Tom Piccirilli - The Fever Kill

Crease hit the highway and didn't even bother to check the rearview. He opened it up and within half a minute hit triple digits.

This was a no man's land of road. Edwards and the county cops wouldn't patrol it because it was supposed to be covered by the state troopers. It wasn't worth their time trying to take bribes on the border of their jurisdiction. The troopers didn't care much about a stretch with no other major town around and hardly anyone coming through anyway. Even tourist season didn't bring in much traffic. Nobody wanted to circuit boonie turf.

Crease floored it nearly all the way back to the diner where he'd first seen Reb again, until the interstate connection came up and the trucker traffic got thick again.

The thug still had one hand pressed tightly over the wound. Blood dribbled down his face and collected in his collar. Crease found a rag under his seat and gave it to him. "Here, staunch the flow with this. What's your name?"

"You gonna kill me?"

"You want me to?"

"No."

Crease pulled into the diner parking lot and backed in far from the nearest car. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up, sitting there smoking while the guy watched him, trying to act like stone but the terror flitting across his face in ripples. "What's your name?"

"Cholo."

Cholo. A Spanish word that had come to mean a tough guy, a cowboy. Every third guy coming up from south of the border was called Cholo, and none of them seemed to get the hint that maybe the word was wearing itself out.

"I've never seen you before. Where'd Tucco outsource you from?"

"I run with Jinga's boys, sometimes."

"I'm going to let you off here. Tucco will be along any minute, but keep out of sight."

"Why?"

Asking the question without taking the time to try to piece it together. This one wasn't going to last long.

"Because he'll kill you," Crease said. "Puts the blame on me and he gets to have a little extra fun. He's probably bored and pissed off, him and Cruez taking this long drive up here. Puts him out of sorts."

"They say he's crazy."

"They're right."

"They say you're crazy too."

"They're pretty smart, whoever's giving you all this good information."

Cholo shifted in his seat, looked over at the diner. Never even questioning if what Crease was telling him was the truth. Never thinking Crease might pull the gun again and put one behind his ear the minute he looked away. It was pretty clear why Jinga was such a small-timer, using dummies like this.

"What do I do here?" Cholo asked.

"Nobody in this part of Vermont is going to give you a ride unless you pay for it. A couple hundred bucks and you should be able to make your way back to New York with one of the truckers. Go back to Jinga and pretend this never happened."

"I don't have a couple hundred bucks," Cholo said, sounding embarrassed.

Crease stared at him for a while, thinking this situation was just getting goofier by the minute. "How much was Tucco paying you to take me out?"

"Twenty g's. But only after I did it."

"Way too much money to just ice a guy. Tucco never meant to pay you no matter how it turned out. You always get at least half the cash up front, that's how you know somebody's serious. You get it a couple days in advance so you can spread the word that you got something going on. Then, if anything happens to you, your boys know who to go see."

Cholo's face firmed up and his eyes darkened with understanding. "I never thought of that."

"You might want to try another profession, maybe go back to business school or something." Crease went into his pocket, pulled out two hundred bucks in fifties and stuck them in Cholo's hand, the one that wasn't covered with blood.

He got back to Hangtree, found a pay phone, and called Mimi. She answered on the tenth ring and shrieked, "What!"

"It's me," Crease said.

"Why is it you call here and never your own house?"

"You know why."

"I know you shouldn't be afraid of your own wife and son. Is that how you go through your day, worried that you might have to talk to your wife and kid?"

"Ex-wife."

"Only because it's the way you wanted it. And Stevie'snot your ex-son, in case you're confused about that."

The kids were yelling in the background and Mimi turned away from the phone to scream.

"How is she?" Crease asked. "How's Joan?"

"Doing her best. Stevie got in trouble at school again. Fighting. He's a bully. He storms around the lunchroom and terrorizes the other kids, even ones who are two, three grades ahead of him. The principal wants to speak to you. He says Stevie would benefit from a father's direct influence. You know what that means? He's talking about the belt. A kid like that, eight years old and punching other kids in the face, he needs a good belting." A dog started to bark. Crease didn't know Mimi had a dog. It sounded small and yippy, the kind that made neighbors go berserk and kill whole families. "I'd like you to talk to Joseph too, when you come around again, if you come around again. He could use a little guidance, a firm lecture. He doesn't listen to me."

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who's Joseph? The dog?"

"Joseph, my oldest!" she yelled. "You don't remember? Thirteen, he's got sandy hair, beady eyes. The dog's name is Freddy." Another voice rose, shouting that his eyes weren't beady, they were smoky. Girls at school called them smoky. Mimi shouted back, "Use condoms, always use condoms. They teach you that in sex education yet?"

Crease remembered a beady-eyed little kid, but Christ, now Joey was thirteen, being called Joseph, getting sweet-talked by schoolgirls. Crease shook his head, knowing his old life was further away than maybe it had ever been before.

"She misses you," Mimi said. "I don't know what's been going on with you these last couple of years, or why you're calling me so much, but if it means you're going through a mid-life crisis, then I hope you get over it soon and get the hell back on track. You know what I'm saying?"

He was twenty-seven. If this was a mid-life crisis it didn't say much for his longevity. Still fifty-four was longer than his own father had made it.

"You listening to me, Crease?"

"Yes."

"You've done better by me than my sister. I appreciate it and.. . shut up in there! I appreciate it, but you need to think of Joan now. Call her. Deal with your son too. He's only got one father no matter what happens."

Mimi hung up before Crease could say anything else. He stood there with the phone buzzing in his ear, a couple kids riding by on bicycles, a young couple pushing a baby girl in a stroller. If this was any other town, he might think this was a nice place to live.

He looked in the trunk. The steaks were still frozen. He gunned it to Reb's place.

~* ~

Not much got to him, but he had to admit, watching Reb burn the hell out of the sirloins really started taking its toll. He sat there at her kitchen table, drinking wine, occasionally taking a forkful of salad, but the smoke was making his nose itch. Reb didn't seem to notice the gray haze rising up from the pan while the grease spattered all over. He craned his neck to look into the kitchen.

She flipped the steaks and flipped them again, with the flame up way too high and the meat turning black. He wondered where her head was at, what it is that she was seeing, because she just wasn't picking up on the fact that in about ten more seconds they were going to be eating cereal for dinner instead.

She glanced at him and saw his face and immediately forked the sirloins into two plates. There were some chopped up carrots on the plates alongside potatoes that she'd baked until they were shrunken and wrinkled. It no longer surprised him that she was so skinny.