The Cold Spot (6 page)

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.

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.”

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.

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.”