The Cold Spot (5 page)

T
he next day, Lila invited him back to her place. A
single-story house off in the woods, pretty much on its own, maybe two miles down the road from her parents’, three or four from the center of town where the police station was. He’d followed her here a couple times and cased the place. He showed her what was wrong with the locks on her windows and how easy it was to break in the back door.

“How romantic,” she told him, “sharing methods on home invasion prevention.”

He shrugged. “I stick to my strengths.”

She made roasted wild turkey and stuffing with sharp, tangy flavors he’d never tasted before. While they sat there eating, without the need always to fill the silence, he realized with some surprise that this was his very first date.

He’d lost his virginity at thirteen when Jonah had brought home two waitresses from a truck stop in Cedar Rapids, where they’d been working a short grift picking up a few easy bucks. Jonah had brought other women around before but no relationship had ever lasted more than a couple of weeks.

Carrying a mostly empty pint of Dewar’s, Jonah introduced both ladies as Lou, which got them giggling. He said their names again and they guffawed so hard they had to sit down. Chase didn’t get the joke, but what the hell.

The whiskey reek coming off them filled the room like smoke from a three-alarm fire. Chase couldn’t handle the smell anymore, not since the days when his father had taken bottles to the cemetery. His stomach tumbled and he began to breathe shallowly.

The cute Lou turned out to be Louise, who gave Chase the eye and licked her lips. She got up and lurched toward him, saying she wanted to dance. She hummed in his ear and pressed her huge breasts to him, where they wobbled proudly. She whispered how she liked younger men because they could ride in the saddle all night long. He’d never heard it called that before, but he was a bright kid and could pick up on the metaphor. It tightened his guts and scared the shit out of him, but the heat rising through his body seared away any doubts.

The much less cute Lou was Lulu, who was nearly unconscious but still making the effort to hang in there. She gave Chase an unfocused gaze where her eyes mostly crossed. Her chin fell to her chest as she struggled to stay awake. Her teeth were smeared with red lipstick.

Chase looked at Jonah and realized his grandfather, who never drank on a job, was stone sober.

It was only when cute Lou was about to dance off to the bedroom with Chase that Jonah put his arm around her in a blatant territorial gesture. No subtlety there, no mistaking the meaning. He held up a hand to Chase’s chest, not quite touching him, grasping the girl tightly under his wing.

So there it was. Chase got the chick who was nearly out cold for his first lay. Before he could do anything he made her brush her teeth and gargle. It still didn’t kill the whiskey smell, and for the eight minutes he was in the saddle he had to keep his face turned away from hers.

It was terrible, but at least he didn’t have to take the blame for the general lack of success all by himself. In the morning, it didn’t seem to matter. Lulu didn’t remember much. They went for a second bout on the couch that was much better than the first go-around.

At Lila’s dinner table, thinking of Lulu made him realize all the more what he’d been missing for so long.

After they’d finished eating she said, “Let’s have wine in the den.”

He looked around the place. “You don’t have a den.”

“Sure I do, there’s even a fireplace.”

“Most folks call that the bedroom,” he told her.

Holding up the bottle of wine, easing him along as she pressed forward, she said,” That right?”

Afterward, while he
was catching his breath, she asked him again about his past.

It was getting a little spooky now, always talking about the worst things that had ever happened to him while her chest was powdered with salt and his neck burned with her teeth marks.

He slid aside and stared into the cold fireplace, wondering why anybody in Mississippi would ever need one in their house, much less in the bedroom. It was October and nearly eighty degrees outside.

“I always wondered what it would’ve been like,” he said, “if my old man had been able to hold on. If he could’ve ever bounced back from being so broken. But Jonah told me I would be better off without my father. Maybe he was right.”

Lila tensed and reared up, giving him the pout, and brought her small, hard fist down on his belly. It hurt and he gasped.

“Don’t you say that.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t you ever say such a thing, you hear me now?”

“All right.”

“Fathers are important.”

She was so powerful in her presence, standing up for people she’d never meet, who were already nearly ten years dead. He’d never shared so much with anyone before.

As the sun went down, the shadows lanced the bedroom, growing thicker second by second, stabbing across the sheets. The window was open, a breeze stirring the lace curtains. Despite having shoved his childhood behind locked doors, he could still hear an occasional noise come through. Now he heard the sound of his old man chopping at the ice with an ax, needing to die so badly.

“I hope he’s not dead,” Chase said.

“Your daddy?”

He let out a small snort of surprise. “No, the man who murdered my mother and the baby. I can’t let go of the idea that one of these days I might get a chance to kill him.”

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.”