Tom Piccirilli - The Cold Spot

Chase knew at least a couple of his kids were tooling around the city picking up extra cash doing some weekend racing. They’d asked him the best way to soup their cars for the fast burn, some of them hoping he could set them up with nitrous. He’d never run nitrous himself and thought it was insane to fuck around like that in New York. It was strictly a West Coast way to kill yourself.

Chase took the train into Manhattan and found the 24-hour parking garage closest to the Holland Tunnel. Security was lax at two A.M. Chase wandered right in past the college kid on duty in the entrance booth who had his face buried in a textbook, snoring so hard that the plastic windows of the little booth rattled.

It took Chase almost two hours of searching the place before he found what he wanted, up on the fourth level.

A 1970 yellow Chevelle. Cowl induction hood, dual exhaust, and fourteen-inch Super Sport wheels. A machine made of muscle.

He got the door open and popped the hood-454 Four Speed with a 360-horsepower engine. It had been cared for, souped pretty nicely but could still use a little fine-tuning. That wouldn’t take him long.

The VIN number had been filed down and burned away with an industrial acid. Same with the serial numbers on the engine block. There was no paperwork in the glove compartment. He was boosting a car that had probably already been boosted a half-dozen times since it came off the line.

He slid up to the semaphore arm and didn’t even have to run it. He just slowly eased down on the gas and the arm snapped across the Chevelle’s grille while the college kid kept dreaming about advanced calculus or subatomic particle theory.

Chase spent the entire morning adjusting the engine, the brakes, and the suspension, making it all even sweeter. The thief before him had done a damn good job, but now she’d handle even better on the turns.

He switched out the plates and repainted the car a burnished black. While waiting for it to dry he sat in the corner of the garage sucking in the fumes and going back and forth on who might have been the inside person on the ice heist, the man or the woman.

Late afternoon he took the Chevelle out for a test run down Commack Road, ripping it into triple digits and hoping a cop would engage him, but no cruiser ever showed. He pulled it back into the garage and checked a couple of final calibrations. Then, when he’d done all that he could do with the time he had, Chase fell into bed exhausted and dreamed of Lila.

She appeared before him on the bed, twining across his chest the way she usually had during the deep night, and said, “I told you the dead would find a way. You just have to listen to us. So hear me now, love. You gotta let this thing go. I don’t want you to follow through with what you’re planning. How do you expect me to rest easy knowing what’s on your mind? You remember what I say.”

He tried to answer her, but when he opened his mouth all that came out was Walcroft’s sound rattling loose from inside him.

He woke in the morning with the pillowcase soaking wet.

He’d been crying like hell in his sleep.

He wasn’t hard at all.

The phone rang. It was the principal of the school extending his condolences again. The staff and many of the students had taken up a collection and bought flowers for the funeral, and had Chase noticed them? The remaining fund would be given to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association in Lila’s name. The principal told him not to worry about returning anytime this semester. An extended leave of absence with pay was in effect. Was there anything that anyone at the school could do? The principal repeated himself and waited for Chase to say something.

Chase said, “I quit,” and hung up.

T urned out the hero who’d gone up against the crew during the ice heist lived alone in a small two-story house over in Smithtown, the kind of place Chase used to burgle pretty frequently during the early years he ran with Jonah.

It was noon. The time of day when all the kids were at school and the stay-at-home moms and dads and retirees were busy with their soap operas and daytime talk shows, learning how to be better people while slumped on their couches. Nobody ever spotted a cat burglar at noon.

He parked down the block and scoped James Lefferts’s house. Lefferts’s Taurus was in the driveway, the exhaust still dripping. Looked like he had come home for lunch. Chase waited twenty minutes before he saw Lefferts leave, holding his briefcase tightly

The guy had two black eyes and wore a Band-aid across the bridge of his nose. He was going to have a definite tilt to the left for a couple of months until they broke his nose again and could realign the cartilage. Chase watched Lefferts get in his car and head back to the diamond merchant’s.

Chase climbed out and walked through a wooden gate at the side of the house. It led to a fussily kept backyard screened from the neighbors by a high row of hedges. Lefferts lived alone and liked things tidy. Garden gnomes, birdhouses, and little windmills had been planted among the carefully cultivated bushes and flowers edging the perfectly trimmed lawn.

No alarm system. The back door had a dead bolt and the windows were all locked. Took Chase ninety seconds to get inside.

He did a slow and efficient search of the house, going through every closet, drawer, and cabinet. It immediately became apparent that Lefferts was a truly finicky guy. He hung all his shirts on hangers, not just the dress ones but even the V-necks, track suits, and Ts. Kept his sock drawer in perfect order, the whites over here, the blacks over there, his boxers folded and neatly stacked. He recycled and washed out his tuna cans and mayo jars. His electric razor was empty of stubble. All his rolls of masking tape had the first half inch folded over.

The only suspicious items Chase came up with were a box of magazines and videos that bordered on child pornography. Not quite over the line, but man was it close. Some of the stuff was in other languages and came with subtitles. What passed for erotica in Romania would get you strung up in Birmingham. There were also Russian mail-order bride catalogs, featuring mostly pale, seminude chubby girls in ads that read, My name is Mischa, and I am looking for a successful American businessman who I can love in bed and out. Must own his own home. No children. I prefer no pets but won’t mind one small dog or cat. I enjoy oral sex. These Russkie chicks laid it on the line.

James Lefferts got home at seven. He was putting in the hours, no doubt about his taking the job seriously. Someone like that would probably mouth off at three Colt Pythons when one of his fellow employees got shoved around.

Chase couldn’t afford Jimmy getting tough with him now. He needed information fast. He could feel the hours evaporating, the crew getting ready to make their move. They were out there, burning away the downtime until their fence came through with the cash. A couple of them thinking about spending the long green, a couple of others only caring about the juice of the next score. Every string was about the same.

Lefferts walked in and saw Chase in the living room and said, “Who the hell are you?”

Chase punched him in his already broken nose. Lefferts let out a squawk of agony and dropped like he’d taken an ax to the head.

Blood burst down his chin and across his shirt. He tore at his face with both hands, writhing on the carpet, tears flowing down his cheeks as he flailed and rolled. Chase got some ice cubes out of the freezer, put them in a dish towel, and crushed them against the countertop. When he got back to the living room he saw that Lefferts had vomited all over himself and was only semiconscious.