Tom Piccirilli: The Cold Spot

“Back to Jonah,” Chase said, checking the door, the guys working the Jag. If this was a setup, it was a slow one.

Deuce put the knife away, pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his shirt pocket, and began chewing the end of it, a sure sign his tumblers were turning, trying to slip into place. “One of them blew away a cop and then started in on the hostages. Killed a security guard so they’d get a chopper. A fuckin’ chopper. Where’d they think they were going? How do you escape in a helicopter, the thing zipping around in the air, buzzing Ben Franklin’s grave, spooking everybody looking at the Liberty Bell? There’s room for what, two or three people in that. Where they gonna fit the paintings? You use a chopper to get out of Hanoi, not fuckin’ Philly.”

“Must’ve been Buzzard.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Me neither,” Chase said, “but the other two aren’t stupid.”

“Well, they left Buzzard there with his brains leaking out his eye sockets, so I guess they didn’t want him around their necks.” Deucie grinned a little and paused, thinking he was clever with that line, a sterling wit making the stretch between buzzards and albatrosses. When he saw he wasn’t going to get any acknowledgment, his smile collapsed and he went on. “Popped him and managed to punch a hole before too many police barricades and roadblocks were laid out and made a run in a getaway car. That’s all I know.”

“Philly’s a tight city,” Chase said. It was like trying to pull a heist in midtown Manhattan. Crammed streets, a red light at every corner, only a couple of ways in and out. Rare coins and Renaissance paintings? The hell was going on? “Cops have their names and faces?”

“No.”

“So how do you know it was Jonah and Rook with this Buzzard guy?”

“That’s what everybody’s saying anyway, so somebody spilled. Maybe Buzzard’s pals are a little steamed about what happened to him. You know me, I spend my day on the phone, the line’s always humming.” Deuce dug around in his pockets trying to come up with his Zippo, even though he’d never light the cigar tip in the garage. “A lot of these solo players, even the solid pros, they got crazy superstitions. They don’t like working a heist with someone named Jonah.”

“I know.”

“And besides”-Deucie found the Zippo, flipped the lid, sparked it, and then put it back again leaving the cigar unlit-“a lot of people were friends with Walcroft. He was popular, dependable, fun in the downtime. They didn’t like how he ended up.”

Chase shouldn’t say anything. Walcroft’s sound swept through him, the man’s blazing red eyes searching him out, even now. He fought for some kind of reply, but whatever he came out with would be totally wrong, there was no chance of otherwise. How aggravating to feel a flush of humiliation and anger rising up his neck and realize he could only react defensively, despite all that had gone down. “Jonah said he was wired.”

Deuce shrugged and nodded, his chin bobbing all over the place. “Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. It does happen. It certainly does.” Saying it like it never happened.

“¡Maricon!” one of the Puerto Ricans shouted, and Chase spun, ready to fight or run. But the guy was just shouting because he couldn’t get the headers of the Jag out and had skinned his knuckles with a socket extension.

“What time did this score go down?” Chase asked.

Deuce realized he’d chewed the cigar butt into tobacco chaw and spit it in the corner. “Eight last night, as the museum was closing.”

There it was, the end of this road. Chase walked away while Deuce called after him, “Hey, where you going? Come on back, I need to pay you for the Mercedes.”

Uh-huh. Chase got into his own car-a ’68 GTO, primed and touched up but not yet fully repainted-and pulled out, knowing his time here was done. Even in the bent life stigma followed. Betraying one of your own crew, butchering hostages, wasting cops-it all brought down serious heat. Jonah and Rook were going to say Buzzard did it and every other pro would have to accept it even if they didn’t believe it. That or go up against them. The whole mess might never be sorted out. No one would want to help Jonah for a while, and anybody hoping to cash in on a quick reward or plea bargain would blow the whistle. The cops would be beating the brush and back alleys trying to shake any bit of info out. A lot of deals were about to be cut.

Seven hours had gone by since Jonah’s name had started getting kicked around again. Chase would have to leave the cache in the bank deposit box. He couldn’t wait the extra day, too many people knew where he was. If there was a bounty put out on Jonah by Buzzard’s friends, Deucie might turn Chase in himself, hoping he could lead them to his grandfather. You never knew. Chase didn’t blame the Deuce, it was business.

He rushed back to his rented room with the driver’s window down, letting the Jersey breeze wash over him, breathing it in deeply. It had a different kind of odor from anyplace else he’d ever been-full of pollution and pine, money and sex and corruption and action. It’d be the last time he smelled it for a while.

At the apartment he packed up, rolled the twenty-four hundred in with the three g’s stashed in the spare tire, and drove west for five hours until he’d crossed into Ohio. On the way he drank nearly all the Cuervo. His stomach burned and so did the back of his skull.

He got a room at a cheap motel, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep. In ten days he’d turn sixteen. He put a couple of quarters in the bed and got the magic fingers going. It felt more like there was a bunch of chubby kids hiding under the bed poking him in the back.

The story continued to break fresh and wide on cable news. He watched the amateur footage of the standoff outside the museum in Philadelphia. It lasted only a few minutes before the robbers burst out of the place and made their run. The sound of gunshots and bullhorns scared the amateur into dropping his camcorder.

When Chase heard the hot Asian correspondent say that the driver had broken through the roadblock and nearly clipped a teenage tourist visiting with her history class for the weekend, Chase knew that Jonah’d had trouble putting together a new string. This time there’d been no driver and his grandfather had been forced to double as the wheelman himself.

They interviewed the girl while her friends mugged and hooted for the camera.

But she was dead-eyed and mechanical in her answers, pretty but stiff with ashen blurs already appearing under her eyes. She understood now just how close she’d come to wiping out of the game and being left shattered in the street without any reason, thought, or mercy.

Despite the goofiness with the chopper and all the rest of it, Jonah was back pulling notable scores within a year. Chase had been worried for the first few months after the botched museum heist so he kept in touch with Murphy, an old-time safecracker who’d done a nine count in the pen, took a bullet in the hip during his last job, and decided to retire. Now Murphy ran a used car lot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his two adult sons, and passed messages for the pros. He sold cars with clean papers to crews operating in the Midwest, and he always kept an ear out for any buzz or action.

Chase checked in a few times to find out what the word was on Jonah. It had taken a while for the stigma to fall away but eventually everybody just blamed Buzzard Allen for the troubles during the museum heist. Buzzard’s friends apparently didn’t like him enough to argue the point too emphatically.

Murphy asked, “You want me to give your grandfather a message?”