“I’m through,” Chase said.
“You’re not through.”
“I’m going my own way.”
“Turning your back on blood?”
“No,” Chase told him. “You ever need me for something other than a score, let me know. I’ll be there.”
That almost made Jonah smile, except he didn’t know how to do that either. “Going to start doing scores on your own? More second-story kitten burglaries, shinnying up the drainpipe? Knock over liquor stores and gas stations? Home invasions? You’ll get picked up on your first run.”
“A minute ago I was a pro.”
Jonah stared at him, eyes empty of everything. You looked into them for too long and it would drive you straight out of your skull. “You’re a string man now. You’re part of a chain. You’re a driver. You going to start working for other crews?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll retire.”
“And deliver newspapers?”
Jonah reached out and gripped Chase’s arm, digging his fingers in deep. It hurt like hell. In the past two years Chase had grown to six feet and gained thirty pounds of muscle, but he knew he wasn’t as icy as his grandfather. He didn’t think he ever would be. He wondered for perhaps the ten thousandth time how his fatally weak father could have come from this man. Chase fought to remain expressionless.
His mind squirmed and buzzed with all his failed tasks and unaccomplished dreams. He hadn’t yet killed the man who’d murdered his mother. He’d never made a major score.
“I don’t have any answers,” Chase admitted. “I just know we’re through after this.” He tried to shrug free but couldn’t break his grandfather’s hold. “Walcroft wasn’t even dead yet.”
“Close enough.”
When you’ve got nowhere to go you go back to the beginning. “I didn’t see a wire. I don’t believe it.”
“You’ve got an overabundance of faith.”
“Not anymore. Let me go.”
“Okay, then try it on your own,” Jonah said, releasing him. “But wipe the table again before you do. You know how to get in touch with me if you need to.”
They each packed
their belongings and took their shares and split up as they moved down the hall. Jonah hit the button for the elevator and Chase hit the stairway. Fourteen floors, he wasn’t going to beat Jonah to the ground, but he didn’t want to be in a confined space with the man. When he came out he searched the lobby and didn’t see any of the crew. He rushed out the door and down the block, still trying to take it all in. Got to the garage where the Nova was parked but couldn’t force himself inside it. He had to know.
Chase ran around the block back toward the hotel. They’d forgotten or didn’t care that he had one of the room’s two plastic card keys. He intended to check Walcroft’s body to see if he’d really been wired.
A confidence man knew how to read human nature. He could see down through the gulf of complex emotion and know what people were feeling, even if he didn’t have those feelings himself.
Jonah had known he’d try it. His grandfather stood on the opposite side of the block, perched just inside a storefront. He was wearing a jacket, his arms crossed against his chest. That meant the .22 was back in its ankle holster and his .38 was on his belt, and his knife was at the small of his back.
Look at this shit, the things you’ve got to worry about now. Like wondering if Jonah or one of the others might tip the cops about the Nova. Was it possible? The fish-market goombahs wouldn’t have called the police so the car should still be clean enough to get out of New York. Unless Jonah had given Chase up directly to the mob, told the fish-market guys, Hey, you want some of your cash back, this kid right here has it.
His grandfather might ace him but would he turn rat? Chase couldn’t see it but he couldn’t see Jonah snuffing Walcroft until he’d done it.
No, the Chevy Nova he’d rebuilt from the tires up was out now.
Chase moved past the garage and caught a bus at the corner heading crosstown. He didn’t feel any fear or hope or excitement. He’d shifted gears again and now his life was on a different road.
F
ive months later Chase was stealing cars for a
Jersey chop shop run by a small-time Mafia bagman called the Deuce.
Deuce had a scam going where he’d strip sports cars and dump the frames back onto the street, wait for the insurance companies to auction them off, buy them up for just a couple of bucks, then reassemble the cars with the original parts and sell them legally to the crime families. He was known as Uncle Deucie to all the Mafia princesses driving around in the Ferraris and Porsches he’d sold them for a flash of leg. All day long the Deuce would be on the phone promising the little darlings anything they might want for Christmas or their birthdays or when they graduated high school. He liked the attention but never let it go any further than that for fear some mob torpedo would punch his ticket for crossing a line.
