“Your grandfather and I set it up together. If I take it, he'll ace me.”
“I get the feeling it was more your idea than his. Besides, he just talks tough. He's really a softie, likes to crochet, drink cocoa, sit in a rocking chair.”
“You've got worse troubles than me, kid.”
The old man got to his feet and took a step. He stumbled, went down to one knee again. Looking up, blood in his eyes, raw murder in his eyes, all power and hate once again. In a way, it was good to see. Chase grinned and held out his hand to help Jonah up. Inside him, Lila told him to duck. Inside him, Jonah told him to duck, I'm going to shatter your rib cage and drive the shards into your heart.
Jonah, taking Chase's hand, said, “This had better work.”
B
oth of them checked out of their motels and took a
room together in an even shittier one. No matter how beautiful a town there was always a skid row where the transients, junkies, and alcoholics on the downslide of dementia lay waiting while the pimps and whores plied their trade. Paying out by the hour, the afternoon, the last week of your life. The failures, the head cases, the hesitant suicides waiting for the final tap off the ledge. This is where they came and readied themselves to die, and prepared themselves to kill.
The air was different. The despair palpable. The curtains always shut. The heat unbearable, the air conditioner gutless. Somebody murmured and hissed his love in Spanish.
Chase set up on one side of the room and Jonah on the other, secure in the intimate understanding of each other, returning to a familiar form. This was the way things used to be, the life they'd led together
when Chase was a kid. He had a sense of déjà vu that wouldn't quit.
There were rituals your body would remember even if you could not. He took the bed closest to the window. Jonah needed to be near the door.
You'd think it was the safer place, being by the window. In case of a fire you jump out. Some hitter breaks in, you dive behind the bed, you're better protected. But the fact was, anybody trying to get in would try the windows first. Anybody looking for an easy kill might just pump a few shotgun shells inside. Jonah had always put himself first, and Chase, early on not understanding, and later only responding to his grandfather's will, learned he was always the one in front of the first bullet.
Jonah unscrewed a ventilation grate up near the ceiling and hid guns and a wedge of cash. Before he sealed it back up he glanced at Chase, expecting him to have something that needed to be cached. Chase shook his head and the old man nearly pulled a face.
Well, that was something.
They were both bruised and smeared with their own dried blood. Jonah took a shower first, leaving Chase lying on the bed listening to the sounds around him, focusing on anything to avoid listening to the sounds inside him.
Doors slammed. Televisions were loud and static-filled. Some surfer dudes sounded like they were starting early with a whore at their bachelor party. Maybe it wasn't a bachelor party. Maybe it wasn't a prostitute.
The walls were little more than Sheetrock. Someone was vomiting a room or two away. Someone else screaming, maybe sex, maybe the D.T.'s, maybe murder. Most of the time you couldn't tell the difference. A hooker was arguing with her trick. He was taking too long. The guy started crying. He wanted to kiss. She made him pay double. One of them started smacking the other. A bottle clanked around on an uncarpeted floor but didn't break. The sounds of his youth.
White sand and ocean only a mile away, paradise right there in your arms waiting, and these people were as far from it as the other side of the grave. So was he.
He split the curtains and checked out front. No one on the prowl.
Jonah had been in the shower for five minutes. Chase figured the old man hadn't even taken his clothes off yet. He was in there waiting to see if Chase was about to sneak in to try and ice him.
Another five minutes went by. Jonah finished and walked out naked. Nearly sixty- six now and still carved from rock. The bruise on his forehead looked like a Catholic daub on Ash Wednesday. The bullet scars in his back were still raw and awful. The tattoos stood out sharply in contrast to his scrubbed and flushed skin. Jonah had been in Florida for a few weeks, but had no tan. Always moving in shadow, hardly ever catching the sun.
Chase thought about the toys around the Dash house. Kylie out there on the beach with little Walt,
the two of them playing together with the salty breeze rolling in off the ocean.
