last of the scotch in a glass and took a deep bite. He didn’t look the least bit interested in helping Chase. “What’s in it for me?”

  At least he put it on the line, first thing. Chase had expected him to say that. He’d assumed from the beginning that he’d have to offer money up front on top of a possible score. At the time, the idea of it hadn’t offended him, but now that he was staring into his grandfather’s face, he found that it did. It stung knowing that the man would never do anything except for a payday, not even for someone whose name was tattooed into his flesh.

  And Lila had once asked Chase if Jonah had ever really loved him.

  “I’m selling my house,” Chase said. “The price of real estate is still shooting up on the island. I should clear at least a hundred grand, maybe more.”

  “And I get it all?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not even going to try to talk me down, see if I’ll do it for less?”

  “You’ll cost whatever you cost.”

  “And when do I get it?”

  “The house isn’t on the market yet. A few months, I guess.”

  “And I trust that you’re good for it?”

  “I’m good for it. Whether you trust me or not is up to you.”

  Jonah showed nothing. “Let me think about it.”

  “No,” Chase said. “I need an answer now. If you shake off then I go it alone.”

  “How much time do you figure you’ve got left?”

  “Almost none. The fence has had over a week to start moving the ice. He’ll have sold some of it by now, and he’ll have a small amount of cash to hand over to the crew. The woman, Marisa Iverson, didn’t cut and run when she should’ve. I think they’re going to score the same diamond merchant again.”

  “So they’re close.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe closer than you think.”

  Chase frowned and said, “What does that mean?”

  “It means you never should’ve given them your address.” Jonah stepped back into the living room and clicked on the video. “If they were smart they would’ve hit you immediately. When did you brace the woman?”

  “Four days ago.”

  “So they’re good but not that good.” He paused the video where Marisa Iverson was getting shoved.

  “She’d have to hide out after you worked on her. She could call in sick for a couple of days, stay away from her house. But if they want to go through with scoring the merchant a second time, they’ll want her back in play. If they’re worried about you fouling the deal, they’ll have to move on you first.” His gaze roved across the TV screen. “She’s got to be fucking the manager of the shop.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because it makes sense.” Jonah rewound, hit play, and pointed out the manager. A puffy guy in his mid-fifties with a bad toupee who stood around looking mildly irritated the entire time the heist was going down. “She’s the insider for the crew and he’s the inside man for her. Feeding her information on when the diamonds are due, what the safe combination is, all that. He’s probably married to a cow and nailing this piece on the sly. Look at him. He only gets upset when the crew pretends to rough her up. He thinks he’s in love with her. She’s driven him out of his head.”

  Chase hadn’t considered the possibility of a second inside person. He hadn’t been able to get into the head of a lonely, middle-aged white-collar guy.

  He thought about Marisa Iverson moving in his arms, forcing her blood-smeared mouth against his. The manager, yeah, he’d enjoy that taste.

  “I see it now,” Chase said.

  Jonah leaned over
and tapped the TV screen.

  “You can tell. Everything in his life is an annoyance except for when he’s in bed with her. She takes him to a whole new place, and he’s desperate for that feeling now. He never wants to go back to what he was before. The straight citizens, most of them are so bored they want to snuff themselves.” Chase looked at the manager being annoyed, wanting out, barely able to contain himself with Marisa in the same room. “The cops will work on him, but right now he thinks he’ll go to the pen before he gives her up. Never underestimate the desperation of a man who has everything.”

  The manager would be a liability now. She’d have to get back into play and deal with him. “He’s going to want to run with her.”

  “They’ll cap him this time, on their way out, before he spills to the police. If the crew wants that second score they’ve got to go in fast. But they can’t move quick because of you. They know you’re watching, and since you were stupid enough to tell them where you lived, and they were stupid enough to wait, that means they’re watching you.”

  His grandfather was right, Chase had been stupid. He’d been so caught up in his own grief and anger that he figured they might want to come at him the same way he wanted to go at them. Head to head. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might be more subtle and monitor him for days.

