The Cold Spot

by Tom Piccirilli

  Mrs. Nicholson’s place was dark except for one dim light in the living room.

  The sun had only been down a few minutes, but Jonah didn’t want to wait for fear the crew might come by and make a hit before he and Chase could get over there. They went out the back door, hopped the fence, and worked their way through neighboring yards, circling in a wide arc.

  There was a sense of time moving very quickly now. The understanding that it was running out, or had already run out, and they could do nothing but wait for whatever was so nearby to strike. There was no averting it, no deflecting it.

  Chase was very quiet but still louder than Jonah, who moved silently and kept to the shadows like he owned them. They spotted and avoided motion-detector lamps, property with dogs, a couple of loud households where rowdy cadres watched a late baseball game. Everybody was losing money on the Mets.

  They got to Mrs. Nicholson’s backyard and eased through an overgrown hedge. Chase put a foot on the lawn and felt something brush his ankle. The cats were loose. Seven or eight of them, slinking about, pooling in the gray patches of light bleeding through the clouds. Their eyes glowed a fiery amber, and the curves of their fangs were outlined in blue detail. They mewled and me-owed. Whoever was inside had tossed them out and they were aggravated about it, maybe starved.

  Jonah whispered, “Make sure none of them follow us inside.”

  Chase and Jonah moved to the back door, which opened into the kitchen. Jonah let him take point, of course. He’d expected that too. He had a very clear image of getting gut-shot and lying there while Jonah ran away and ransacked Chase’s house, stealing Lila’s candlestick holders.

  The thought of it made his shoulders tighten. Jonah noticed and put a hand on his back, pushing forward because he thought Chase had frozen with fear. The old man really never had known him at all.

  Drawing his tools out of his jacket, Chase got to work. It took fifteen seconds to pop the door. He inched it open and squirted oil onto the hinges so there wouldn’t be any squeaking.

  A sharp crew but maybe not sharp enough. The guy should’ve blocked the door with something—a chair, a beer bottle, a stack of glasses. Anything to warn him that somebody was coming in, but he hadn’t taken the precaution.

  So, either an oversight or a trap.

  Chase crept in, his grandfather at his heel.

  Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy were seated at the kitchen table. Side by side. Their heads almost touching.

  At least Chase figured it was them. Two body-sized shapes wrapped in garbage bags and cocooned with duct tape. The roll was still on the counter. The bodies didn’t stink all that much, considering. The cat piss smell overpowered it.

  Chase thought, Because of me, because of my mistakes.

  He tasted Marisa Iverson and didn’t know what it meant until he realized he’d bitten through his tongue and his mouth was full of blood.

  The fire began to burn again but he fought off a wave of guilt and forced himself to stay focused. He pulled the 9mm, hating the feel of it in his hand but adoring its intention.

  The guy was napping at the front window, sitting in a worn love seat with an MP3 player in his hand and the tinny sound of music coming from his earplugs. He’d been here a day or two and the boredom had made him sloppy.

  He was slim, a little younger than Chase, with a pretty-boy roguishness and his hair moussed all to hell. Probably took him forty-five minutes every morning to affect that nonchalant hipster messiness. Dressed down in a wife-beater T-shirt and stained jeans. Young girls would’ve found him beautiful.

  Chase didn’t get a pro vibe off this guy. Something was wrong.

  He smelled setup but couldn’t see any kind of trap. He quickly walked up and cracked the fucker across the head with the butt of the 9mm. The guy’s eyes shot open and then quickly closed again as he tumbled to the floor. The solid thunk of metal on bone was so satisfying that Chase had to restrain himself to keep from doing it again and smashing the guy’s skull in.

  Jonah had drawn his favored .38 and was searching through the small house. He returned and gave a headshake. Nobody else in the place.