Going from that to living like this with Jonah. Hearing the whores robbing the johns, the curtains always drawn, the walls always thin. The girl sleeping by the window so she could take the first bullet.
Without turning, Jonah said, “What is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You're sitting there ready to jump out of your skin.”
The man forever aware and onto you.
“Nothing,” Chase said, wondering if his grandfather was going to throw a punch now, payback for that move in the parking lot. He stood and cautiously walked past, realizing the old man knew he was being wary, and why, and so right there he'd managed to retaliate.
Chase took a shower. There was no hot water. It didn't matter to him. He stayed beneath the freezing jets for a long time, and still he was burning.
The rest of
the afternoon stumbled past. Night came on fervent and thick. The motel filled and emptied by the hour. The drunks started to sing and fight and die a little more. Noise on all four sides. Moan ing that sounded more like getting knifed in the kidneys than sex.
“Why did you come after me?” Jonah asked.
“How about if we let it slide until we get Kylie back?”
“She's nothing to you.”
“She's my blood.”
“Is that important to you?”
“You know it is.”
“Even now?”
“Especially now.”
So, was it finally time to come out with it and ask Jonah, Did you murder my mother? Did you drive your own son to suicide?
Other men, even the hardest jailbirds, the guys who'd spent half their lives in solitary, would answer human questions. You ask them what it was like pulling the trigger, strangling the woman, boosting the bank, kidnapping the mayor's kid, blasting into the crowd, and you'd get a serious response, some kind of answer. It might be the truth and it might be a lie, but they'd talk, they'd tell you.
Jonah wouldn't. Chase wanted to know about Angie, ask about Kylie, find out what the old man planned to do now that the Dash family was gone and there was nowhere else for Kylie to go. The questions built up inside him and he knew his grandfather could feel them charging the air.
“You don't know what you want, do you?” the old man said. “You've got no idea who you are anymore. You managed to stay straight a long time, but in Newark you cut all the way loose, and now you think there's no coming back from that.”
Maybe it was true. Chase tried to respond but nothing sounded real or true enough to waste his breath on.
“Go on home to New York,” Jonah said. “You don't need to be here.”
“You could use my help. You said so yourself. Besides, I don't have a home anymore.”
“You made one for yourself once, you can do it again.”
Jesus, listen to this, his grandfather almost sounding protective, with four guns in the air vent.
“I'll stick around for a while longer,” Chase said.
“Where'd you pick up the forty g's?”
While Chase had been inside talking to Boze and his crew, Jonah had taken off the car door panel and found the cash. Chase wondered how much the old man had grabbed. Not all of it, but some anyway. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen. He wouldn't have been able to stop himself.
“What do you think. I stole it.”
“That much I figured. Where? And why?”
He didn't want to get into the story about the Langans and the tie and white gloves, Sherry insane because he wouldn't fuck her, Jackie dead in Vegas. “Because I'm a thief.”
“You're an auto- shop teacher.”
Chase turned to the old man and said, “Do you love Kylie?”
“We weren't talking about that.”
“I was. I am. Do you love her more than you did Angie?”
“You're still stewing about that?”
“You killed your own woman.”
“Only because she shot me. In the back. Twice.”
“Yeah, but do you know why?”
“For the same reason anybody shoots you twice in the back. Because they want you in the ground when they steal what you've got.”
Nearly sixty- six years old, been in the joint and spent a long time dodging it, partnered with Chase and a lot of others along the way, enough blood on his hands to fill a city gutter, and the man still just didn't get it.
In a voice he knew was weak and full of sighs Chase said, “Or because they're afraid you'll steal what they've got.”
“We already talked about this. After Newark.”
“You said you expected her to make a play. You said you always do.”
“That's right.”
It was back then after Newark, with the old man driving to Chase's empty house, while Chase lay in the back still fighting fever and infection, one lung collapsed, that Jonah had said,
It happened once be fore. And for the same reason. Over a kid. Another foolish woman.
And Chase couldn't get it out of his head that the old man had been talking about Chase's mother.
