The Cold Spot

1

L ila introduced her father as Sheriff Bodeen. A woman introduces her father as something other than Dad or Daddy and you know you’ve got a situation on your hands.

Sheriff Bodeen hated Chase’s guts from the first minute. Bodeen smiled like a three-day-old corpse and kept chuckling under his breath, trying to be a good ole boy. Going, Heh heh heh. Eh heh heh. The sound lifted the hair on Chase’s neck.

Bodeen stood about five-foot-two and had short-guy syndrome, needed to prove he was the toughest son of a bitch in any room he walked into. He had arms thick as tree trunks and with every step he sort of exploded across the room. All rip-tide energy.

His brown uniform was immaculately clean and pressed, buttoned to the throat. He kept his gun belt on. The strap over the butt of his.45 had been snapped loose. This for Sunday dinner, meeting his daughter’s boyfriend for the first time.

When Bodeen hugged Lila he made a spectacle out of it, like he hadn’t seen her for years. Swept her up, twirled her around, kept calling her his little girl, his buttercup. She went with it. Finally he put her down and she left the room to check on the chicken-fried steak she was making for dinner.

Her mother was the quietest woman Chase had ever met. Really big, burly actually, with a lot of muscle to her. She hugged him hello. He couldn’t get his arms all the way around her, it was like grabbing hold of the front end of a Toyota. She squeezed him until he thought his ribs were about to go.

These people, he thought, Christ, there’s a lot of undercurrent here, forget that Southern hospitality shit.

Lila flashed in and out of the living room, either giving him time to get used to her parents or really busy cooking. He had stared at the stuff stewing and boiling in the pots and pans and had no idea what side dishes they’d be eating tonight.

She’d told him to call her mother Mama, but Chase couldn’t do it. He went with her first name. Hester.

Keeping up the friendly front, Bodeen called Chase “son” a lot, but there was serious ice in his eyes, a lot of rage and resentment. It would come out eventually, Chase knew, he just had to wait for it.

The man asked a lot of questions about Chase’s background. Started off casually but got more and more personal while they sat and waited. He drank a lot of whiskey with a lot of ice and appeared a little put off that Chase was sticking to beer.

Chase knew his name had already been run through the system by Bodeen, and the man would be wondering about all the gaps and holes. Lila had come up with a pretty complicated and convincing backstory that would hopefully divert any doubts. It was so involved and complex that Chase couldn’t remember any of it.

Bodeen would know about Chase’s mother being murdered. Jonah had been off the map for too long; Chase didn’t think anybody would ever find a connection between the two of them, but you just couldn’t tell. There might be some small scrap of computer info. Or somebody in the bent life might’ve flipped and given up everything he knew about everybody he knew. It was a chance Chase would take for Lila. They could always run if it came down to that.

Her parents had him pinned in the living room. Hester sat to the left of Chase, sipping a tumbler of rye and patting and rubbing his wrist. It was a vaguely sensual display and really threw him off.

Bodeen, squashing him on the right, said, “You plan on staying in these parts?”

“Yes,” Chase said.

“Never knew anyone from the North who could last more than a year down this way.”

“I’ve been in the South for almost four.”

“On the move.”

“That’s right.”

“Why’s that?” Bodeen asked.

“Because I’ve been alone.”

“And now you’re not so you think you wanna settle down. But I’m talking about roots. It’s a different way of life. We still speak like somebody. We have the advantage of not being as homogenized as other places.”

Bodeen’s use of “homogenized” impressed Chase. It was a word his father had used. He could just imagine his old man sitting here, trying hard to fit in and get along, making the effort not to discuss Russian literature. Maybe saying, “Boy, it’s humid!” because when you got down to it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of middle ground where they could meet.

“I think I’m taking to it just fine so far.”

“Because of Lila.”

“Yes, because of her.”

Hester smiled at him and kept touching his wrist. Chase smiled back. She smiled more. He tried to smile more but just couldn’t do it, it was tiring his face out. Bodeen finished another glass of whiskey and started chewing the ice.

Lila poked her head out of the kitchen and said, “Dinner’s almost ready.”

Bodeen told her, “Me and the boy are gonna have a quick smoke out back,” and Chase thought, Here it comes, here it is.

“You smoke after dinner, Daddy, not before.”

“I smoke whenever the hell I want and that’s just so. We’ll be back in a couple a minutes.”

Chase walked out the back door with the man and accepted the unfiltered Camel offered from a soft pack. He used to smoke on occasion with the crews but hadn’t had a cigarette since that poker game, when he’d split the filters and flushed them down the toilet hoping the others wouldn’t cap him like they’d done Walcroft.

The smoke burned in his mouth. Bodeen leaned in as if to say something but didn’t. Just rocked back on his heels, then bent forward again. He did it three or four times before getting in close and whispering, “I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”

Chase asked, “For what?”

“To get out of town.”

At least it was right there out in the open now. “That so?”

“I don’t want you ’round my little girl.”

“Why’s that?”

“She deserves better.”

“You’re probably right. But for argument’s sake, who would you consider better?”

“Anybody but you.”

“Now you’re just being mean.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s a daddy’s right.” Bodeen took a long drag, let it out slow. Turned that gaze on Chase again, really sizzling it in. “I can smell the bad on you. You gonna try and deny that?”

“No.”

“So, by this time tomorrow, you be gone.”

“No.”

“What’s that now?”

“I love her and I’m not leaving.”

Chase thought if Bodeen pulled his gun now this whole situation was going to step up a notch, so he might as well do it himself. His hand flashed out and he snatched the.45 from its holster and tossed it over his shoulder into the mud.

Get the ball rolling, let’s see where this leads us.

Sheriff Bodeen stared at him and let the smile ease out again, inch by inch. “You’re a fast one,” he said.

Same thing his daughter had first said to Chase.

Chase thought if it was going to work with Lila he would have to do something to impress her father. That meant a slug-out or some kind of insanity like duck hunting. He stepped forward in case the sheriff wanted to take a poke at him. So long as it wasn’t in the kidneys, it would be worth it.

“Yeah,” Chase said, and finished a last drag on the cigarette and flicked the butt in the dirt.

A knowing, crooked smile split Sheriff Bodeen’s face. Like a lot of cops, he enjoyed finding a player. Someone in the know he could legally beat the shit out of.

Bodeen nodded, said, “Let me tell you something, son. You don’t ever throw a man’s pistol in the dirt. It’s disrespectful. It’s uncivilized.”

Then with a mulish bellow, he lunged.

Chase thinking, Frickin’ terrific.

The sheriff caught him in the left ribs with a hell of a shot. The air burst from Chase’s lungs and he went over backward and hit the ground hard. Black streamers appeared at the edges of his vision, but as he gasped for breath he still had sense enough to roll aside as fast as he could.

He tucked in tight because Bodeen was coming at him again. Chase got to his knees and took a kick in the gut and a quick one-two punch to the head that sent him spinning in the grass. But at least he’d bought a little time, and now he was breathing again.

Cracking his knuckles, Bodeen postured for a moment. Good, the guy was flawed. He imagined eyes on him. He wanted to show off for the crowd. Chase managed to get to his feet, trying to remember the boxing lessons Jonah had given him years ago.

He got his fists up and deflected a couple of Bodeen’s jabs. The man was strong but not very quick, and Chase had an extra few inches of reach over the short fucker. The man came on with another flurry and tagged both Chase’s eyes, which immediately started to water.