  First thing Jonah did was rifle the guy’s wallet and pull all the cash. Looked like three or four hundred bucks. Jonah pocketed it and checked the driver’s license. “It’s a fake. Shitty work too. Looks like it was glued together in a half hour. First time stopped at a traffic light he’d be busted. Name on it is Timmy Rosso. He can’t be a pro, sleeping on the job. They killed the old lady and her son and then suckered him into taking this fall.”

  “Is he carrying a phone?”

  Jonah found the guy’s cell and handed it to Chase. Only one number programmed in. Terrific, he thought. Now we have to go through this shit again.

  Chase walked away and Jonah said, “Where are you going?”

  You couldn’t do much but you had to do something. Chase went to the back door and opened it, letting in the cats. There were empty food and water bowls in the corner of the kitchen. He found the cat food under the sink, filled the bowls, poured water, and watched the hungry cats tearing in. He turned and stared at the figures of the dead old woman and her retarded son wrapped in their own garbage bags. Lila was in his head saying, Sweetness, you gone far enough for me, I’m proud of you. Now it’s time to stop. And don’t let that granddaddy of yours touch the good silverware.

  Jonah stared at him like he’d gone insane, which was fine. Chase found a vase full of dead flowers, filled it at the sink, walked back into the living room, and tossed it in Timmy Rosso’s face, dried stems and all.

  As the guy came awake Chase looked at Rosso, pointed the 9mm in his face, and asked, “Hey, any chance you’re the driver?”

  The look Jonah gave him said, What the fuck kind of question is that? He knows you want the driver. Even if it is him, he won’t admit to it.

  That’s because Jonah didn’t understand that wheelmen had their own thing going. They wanted to be known. It set them apart like the old-time juggers, the safecrackers. Or the demolition men, who were the only ones willing to touch nitro. They had special skills, talents that made them distinct from the rest of the string. It made them a little vain.

  If it was him, he’d say it.

  “No,” Rosso told him, dead flower petals in his dripping hair. Blood pulsed across his forehead and threaded into his eyes. “I don’t do that.”

  There was a whine and some real fear in his voice. “And I didn’t kill those two in the kitchen either.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Chase said. “Do you know who they were?”

  “No, I never saw them. They were already…covered when I got here.”

  “So who snuffed them?”

  “I…I can’t say.”

  “I think you can.”

  “No, really, listen to me—”

  Chase held up a hand and cut him off. Rosso wasn’t one of the string. The guy was holding back out of fear, not loyalty or professionalism. They’d hired him especially for this part of the job, to watch and report, and then go down.

  “All I want is the driver.”

  “The driver of what?” Rosso said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Was this another desperate man who had everything but still needed Marisa Iverson?

  “What do you know?” Chase asked, sounding tired even to himself. “Come on, tell me your story.”

  Trying to hold out, Rosso struggled with himself and ran all kinds of scenarios through his mind. His eyes danced and darted. Chase could tell the kid was thinking about throwing himself out the front window, tucking and rolling, doing some kind of ninja shit. He started to pant and flex a little. Gearing himself up to launch at Chase, fight him for the gun, shoot his way out.

  “This is why you always tie them up before you throw water in their faces,” Jonah said.

  Chase nodded.

  But the fact was that Rosso remained too dazed from the blow to the head to think clearly enough about how weak he was. If he tri
ed to get up, he’d fall over on his ass. Chase waited for him to try.

  Rosso tried and flopped out of the chair and landed among the cats. You’d think they’d been rehearsing this gag for a while, the way the cats just watched him fall and then slunk against him.

  Chase picked the guy up and threw him in the chair again.

  “I’m going to call you Timmy, okay?”

  “It’s not my—”

  “I know it’s not your real name. I don’t care about your real name. But I need to call you something, right? So, Timmy, tell me about the crew who set you up in this house with these dead bodies.”

  Rosso began to cry.

  It wasn’t something Chase had been expecting and it made him break out in a sweat. Rosso continued sobbing. He really was only a kid, in way over his head. Chase figured Marisa had fucked and scammed him too. Given him the bad fake ID to make him feel like a part of her lifestyle. She would’ve promised to take care of him.