“You remember what else I said?” Jonah asked.
“You asked if I was going to try you.”
“And are you?”
“You sound like you want me to.”
Jonah said nothing more, letting it go just like he let everything go that had any worth, while he lay in the dark and made sure he was always one step ahead.
* * *
Two in the
morning, the moonlight drenching him, Chase sat at the window while Jonah slept the way he always slept. Lightly. Without dreams.
Clap your hands and the old man would roll off the covers and go for the hidden gun clipped under the bed that he'd put there while Chase was in the shower.
Something was happening out in the world, Chase could feel it.
Moves being made.
Eight in the
morning, Jonah went out and brought back a greasy, bagged breakfast. The stink of it filled Chase's head with more memories. His grandfather had fed him this same meal a thousand times before, while they were planning scores, sometimes on the run. Tossing it underhand across the room, the way he did now, and Chase catching it, opening the bag and eating without knowing or caring what the food was, without even tasting it.
“Dex is setting us up,” Jonah said.
“Maybe.”
“No maybes, he is.”
“Nothing we can do about it now,” Chase said. “Unless you know where Dex has moved on to and we can get close to him.”
“No.”
“Then we wait.”
* * *
At noon Jonah's
cell buzzed. He drew the phone, handed it to Chase, and said, “Dex. You talk. This is your agenda.”
Agenda—it wasn't a word he expected Jonah to ever use. Chase nearly said, I'm trying to save your daughter.
Chase answered and Dex said, “ One- thirty this afternoon.”
“Why'd it take so long?”
“I had to find him. Bring the money.”
“You'll be there?”
“No, but the Reverend will give me my cut.”
Dex was a perfect liar, and the perfect lie rang like crystal.
Chase said, “I told you the circus score was yours. If you've fucked us on this, tell me now. It might save your life.”
“I'm way down on your list of worries.”
Chase thought, Jonah is going to turn your switch off, all because in a town full of money, you two couldn't find your own scores.
“Where's the meet?”
“At a club called the Curse of Nature. It's in Tampa. Don't be late. You need directions?”
“No,” Chase said, and hung up, knowing there was going to be a lot of blood, and almost glad for it.
J
onah unscrewed a ventilation grate and pulled out
his weapons, kept two Browning 9mm automatics and handed Chase a S&W .38. “Here.” Then Jonah reached beneath the bed and pulled his popgun .22, stuck it in his back pocket.
In the Goat on the way to Tampa, Chase told his grandfather about Arno and the club and what had happened there the other night.
“There are no coincidences. Dex is out to burn us. So why'd this place get picked for the meet?”
“I don't know.”
“He must've made a lot of calls last night. He's heard about you. What you've been doing here in Florida. Someone's been talking about you.” Jonah chewed on that for a while. “We're supposed to meet the Reverend, who ran with Angie and might give us a line on where Clarke is. Your connection said the Reverend wouldn't know Arno.”
“That's what he said.”
“So this Reverend wouldn't call the meet here.”
There are no coincidences. “Doesn't seem likely.”
“And if Dex set something up with Clarke to take us down, Clarke wouldn't call the meet here either.”
“I don't see why he would.”
“So maybe this Arno wants to settle a score.”
“It wasn't that big a thing,” Chase said. “But even if he did want me dead, and was willing to pay for it, why bring us to his front door, where things could get messy?”
“He wouldn't.”
“I don't see why.”
Dex and Clarke and Arno all working together? Had he really pissed so many people off?
Silent in the car now, Chase and Jonah both worked the angles, thinking of who might get paid, and how, and from whom, and who was selling them out. What the connections were, who might stab who in the back to get to them.
Chase kept hitting walls. He felt stupid and blinded by his need to save the girl. He wanted Lila to tell him what would be coming around the next corner. He was a little light- headed, but still drove perfectly, slick and fast, as they entered sun- glazed Tampa.
“Nice city,” Jonah said. His voice was loud as a rifle shot in the car.