Tuned in to an oldies station—the vibrant and charged black female harmonies working through his guts like the thrum of the engine—Chase slid into the garage driving a Mercedes SUV, sort of grooving in his seat.
He’d boosted the truck from a high-end dance club on the shore known for its coke trade, where the valet parkers and the bouncers always left the front door uncovered around closing because they were off getting blowjobs in the little security booth. The locked glove box held an envelope with twenty-four hundred bucks cash, a fifth of Cuervo, and a few tabs of acid. Owner was probably a rich dude turned small-time hustler, who brought drunk Jersey City high-hair chicks out to the truck and banged them in the backseat.
Chase had pocketed the money and tequila and tossed the LSD out the window. It was now 3:00
A.M
., the slowest time for the shop. He parked in a stall and shut his eyes, swaying and tapping the shift knob while the song finished.
It was rare but, on occasion, usually in the dark of predawn with a suggestion of rain in the air, he could manage to drift from himself just far enough to start thinking about what his next step should be.
Tugging the wires in the cracked steering column apart, he listened to the echoes of the engine stalling across the bay. The place was empty except for a couple of Puerto Rican guys arguing in Spanish and trying to wrestle loose the transmission from a Jaguar. They’d never worked on one before and were perplexed by the layout. Chase didn’t know much about Jags either. He’d just decided to help out and learn whatever he could when the Deuce stepped over, opened his pocketknife, and started cleaning his fingernails.
Deuce said, “Heard about your gramps.”
Now what. Now what the fuck what.
Already sensing he was going to have to cut and run tonight, Chase prepared to make a move. He hoped to Christ this had nothing to do with the mob finding out about the fish-market boost. You never knew when something was going to roll back onto you. He had almost twenty-two grand stashed in a bank deposit box he’d rented with some fake ID and wondered if he’d be able to hold out until morning and go back for it.
“Heard what?” Chase asked.
“Him and Rook and Buzzard Allen were holed up in a museum down in Philly last night. They were going after some Renaissance paintings and rare coins, who the hell knows what fence they got. Only one I know who can move that kind of product is Joe Timpo, and he’s doing ten in Attica. Maybe nine. Nine or ten. Renaissance paintings, the hell is that? Who’s gonna hang any of that in their living rooms, even the private collectors they got today? Rare coins, sixteenth-century, Spanish I think. Spanish or Italian. Or Portuguese.”
“Back to Jonah,” Chase said, checking the door, the guys working the Jag. If this was a setup, it was a slow one.
Deuce put the knife away, pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his shirt pocket, and began chewing the end of it, a sure sign his tumblers were turning, trying to slip into place. “One of them blew away a cop and then started in on the hostages. Killed a security guard so they’d get a chopper. A fuckin’ chopper. Where’d they think they were going? How do you escape in a helicopter, the thing zipping around in the air, buzzing Ben Franklin’s grave, spooking everybody looking at the Liberty Bell? There’s room for what, two or three people in that. Where they gonna fit the paintings? You use a chopper to get out of Hanoi, not fuckin’ Philly.”
“Must’ve been Buzzard.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Me neither,” Chase said, “but the other two aren’t stupid.”
“Well, they left Buzzard there with his brains leaking out his eye sockets, so I guess they didn’t want him around their necks.” Deucie grinned a little and paused, thinking he was clever with that line, a sterling wit making the stretch between buzzards and albatrosses. When he saw he wasn’t going to get any acknowledgment, his smile collapsed and he went on. “Popped him and managed to punch a hole before too many police barricades and roadblocks were laid out and made a run in a getaway car. That’s all I know.”
“Philly’s a tight city,” Chase said. It was like trying to pull a heist in midtown Manhattan. Crammed streets, a red light at every corner, only a couple of ways in and out. Rare coins and Renaissance paintings? The hell was going on? “Cops have their names and faces?”
“No.”
“So how do you know it was Jonah and Rook with this Buzzard guy?”
