her tightly with his face pressed between her breasts, breathing deeply, and she brushed her fingers through his hair and said, “You don’t have anything to feel conscience-struck about. I love it here. You gave me the ocean.”
“Is it enough?”
“Nothing is except for you, love. You’re enough. And that’s all that matters.” She kissed him and looked into his eyes, going deep again, the way she did. “’Sides, if we’d stayed in Mississippi, I’d be babysitting. Molly Mae just had her sixth.”
“Jesus Christ, six! How’s the judge?”
“He’s ready to walk on water, that miraculous sumbitch.”
7
He and Lila started going to the theater as often as they could afford it. Prices were outrageous, and he didn’t know how the other stiffs managed to swing the shows. Two tickets, dinner, and parking ran upwards of three or four bills, but they managed to make a night of it at least once a month, so long as Lila wasn’t pulling night shifts.
One evening, after
“Sure,” Chase said, knowing something had just gone wrong. It took him a second to check his wallet.
Gone. His pocket had been picked.
Goddamn, that had been a nice brazen, fluid move. A quick dip, lift, and fly. The straight life had made him careless. Getting hit by a nimble, practiced pickpocket, it actually surprised him the way it would a regular citizen. Chase wasn’t sure if he should rush after the mook or ask Lila to go grab him, use her wily police skills all over his ass.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I just had my wallet lifted.”
“You know by who?”
Chase still had his eye on the guy up ahead in the foot traffic. “Yeah.”
“Well? You gonna let him get away with the boodle? Or you want I should do all the work even on my night off?”
“You are the defender of the peace,” Chase said. “My taxes pay your salary.”
“I’m simply a wife expecting to be treated to a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant.”
“Be right back.”
“Don’t take too long, I’m jonesing for some lasagna.”
Pronouncing it la-zanga.
“Get a bottle of Merlot and order me the fettuccine Alfredo,” Chase said and took off down Seventh Avenue after the pickpocket, weaving through the crowd.
He found the guy zipping around the corner, heading for a subway station. Walking hurriedly but without breaking into a run. He was good but not especially smart. He should’ve stayed with the street crowd instead of taking the corner and making for a subway fifteen minutes before the next train. He should’ve had the cash out by now and dumped the wallet.
Chase got up close behind the mook, invading space, and made the guy stop and turn around to see who was breathing down his neck. No one else was nearby.
“I’m curious,” Chase said, “what made you choose me?”
“What?”
Up close, the stealthy mutt didn’t blend in with the urban hordes as much as Chase had originally thought. He was only around thirty but already seriously burned at the edges. Wrinkled, faded, and losing the fight to keep from being swept out to sea. A cokehead but not overly wired at the moment, his eyes a low grade of lethal. What Jonah used to call a skel, a dreg, a bottom-feeder.
“I’m no mark,” Chase told him. “Your kind always go after the tourist trade and folks who are distracted or lost. So why me?”
“What?”
Okay, so no reminiscing over the bent life with this one. Chase would have to settle on getting just a brief whiff of the old days. “Give me my wallet.”
“Get the fuck away. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. Come on, let’s have it.”
“You don’t want a piece of me.”
“You’ve got that right. Just hand over my wallet.”
“I’m not kidding with you, man, go back to fucking Kentucky or wherever you’re from.”
Now that was just mean-spirited. “New York born and bred, fucker!”
The guy drew his chin to his chest, eyes narrowing, squeezing out the world. He went deep, calling up anger and hate and letting it wash over him. You could see it happening, how the guy was just letting himself go, drifting with the worst that was inside him. All of this for what? Chase had maybe eighty bucks in the wallet, two credit cards he could cancel in sixty seconds.
But the mook had skilled hands all right. One second there was nothing in his fist, and the next he was holding a fold-out blade. It snapped open with a dramatic click. Chase hadn’t been expecting a blade or pistol. Most pickpockets went into the trade because of its relative safety. No confrontation, no muscle, nobody gets hurt. No weapons were used so any jail time was light.
But this one, he’d worked a lot with his knife. Maybe it was the coke. It kept him up three days straight with nothing to do but practice.
He kept the blade down low, out straight before him. He did everything right so far as Chase knew. A couple of strings he’d been a part of had had knife fighters on them. Guys who did nothing but sharpen blades and throw them into dart-boards between scores. Almost all of them went down after carving up someone in a barroom brawl.
You saw a guy with a knife in this day and age and you knew you were looking at a serious asshole.
The mutt unleashed a nice speedy move, and suddenly the knife was coming in at a nasty angle. None of this slashing shit, not even the usual stabbing motion. A low-slung swinging arc coming up from the groin. If it hooked into Chase’s belly it would yank out his guts.
The fuck was wrong with these antisocial sons of bitches? You could rob a man without butchering him.
Chase barely avoided the maneuver, got his left arm up to block and shot off two rapid-fire punches to the guy’s nose. It brought blood but didn’t slow the mook down any. He made another low, slicing action.
“You’re fast but you don’t know when to call it quits,” Chase said.
The guy was too focused to respond, on a complete burn with his heart rate up. He looked like he just didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, like he might as well kill or die as soon as walk away.
Chase was only twenty-five and in prime shape, but the straight life had worn him down a little, made him