  “You think they’re somewhere nearby this minute?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Jonah said. “They should’ve punched your ticket already but they think you’re on to them, baiting a trap. They believe you’re a pro because you got this close. By now they’ve aced one of your neighbors and have somebody installed.”

  A crew that would murder a civilian in his own living room, just to keep an eye on somebody. Maybe the driver wasn’t the only wild dog. Marisa Iverson was at least a little crazy, going through what she had for the sake of the driver, who’d popped a cop. Chase had been thinking too positively. He wasn’t going to get the driver without taking them all down.

  He glanced at Jonah, who was staring back at him.

  “You didn’t think anybody else might get hurt in this fight of yours?” his grandfather asked.

  Chase said nothing.

  They moved to the front window together and peered through the blinds. Jonah pointed across the street on the diagonal. “Who lives there?”

  Sarah Corvis and her kids. They’d sent over a roast after Lila’s funeral. “A middle-aged woman, has a teenage son and daughter.”

  “Too many to take out and keep quiet.” Jonah pointed to the house opposite it. “There?”

  The Wagner family. The children had brought over a card. “Husband, wife, three children grade-school age.”

  “No.” Now, pointing down the block the other way, again diagonally from Chase’s house. “And there?”

  Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. Freddy would sometimes walk to the very bottom of the lawn and watch Chase tune the car, but he’d never come any closer than that. “Elderly lady, seventy, seventy-five. Has a mentally handicapped son who’s maybe fifty. They’re shut-ins, live on government checks, have their groceries delivered. They have lots of cats.”

  “Call her.”

  Chase got out the phone book and dialed the number. He let it ring ten times and hung up. He swallowed thickly, thinking of the poor woman, in her kitchen, Freddy in the bedroom, the cats going hungry. “No answer.”

  “They’re dead.”

  He didn’t waver or tremble, but inside he fell in a heap and the hatred bloomed further, for the crew and himself, and he was screaming.

  The volume inside his skull was turned way up. He had trouble hearing his grandfather.

  “When it gets dark we’ll go over there for a visit,” Jonah was saying. “Pack up your shit because we’re leaving here. We’ll get another place up near the diamond merchant.”

  He held out his arm and Angie immediately slid next to him. He toyed with her hair and she plucked at his fingers, as if they’d practiced the action many times before, like a dance neither one of them enjoyed anymore.

  Jonah told Chase, “Stand watch for a few hours, we’re tired from the trip. You think you can handle it?”

  Lila had liked Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. She used to go over there and bring pies. She’d made the effort to be generous and sociable. Chase never had. He’d be out in the garage working the speed bag and Lila would come back from across the street with her breath smelling like peach cobbler and say, “No reason under God why such lovely people as them have got to be alone in the world. Living in a houseful of cat piss. That Freddy, he admires you.” After the funeral, Freddy had come a little farther up the driveway and waved.

  Even Freddy had made the effort, and now he and his mother were dead because of what Chase had set in motion. The Jonah inside his head said, You didn’t think anybody else might get hurt in this fight of yours?

  He’d be saying it forever.

  Still putting Chase to the test, Jonah wanted to see how far he could push. He walked to the master bedroom and said, “We’ll take this one.”

  “No,” Chase told him.

  “You’re alone, you can take the smaller bed in the guest room.”

  “No.”

  Thinking now, So maybe this is where I get to shove that popgun .22 up his ass.

  He looked at his grandfather and his grandfather looked at him, and they both stayed that way for a while until Angie pressed a hand tenderly to Jonah’s face and made him turn aside, then tugged him down the short hall to the guest room.

  Jonah, who didn’t feel things like a regular man did, but somehow still acted like someone stung by an ungrateful child. Chase turned back to the window and stared at Mrs. Nicholson’s house, imagining the scene.

