The Coldest Mile Page 12

  After a week he'd put on some weight and regained muscle mass and speed. Cessy's stitches were ready to come out and he carefully clipped the threads and tugged them free. The bullet- wound scar was red and ugly but didn't bother him.

  Georgie called from his car lot in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There was a huckster in the background shouting something into a bullhorn about low interest rates and no money down. “I got some word on your gramps. He's down South. Florida.”

  “Where?”

  “I just told you. Florida.”

  Chase had to remember that even though Georgie was a second- generation, he'd mostly centered in on the car salesmanship and that seemed to still be where his heart was. “It's a big state. I was hoping for something a little more specific.”

  “Oh. I think he's vacationing in Sarasota.”

  “Yeah, that's what I told you, Georgie.”

  “Oh yeah, but I heard it again this morning. The info I got was a few days old.”

  So the old man was still nearby. Killing Dash hadn't made him move on, the way he normally would have. What did that mean? Was he still hunting for Milly and Kylie? Or was it because of the score he had set up with this cat Dex?

  “What's Jonah doing down here?”

  “I'm not sure. There are these new circuits popping up. They don't do things the way we were taught. They're more … independent. He got in touch with Lamberson and Sloane about opening his own car lot.”

  Still with the outdated code words. “What did they tell him?”

  “Not certain what the business proposition was,” Georgie said while the bullhorn blared, “but they turned him down. Lamberson's been struggling with prostate cancer, they got him in for radiation treatments once a week, so he figures he's got to be selective.”

  “He told you this himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything about Dex?”

  “No. I checked into that. He's got good references. Been around a while, does good work, a lot of happy clients, for the most part. But he can be expensive and he, well, you know how those chiropractors are. One wrong touch and they can break your back. His name turns up every so often, but he doesn't usually work with the guys we do.”

  “Was anyone with Jonah?”

  “What?”

  “Was anyone with him? A woman. A kid. Anybody. Was he alone?”

  “I don't know. Why would he be with a kid?”

  Chase was fed up with the double- talk bullshit. “Keep checking. Jonah's trying to put together a crew for a job. He'll be reaching out. Just give Lamberson and Sloane my number and tell them to get in touch with me. I need more details than this.”

  Georgie said, “Most guys don't like giving out details about their merchandise and their chiropractors and their plans to open their own car lots, you know.”

  Chase hung up, thinking, If the feds were listening in on this, then they must think we're truly a bunch of morons.

  Chase had worked with Sloane once, part of a string Jonah had set up to score a supermarket in Parma, Ohio.

  Chase remembered him as being a little hyper and talkative, drinking too much in the motel room where they'd gathered to go over the plan. Sloane went on about his college- age girlfriend who was studying criminal justice when she wasn't cheerleading or making it with Sloane. Sloane discussed what it was like to visit her dorm room and take showers with her while coeds skimped around in towels. Chase, who was fourteen and intensely lonely, listened attentively and let his daydreams take him away, thinking what it would be like to attend college and live on campus surrounded by thousands of girls.

  The score had gone off smoothly while Chase sat outside behind the wheel of a stolen Chevy. Everybody clambered in and Chase eased away, never breaking the speed limit even while Sloane slapped the back of the driver's seat trying to get Chase to move it.

  Jonah had turned around in the passenger seat and said, “The kid's the driver, he knows what he's doing.”

  Remembering that, Chase had a moment of mixed feelings. The pride he felt when his grandfather had shown such faith and respect for him, the love and hero worship he'd felt for Jonah back then.

  Lamberson was a pretty solid hood with a good rep for second- story work and tricking out alarms. Chase had never met him but had heard the name a lot when he was a kid.

  Lamberson phoned the next morning while Chase was running on the beach, finishing his fifth mile surrounded by bikinis. “I don't know if I should be talking to you. This isn't how we do things.”

  “I know,” Chase said, “but these are special circumstances.”

  “That doesn't matter to me.”

  “It must. You called.”