Bodeen started to chuckle, enjoying himself. And why not, Chase hadn’t landed a punch yet. He had a hell of a time focusing, his mind stuffed with clutter and loud with too many voices. Jonah telling him to pick up the gun and shoot the cop. Jonah telling him to get on his toes, dance forward, work the bridge of the nose. His father explaining that violence was a sign of character weakness. His mother crying-why was she crying? She seemed to be crying so much there at the end. Why? He hadn’t thought about that since he was a kid.

Lowering his arms an inch, Chase baited Bodeen into throwing a wild roundhouse. He dodged and gunned four rapid-fire shots into the sheriff ’s belly, hearing the man’s grunts grow louder and more pained each time he connected. It felt good. He danced away, kicking up tufts of grass, then came in again and worked Bodeen’s nose.

Snapping his knuckles hard across the bridge, over and over, wanting to leave his mark. Blood burst from Bodeen’s nostrils and the man let out another little laugh. Everything funny to this guy. The Jonah inside Chase’s head said, Look out.

Chase tried to move back a step, but Bodeen charged again, those squat muscular legs really letting him explode. The force carried him through Chase’s defenses. One of those huge fists landed directly over Chase’s heart. His blood flow felt like it reversed course for a second and he stood paralyzed. Even his knees wouldn’t fold to let him drop out of range. Bodeen took his time to line up his next shot and brought a right crashing into Chase’s chin. It was a hell of a nice move. Chase felt the hinges of his jaw break and wondered how much it was going to cost to get it wired.

Maybe duck hunting would’ve been the way to go.

He fell back and hit the dirt, gagging from the incredible pain and spitting blood. He’d botched this whole play. He should’ve been listening more closely to Jonah.

He wanted one more chance to prove himself to the sheriff. He struggled to turn over, got on all fours, and carefully made it to his feet. Bodeen laughed some more, going, Heh heh heh. Eh heh heh. What the fuck was that all about anyway? Chase let it slide. The sheriff ’s hands had lowered, but when he got a look at Chase’s eyes he brought them back up again.

Jonah said, You idiot, cheat already.

Staggering, Chase found the cold spot. The pain faded away beneath the freeze, but his head was still loud with noise and need.

“You sure can handle pain, boy,” Bodeen said. “We’re done here.”

Chase tried to say, Not yet, but when he opened his mouth all that came out was a huge wad of blood. He tried to grin but his jaw slid out of alignment and it felt like his tongue had flopped loose over his bottom lip.

Chase asked Jonah, So what now?

Jonah told him, He favors his left leg. Kick the kneecap out.

Sound advice, and not much of a cheat under the circumstances. So Chase brought an elbow down hard against Bodeen’s hip, shifted his weight, and lashed out with his left foot. He connected with the sheriff ’s kneecap and felt the ten-dons go. Bodeen’s leg broke with a small pop and he let out a shriek that spooked an oak tree full of egrets into flight.

Now get the.45 and kill him, Jonah said.

Bodeen toppled backward and writhed in the scrub grass, moaning but still letting loose a chuckle here and there. Weird son of a bitch.

Starting forward, Chase wobbled and dropped onto his ass, turned over onto his side and stretched out, trying to get air. They lay in the yard almost on top of each other, gasping loudly.

“You gonna make…my daughter a proper woman?” the sheriff asked.

Chase didn’t know what the hell Bodeen was talking about now. He had to hold both palms tightly to the sides of his jaw in order to make it work well enough for him to speak. The pain was electric and unbelievable. “Lila is a…proper…woman.” Strings of blood looped from his lips.

“A proper wife.”

“Oh. Yeah…I am.”

Bodeen was trying to put his kneecap back into place but as he gingerly touched his leg he let out another howl that ended in laughter. The sheriff lumbered up on his good leg and dragged the other behind him, limping around in circles until he found his gun. He stood and offered a hand. “Come on, son, let’s go eat some greens.”

But Chase wasn’t going to eat anything solid for a while. Lila’s mother pretended not to notice the blood and bruises when they dragged their asses back inside, which made sitting down to dinner even more fucking creepy. He figured he’d already earned whatever points he needed to earn. Hester just kept smiling. He was starting to think maybe this lady here had some serious emotional problems.

Lila brought him an ice pack and shot a death glare at her father, but she said nothing to the man. She got Chase on his feet and told him, “Come on along, we gotta get you to a hospital.” He tried to wink at her but his eyes were closing up.

Hester smiled some more. This solid, hefty lady saying nothing, it felt like she was another aspect of his own lost mother. He was doomed to be surrounded by a mother’s silent ghost.

They got to the door and Bodeen, clutching at his twisted leg in his chair, said, “What about me? You ain’t worried your daddy might be crippled for life?” Trying to play it off as tough but with a touch of whine in his voice.

Lila left Chase propped in the doorway, walked back to her father, geared up, and with the side of her hand chopped him in the throat.

Sheriff Bodeen squawked like a strangled cat and flopped against the dining-room table. Lila told him, “Daddy, you ever touch my man again and I’ll make sure you ride all the way to hell in a wheelchair.”

Hearing her say “my man” like that made Chase grin, and as she pulled his arm around her shoulder again, his tongue spilled out one side of his mouth and a thick rope of blood trailed from the other.

2

T he next Saturday Sheriff Bodeen showed up at Lila’s door on crutches with his leg in a cast. Chase backed up a step when he saw the man on the porch. He was still pissing blood and had already lost five pounds from having to eat meals through a straw. The fight had given him a certain sense about himself, knowing he could be hard when he had to be and that he could disregard Jonah when necessary. But still, he didn’t feel like going another round right now.

The sheriff said, “You want a job?”

It was tough to talk but he could swing it. “What job?”

“I need another deputy. I could use someone like you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s what mean, son?”

“Someone like me.”

“You’re smart, you’re fast, you’re tough as saddle leather, and you know how to keep your head in the middle of a fight.”

He thought about that for a minute. What a gas Jonah would have, thinking about Chase walking around with a badge. Standing there on a street corner being Deputy Dawg while Lila called him an outlaw. Riding after the stupid Southern crews that stumbled into town loaded on moonshine.

Chase said, “Thanks anyway.”

Bodeen nodded, looked a little irritated, said, “You mind tellin’ me why the hell not?”

“I don’t like guns.”

A couple of months later, when he started looking around for a wedding ring, he asked folks who the best jeweler in the area was. They all pushed him to Bookatee. He couldn’t believe it, and nearly hit the road to go check out shops in New Orleans, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, somewhere there was civilization. But he figured what the hell and went to visit the Emporium.

Turned out Bookatee really did know jewelry. Book sold Chase a nice diamond ring for a fair price. When Book opened his safe and Chase got a look inside, he pursed his lips, realizing the crew really had known what they were doing. At least in scoring Bookatee.

He sent a message to Jonah only once, through the regular channels. From a pay phone he called Murphy in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“Heard you were down South someplace,” Murphy said.

“Still am.”

“You looking for a job? I know of two shops that could use a good mechanic like you.”

The usual way of telling him there were two crews looking for a wheelman. “No thanks. I think I’m settling down here for a while.”

“Doing what? Changing oil? Rotating tires? Fixing crankshafts?”

Asking him what grifts he was working. “My crankshaft is just fine. I met a girl.”

Chase could sense Murphy wrinkling his brow, trying to figure out what Chase was talking about, what kind of score he was after.

Chase said, “A real girl, Murph. I’m settling down.”

