Tom Piccirilli - The Cold Spot

He thought about Marisa Iverson moving in his arms, forcing her blood-smeared mouth against his. The manager, yeah, he’d enjoy that taste.

“I see it now,” Chase said.

Jonah leaned over and tapped the TV screen.

“You can tell. Everything in his life is an annoyance except for when he’s in bed with her. She takes him to a whole new place, and he’s desperate for that feeling now. He never wants to go back to what he was before. The straight citizens, most of them are so bored they want to snuff themselves.” Chase looked at the manager being annoyed, wanting out, barely able to contain himself with Marisa in the same room. “The cops will work on him, but right now he thinks he’ll go to the pen before he gives her up. Never underestimate the desperation of a man who has everything.”

The manager would be a liability now. She’d have to get back into play and deal with him. “He’s going to want to run with her.”

“They’ll cap him this time, on their way out, before he spills to the police. If the crew wants that second score they’ve got to go in fast. But they can’t move quick because of you. They know you’re watching, and since you were stupid enough to tell them where you lived, and they were stupid enough to wait, that means they’re watching you.”

His grandfather was right, Chase had been stupid. He’d been so caught up in his own grief and anger that he figured they might want to come at him the same way he wanted to go at them. Head to head. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might be more subtle and monitor him for days.

“You think they’re somewhere nearby this minute?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jonah said. “They should’ve punched your ticket already but they think you’re on to them, baiting a trap. They believe you’re a pro because you got this close. By now they’ve aced one of your neighbors and have somebody installed.”

A crew that would murder a civilian in his own living room, just to keep an eye on somebody. Maybe the driver wasn’t the only wild dog. Marisa Iverson was at least a little crazy, going through what she had for the sake of the driver, who’d popped a cop. Chase had been thinking too positively. He wasn’t going to get the driver without taking them all down.

He glanced at Jonah, who was staring back at him.

“You didn’t think anybody else might get hurt in this fight of yours?” his grandfather asked.

Chase said nothing.

They moved to the front window together and peered through the blinds. Jonah pointed across the street on the diagonal. “Who lives there?”

Sarah Corvis and her kids. They’d sent over a roast after Lila’s funeral. “A middle-aged woman, has a teenage son and daughter.”

“Too many to take out and keep quiet.” Jonah pointed to the house opposite it. “There?”

The Wagner family. The children had brought over a card. “Husband, wife, three children grade-school age.”

“No.” Now, pointing down the block the other way, again diagonally from Chase’s house. “And there?”

Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. Freddy would sometimes walk to the very bottom of the lawn and watch Chase tune the car, but he’d never come any closer than that. “Elderly lady, seventy, seventy-five. Has a mentally handicapped son who’s maybe fifty. They’re shut-ins, live on government checks, have their groceries delivered. They have lots of cats.”

“Call her.”

Chase got out the phone book and dialed the number. He let it ring ten times and hung up. He swallowed thickly, thinking of the poor woman, in her kitchen, Freddy in the bedroom, the cats going hungry. “No answer.”

“They’re dead.”

He didn’t waver or tremble, but inside he fell in a heap and the hatred bloomed further, for the crew and himself, and he was screaming.

The volume inside his skull was turned way up. He had trouble hearing his grandfather.

“When it gets dark we’ll go over there for a visit,” Jonah was saying. “Pack up your shit because we’re leaving here. We’ll get another place up near the diamond merchant.”

He held out his arm and Angie immediately slid next to him. He toyed with her hair and she plucked at his fingers, as if they’d practiced the action many times before, like a dance neither one of them enjoyed anymore.

Jonah told Chase, “Stand watch for a few hours, we’re tired from the trip. You think you can handle it?”

Lila had liked Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. She used to go over there and bring pies. She’d made the effort to be generous and sociable. Chase never had. He’d be out in the garage working the speed bag and Lila would come back from across the street with her breath smelling like peach cobbler and say, “No reason under God why such lovely people as them have got to be alone in the world. Living in a houseful of cat piss. That Freddy, he admires you.” After the funeral, Freddy had come a little farther up the driveway and waved.

Even Freddy had made the effort, and now he and his mother were dead because of what Chase had set in motion. The Jonah inside his head said, You didn’t think anybody else might get hurt in this fight of yours?

He’d be saying it forever.

Still putting Chase to the test, Jonah wanted to see how far he could push. He walked to the master bedroom and said, “We’ll take this one.”

“No,” Chase told him.

“You’re alone, you can take the smaller bed in the guest room.”

“No.”

Thinking now, So maybe this is where I get to shove that popgun.22 up his ass.

He looked at his grandfather and his grandfather looked at him, and they both stayed that way for a while until Angie pressed a hand tenderly to Jonah’s face and made him turn aside, then tugged him down the short hall to the guest room.

Jonah, who didn’t feel things like a regular man did, but somehow still acted like someone stung by an ungrateful child. Chase turned back to the window and stared at Mrs. Nicholson’s house, imagining the scene.

The crew wouldn’t let the driver go along because he was a wild card and might try to pop Chase without first checking him out thoroughly. So one of the others would be sent in, someone who liked to work quietly, maybe with a knife. He’d park up the road from Chase’s house, checking out his house and everybody on the block. Watch the kids play, the men cutting their lawns, the women heading off to work or shopping. See Mrs. Nicholson limp out onto her front stoop to get the mail or pay the paperboy. Contemplate Freddy standing out on the cement driveway doing nothing.

So he’d knock on the old lady’s door and say he was selling Bibles, keep a conversation going while he scanned her place, making sure she lived only with the retarded guy, except for all the cats. The stink of the cat piss would make his nose run. He’d look out her front window at Chase’s house and wonder what was going on in there, why Chase had fuckin’ invited the crew to come crush him. There had to be some kind of setup.

The old lady asking him, Aren’t you going to show me the Bibles?

What Bibles?

The gold-inlaid fine end-paper illustrated and annotated text Bibles that you’re selling.

Maybe knifing her right then. Or, not wanting to get any blood on himself, just strangling her, garotting her. It didn’t take much to snap the neck of an eighty-year-old woman with osteoporosis and light bone density.

Freddy letting out a perplexed and terrified shriek. Or maybe not, maybe just standing there unsure of what just happened. Going, Ma? Ma?

Standing there going, Mama? While the knife appeared. While it slid into his belly and the great overwhelming pain engulfed him, but still not great enough to drown out his fear for his mother. Ma?