The Coldest Mile (28 page)

“Not where we're going.”

They hit the
block lined with bars and dance clubs. In the day it looked even worse than it had the last time Chase had been here. Abandoned, stagnant, like the
place was a hair away from planned demolitions and urban renewal. Metal shutters were locked over a lot of the windows. The streets were empty. They'd looked a lot better with the drunk girls wandering from bar to bar, holding each other up.

“There it is,” Chase said, pointing out the Curse of Nature.

“Doesn't look like much.”

“It's not.”

“There's no real cover,” Jonah said. “I'd like to get a look at the back parking lot, but we might get pinned.”

Chase turned around, eased up and down the area until he found an alley two blocks away that still gave them a line of sight to the front door of the Curse of Nature.

Jonah asked, “The hell does the name mean?”

“I have no idea.” Chase checked his watch. It was 1:10.

Claustrophobia set in as they sat, Chase feeling like his skin was on fire. His grandfather's strength of presence was pushing him right out of the fucking car. He looked at the old man's tattoos and wondered why Kylie wasn't among the other names.

His thoughts raced along. He had no control. He couldn't stop thinking about all the specialists he and Lila had visited while trying for a baby. The docs had said it wasn't impossible, but the odds were worse for Lila than the “average young female” to become pregnant and carry a child full term.

He remembered how she'd said, “Well, I was raised to believe in miracles.”

“Tell me about Kylie,” Chase said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about her.”

The old man looked at him, having no idea what to say. Other men, they talked to you about their kids until you were shitless. The little girls all angelic, the boys smart and great athletes. They sometimes put on adorable voices to sound like their children, and you wanted to cover your ears and howl because you couldn't take listening to that cutie- pie crap. And those same guys had felt the same way too until they'd had kids. It was just the way things went.

But Jonah had nothing to say.

“It's one- thirty” Chase told him.

“What time do clubs like that open?”

“Maybe six o'clock? Seven?”

“You don't know.”

“No.”

“Then say that.”

“I just did.”

The old man stared through the windshield, sighting the front door. The only apparent hint of tension in his body was that the veins in his thick wrists were sticking out and throbbing. Chase knew exactly what his grandfather would say next.

“Never follow someone else's rules.”

Chase nodded and said, “We wait.”

Fifteen minutes later
Jonah's cell went off. He ignored it.

The temperature in the car had to be topping one-ten, but Chase didn't feel it. He was bathed in cold sweat, trails running down his throat and chest. He didn't know where the willpower was coming from for him to stay in his seat. Thinking of the little girl out there someplace, surrounded by enemies, maybe hungry, crying, wearing dirty diapers. No, Jonah had said she was potty- trained. Chase held the steering wheel tightly in his hands and gained no comfort.

At 2:20, someone came to the front door of the club, opened it a few inches, peered out.

“Trying to get us to jump,” Jonah said. “Any idea what this Reverend looks like?”

“Like a reverend I guess.”

“Could it be Arno?”

“Can't tell.”

“They're getting edgy.”

Chase wanted to say, So am I.

“Another half hour or so and we go.”

Touching the keys, trying to draw strength from the Detroit line of forty years ago, when they cared about their craft and the roads were full of cars with style and attitude and cool, but Chase still couldn't calm himself. He was freezing.

It was almost
three when a figure came to the door with Kylie in his arms.

“Oh Christ,” Chase said.

Jonah never rattled. “So we know she's still alive.”

The door opening wider.

Molten sunlight flooding inside.

Shadow becoming color and form.

A lot of muscle stood around in back, filling the en-tranceway. Not Voorman and not the prettyboys.

Chase finally understood the setup. How Arno fit into it. Boze had said,
Sometimes he deals with the syndicates, old fat Italians on the down slide who come here to go out on his boat and get blowjobs and go fishing.

All these years thinking he'd been fast, and yet now he saw that he was so very goddamn slow. Chase had been too close to the situation, hadn't been able to focus. As usual, he'd been worrying about the wrong things. He'd known it was happening and still hadn't been able to help himself.

Dex had been busy on the phone all right, making a lot of calls, gathering info, swinging deals. But the scheme couldn't have come together so quickly if it hadn't already been in motion.

Jonah swept his arm out, holding Chase in his seat. He hadn't realized that he'd started to lean forward and begun to turn the key.

The little girl, Chase had never seen her before. He thought, My God, she's a golden beauty.

“That Clarke?” Jonah asked.

“What?”

“Is that Clarke holding Kylie?”

“No.”

“The Reverend? He doesn't look like someone who'd be chasing down the Ladies Christian Coalition.”

“He's not. His name is Bishop.”

H
e looks hard,” the old man said. “He's wearing a
black suit and tie in Florida. His jacket is cut to hide his shoulder holster. A torpedo?”

“What?”

Jonah thumped Chase in the chest once, trying to get him to concentrate. “You know him?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he a shooter?”

“Yeah. He works for the Langans.”

“The New Jersey Langans? Lenny Langan's dead. What are they doing here in Florida? They've got no real muscle anymore.”

“They've got him,” Chase said, “and he's good. The daughter, Sherry Langan, took over. I bet she's inside. When we go in, she'll have Kylie sitting on her lap.”

Jonah looked at him, gave him the empty, lethal stare. “So this isn't only about what happened at the motel in Newark anymore.”

“No.”

“What did you get into?”

“I stole some money from them.”

“From the Langan syndicate?”

“Yeah, I was a driver for them.”