  Lamberson let out a deep grunt, turning something over in his mind. Chase could feel the guy's annoyance and wondered if it was coming from his health problems or something else. “Yeah.”

  “Jonah is putting together a score down here in Sarasota,” Chase said. “Him and somebody named Dex. I don't care about that. I'm not trying to deal myself in. I just need to get in touch with my grandfather. I heard there were problems with the setup and somebody got killed. What happened?”

  “I don't know, I wasn't a part of that. It would've been disrespectful not to meet with Jonah, but once I did, I felt no obligation to listen. I got enough problems without working with that guy. His last few jobs have left way too much heat behind him, bodies all over the fuckin’ place. I liked Lorelli.”

  “I only met him a couple of times when I was a kid, but I liked him too. That what happened? One of Lorelli's friends went after Jonah?”

  “Like I said, I have no idea. But it happens, sometimes, among us, our type. Not often, but there are guys out there with crews who'll try to settle a score. Anyway, it's all shit I don't need right now. My old man's prostate sent him to the grave twenty years ago, and now it looks like mine might bury me too. They got me coming in to fry my 'nads once a fuckin’ week. I can't go off and hole up for a month the way we used to in the old days.”

  “I can understand that,” Chase said. “You probably did the right thing.” There was no point in asking where the meet had been held because it would've been in a room rented by the hour under a fake name. If Jonah had a score brewing, he'd taken an apartment for a couple of months or moved in with a prostitute living on the fringes of Dex's crew. “How do I get in touch with Dex?”

  “You don't. He's a cagey prick, that one. As bad as Jonah in some ways. He calls you and sets up a time. You're not there, you won't ever see him again.”

  “Did you run into Sloane while you were down here?”

  “No, haven't talked to him in about a year,” Lamberson said. “Listen, it's nothing to me, but you should stay away from the old bastard. You used to be pretty well- known, being so young, working with Jonah, a family team. There was always noise about you. Then I heard you'd cut ties and gone straight, had a house and wife. So what the fuck are you messing around with this life again? You should go back to her.”

  Chase said, “Thanks for your help,” and hung up.

  The next afternoon, Sloane called while Chase was in the hotel gym, pushing himself a little harder. The lung was holding up. So were the fingers.

  Sloane was as edgy and talkative as Chase remembered him. “We don't talk directly for a reason, kid, and now you're making me make a phone call with roaming charges and it's not even the weekend. You going to reimburse me or what? Jesus Christ, I'm hemorrhaging cash out my asshole and you people keep taking more from me, you're like the fucking IRS, I can feel them crawling around in my colon. What do you want?”

  “Heard you were asked in on a score that Jonah is putting together here in Sarasota. Him and somebody named Dex.”

  “And you want a piece of it?”

  “No. I just need to talk to my grandfather.”

  “And he's ducking you?”

  “Let's just say we need to get into a room together and clear the air between us.”

  “Well, I turned them down,
” Sloane said, and suddenly grew tight- lipped.

  Chase let a few seconds go by. “I heard there were problems with the setup and somebody got killed. You know anything about that?”

  “Everybody's a gossipmonger, they all want to know where the bodies are buried. I don't really know anything about that, just that somebody got iced.”

  “Who was it?”

  “How the fuck do any of us know? Some guy sniffing around the motel, I guess he was trailing Jonah. As if that crazy old bastard wouldn't know about it. We were just sitting down to talk business and he leaves the room saying he's going to get ice from the ice machine. He walks down the hall, shoots this guy standing at the candy machine, then comes back and says we have to move the meeting. I up and split right then. For all I know it was a cop or a fed. Who needs to be on the feebs’ most wanted list? Your face showing up on television, reenactments being played out on prime time? Not me. Sometimes things go smooth with Jonah, but hardly ever the past ten years. You were his rudder, kid. When he lost you, he lost his way.”