  The crew wouldn’t let the driver go along because he was a wild card and might try to pop Chase without first checking him out thoroughly. So one of the others would be sent in, someone who liked to work quietly, maybe with a knife. He’d park up the road from Chase’s house, checking out his house and everybody on the block. Watch the kids play, the men cutting their lawns, the women heading off to work or shopping. See Mrs. Nicholson limp out onto her front stoop to get the mail or pay the paperboy. Contemplate Freddy standing out on the cement driveway doing nothing.

  So he’d knock on the old lady’s door and say he was selling Bibles, keep a conversation going while he scanned her place, making sure she lived only with the retarded guy, except for all the cats. The stink of the cat piss would make his nose run. He’d look out her front window at Chase’s house and wonder what was going on in there, why Chase had fuckin’ invited the crew to come crush him. There had to be some kind of setup.

  The old lady asking him, Aren’t you going to show me the Bibles?

  What Bibles?

  The gold-inlaid fine end-paper illustrated and annotated text Bibles that you’re selling.

  Maybe knifing her right then. Or, not wanting to get any blood on himself, just strangling her, garotting her. It didn’t take much to snap the neck of an eighty-year-old woman with osteoporosis and light bone density.

  Freddy letting out a perplexed and terrified shriek. Or maybe not, maybe just standing there unsure of what just happened. Going, Ma? Ma?

  Standing there going, Mama? While the knife appeared. While it slid into his belly and the great overwhelming pain engulfed him, but still not great enough to drown out his fear for his mother. Ma?

  Falling to his knees, then on his face, the cats scattering.

  The killer calling his crew and using their little code, two rings, hang up, three rings, hang up. Whatever. Telling the boss, the schemer behind it all, I’m in.

  Watching the house across the street, seeing Chase come and go. Now a van pulling up with an old man and a hot chippie with him, sliding into the garage. Watching the blinds part a little bit in the living room over there now, somebody staring back out at him.

  Chase went for the cold spot and let it ice him down, the burning fury that threatened to consume his thoughts
slowly being quelled until he could think again.

  He stood watch, staring at the house for four hours. He heard Jonah and Angie in the guest room going at it. Maybe not so tired from the trip, after all.

  Chase remembered being thirteen, and Jonah holding the mostly empty pint of Dewar’s and introducing him to the cute and less-cute girls named Lou. His grandfather had stolen the one Chase wanted to be with simply because he could. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, which reminded him of Marisa Iverson and why Chase had called Jonah in the first place.

  They were two of a kind. He’d been right. He needed Jonah.

  Chase stood at his front window staring into the evening as it became night, wanting to kill someone.

  By the time Jonah was ready, Chase had a bag packed with a few changes of clothes and some personal items. There was nothing else he wanted from the house. The bag was out in the trunk of the Chevelle in the garage. He’d brought in many of Lila’s guns and laid them on the kitchen table.

  “In case you want something to carry.”

  “Yours?” Jonah asked.

  There were things he would talk about and things he wouldn’t. Chase didn’t want to say anything about Lila to Jonah. The very act of discussing her with his grandfather seemed disrespectful to her memory.

  So he said, “Yes.”

  “Don’t need them right now. Got a .38 I like. But pack them up and bring them along. We might have use for them later.”

  Chase still had Marisa Iverson’s 9mm and two .22s, all three of which he’d cleaned. He felt more comfortable with them than he did with any of Lila’s weapons. It was a complicated emotion that he couldn’t quite untangle.

  But he knew that thinking about Lila would make him soft, even if only while holding her pistol. His concentration would fail, even as it was failing now, his mind wanting to take him back to her, to hear her laughter, think about her smile. He had to hold on.

  Angie walked out of the guest room and picked up Lila’s twelve-gauge shotgun. She checked the load and racked it. “I’ll be able to hold the fort with this.”

  “We won’t be far,” Jonah said. “We’ll cut through the backyard, circle around the block, come up behind the house.”