“Kid like you who’s been in the life since you were a squirt, it’s got to be hard.”

“Well, I’m getting married anyway.”

“To one of them Southern belles? She the kind who expects you to sit in the stands of the Alabama-Mississippi game and cheer for the Muskrats or the Armadillos or whatever the fuck their mascots are?”

“No, she’s the local sheriff ’s daughter.”

“You do like a life of juice. What if big daddy decides to pull you in?”

“She already tried it. She’s the deputy. He only broke my jaw.”

Murphy let loose with a wild laugh. “Like most of you speedsters, you like to put the hammer down as far as it’ll go.”

“Only when I have to. I need to get a message to Jonah. I’d like to send him an invitation to the wedding.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“He’ll steal the icing off the cake. Hold on.” Murphy rolled around his office in a chair with squeaky casters, opening and closing filing cabinets. “He opened his own shop.” Murphy rattled off ten digits. It wasn’t exactly a sophisticated code. Chase reversed the number and saw it was a 202 prefix. Jonah was in DC.

He wasn’t sure how it would go, talking to his grandfather again after all this time. He figured it would be easier for Jonah to get in touch with him if the man felt like it. Chase gave Murphy the reverse of his cell phone. “Tell him what I said. If he wants to, he can drop me a line.”

3

T he wedding got a little wonky because Lila had three moonshine-toting uncles who came out of the deep woods for the first time in years and started kicking it up hard. Chase liked them fine, but Sheriff Bodeen sat there eating fried possum and glowering as if he wanted to arrest them. And this was his best man, the father of the bride.

First came the drinking, then a lot of the food and some dancing, and then the actual service down at the lake. Everybody set up chairs with parasols affixed to them to keep the sun off their heads. They wreathed themselves in veils of mosquito netting. A choir of gospel singers led them all through a couple of quiet hymns before really getting funky, dancing around with their tambourines and howling out praises to Jesus.

Chase and Lila exchanged vows in front of a minister who was overcome with the Holy Ghost and started speaking in tongues. He threw himself into the lake and Chase had to dive in and fish him out. They both stood there dripping while the man finished the ceremony, Lila unable to look at Chase for fear of cracking up.

When he and Lila kissed everybody let out a Rebel yell.

She drew back and said, “Well, you’re in it now, outlaw.”

“Been that way since the moment you botched the grand curio shop heist.”

A few of her friends wondered where his family was and asked a lot of personal questions. He gave the usual short-shrift answers, smiling but definitely putting some ice into his words, and eventually they backed off. The three drunk toothless uncles started firing shotguns in the air and actually managed to nail a couple of wild geese. They plucked the birds and threw them on the fire. By then Sheriff Bodeen had finished a bottle of whiskey and was hugging everybody, including Chase.

“Son,” he said, “you gonna take care’a ma cherished girl or I’m’a gonna bury you in the bayou.”

It wasn’t exactly congratulations, but Chase knew it was from the heart.

Judge Kelton got crazy on moonshine and started taking off his clothes and chasing Molly Mae around the field. For a girl with some heft to her, she was pretty fleet on her feet. By midafternoon he’d proposed in nothing but his skivvies, and she seemed to be seriously considering it.

She said to Lila, “He’s got hisself a fine house, no chilluns, and I hear tell he got money stashed away in mason jars buried ’neath his barn. He gotta be goin’ on eighty, I won’t have to bear his tomfoolery long.”

Lila said, “He’s lookin’ healthy enough to stay outta the undertaker’s clutches a good while longer.”

Molly, hitching up her girth. “I reckon I can help him along down that road fast enough.”

About sundown the preacher was overcome by another case of the tongues and ran back into the lake. This time Chase let him go. He sat there on the shore beside Lila, her hand in his, watching the preacher call down an army of angels, wondering why Jonah never called, and thinking, Here it is. Here I am.

4

C hase didn’t mind being out of the bent life. Now that he’d gone straight he could use his own name and paperwork again. It had always bothered him he hadn’t ever gone to school. He signed up for night classes at a community college sixty miles away and made the trip three times a week in order to earn his GED.

No one in the office ever asked him why he’d quit school in the sixth grade. Even now in Mississippi he wasn’t a unique case. If anyone ever got curious, he knew all he had to say was, “Daddy catched ill one winter and I had to take to the fields.”

He worked in a local garage doing lube jobs on pickups that smelled like fertilizer and old fish. He took care of their thirty-year-old Chevys that had turned the odometer at least four times. If the cars were dead, he managed to bring them back, if they still had a spark of life, he made them hum. He spent a lot of time fine-tuning the moonrunners’ muscle cars, reinforcing the frames so they could take the rutted dirt tracks without bottoming out, even with all the extra weight in the trunk.

Every now and again Bodeen or one of the state troopers would bring their cruisers in for the extra kick Chase could squeeze out of an engine. It quickly got around that he was one of the best mechanics in three states. Bodeen offered him another job as official police mechanic in charge of the auto pool. Chase couldn’t help thinking about how easy it would be to gaff all the cars to throw a rod or blow their brake lines on the same night. He could score the whole county while the cops pursued him in flatbeds that couldn’t crack forty-five.

Maybe he missed the bent life a little.

Joe-Boo Brinks, the biggest still operator in the area, wanted Chase to come work for him full-time as a mechanic and runner. He tried to woo Chase with the promise of his underage daughter and eighteen grand in cash. He brought the money over in a cardboard suitcase one afternoon while Chase was sitting on a dead log down by the creek having his lunch.

The girl had come along too, wearing a pair of frayed short shorts and a blouse with the sleeves torn off, knotted at her midriff. She had very tight stomach muscles and only a few ounces of baby fat to round her out where it mattered.

Joe-Boo stood six feet of wiry muscle, his mostly bald head gleaming in the sunshine, his graying beard poorly trimmed and sticking out in tufts. A perpetual sour stink wafted off him, part body odor and part sour mash whiskey bleeding from his very pores. He smiled so broadly you could see every empty space and gold tooth in his head, and he repeatedly drew out a red bandana to wipe down his sunburned, freckled crown.

“I put the first set of car keys in the hands of a lot of runners,” Joe-Boo told him, “but I ain’t never seen anyone drive like you.”

“You’ve never seen me drive, Joe-Boo,” Chase said.

“Yeah, I have, when you thought no one lookin’. Out there on the gravel tracks by the river, down near the sweetwater. You go it alone at night, boy, why’s that? You could be earnin’ money doing the same thing during the day.”

“I’m on the narrow, Joe-Boo.”

“You ain’t always been though, now have you, boy?”

Grabbing hold of his daughter’s wrist, Joe-Boo pulled her down beside him and turned her so Chase could take a good look at her ass.

“This here is my youngest, Iris.”

“H’lo,” Iris said.

Joe-Boo drew her unkempt black hair from her face and she smiled delicately while he did it.

“Don’t take but a glance before any man begins to fancy her,” Joe-Boo said.

Chase lost his appetite and tossed the uneaten remainder of his lunch back in his brown bag. He said in a steady voice, “Listen, you’re really starting to creep me out, all right? I appreciate the offer but let’s just settle on no. You bring your cars in and I’ll fix them up the way I’ve been doing. For the rest of it, find another man.”

“I need a driver like you, and I aim to get what I need.”

The girl might seem like an empty-headed backwoods honey, but she was smart enough to say, “Daddy, let’s get on home. He done said no as nice as he can.”

“It’s him sayin’ yes that I’m after.”

“He ain’t gonna.”