  The guy tried to talk through his blubbering but Chase couldn’t understand the words. Chase went, “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay.”

  Finally Rosso calmed down, tried again, and managed to form coherent sentences while he sniffled. “I don’t know any crew…I just know Mary and Gus.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “You already know Gus. That’s what this is all about.”

  “Sure,” Chase said, “but pretend I don’t know Gus. Just tell me about him and Mary. How you met them, all that, okay?”

  “Well, she’s…she’s…my girl. He’s…her husband. You know this!”

  Jonah drew out a knife from a sheath at the small of his back. A two-inch blade, which was more than enough if you knew what you were doing. He moved in on Rosso very quickly. His face, as always, showing nothing. Rosso’s eyes grew wide and he parted his lips to shout. Jonah covered the kid’s mouth with his left hand, almost gently holding it there in an oddly loving gesture, then stabbed the blade down into the thick meat of Rosso’s leg.

  The kid dropped forward with a muted shriek and Jonah held him there while Rosso wailed beneath Jonah’s thick, callused palm. Tears again spurted from the kid’s eyes and he sucked air loudly through his nose.

  Jonah mimicked Chase and said, “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay. I just want you to stay focused and tell the truth, okay? Tell the truth and you’ll get to go home soon. All right?”

  It took a couple minutes but eventually Rosso managed to nod.

  The leg wasn’t bleeding much. The knife had only gone in a half inch and the wound had sealed around it. Jonah moved his hand from Rosso’s lips and saw that the kid had vomited a little. Jonah left the knife in Rosso’s leg and wiped his hand on one of Mrs. Nicholson’s cats.

  “You…stabbed me.”

  “Keep talking. Now. Come on.”

  “She’s married to Gus,” Rosso said, panting, “but he doesn’t take care of her the way she needs, all right? I met them at the Plead the Fifth in Smithtown, on 25a. It’s a hole-in-the-wall joint, I’m a bartender there. They just moved here from Sacramento, and he can’t find a real job. He’s done time and he’s drifted in and out of drugs. You know all this! Please, my leg. Get me a bandage.”

  He made as if to grab the blade and Jonah said, “Don’t you touch it.”

  Chase told him, “In a minute, Timmy, we’ll call a doctor. Come on, keep going.”

  “She started coming in alone and, well…she wants to leave him. He hits her, she had bruises on her face. He beats her and makes her do things. With his friends. With you! She doesn’t love him anymore.”

  “She loves you now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

  “So what did she tell you about the people in this house? And about me?”

  “About your deal with Gus.”

  “What deal, Timmy?”

  “Don’t call me Timmy. About how these two were your partners, and you double-crossed and killed them because you’ve got a big shipment of drugs in your house and you’re going to sell them to Colombians and make at least a hundred thousand dollars. Afterward, when you were sleeping, I was going to steal the cash. And then you and Gus will probably go back to Cleveland where him and Mary grew up, and me and Mary can go anyplace in the world with the money. Maybe go to Italy and buy a villa. She wants to visit Italy.”

  Jonah said, “Nobody can be this stupid.”

  Chase was awed by the clever manipulation. Take a dumb, immature, mostly honest kid, make him think he was in love, give him an awful task like sitting in a house with two corpses, and so long as he thought it was for the right reasons, saving his woman from a brute of a husband, he’d do it with no hesitation at all. She’d even worked in the bruises Chase had given her and used them against the kid as well. The fact that none of it made any sense only added to the beauty of it. Rosso was a romantic, and he was more than willing to believe the fairy tale. Details only would’ve confused him.

  He’d been in this house for two days and had never really looked at the pictures on the walls. Photos of Freddy, of Mrs. Nicholson as a young girl, as an old lady, all the cats. Shelves and shelves full of framed photos of the cats. Crochet and knitting magazines on the coffee table. Balls of yarn and knitting needles in a wicker basket on the end of the couch. And yet when Chase looked in Rosso’s terrified eyes he saw the kid really believed all the idiotic shit he was saying.

