The Cold Spot

The Wagner family. The children had brought over a card. “Husband, wife, three children grade-school age.”

“No.” Now, pointing down the block the other way, again diagonally from Chase’s house. “And there?”

Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. Freddy would sometimes walk to the very bottom of the lawn and watch Chase tune the car, but he’d never come any closer than that. “Elderly lady, seventy, seventy-five. Has a mentally handicapped son who’s maybe fifty. They’re shut-ins, live on government checks, have their groceries delivered. They have lots of cats.”

“Call her.”

Chase got out the phone book and dialed the number. He let it ring ten times and hung up. He swallowed thickly, thinking of the poor woman, in her kitchen, Freddy in the bedroom, the cats going hungry. “No answer.”

“They’re dead.”

He didn’t waver or tremble, but inside he fell in a heap and the hatred bloomed further, for the crew and himself, and he was screaming.

The volume inside his skull was turned way up. He had trouble hearing his grandfather.

“When it gets dark we’ll go over there for a visit,” Jonah was saying. “Pack up your shit because we’re leaving here. We’ll get another place up near the diamond merchant.”

He held out his arm and Angie immediately slid next to him. He toyed with her hair and she plucked at his fingers, as if they’d practiced the action many times before, like a dance neither one of them enjoyed anymore.

Jonah told Chase, “Stand watch for a few hours, we’re tired from the trip. You think you can handle it?”

Lila had liked Mrs. Nicholson and Freddy. She used to go over there and bring pies. She’d made the effort to be generous and sociable. Chase never had. He’d be out in the garage working the speed bag and Lila would come back from across the street with her breath smelling like peach cobbler and say, “No reason under God why such lovely people as them have got to be alone in the world. Living in a houseful of cat piss. That Freddy, he admires you.” After the funeral, Freddy had come a little farther up the driveway and waved.

Even Freddy had made the effort, and now he and his mother were dead because of what Chase had set in motion. The Jonah inside his head said, You didn’t think anybody else might get hurt in this fight of yours?

He’d be saying it forever.

Still putting Chase to the test, Jonah wanted to see how far he could push. He walked to the master bedroom and said, “We’ll take this one.”

“No,” Chase told him.

“You’re alone, you can take the smaller bed in the guest room.”

“No.”

Thinking now, So maybe this is where I get to shove that popgun.22 up his ass.

He looked at his grandfather and his grandfather looked at him, and they both stayed that way for a while until Angie pressed a hand tenderly to Jonah’s face and made him turn aside, then tugged him down the short hall to the guest room.

Jonah, who didn’t feel things like a regular man did, but somehow still acted like someone stung by an ungrateful child. Chase turned back to the window and stared at Mrs. Nicholson’s house, imagining the scene.

The crew wouldn’t let the driver go along because he was a wild card and might try to pop Chase without first checking him out thoroughly. So one of the others would be sent in, someone who liked to work quietly, maybe with a knife. He’d park up the road from Chase’s house, checking out his house and everybody on the block. Watch the kids play, the men cutting their lawns, the women heading off to work or shopping. See Mrs. Nicholson limp out onto her front stoop to get the mail or pay the paperboy. Contemplate Freddy standing out on the cement driveway doing nothing.

So he’d knock on the old lady’s door and say he was selling Bibles, keep a conversation going while he scanned her place, making sure she lived only with the retarded guy, except for all the cats. The stink of the cat piss would make his nose run. He’d look out her front window at Chase’s house and wonder what was going on in there, why Chase had fuckin’ invited the crew to come crush him. There had to be some kind of setup.

The old lady asking him, Aren’t you going to show me the Bibles?

What Bibles?

The gold-inlaid fine end-paper illustrated and annotated text Bibles that you’re selling.

Maybe knifing her right then. Or, not wanting to get any blood on himself, just strangling her, garotting her. It didn’t take much to snap the neck of an eighty-year-old woman with osteoporosis and light bone density.

Freddy letting out a perplexed and terrified shriek. Or maybe not, maybe just standing there unsure of what just happened. Going, Ma? Ma?

Standing there going, Mama? While the knife appeared. While it slid into his belly and the great overwhelming pain engulfed him, but still not great enough to drown out his fear for his mother. Ma?

Falling to his knees, then on his face, the cats scattering.

The killer calling his crew and using their little code, two rings, hang up, three rings, hang up. Whatever. Telling the boss, the schemer behind it all, I’m in.

Watching the house across the street, seeing Chase come and go. Now a van pulling up with an old man and a hot chippie with him, sliding into the garage. Watching the blinds part a little bit in the living room over there now, somebody staring back out at him.

Chase went for the cold spot and let it ice him down, the burning fury that threatened to consume his thoughts slowly being quelled until he could think again.

He stood watch, staring at the house for four hours. He heard Jonah and Angie in the guest room going at it. Maybe not so tired from the trip, after all.

Chase remembered being thirteen, and Jonah holding the mostly empty pint of Dewar’s and introducing him to the cute and less-cute girls named Lou. His grandfather had stolen the one Chase wanted to be with simply because he could. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, which reminded him of Marisa Iverson and why Chase had called Jonah in the first place.

They were two of a kind. He’d been right. He needed Jonah.

Chase stood at his front window staring into the evening as it became night, wanting to kill someone.

6

B y the time Jonah was ready, Chase had a bag packed with a few changes of clothes and some personal items. There was nothing else he wanted from the house. The bag was out in the trunk of the Chevelle in the garage. He’d brought in many of Lila’s guns and laid them on the kitchen table.

“In case you want something to carry.”

“Yours?” Jonah asked.

There were things he would talk about and things he wouldn’t. Chase didn’t want to say anything about Lila to Jonah. The very act of discussing her with his grandfather seemed disrespectful to her memory.

So he said, “Yes.”

“Don’t need them right now. Got a.38 I like. But pack them up and bring them along. We might have use for them later.”

Chase still had Marisa Iverson’s 9mm and two.22s, all three of which he’d cleaned. He felt more comfortable with them than he did with any of Lila’s weapons. It was a complicated emotion that he couldn’t quite untangle.

But he knew that thinking about Lila would make him soft, even if only while holding her pistol. His concentration would fail, even as it was failing now, his mind wanting to take him back to her, to hear her laughter, think about her smile. He had to hold on.

Angie walked out of the guest room and picked up Lila’s twelve-gauge shotgun. She checked the load and