“Hush, baby doll.”

With his foot, Joe-Boo shoved the cardboard suitcase with the money in it closer to Chase. He was no longer smiling. He’d dropped the neighborly shit and was turning up the heat in his glare. His eyes were milky and bloodshot. Rumor was that Joe-Boo carried a switchblade pigsticker and liked to hurl it into tree trunks from about twenty yards off. He had fifteen men working under him in the back hills, and it had taken a lot for him to walk up bearing cash, showing some respect.

It was an overture not usually made, and Chase really didn’t want to get on the moonshine king’s bad side, but it seemed that was how it was going to play out.

“You pull that pigsticker and I’m going to have to shove it up your ass, Joe-Boo,” Chase said, shifting his weight on the log, waiting for Brinks to reach into his back pocket. “I’m married. You were at my wedding. You’ve known Lila her whole life. All of you people have known each other your whole lives. Let me tell you something for all our sakes.” He leaned in a bit. “She usually drives by the garage about this time every day and comes to sit with me down here at the creek. So let me ask…what do you think will happen if she shows up in the next minute or two and spots your cash and your baby girl with her tits practically out, sitting this close to me?”

Joe-Boo Brinks pulled a face, a little pie-eyed now, angry, but the worry leaking into his features ounce by ounce, until he and his daughter finally got the hell out of there.

Chase still liked a little action. That was why he hauled ass down by the gravel tracks. When he felt the urge for a score coming over him he’d scope out a car with a good engine and a solid frame, steal it and tune it up, go for a joyride, and then bring it back in much better condition.

Lila started getting reports from people who picked up on the extra mileage and noticed how fine their engines ran now. Their tires rotated, their plugs changed, timing chains fixed, new air filters and hoses put in.

She would say to him, “You been wheeling around town again? You know what it’s going to look like if I have to arrest my own husband?”

“No one’s going to press charges because their carburetors were cleaned.”

“You never know, and I don’t want to have to stick the cuffs back on you.”

“You’d have to catch me first.”

“That a challenge or a threat?”

“I don’t know.” He’d take her in his arms and nuzzle her neck. “Which one turns you on more?”

“Both about the same, I’d guess.”

He liked to keep up with the boxing to stay fit. He set up a heavy bag, speed bag, and some wrestling mats in the garage. Lila stocked most of her guns out there in a couple of wide lockers that she kept locked. While he worked the bag, skipped rope, or shadowboxed, she’d oil her weapons over on the workbench, pull them apart, and snap them back together. His old burglary tools were wrapped up in a gym bag stashed in the crawl space.

She asked him, “You ever handle a pistol besides mine that night?”

“Not many,” he told her. “But I know guns. A couple of guys I used to run with were purveyors. Suppliers, not hitters. They taught me a lot.”

“You want to learn about shooting?”

“I think I know all I need to.”

“You might be surprised. You’re in Mississippi now, sweetness.”

“People bleed here if you shoot them in the leg just like they do anywhere else. I’m almost sure I’ve seen a practical demonstration of that someplace.”

“I reckon I recall seeing something along those lines myself.”

She didn’t push any further although he knew that his hatred for firearms ran counter to everything she knew. Her father had taught her how to shoot when she was three-goddamn three. But between his mother’s murder and having seen Jonah tapping Walcroft, he had an aversion that almost bordered on phobia.

He was a driver. No driver he’d ever heard about carried a gun, at least not on the job. A wheelman sat in the car, kept his nerve, and waited for his crew even as the alarms went off and the sirens whipped closer.

After he’d finished his workout he stood there pouring sweat, watching her while she finished cleaning her.38. He reached around her and picked up the bottle of gun oil and said, “This have any other uses?”

“Hell, we got us some cherry, cinnamon, and scented oils for just those kind of improper thoughts and unsavorish doings.”

“I don’t remember the cinnamon.”

“No? It was a wedding present from Judge Kelton.”

He frowned and licked his teeth, the taste already in his mouth, and said, “If you don’t ever want my mood to sink, please don’t tell me things like that.”

“Just give me a minute to put my sidearm away and we’ll work on that sinking mood, see if we can’t elevate it some.”

“I have complete faith,” he said, and it turned out not to be misplaced.

Another time, she stood in the center of the mats and said, “You want I should show you some moves?”

“I’ve got the moves, thank you anyway.”

“Ain’t talking about those, which are adequate at best.”

“Hey, now-”

“I’m talking about these.”

She got behind him, reached forward and wrapped her right arm around his neck, thrust his chin aside with the back of her hand, and flipped him backward over her hip. He rose five feet into the air and came down flat on his back. It stunned him and his head swam. She got on top of him, turned him over, cuffed him, and pinned him so he couldn’t breathe. With his vision starting to go black at the edges, maybe five or ten seconds from passing out, she finally climbed off.

He lay there groaning for a while until he got his breath back. He realized, with a swelling sadness, that somewhere inside her she resented how their first meeting had gone-if he hadn’t gotten the drop on her, she would’ve kicked his ass. He sputtered and gasped. “You really think I’m only adequate?”

“But with a touch of potential in some areas,” she said, and left him cuffed on the mat while she yanked down his sweatpants and took degenerate advantage of him.

After a year of trying, they drove up to St. Louis to see a specialist. The tests included a lot of unholy acts against him, Chase thought, including the forced and unnatural congress with a Dixie cup, but when he complained about these misdeeds against his flesh Lila got the giggles so bad she nearly flopped off the chair.

Easy for her to dismiss. But getting your prostate checked at twenty-one was bound to make any guy a little distressed. He was hoping to hold off that particularly disconcerting and downright unflattering situation until he was at least fifty, and maybe even then he’d balk.

“There’s going to be an accounting for this,” he said. “If not in this life, then the next.”

“You never got this edgy being the wheelman for a diamond heist.”

“You’ve got to draw your lines somewhere.”

“You don’t know what true invasion is,” she said. “Until your ankles are locked in stirrups and a geezer with a flashlight and a speculum has crawled eight inches up into your belly.”

“Jesus Christ, this I need to hear?” He didn’t even want to know what a speculum was.

“It’ll help you to appreciate the life you lead.”

“I appreciate it plenty,” he said, and he meant it.

After a second visit, the specialist with the fucking frigid fingers narrowed down the problem to Lila. Chase tried to follow the biology behind it, but for a guy who’d never made it past the sixth grade, he was having trouble visualizing things, and the doctor wasn’t using a pointer to tap on the chart on his wall the way Chase had been hoping.

The doc said it wasn’t impossible, but the odds were significantly narrower for Lila than the “average young female” to become pregnant and carry a child full-term.

She said, “Well, I was raised to believe in miracles.”

When they got home she unloaded two hundred rounds into the woods, trying to snuff ghosts.

Chase tried to keep Lila laughing because he knew it was starting to get to her, the fact that what came naturally to everyone else wasn’t happening for them. All day long they’d see pregnant teenagers heading to Mrs. Haskins’s Home for Wayward Unwed Girls & Peanut Farm. Lila had something like nineteen uncles and aunts, thirty-seven cousins, her parents, and both sets of grandparents living less than five miles away. At every family function they all let her have it. Asking when she was going to have a kid.

It worked her nerves. Chase knew they all figured he must have bad genes, being a Yankee and now this, and he let them keep on believing it. Lila cared and he didn’t.

She hung in there, but on certain nights the fact rattled her and a black mood would hit. She’d hold him tightly as if he might be running out on her, really putting her weight into it and using some cop holds on him, twisting him down. With her mascara running she’d say, “I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“There is.”