  Chase asked, “So what makes you think Gus is from Cleveland if they said they were from Sacramento?”

  “That’s because of the guy with the scar. Please, my leg. It really hurts!”

  “Forget your leg. Tell me about this guy with a scar.”

  “One night Gus came in alone for a couple of beers. I hate him. I hate him so much I thought of putting ground glass in his beer. It’s a sin what he does to her. But I can’t do anything until after the deal goes down. So he was sitting there and…and a guy with a scar going across his forehead comes in and sits next to him. They pretended they didn’t know each other but I could tell. It’s in the body language. They made a big show of shaking hands and introducing themselves, but I knew.” Holding his chin up, trying to eke out the last of his courage, Rosso did a pretty good job of it. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “I know,” Chase said. “Tell me about Cleveland.”

  “The guy was whispering. He said imagine if they’d hung around in Cleveland like their fathers. They’d both have had heart attacks and hernias by now. Meanwhile, this guy, his forehead all disfigured like that, looks like he went through a windshield.”

  Maybe the driver. Why a public meet? Because they were both getting antsy holed up for so long, waiting for the fence to get back to them?

  “You did good, Timmy.” Chase held up the cell. “Now, what’s the stupid phone code you’re using?”

  “No code, Mary just picks up.”

  “What have you been telling her about me?”

  “That you’re always in the garage tuning the car. And that your connection showed up this afternoon.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She said she couldn’t wait to get the money. She couldn’t wait to be with me. We’re in love. Gus—”

  “Yeah, I know, Gus is a piece of shit. When was the last time you spoke to her?”

  “Around then, when he showed up with you in the van.”

  “When are you supposed to contact her again?”

  “About twenty minutes ago.”

  Chase hit REDIAL and the phone rang once and immediately went to voice mail. Marisa Iverson’s voice came on the line and said, “You’re too late. I know who you are now. Sorry about the wife. See you on the road.”

  Chase disconnected and said, “Shit. It could be too late already. They might’ve scored the merchant this afternoon. Put on the television.”

  Jonah switched on the set, and it was all over the news. The diamond merchant had been robbed for a second time in less t
han two weeks. The manager was dead, shot right before the thieves left. James Lefferts’s nose was swaddled in bandages but he seemed comfortable in front of the cameras this time.

  Lila’s photo appeared behind the cute newscaster and they brought the whole thing up again.

  “They’re out,” Chase said. “All of this was a diversion.”

  “You’re the one who gave her the edge,” Jonah said. “She was a step ahead. I’d like to meet this woman.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Chase told him.

  They had Marisa Iverson’s face but they didn’t really have her face. They’d never track her from the employee photo or security tapes they had. She’d pitch the glasses and let her hair down, wipe off all the overdone makeup and let the strength and confidence cut loose again. No one would take her for the same woman.

  Timmy Rosso stared at the TV but still didn’t make any connection. He said, “Look, I don’t want the money anymore. I just want to leave. Me and Mary, we’ll go, right now, tonight. You’ll never see either of us again.”

  Jonah walked over to Rosso and tugged the blade out of his leg. A small spurt of blood came along with it, a dollop arcing onto the carpet, just missing the cats. The kid screamed and this time Jonah let him. Rosso fell out of the chair and gripped his leg, thrashing.

  The old man started to raise his .38 and Chase gripped his wrist.

  Jonah was still incredibly strong. Chase could only keep hold of him because Jonah allowed it. His grandfather stared hard into his eyes and said quietly, “We have to kill him.”

  “No.”

  “He was watching us.”

  “He was watching me. And so what? He’s got nothing.”

  “He can describe me to the cops.”

  “And tell them what? That he was keeping my house under surveillance while he sat here with two dead bodies wrapped up in garbage bags? Nothing he could say to them will make any sense at all.”

  “It’s still trouble we don’t need.”

  “He was a sucker. He doesn’t have to die for that.”

  “That’s how everybody dies.”