Tom Piccirilli - The Cold Spot

The doctor yanked on Chase’s arm and leg and felt around his ribs. No bones had been broken except for the fingers. The bullets had gone straight through. The doctor said he was lucky. Not much muscle damage. But the blood loss. The chance for infection. The lung. He got out needles and tubes and shoved them into Chase’s chest.

You get shot three times and somebody still has to come along and put more holes in you. Chase didn’t feel lucky. The doctor leaned forward and clasped the tube between his lips and started to blow. Chase felt his lung expanding but was suddenly worried about what kind of germs this dude was breathing into him. Chase vomited from the pain and passed out.

He dreamed of his sibling who had never been born. The baby sat at the kitchen table in a high chair. Chase couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. The kid knew more answers than he did. The kid had been there the day his mother had been murdered and had died with her. Chase asked questions he couldn’t hear. The kid responded in Chase’s own voice, going, You already know all that, don’t you?

Once he came awake for only a few seconds and saw the doctor working on Jonah’s back, the old man’s skin and muscle held open by retractors. There was blood everywhere. His grandfather didn’t make a sound, the hard son of a bitch. It seemed impossible.

Now that the driver was iced, Chase realized that Jonah hadn’t done much in the way of helping him at all. He’d punched in the wrong door and wound up acing his own woman, leaving Chase to take down the three crew members by himself.

He whispered, “You know, you didn’t do shit.”

With the doc drilling for bullets around the old man’s spine, Jonah said, “You were two minutes from being dead when I got you here. Does that count?”

With a sluggish anger trying to overcome him, Chase wanted to say, Fuck no, that wasn’t the job, but he was already unconscious.

The next time he woke he was bandaged, his hand was in a cast, and he could barely move, but the painkillers had finally kicked in because he didn’t feel much. There were drains all over him. He was hooked to a couple of IVs and a blood bag. He didn’t even want to think about where the blood had come from. Jonah was sitting up staring out the window, where you could just make out the Grand Concourse in the Bronx across the river to the east.

Jonah said, “You’ve been out for two and a half days. Doc says you’ll be okay if your heart doesn’t stop.”

“Terrific.”

“Go easy on the lung.”

Chase had to wonder, How the hell do you go easy on a lung? No scuba diving? No marathons? No deep breaths? He tried to struggle up but nothing would work right.

His grandfather said, “It’ll be a couple more days before you can be moved.”

“How much is he costing us?”

“Nothing, I did a favor for him once.”

That made no sense. Jonah never did favors. All it meant was he’d crossed up with the doc at one point and hadn’t killed him. “What’s he on?”

“I’m not sure. Coke, maybe.”

“What’s he know about us?”

“He doesn’t know anything about anything,” Jonah said. “That’s why we can come to him.”

Sleep drew Chase down again, but he fought the tide, knowing he needed to think a few things through. Morgan and Murray would be on to him now. He’d practically lit the sky with a blazing neon arrow pointing to himself. Still, he didn’t think they’d press him too hard, but you never knew. Who cared exactly how a cop killer got taken down? They were macho hard-asses, they might like that Chase had handled this himself even if there were four bodies left behind. They could juggle the paperwork, take some of the credit for it, get their photos in the papers with some of the gropers. He figured Morgan would let it slide, but Murray might be trouble. It didn’t matter much, one way or the other. He’d done what had to be done, and if he had to go on the run with them chasing behind him, or if he wound up in the can for twelve to fifteen, or if they got him in a corner and made him draw, he’d do it for his girl.

Four days later, on the way home, lying in the backseat and still smelling the oil from Angie’s Bernadelli subcompact, Chase asked the old man, “Does it bother you that you she made a play?”

Jonah, too heavy on the gas, barreling through traffic on the parkway, said, “I expected it.”

“Why?”

“I always expect it.”

“Yeah, but do you ever understand it?”

Jonah caught his eyes in the rearview. The car shimmied. The old man hardly looked at the road, like he thought there would never be a curve ahead. “It happened once before. And for the same reason. Over a kid.”

“What? With who?”

“Another foolish woman.”

“Yeah, but who?”

Jonah said nothing for miles. Then, “Are you going to try me?”

“What?”

“She asked you to, didn’t she?”

“Why didn’t you just let her go?”

“She could’ve left anytime. But I need Kylie. Blood is important.”

As if the names on his scarred arms actually meant anything. “Since when?”

“Forever.”

“Do you love anything?”

The old man’s gaze held him in the mirror. You could spend your whole life trying to figure out what Jonah knew about love and grief, and you’d never get an answer.

Chase thought he should’ve tried harder to help Angie, to dissuade her from taking a run at Jonah, at least with a.32. Maybe a.44. Maybe Chase should’ve drawn on him. Yanked a gun or thrown at least one good punch if nothing else. Whatever happened afterward, it might’ve been worth it.

But then he remembered his grandfather gripping his hand in the doc’s office. That meant something. Anyone else, you might say it was a gesture of the heart. But the old man would always be beyond him. And always inside of him.

J onah didn’t plan to stay. He packed the van with his gear and kept pulling out whatever belonged to Angie and leaving it on the side of the garage. There wasn’t a lot. The little pile became a slightly larger little pile as he added a belt, a scarf. All that was left of the woman’s history, besides her child somewhere in Florida, could be fit into a shoe box.

Popping a handful of pills the doc had given him, Chase swallowed them dry. Painkillers and antibiotics, but they didn’t seem to be doing much good so far. He’d reached his limit and was covered in cold sweat. His bandages had soaked through and needed changing.

He leaned against the hood of the Chevelle, almost ready to drop, staring up at his grandfather through his damp hair.

Jonah said, “It’s a nice house. You shouldn’t sell it.”

“It’s over for me here. I’m leaving.”

“Any idea where you’ll go?”

“No,” Chase said. “But I’ll get you your money.”

“Forget that.”

Chase had been through a lot these last few weeks, but his grandfather’s voice now, the words he spoke, nearly took out his knees. He wavered.

“What?”

“After what I nabbed from Fishman the fence and scored off the crew, I made out all right.”

“The crew? When did you score them?”

“There was ninety grand in the closet of their motel room,” Jonah said.

“When did you have a chance to dig around in their room?”

“Before I pulled you out of there.”

Which meant that while Chase was dying in the lot bleeding out, and everyone in the crew was dead, and the Superbird was still roaring with a corpse’s foot jammed down on the pedal, the car wedged into the front of the room having crashed through the wall, Jonah had staggered around with two in the back after having just killed the mother of his child and dug among the bodies to find the cash.