No matter what he said he couldn’t snap her out of it. She had to bounce back on her own. They’d lie there drinking wine or whiskey, the heavy breeze coming down out of the hills washing the curtains back.

She only brought up his parents or Jonah when the idea of motherhood started to drift away from her. “You think he ever loved you? Your granddaddy?”

“Yes,” Chase said, surprising both of them.

“You loved him?”

“Yes.”

“But you were afraid of him.”

“Everybody was afraid of him.”

“And you just couldn’t trust him anymore after that last card game.”

“Even before that. He would’ve thrown me over if he had to. I just thought I’d be the last one he threw over.” Chase sipped the whiskey. “It’s part of the way the pros do things.”

“Leaving their friends behind?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “If there’s no other way around it.”

“But you didn’t. Not the night we met. You hung around. You never ran.”

“No, I don’t run.”

“A’ course, you did wind up shooting your own string.”

“Only in their legs. And only for you.”

“Wasn’t much of a getaway.”

“It was for you.”

“So warm, sweetness,” she said and rolled to him.

“I bet the other girls just got flowers and chocolates.”

5

C hase began dreaming of his mother and the dead little sibling, the one who hadn’t had a chance to be born. He’d spent years trying to forget her face, tamping those memories down inside him, but now she appeared before him quite clearly, her voice almost breezy as she spoke his name.

He was back in the house he grew up in. The lawn had been mowed, the edging along the grass done with precision, the hedges perfectly trimmed, the tops as straight as if they’d been laid out with a ruler. Either it was high aesthetic or his father had a touch of OCD.

At the kitchen table, his mother sat calling to him, as if he was in another room. He stepped closer but she couldn’t seem to see him. He noted the way she wore her hair in looping ringlets, a slight reddish tint to it, the same as he got in his beard when he let it grow out. Her lips were full, almost as full as Lila’s. Her belly just a tiny bulge.

He waited to see himself, as a boy, come running by, but it didn’t happen. The dead little kid was in a chair at the other end of the table. Weird to see it and still not know if it was a boy or a girl. It stared at him with its mouth moving, indecipherable sounds emerging and growing louder until he thought he could almost make them out. He moved closer and closer, and the kid leaned forward and spit in his face.

“I dreamed of my mother again last night,” Chase told her.

“I thought you might be,” Lila said. “The way you twisted in your sleep. I held you and rubbed your chest lightly and you quieted down some after a time.”

She’d been raised on mountain folklore, backwoods myths, and gospel tent revivals. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to lose the superstitious streak that had been spiked into her from childhood. When he spoke of his dreams her face grew very intense and she spooked him a little with how seriously she took them.

“What did your mama tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing. She just kept saying my name.”

Lila nodded, like spirits did this on occasion. He wondered if he should go fire a few rounds into the woods, maybe it would ease his mind a bit. Lila studied him for a moment, her features folding along all the contours of worry. It made his guts tighten, and she laid a hand against the side of his face.

“The dead will find a way to you. They’ll make you listen.”

It took about four years in Mississippi before he started to lose his cool. He’d done pretty well, all things considered.

They were at a picnic on a lake, all the kids running around down by the shore, skimming rocks and chasing turtles. Molly Mae and Judge Kelton had three little ones by now and were working on a fourth, the old man getting healthier by the year while Molly looked ready to throw herself under a truck.

Chase tried to keep his mind on the conversations circling him, but the accent still threw him off and he laughed inappropriately on occasion. He was never going to get a handle on it.

He knew he’d been getting a little distant and didn’t know how to bring himself back.

Lila came over and sat on his lap. “You want to head home to the East Coast, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

He knew she wanted to leave this place, maybe even more than he did, just to get away from the constant reminder of her family asking about when they were going to have children.

“You think I’ll like it there?” she asked.

“It’ll take some adjustment, but yeah, I think you will.”

“We going to live in Manhattan? I’m not sure I could get used to a big city like that.”

“You could, but I think we’ll be better off out on Long Island. Get a little house.”

“I suppose police work would be a little more action-packed.”

It made him tense up. He hadn’t thought for a minute she’d want to stay a cop in New York.

“I don’t think that’s an especially good idea,” he said.

Her voice grew heavy as she whispered into his ear. “You think those bad New York crews are going to take advantage of my poor countrified ways?”

“You wouldn’t be out there arresting your cousin Ernie.”

“Now you know Ernie was a real villain despite him being blood.”

It was supposed to make him feel like an idiot but instead it alarmed him a touch. She was strong and smart and could handle herself, but New York was a different world from anything she’d known. He thought about trying to talk her out of it, making a real scene if he had to, but there wasn’t any point. She’d hold her course the way she always had, right from the start.

6

L ila had never seen the ocean before. The first thing he did was take her down to the beaches. The water hypnotized her, the ever-shifting terrain and form of it, the endless blue and white fading beyond the vanishing point of the horizon. It took her hours before she went in up to her ankles. The sea terrified and elated her. A couple of times she kneeled and splashed, as if she were playing with a child. The waves rolled in and out, and from second to second, as her eyes widened and narrowed, it appeared to Chase that she had to force herself to remember she didn’t have a lost child rolling in the surf. That the kid had never been there no matter how alive in her mind it might be, calling out to her.

He became a teacher, like his father, in a town not far from where he grew up and where his mother had been murdered. Auto shop. He didn’t need a master’s degree to show kids how to fix a fan belt. Most of them couldn’t even change a spark plug and were only there because the other elective in the time slot was Home Ec. What you wound up with was all the girls learning how to make waffles and all the guys trying to act manly even though they each had Triple A and would call a towing service before changing a tire.

Only a handful of the boys were destined to be grease monkeys. They didn’t have the grades or the attitude for college and were bound to work in garages for the rest of their lives. A couple would take to it, and the others would probably be hissing in bitterness for decades to come. Chase taught them all the way Jonah and a few of the other string members had taught him, as if there was something mythic and lifesaving hidden within the depths of a car.

The kids liked him because he was young and cared more about life lessons than he did about grades. He’d watch them in the hallways and listen to their chatter. So many of them seemed bent out of shape already, worried about college, their résumés, mortgages they didn’t even have yet. He was astonished by the number of kids who had to go to rehab, had psychiatrists, took antidepressants because they’d already tried to off themselves. For the first time he started to realize maybe he’d been better off without school after all.

He taught the kids a couple of car-boosting tricks. Nothing too serious, just goofing around. But it solidified his reputation. They dug the way he spoke to them, as equals. Unlike other teachers, Chase would never judge or analyze them, and the kids knew it. The rest of the faculty members, trying to relate, would have to sift back through their lives and make an effort to recall what it was like to be a teen.

But they couldn’t quite remember and they didn’t really want to. It was too painful. Resentment would flare. So they wound up looking fake and deceptive despite their sincerity. He saw it happening all the time. Watching some old man make an ass out of himself hoping to sound hip, waving hall passes around, throwing a conniption fit if anyone was still around after the bell rang.

But Chase had never been a kid and had never been to school. He couldn’t pretend even if he wanted to. He talked to his students the way he talked to everyone. They respected him for it. They also knew that if they ever crossed him or gave him too much shit, he wouldn’t send them to the principal’s office. He’d take care of it himself. It kept them on their toes.