“That’s what everybody’s saying anyway, so somebody spilled. Maybe Buzzard’s pals are a little steamed about what happened to him. You know me, I spend my day on the phone, the line’s always humming.” Deuce dug around in his pockets trying to come up with his Zippo, even though he’d never light the cigar tip in the garage. “A lot of these solo players, even the solid pros, they got crazy superstitions. They don’t like working a heist with someone named Jonah.”
“I know.”
“And besides”—Deucie found the Zippo, flipped the lid, sparked it, and then put it back again leaving the cigar unlit—“a lot of people were friends with Walcroft. He was popular, dependable, fun in the downtime. They didn’t like how he ended up.”
Chase shouldn’t say anything. Walcroft’s sound swept through him, the man’s blazing red eyes searching him out, even now. He fought for some kind of reply, but whatever he came out with would be totally wrong, there was no chance of otherwise. How aggravating to feel a flush of humiliation and anger rising up his neck and realize he could only react defensively, despite all that had gone down. “Jonah said he was wired.”
Deuce shrugged and nodded, his chin bobbing all over the place. “Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. It does happen. It certainly does.” Saying it like it never happened.
“¡Maricon!”
one of the Puerto Ricans shouted, and Chase spun, ready to fight or run. But the guy was just shouting because he couldn’t get the headers of the Jag out and had skinned his knuckles with a socket extension.
“What time did this score go down?” Chase asked.
Deuce realized he’d chewed the cigar butt into tobacco chaw and spit it in the corner. “Eight last night, as the museum was closing.”
There it was, the end of this road. Chase walked away while Deuce called after him, “Hey, where you going? Come on back, I need to pay you for the Mercedes.”
Uh-huh. Chase got into his own car—a ’68 GTO, primed and touched up but not yet fully repainted—and pulled out, knowing his time here was done. Even in the bent life stigma followed. Betraying one of your own crew, butchering hostages, wasting cops—it all brought down serious heat. Jonah and Rook were going to say Buzzard did it and every other pro would have to accept it even if they didn’t believe it. That or go up against them. The whole mess might never be sorted out. No one would want to help Jonah for a while, and anybody hoping to cash in on a quick reward or plea bargain would blow the whistle. The cops would be beating the brush and back alleys trying to shake any bit of info out. A lot of deals were about to be cut.
Seven hours had gone by since Jonah’s name had started getting kicked around again. Chase would have to leave the cache in the bank deposit box. He couldn’t wait the extra day, too many people knew where he was. If there was a bounty put out on Jonah by Buzzard’s friends, Deucie might turn Chase in himself, hoping he could lead them to his grandfather. You never knew. Chase didn’t blame the Deuce, it was business.
He rushed back to his rented room with the driver’s window down, letting the Jersey breeze wash over him, breathing it in deeply. It had a different kind of odor from anyplace else he’d ever been—full of pollution and pine, money and sex and corruption and action. It’d be the last time he smelled it for a while.
At the apartment he packed up, rolled the twenty-four hundred in with the three g’s stashed in the spare tire, and drove west for five hours until he’d crossed into Ohio. On the way he drank nearly all the Cuervo. His stomach burned and so did the back of his skull.
He got a room at a cheap motel, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep. In ten days he’d turn sixteen. He put a couple of quarters in the bed and got the magic fingers going. It felt more like there was a bunch of chubby kids hiding under the bed poking him in the back.
The story continued to break fresh and wide on cable news. He watched the amateur footage of the standoff outside the museum in Philadelphia. It lasted only a few minutes before the robbers burst out of the place and made their run. The sound of gunshots and bullhorns scared the amateur into dropping his camcorder.
When Chase heard the hot Asian correspondent say that the driver had broken through the roadblock and nearly clipped a teenage tourist visiting with her history class for the weekend, Chase knew that Jonah’d had trouble putting together a new string. This time there’d been no driver and his grandfather had been forced to double as the wheelman himself.
They interviewed the girl while her friends mugged and hooted for the camera.
But she was dead-eyed and mechanical in her answers, pretty but stiff with ashen blurs already appearing under her eyes. She understood now just how close she’d come to wiping out of the game and being left shattered in the street without any reason, thought, or mercy.