  Chase thought Jonah had always been off track, but now that he thought about it a bit, he remembered how just a few months after Chase had split and gone out on his own, Jonah's first real botched score occurred. The old man had nearly run over a teenage tourist while escaping from a museum heist gone bad. Maybe Chase really had been his grandfather's rudder.

  “He never said who it was or why the guy was tailing him?”

  “Didn't tell me and I didn't ask,” Sloane said. “Why would I? Like I need to know his business? I said good- bye and got the hell out of there.”

  “Any idea how I can get in touch with this Dex?”

  “No. I had nothing to do with him. Hardly even got a look at him. I walked in, he handed me a beer, and then Jonah snuffed the guy at the candy machine, and I was gone. Besides, it was Jonah got in touch with me through Murphy's kid.”

  “Was Jonah alone?”

  “Who the hell would he have with him?”

  All this heat and sun and Chase couldn't stop dreaming of ice. His father handed Chase a pickax and the two of them worked side by side for over an hour to free the sailboat from the frozen slip. Low under his breath, his old man was saying something, whispering against the wind.

  Ghosts were always talking but never quite loud enough to be heard. You'd think they might learn from it and speak up clearly. Either that or just shut up.

  A dream, but also a memory. He recognized it for what it was and tried to impress himself upon the nightmare.

  This time, Chase threw down the pickax and stared out over the bay, the hacked chunks of ice bobbing off down the channel. Lila, his mother, and the unborn sibling were already on deck of the boat, preparing to cast off. He kept wondering why the rest of the dead didn't join them. Angie, Dash, Milly, and others before them.

  The kid leaned over the bow rail and gestured to Chase with its tiny hands. Chase was a little sick of the kid always taking point, the kid being the only one who ever said anything. Chase turned his back and tried to get his father to talk with him. Snow spi-raled around them and his father stopped working for a moment to take a pull from a bottle of Jack. Chase thought, quite clearly, What a waste of a dream. This isn't helping me any.

  He was close enough to the rail that the kid could reach down and brush its fingers lightly through Chase's hair, thick with crystals. He looked up at Lila but she'd drifted away and started to move be-lowdecks with his mother, the two of them shoulder to shoulder exchanging the secrets of the dead. He wondered if he got on board with all of them, and sailed off, if that would be the end of him.

  He said to the kid, What do you want now?

  The next evening, after Chase got back from his beach run, exhausted but feeling much stronger, he showered, lay on the bed, and caught the news.

  They'd pulled two bodies out of a lagoon less than five miles from the Dash house. A woman and a young boy, no older than four.

  The cops had no identification yet, but Chase sat there knowing Jonah had crossed yet another line.

  So either the SUV was in the water too or Jonah had called a local car thief to come pick it up and give him his cut.

  The old man had his daughter again and was on to a new score. He'd never look back, never think of Angie, Milly, or Walt again.

  Chase sat in the empty room willing himself to be his grandfather's conscience, accepting a guilt and pain that wasn't his own. He played with the switchblade for a while. His hands were fast, fast enough to take on Bishop, maybe fast enough to stop Jonah too.

  He stared at the eyes in the blade and they told him, You need a gun, you stupid fuck.

  Chase checked out of the ritzy hotel and found a dive in the shitty part of town. He needed to track down Dex. To do that, he had to connect with somebody on this circuit. He'd start at the bottom and work his way up.

  He flashed cash and scanned the place for Durrells and Augies and Betty Lynns. There were a couple in sight, hookers bringing in their clients on an hourly basis, but nobody took the bait.

  Two days passed before somebody came after him. She was young, no more than sixteen or seventeen but with a real sharpness about her, dressed to distract. Short red hair tied back in a ponytail so you could see the childishly chubby cheeks in all their sexiness, the angle of her jawline and the clear lovely skin and sloping angle of her throat.

  Tight clothes but not too tight, just right to give her natural curves a little extra heft. Braless so she'd bounce a tad more, wearing shorts that clung the way they should, so your concentration would be split and you'd keep an eye on the jiggle.