Despite already being a deputy sheriff, Lila had to pay for a couple of academy courses and wound up a Suffolk County cop, which was considered a cush job by the New York City fuzz. She said some of the guys gave her a hard time because of her accent, but she liked her partner, a kid a few years younger than her named Hopkins, and so far there hadn’t been too much rough action.

Hopkins was married and had two baby daughters. He and his wife came over for cake and coffee-that’s what you were supposed to do here, married couples, have cake and coffee-and brought the kids with them. Lila left Chase in the kitchen having the fucking cake and coffee while she played with the girls in the other room the whole time. He didn’t blame her, but hell, enough with the cake and coffee.

Lila told him, “Maybe you should quit teaching them kids how to steal cars. Since you started in on their fertile minds, joyriding in the area’s gone up about three thousand percent.”

She was too damn good at her job, giving the guys on the force a complex. Always getting citations, commendations, and medals for something or other. There were plenty of photo ops, the chief of her division and other public servants standing beside her, smiling, sometimes holding their hands up in a salute. It didn’t hurt to get your photo in the paper next to a beautiful young woman. Chase figured they got a little extra thrill pinning the medal to her chest, going in for a quick grope. They’d put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her ass. He noted their faces.

On occasion, she’d have some kind of a banquet or police ceremony to attend and he’d get a free dinner out of it. When the grinning gropers came around to shake his hand, telling him what a fine officer his wife was, the pride of the order, Chase would pretend to trip and give them a cheap shot to the kidneys. It wasn’t much but you retaliated where you could. The Jonah in his head told him to carry a roll of quarters in his fist next time.

Eventually it got back to the PTA that Chase was teaching the kids how to boost rides and he was brought up for review. He sat there in a classroom that had been set up to look like a court, with the judge behind the desk and him in a little chair off on his own. He got scolded by a couple of tight-asses, and he had to promise not to do it anymore. The whole review board thing didn’t carry much weight anyway since he was consistently voted one of the most popular teachers in the school district.

Sometimes at night he felt a little guilty stealing Lila away from the life she had always known before. He held her tightly with his face pressed between her breasts, breathing deeply, and she brushed her fingers through his hair and said, “You don’t have anything to feel conscience-struck about. I love it here. You gave me the ocean.”

“Is it enough?”

“Nothing is except for you, love. You’re enough. And that’s all that matters.” She kissed him and looked into his eyes, going deep again, the way she did. “’Sides, if we’d stayed in Mississippi, I’d be babysitting. Molly Mae just had her sixth.”

“Jesus Christ, six! How’s the judge?”

“He’s ready to walk on water, that miraculous sumbitch.”

7

T hey hit the city, and Lila fell in love with Broadway. So did Chase, all over again. Back when he was pulling heists with Jonah just outside of the city, he’d managed to take in a number of shows during their downtime, the scheme time. None of these major musicals playing in the elaborate theaters, but the classics held in smaller 99-seat venues. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Ibsen’s Ghosts, Albee’s A Delicate Balance, and an all-female version of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He was only fourteen but had appreciated them greatly, as they stirred him toward understanding metaphor and sentiment. He even caught a revival of Shaffer’s Equus and was surprised to see nudity on the stage. He’d been embarrassed as hell, slinking down in his seat with his cheeks heating up.

He and Lila started going to the theater as often as they could afford it. Prices were outrageous, and he didn’t know how the other stiffs managed to swing the shows. Two tickets, dinner, and parking ran upwards of three or four bills, but they managed to make a night of it at least once a month, so long as Lila wasn’t pulling night shifts.

One evening, after The Producers, which Lila found hysterical and Chase thought was way too broadly acted, they were walking down Seventh Avenue toward a little Italian place they liked when a guy bumped into Chase and said, “’Scuse me, buddy.”

“Sure,” Chase said, knowing something had just gone wrong. It took him a second to check his wallet.

Gone. His pocket had been picked.

Goddamn, that had been a nice brazen, fluid move. A quick dip, lift, and fly. The straight life had made him careless. Getting hit by a nimble, practiced pickpocket, it actually surprised him the way it would a regular citizen. Chase wasn’t sure if he should rush after the mook or ask Lila to go grab him, use her wily police skills all over his ass.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I just had my wallet lifted.”

“You know by who?”

Chase still had his eye on the guy up ahead in the foot traffic. “Yeah.”

“Well? You gonna let him get away with the boodle? Or you want I should do all the work even on my night off?”

“You are the defender of the peace,” Chase said. “My taxes pay your salary.”

“I’m simply a wife expecting to be treated to a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant.”

“Be right back.”

“Don’t take too long, I’m jonesing for some lasagna.”

Pronouncing it la-zanga.

“Get a bottle of Merlot and order me the fettuccine Alfredo,” Chase said and took off down Seventh Avenue after the pickpocket, weaving through the crowd.

He found the guy zipping around the corner, heading for a subway station. Walking hurriedly but without breaking into a run. He was good but not especially smart. He should’ve stayed with the street crowd instead of taking the corner and making for a subway fifteen minutes before the next train. He should’ve had the cash out by now and dumped the wallet.

Chase got up close behind the mook, invading space, and made the guy stop and turn around to see who was breathing down his neck. No one else was nearby.

“I’m curious,” Chase said, “what made you choose me?”

“What?”

Up close, the stealthy mutt didn’t blend in with the urban hordes as much as Chase had originally thought. He was only around thirty but already seriously burned at the edges. Wrinkled, faded, and losing the fight to keep from being swept out to sea. A cokehead but not overly wired at the moment, his eyes a low grade of lethal. What Jonah used to call a skel, a dreg, a bottom-feeder.

“I’m no mark,” Chase told him. “Your kind always go after the tourist trade and folks who are distracted or lost. So why me?”

“What?”

Okay, so no reminiscing over the bent life with this one. Chase would have to settle on getting just a brief whiff of the old days. “Give me my wallet.”

“Get the fuck away. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Come on, let’s have it.”

“You don’t want a piece of me.”

“You’ve got that right. Just hand over my wallet.”

“I’m not kidding with you, man, go back to fucking Kentucky or wherever you’re from.”

Now that was just mean-spirited. “New York born and bred, fucker!”

The guy drew his chin to his chest, eyes narrowing, squeezing out the world. He went deep, calling up anger and hate and letting it wash over him. You could see it happening, how the guy was just letting himself go, drifting with the worst that was inside him. All of this for what? Chase had maybe eighty bucks in the wallet, two credit cards he could cancel in sixty seconds.

But the mook had skilled hands all right. One second there was nothing in his fist, and the next he was holding a fold-out blade. It snapped open with a dramatic click. Chase hadn’t been expecting a blade or pistol. Most pickpockets went into the trade because of its relative safety. No confrontation, no muscle, nobody gets hurt. No weapons were used so any jail time was light.

But this one, he’d worked a lot with his knife. Maybe it was the coke. It kept him up three days straight with nothing to do but practice.

He kept the blade down low, out straight before him. He did everything right so far as Chase knew. A couple of strings he’d been a part of had had knife fighters on them. Guys who did nothing but sharpen blades and throw them into dart-boards between scores. Almost all of them went down after carving up someone in a barroom brawl.

You saw a guy with a knife in this day and age and you knew you were looking at a serious asshole.

The mutt unleashed a nice speedy move, and suddenly the knife was coming in at a nasty angle. None of this slashing shit, not even the usual stabbing motion. A low-slung swinging arc coming up from the groin. If it hooked into Chase’s belly it would yank out his guts.

