The Cold Spot (8 page)

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.

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.”

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.