  She pretended to have the room next door to him and stood there fumbling with her key as Chase stepped into the hall. She tried balancing a paper sack on one hip, still fighting with the door lock. The ponytail bobbed and weaved, and her tongue jutted from the corner of her mouth, a nice affectation that could start a man simmering.

  He moved as he was expected to move, toward her in an effort to help. Just as he got there, the bag went over and a dozen small grocery items scattered.

  “Here,” he said, bending to retrieve them. “Let me help.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” she told him, wetting her lips, stretching out a leg so he'd be sure to notice, “that's so kind of you.”

  It was a solid ploy. As he was bent over, glancing at her knee, gathering her things—mostly cheap cans of soup and oranges, stuff that would roll and keep him in position—she plucked out his wallet.

  She had deft fingers but wasn't quite a pro. Any guy would've felt it without the distraction, but that was part of the con. Get the mark's attention off the swindle, keep him busy. She kept talking, maybe just a touch too much baby doll in her voice. “It's so sweet of you to help a stranger out.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, grabbing the oranges and stuffing them back in the bag. The fruit was old, already going bad. She'd either bought it real cheap off the street or she'd kept it lying around to keep playing this con. He stood and held on to the groceries. “Can I carry this inside for you?”

  “That won't be necessary, I've troubled you enough.”

  “Really, it was no trouble at all.”

  She wet her lips again, and he thought it might be a tell, a subconscious signal. If she was part of a crew, nobody had ever told her to quit it, because it worked for her anyway. “I think I'll bring this bruised fruit back to the store right now. I didn't notice before but it's not as fresh as I was hoping for.” She waited for Chase to move off and said, “Thanks again.”

  “Sure,” he told her, and walked out to the parking lot and slid into the GTO. She'd gotten about fifty bucks off him and nothing else. His ID was safe inside the driver's door with the rest of his cash. He'd dismantle the door and get it later when he needed it.

  Chase put on the radio and listened to salsa and reggae music while he watched the front door of the motel. He was surprised he liked the songs so much and actually turned up the volume a little.

&nb
sp; She came out about a half hour later, without the groceries. She got into an old, dinged- up Mercury coupe, pulled out, and turned onto the street heading north. He started up the Goat and followed.

  She drove to the local mall, parked outside one of the big chain stores, locked up, and walked inside. He climbed out, popped the door to her Merc, and riffled the interior. No registration in the glove box. No weapons stashed under the dash.

  Beneath the passenger seat he found a box of fresh checks and two reorder forms, each in a different woman's name. Neither would be her own.

  It was another old con. You didn't steal somebody's checkbook. They'd get wise too fast to that. All you needed was the reorder paperwork, then you changed the address and paid for a box of extra checks that the rube didn't know about. You could hang paper for a couple weeks before anybody found out about the excess draws on the account. Then you moved on to the next batch.

  It was a little sloppy leaving the forms here in the car where anybody digging around could spot them, but she was still pretty new to the game. At least he knew she was part of a crew now. Small grifts like reorder forms were usually an afterthought during a burglary. While somebody was scoring the silverware and jewelry, someone else was going through the paperwork. If the crew was big enough, it might have contacts to Dex.

  Chase popped the trunk and checked the spare tire, found a fairly large stash of marijuana, a few hundred tabs of X, and what looked like about a thousand bucks’ worth of coke. No weapons.

  He got the hood open and saw that the VIN hadn't been etched away with acid. If the car was stolen, it hadn't been done by a pro. He relocked the Merc and relaxed in the GTO, waiting for her to return.

  But there was no breeze, and the stifling heat got to him fast. He should've taken the Goat in to get the air conditioner fixed, but you never wanted to leave a stolen car with stolen plates, forty- five grand and fake ID hidden inside the door in some hick garage.

  There was no use frying. Chase popped the Mercury's hood, pulled the distributor cap, and went inside the mall. He got himself a soda and a slice of pizza that could hardly be recognized as pizza, and took up a spot in the food court where he could look out the glass mall doors and down the parking row in case she walked out another exit.