The Cold Spot

“Still am.”

“You looking for a job? I know of two shops that could use a good mechanic like you.”

The usual way of telling him there were two crews looking for a wheelman. “No thanks. I think I’m settling down here for a while.”

“Doing what? Changing oil? Rotating tires? Fixing crankshafts?”

Asking him what grifts he was working. “My crankshaft is just fine. I met a girl.”

Chase could sense Murphy wrinkling his brow, trying to figure out what Chase was talking about, what kind of score he was after.

Chase said, “A real girl, Murph. I’m settling down.”

“Kid like you who’s been in the life since you were a squirt, it’s got to be hard.”

“Well, I’m getting married anyway.”

“To one of them Southern belles? She the kind who expects you to sit in the stands of the Alabama-Mississippi game and cheer for the Muskrats or the Armadillos or whatever the fuck their mascots are?”

“No, she’s the local sheriff ’s daughter.”

“You do like a life of juice. What if big daddy decides to pull you in?”

“She already tried it. She’s the deputy. He only broke my jaw.”

Murphy let loose with a wild laugh. “Like most of you speedsters, you like to put the hammer down as far as it’ll go.”

“Only when I have to. I need to get a message to Jonah. I’d like to send him an invitation to the wedding.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“He’ll steal the icing off the cake. Hold on.” Murphy rolled around his office in a chair with squeaky casters, opening and closing filing cabinets. “He opened his own shop.” Murphy rattled off ten digits. It wasn’t exactly a sophisticated code. Chase reversed the number and saw it was a 202 prefix. Jonah was in DC.

He wasn’t sure how it would go, talking to his grandfather again after all this time. He figured it would be easier for Jonah to get in touch with him if the man felt like it. Chase gave Murphy the reverse of his cell phone. “Tell him what I said. If he wants to, he can drop me a line.”

3

T he wedding got a little wonky because Lila had three moonshine-toting uncles who came out of the deep woods for the first time in years and started kicking it up hard. Chase liked them fine, but Sheriff Bodeen sat there eating fried possum and glowering as if he wanted to arrest them. And this was his best man, the father of the bride.

First came the drinking, then a lot of the food and some dancing, and then the actual service down at the lake. Everybody set up chairs with parasols affixed to them to keep the sun off their heads. They wreathed themselves in veils of mosquito netting. A choir of gospel singers led them all through a couple of quiet hymns before really getting funky, dancing around with their tambourines and howling out praises to Jesus.

Chase and Lila exchanged vows in front of a minister who was overcome with the Holy Ghost and started speaking in tongues. He threw himself into the lake and Chase had to dive in and fish him out. They both stood there dripping while the man finished the ceremony, Lila unable to look at Chase for fear of cracking up.

When he and Lila kissed everybody let out a Rebel yell.

She drew back and said, “Well, you’re in it now, outlaw.”

“Been that way since the moment you botched the grand curio shop heist.”

A few of her friends wondered where his family was and asked a lot of personal questions. He gave the usual short-shrift answers, smiling but definitely putting some ice into his words, and eventually they backed off. The three drunk toothless uncles started firing shotguns in the air and actually managed to nail a couple of wild geese. They plucked the birds and threw them on the fire. By then Sheriff Bodeen had finished a bottle of whiskey and was hugging everybody, including Chase.

“Son,” he said, “you gonna take care’a ma cherished girl or I’m’a gonna bury you in the bayou.”

It wasn’t exactly congratulations, but Chase knew it was from the heart.

Judge Kelton got crazy on moonshine and started taking off his clothes and chasing Molly Mae around the field. For a girl with some heft to her, she was pretty fleet on her feet. By midafternoon he’d proposed in nothing but his skivvies, and she seemed to be seriously considering it.

She said to Lila, “He’s got hisself a fine house, no chilluns, and I hear tell he got money stashed away in mason jars buried ’neath his barn. He gotta be goin’ on eighty, I won’t have to bear his tomfoolery long.”

Lila said, “He’s lookin’ healthy enough to stay outta the undertaker’s clutches a good while longer.”

Molly, hitching up her girth. “I reckon I can help him along down that road fast enough.”

About sundown the preacher was overcome by another case of the tongues and ran back into the lake. This time Chase let him go. He sat there on the shore beside Lila, her hand in his, watching the preacher call down an army of angels, wondering why Jonah never called, and thinking, Here it is. Here I am.

4

C hase didn’t mind being out of the bent life. Now that he’d gone straight he could use his own name and paperwork again. It had always bothered him he hadn’t ever gone to school. He signed up for night classes at a community college sixty miles away and made the trip three times a week in order to earn his GED.

No one in the office ever asked him why he’d quit school in the sixth grade. Even now in Mississippi he wasn’t a unique case. If anyone ever got curious, he knew all he had to say was, “Daddy catched ill one winter and I had to take to the fields.”

He worked in a local garage doing lube jobs on pickups that smelled like fertilizer and old fish. He took care of their thirty-year-old Chevys that had turned the odometer at least four times. If the cars were dead, he managed to bring them back, if they still had a spark of life, he made them hum. He spent a lot of time fine-tuning the moonrunners’ muscle cars, reinforcing the frames so they could take the rutted dirt tracks without bottoming out, even with all the extra weight in the trunk.

Every now and again Bodeen or one of the state troopers would bring their cruisers in for the extra kick Chase could squeeze out of an engine. It quickly got around that he was one of the best mechanics in three states. Bodeen offered him another job as official police mechanic in charge of the auto pool. Chase couldn’t help thinking about how easy it would be to gaff all the cars to throw a rod or blow their brake lines on the same night. He could score the whole county while the cops pursued him in flatbeds that couldn’t crack forty-five.

Maybe he missed the bent life a little.

Joe-Boo Brinks, the biggest still operator in the area, wanted Chase to come work for him full-time as a mechanic and runner. He tried to woo Chase with the promise of his underage daughter and eighteen grand in cash. He brought the money over in a cardboard suitcase one afternoon while Chase was sitting on a dead log down by the creek having his lunch.

The girl had come along too, wearing a pair of frayed short shorts and a blouse with the sleeves torn off, knotted at her midriff. She had very tight stomach muscles and only a few ounces of baby fat to round her out where it mattered.

Joe-Boo stood six feet of wiry muscle, his mostly bald head gleaming in the sunshine, his graying beard poorly