The fuck was wrong with these antisocial sons of bitches? You could rob a man without butchering him.

Chase barely avoided the maneuver, got his left arm up to block and shot off two rapid-fire punches to the guy’s nose. It brought blood but didn’t slow the mook down any. He made another low, slicing action.

“You’re fast but you don’t know when to call it quits,” Chase said.

The guy was too focused to respond, on a complete burn with his heart rate up. He looked like he just didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, like he might as well kill or die as soon as walk away.

Chase was only twenty-five and in prime shape, but the straight life had worn him down a little, made him soft. He saw what might happen. Imagined himself snuffed on the curb, with Lila eating breadsticks for the next hour thinking what the hell had happened to him, and wondering when she could crack the wine and get some pasta.

“Shit,” Chase said.

The blade came upward toward Chase’s groin and he caught the guy’s wrist, squeezed and bent it back, feeling the little bones grind into sand. The knife dropped and clattered on the cement. Chase tugged forward and sidestepped. The mook let loose with an outraged yelp as he passed by Chase’s shoulder, the light stir of breeze sort of singing, and Chase spun and elbowed him hard in the back of the head.

The pickpocket went down like he was dead.

Bathed in cold sweat, Chase staggered against the side of a building, gasping for air. It took him a minute to get back his cool. He went through the mutt’s pockets. Tore open a folded envelope and poured out a gram of coke on the sidewalk. Found a tightly rolled wad of eleven hundred bucks and took it. Got his wallet and five others. Another grand or so, not including his own eighty bucks. He pocketed it all.

Fuck off for the night, straight life.

Turning the corner, he found a mailbox and tossed the other wallets in.

At the restaurant, Lila had already ordered and was digging into a plate of lasagna, a hunk of buttered bread on the side of her plate, an open bottle of Merlot in the center of the table. God he loved to see her eat. His fettuccine was still steaming. Perfect timing. He sat and poured two glasses, downed his own quickly, and poured another.

She said, “Go wash, there’s blood on your hands.”

He hadn’t noticed. It took him a minute in the men’s room to scrub a stain out of his cuff. He knew she’d never ask him anything about it, giving him plenty of room to move. When he got back, the waiter was passing by, and Chase ordered Dom Pérignon.

She said, “Champagne?”

Why the hell not, he was twenty-one big ones ahead. “It’s a celebration.”

“My. And just what are we celebrating, sweetness?”

“That you’re not a widow,” Chase told her.

8

T hey went to another specialist at the Center for Human Reproduction in Manhasset. A real fat cat who blinked and sniffed a lot. This time the doc had a big chart on a wall and he drew on it with an erasable marker, showing the ins and outs of all their plumbing. Chase was a little sorry he’d been given the grand tour. Of all the mysteries that needed to be solved, he figured this one was better left in the shadows of the bedroom. The doc told him to wear boxers. Chase hated boxers but he’d been wearing them for years, since the first specialist told him to wear boxers. The doc gave him pills so he could power up the little guys and get them to do their business despite the hardships they faced.

In the deep night, when she thought he was asleep, Lila would whisper that she was sorry. But he wasn’t sure she was saying it to him. Just putting it out there to the universe. Sometimes he just let her talk, and sometimes he’d feel the need to tell her it wasn’t her fault. He’d fight for the light, but by the time he got the lamp on she’d be pretending to be asleep.

Chase got a call from Hopkins saying Lila had taken a wrench to the back while busting up a roadside car lot in Wyandanch.

Hopkins described the scam even though Chase already knew it. He’d been the one to explain it to Lila, who’d then told Hopkins.

Failing auto shops would partner up for a hit. Clean out the garages and claim that all their tools and cars brought in for servicing had been stolen. They’d put in insurance claims and shut their doors. One day there’d be a thriving auto shop on the corner, and the next everything was wiped clean, not even a can of motor oil left behind. The cars would be sold off cheap at a highway rest stop or a corner lot someplace, mostly to old men who knew the score and didn’t care or teenagers who’d learn fast the first time they caught a ticket.

Whatever didn’t sell in twelve hours was taken to a chop shop. After the insurance came through, a new garage opened up across town, with all the same tools and stock, and everybody would take their part of the kick.

Lila mentioned the trouble they were having in the Wyandanch-Deer Park area and Chase told her exactly how the scam worked. Three days later, she and Hopkins went out and caught one of the roadside lots going full swing. They got into a high-speed pursuit with the guys running the show, racing down the Sagtikos to Ocean Parkway. Lila always drove. She’d learned a lot from Chase over the years. She rammed the getaway car and nearly drove it off the Robert Moses Bridge into the Great South Bay.

They arrested a trio of perps right there on the bridge. While Hopkins was reading them their Miranda, a skinny guy with a lot of grease on his hands managed to slip his cuffs and come at Lila with a twelve-inch crescent wrench he’d hidden down the back of his overalls.

Doesn’t look like much until you get hit with it. That fucker can powder bones.

At the hospital, the doctors told Chase there was nerve damage and pressure on her spine. She couldn’t feel her legs. They weren’t sure if she’d ever walk again.

In her hospital bed she laughed it off while he tried to shake his terror and smile at her. She said, “A’ course I’m gonna walk again, the hell kinda foolishness is that? I’m just a little bruised.”

Turned out she was right. Not even twelve hours later she was up and walking around, feeling fine. The goddamn doctors, they’d give you their very worst right out of the gate just so you couldn’t come back at them later with a lawsuit for building up your hopes. Still, they wanted her to stay put for observation.

Chase called Deucie, who was still running the same chop shop for the mob in Jersey. He said, “There’s a crew working the roadside car lot scam in Wyandanch.”

“What do I care about fucking Long Island?” the Deuce said.

“They’ve lost three of their main guys in charge of the show. It’s going to take them a while to get reorganized and figure out what to do with all the product the cops haven’t already seized. Anybody with a little resolve and muscle can take over a couple of garages worth of stock, autos, and car parts.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Sure he would. A couple of days later a string of auto shops in the area went out of business and never did reopen across town. Chase called Deucie back, said, “Okay, now I need something.”

“Of course you do. This got anything to do with the mutt who beat up your old lady?”

It snapped Chase’s chin up, hearing it laid down like that. He didn’t know Deucie would’ve checked him out so thoroughly. “Yeah.”

The Deuce made a noise, a kind of snorting laugh.

“What?” Chase asked.

“It’s what Jonah would do.”

“Fuck that noise, Deuce. Jonah would do it himself. So listen, you got anybody who knows anybody who’s stuck out at the Suffolk County lockup?”

“Not any of those short-time local inmates, but I think I have a friend who knows a correctional guard.”

The guy with the crescent wrench’s name was Cordell Williams. Chase had been turning the name around and around in his head. He said, “He’ll be getting transferred to Rikers soon.”

“And before he does? You want him aced? That’s going to cost you more than some cheap-shit car wrecks and a couple dozen boxed mufflers.”

“I just want him worked over enough that he lays in bed for a while and reflects on his life’s mistakes.”

“You always were a little soft.”

“Call me when it’s done.”

The Deuce phoned the next afternoon. “They put the hurt on him. Busted a couple of ribs, three or four of his toes. Hope that’s not too rough for you.”

Chase thought it was a little light but said, “Fine.”

Her first day home, lying on the couch with a bunch of satin pillows propped behind her, she got a call from Hopkins. He must’ve told her about what had happened to Cordell Williams, but she just hung up, flipped on the television, and started watching some cooking show. If she suspected Chase had anything to do with it, she never said a word to him about it. But once, during a commercial, he caught her grinning at him.

