The Cold Spot

Now the front end was no more than ten feet away, and Chase was going to die beneath three thousand pounds of Detroit muscle. It actually made him grin.

Earl cared for the car but wasn’t overzealous about it. If he had been, he would’ve restored it fully and put the funky back spoiler on even if it did make the Superbird stand out. He didn’t quite love the car enough.

There was a slight pull to the right and the Plymouth angled just enough to miss Chase as it roared past.

He got a good look. The last bullet had smashed Earl’s head apart and a nice red cascade had covered the dashboard and the inside of the windshield.

The Superbird’s side mirror caught Chase’s left hand and he felt three of his fingers break. It spun him around and he polished the driver’s door with the seat of his pants. He went down again and watched the car make a wild turn and plow into the front of Room #18, roaring over and crushing the bodies of the crew. The idle was stuck high and the engine kept screaming. Chase wanted to join it, but the Jonah in his head said, Get the fuck up.

His grandfather was there telling him, “Get the fuck up.”

9

J onah drove like shit. Chase could see why the old man always needed a getaway driver, and why during the Philly museum heist escape he’d nearly run over a teenage girl. Way too loose with the wheel, too heavy on the gas pedal, taking turns too tight. He swerved all over the road trying to get to the George Washington Bridge. Maybe the two bullets in his back had something to do with it, but still.

Clearly Jonah still knew his way around the area but not as well as Chase did, and the old man kept barking questions, asking if he should take a left or right here to get uptown, which way was quickest to the East Side. Chase tried to focus and keep his eyes on the road but his vision kept doubling, tripling. Racking coughs filled his mouth with blood. Even then, he couldn’t brush past the nagging feeling that he was staining the seat. The next thief who boosted the Chevelle was going to have his work cut out for him when it came to the detailing.

Way uptown on 203rd, right on the Harlem River, Jonah finally got them to a safe doctor, which meant the guy was a fucking butcher. He was also a junkie and looked high on speed or meth. He’d fallen from grace decades ago and stared vacantly but bright-eyed at Chase. The guy looked happy and genuinely deranged.

He gave Chase a needle and said, “This will kill the pain.”

It didn’t. Five minutes later, while the guy poked around in the bullet wounds, scratching at the collarbone, Chase wailed as loudly as he could, which wasn’t much above a whisper because of the collapsed lung. He tried to reach his good hand out to Jonah but the arm was nearly useless. Still, Jonah knew what Chase was doing, and Chase was surprised as hell when his grandfather took it. That meant something but he wasn’t sure what.

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