9

A couple of months later her parents came in for a weeklong visit during Lila’s vacation. Chase picked them up at Newark and played tour guide, showing them some of Manhattan. Passing by the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall. He crawled up Fifth Avenue pointing out the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum Mile, the Guggenheim. Right from the start they were both withdrawn and spooked. The traffic terrified them, the noise, the smell. He figured he’d botched the mission by killing them with culture shock on their first day in town, and he got them back to his house as fast as he could.

Lila had an itinerary: barbecue that afternoon. Head out to Montauk Point the next day, go see the seals. Later in the week, go take in a Broadway show, visit to the top of the Empire State Building, do the Circle Line, see the Statue of Liberty.

But Chase had blown it. There, fifteen minutes after her parents set foot in the living room, both he and Lila realized none of it was ever going to happen. They grilled steaks in the backyard for five days straight.

Sheriff Bodeen sat on the patio chair and drank a case of beer a day. Watched a lot of television, commented on the state of the front lawn, and cleaned Lila’s already extremely clean guns. And every afternoon, when Chase got home from work, Bodeen found the need to ask him, “So when you gonna put my little gal in a family way?”

The week crawled by like a gutted animal. Chase started staying at the school later and later, even after everyone had gone except for him and the janitors. The custodial staff played their radios and buffed the floors, and Chase would sit in the automotive shop pulling out and rebuilding transmissions for the hell of it.

At the end of the week, Lila’s mother, the quietest woman Chase had ever met, hugged him good-bye, squeezing hard and putting all her burly muscle into it, said, “When you gonna put my little gal in a family way?”

They went to another specialist in Manhattan. This one doused any last hope. He looked at the files and charts and focused his attention entirely on Lila, explaining why she couldn’t get pregnant, patting her lightly on the shoulder and running his hand down the back of her hair, flattening it with his hesitant touch. He occasionally pressed his fingers to her belly, drawing little maps of where her internal organs were. Which ones were doing their job, which ones weren’t. When he jabbed at the offending parts of her anatomy, Lila’s face would darken. He told them that miracles were always possible, and he said it like they’d have to be fucking idiots to believe it. He walked out without another word.

No one else would’ve noticed the shift in her expression. In every way it appeared to be the same as before the doc had entered the little room and poked at her and said his piece, but Chase saw a world of difference. She wouldn’t want to break down in front of him, but it was an hour’s train ride back to their station on Long Island. He didn’t think she’d be able to make it.

They took a cab to Penn and he felt the guilt and remorse within her straining to break free, the small space separating them in the backseat filled as if by the presence of a remote but solidifying dream. He didn’t suggest adoption because he knew that, more than wanting to bear a child, she wanted to bear his child. She’d always hoped to offer Chase the stability of the healthy, happy family he’d never had growing up. No matter how often he told her that it was all right with him, she wouldn’t accept it. It was just another reason to love her.

They entered Penn Station from Seventh Avenue and moved quickly down two flights of stairs to the Long Island Railroad waiting room. They had almost a half hour before their train and he decided to give her a few minutes alone to cry in the ladies’ room if she needed to.

He asked if she wanted anything and she told him to get a slice of pizza for her. Italian food was the one thing she loved better than Southern cooking. They had pizza three times a week. He didn’t mind, he’d been missing it badly for years, and it reminded him of Friday nights when he was a kid and his father would bring a pie home for dinner.

He had to fight the rush-hour throng to make it to the parlor on the other side of the station. The place was crowded and he hung back waiting a few minutes until he thought she might be through with her crying jag. He ordered four slices and a couple of sodas and carried them back to the waiting room.

Three cops were there waving their billy clubs in the air, and Lila had her knee on some guy’s throat. He was a well-trimmed youth in a camouflage jacket, his mouth bleeding and his face going purple while he struggled to breathe. He wasn’t having much luck with it since Lila was kind of crushing his thorax. Her purse was on the floor beside her with a few bills on the loose.

Chase quickly put together what must’ve happened. The kid asking for spare change, Lila handing him a dollar, and then the punk making a grab for the wallet.

She was saying, “If your mama ain’t learned you no manners, then maybe the fine gentlemen at Rikers Island will!” When she was pissed her accent came on even stronger. “You goin’ to see what they there charge you for lessons in flesh and bone, boy!”

With every word she nudged up and down on his neck and he went “Gug!”

The cops finally wrestled her off and nearly arrested her until she flashed her badge. They hauled the punk off, she gave her statement and signed the papers. It had all taken less than ten minutes.

Chase stood there as she stepped over and took the bagged pizza from him. “I’m a damn sight on the far side of hungry, sweetness,” she said, tearing into a slice. “Bless yer soul.”

10

I t rained like a son of a bitch the day she died.

He was showing the kids how to flush a transmission and do a fluid change when one of the math teachers appeared at the door. He called Chase aside. He’d been on break in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette listening to his car radio, and told him what he’d just heard. The breaking news report hadn’t mentioned any names, but when they said a female police officer had been taken in for emergency surgery after a shoot-out at a diamond wholesaler in Hauppauge, he thought he’d better tell Chase.

Chase kept his cell phone turned off during class hours. He snapped it on and checked the messages. There was one from Hopkins. Chase could barely make out what the fuck he was saying due to all the sirens in the background. Hopkins was crying.

Taking flooded corners at seventy, Chase got to the hospital in fifteen minutes and parked in the red zone. It was coming down so hard that the twenty-yard dash to the door left him completely drenched. He spotted Hopkins beating the shit out of a coffee machine. Chase walked past, found a nurse, and gave her Lila’s name.

The nurse scuttled off and came back with a young doctor who needed to work on his people skills. The guy blurted out that Lila had taken a bullet in the throat and two in the chest, one nicking her heart. Thirty seconds later, as an addendum with artificial syrup dripped on, he stated how they’d tried their best, their very best, but there was really nothing anyone could do. It was her time. The young doctor licked his teeth like he smelled sirloin. His black hair was moussed with the front swirled into a little curtain of tight, dyed-blond ringlets that wasn’t marred by any breaking sweat. Chase asked if she was DOA.

No, the doc said, no. No. She’d died on the table. He told Chase where to go if he wanted to see the body.

The body.

He didn’t. He put the flat of his hand on the doc’s chest and shoved him away. The guy fell back into the nurses’ station and almost said something. How smart of him not to.

There was blood in the air. Some of it Lila’s, none of it Chase’s. Think about the mistake of that.

Chase dove for the cold spot and couldn’t seem to find it. It had moved from the place where it had always been before. Seconds ticked off like lifetimes going by as he kept seeking the spot and coming up empty. Finally he realized he was already there.

It was a deeper and blacker place than he remembered, but the ice slid over his utter desolation, cooling him, forcing him to function. Chase asked what caliber the bullets had been, and the doctor just looked at him. The storm tore at the windows. Chase repeated himself and the doc lurched backward.

Nothing more out of that one. Chase turned and Hopkins’s wife was there sobbing in the hallway. So was Hopkins, the two of them staggering around together, not quite touching for a minute, and then finally grasping hold of each other. Hospital security was yelling about the busted coffee machine. Hopkins’s hands were badly skinned, blood leaking onto the floor. Hopkins and his wife went to their knees. Nothing out of them either.

They didn’t notice Chase until he was almost to the door and then they started calling to him, his own name sailing past. He didn’t look back.