“They don't use drivers.”

“I was a chauffeur.”

“How much did you heist?”

“One forty.”

The old man almost imperceptibly shaking his head. “That's not enough for a mob princess to get personally involved. If she's here, why's she here?”

“She's mad at me too,” Chase said.

“What else did you do?”

“I wouldn't fuck her doggie style.”

“Did you fuck her some other way?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should've.”

Chase wiped sweat from his eyes. “The situation probably could've been resolved a bit more tactfully.”

“That's one way of putting it. A woman scorned is bad enough. A syndicate princess you scored and left high and dry, no wonder she's chased you down here.”

Jonah turned his attention back to the front door, and they saw that Bishop had pulled the girl back inside.

Chase said, “Dex found the Reverend. The Reverend led him to Clarke and Kylie. Clarke had been following me around. He must've followed me to the club.”

“Followed you for over an hour on the road?”

“I told you I'd been sloppy.”

“Sloppy is one thing. You've been something else.”

“Yeah,” Chase admitted. He'd been disconnected even worse than he'd thought.

“Why this place though?”

“Clarke must've talked to Arno. He mentions what happened in Newark, tells him we're pros from the East Coast. Asks him for help in tracking you down and in popping me.” He thought, That's who was in the Dodge pickup. Voorman or one of the prettyboys helping Clarke out. “Arno has some dealings with the weaker mob families. He must've put his ear to the wire and eventually heard some buzz about what I pulled at the Langans.”

“Contacted them and told them to come on down, he's got my baby and he knows where you are. They tell him there's a big payday if he grabs and holds you.” Jonah turned, looked into Chase's face. “This broad really hates your guts.”

“Yeah.”

Jonah said, “While we were making calls trying to find Kylie, they were making calls to the same people and using her to find us.”

It was true. Right from the day Chase hit Florida he'd thought he was so slick and in control, but he'd had everything backward, and everyone else had been using his blind stupidity against him. “It's my fault. I wasn't watching. I wasn't thinking.”

“So this has nothing to do with me anymore.”

“No,” Chase said. “It never really did.” “You should've told me,” Jonah said, and swung in his seat, bringing his fist up from the wheel well and smashing Chase in the mouth.

The old man climbed out of the car, gave Chase a final once- over, showing nothing, walked out the alley, and headed for the front door of the club.

H
ell of a turn, Chase thought, spitting ribbons of
blood and half a molar out the window.

It took him ten minutes until the bleeding stopped enough for him to speak clearly. Then he made one last phone call, spoke calmly but sharply, hung up and threw the cell against the alley wall. The phone splintered into pieces.

He drove out of the mouth of the alley, turned the corner, went around the block and parked down the street from the Curse of Nature. He took the S&W .38 out of his gym bag and had no idea what to do with it. He had no holster, and all he was wearing was a T-shirt. He got out of the car, untucked his shirt and stuck the gun in his waistband but it wouldn't fit. Tried it at the small of his back and it didn't fit there either. He decided to just carry the damn thing. He felt like an idiot. Decided fuck it. Threw it back in the gym bag and left it in the passenger foot well.

His mouth filled again and he spit more blood.
The tooth hurt. He embraced the pain. He walked down the block, opened the front door of the club, and walked in.

Sherry Langan sat at a table with Kylie on her lap, a glass of what was probably Glenlivet in front of her, the little girl playing with one of Sherry's diamond earrings.

The Langans didn't kill kids.

They sold them.

Jonah was having a beer with Bishop.

Bishop was laughing, holding his .44 loosely in one hand. The wrist where Chase had stabbed him had healed up with hardly a trace of a scar. Two knee breakers were nearby, flanking the old man. Jonah was grinning, doing a bad job of acting normal but much better than Chase had been expecting. He held the beer to his chest with his right hand, not drinking. His left was cupped to his leg, hiding the pop .22. They hadn't frisked him. Jonah wouldn't have allowed that, which was why Bishop was right on top of him.

Arno and his entourage weren't around. Moe Irvine wasn't around either. Chase wondered if that meant Moe was dead too. That once Sherry Langan and Bishop started down their road together, they couldn't stop punching tickets.

Chase recognized Elkins, the thug he'd fought in Jackie's office. The one who'd paid the hitters on the street. So he was number two under Bishop. Chase had worked grease into the guy's eyes and yanked
his .357. Good. When things went bad, he'd stick close to Elkins. The goon carried heavy hardware.

Bishop looked over at Chase and called, “Hey there!”

No need to be rude. Chase waved. Bishop was having a good time, trying to have a little fun with the old man before pulling the trigger.

As Chase stood there, Elkins came over and searched him for guns.

The other knee breaker doing nothing but wearing mirror shades and trying to look suave in a newly bought Hawaiian shirt.

“Miss Langan would like to talk to you,” Elkins said.

“Did she ice Moe?” Chase asked, curious for some reason.

“Moe saw the writing on the wall and split for Israel.”

“You should've too.”

Chase moved to the table and sat across from Sherry. Elkins and the other thug covered both him and Jonah. Kylie was enraptured by Sherry's earring and didn't look up at Chase. He wanted her attention, wanted her to smile at him, but he had to fight to hold steady, to keep focused on Sherry Langan, who was watching him with her cruel, hot, amused eyes, one hand stroking Kylie's hair.

“You're not surprised to see me,” Sherry said.

“No.”

“Not even interested in knowing why I'm sitting here with your … aunt… isn't it?”

Still brushing through Kylie's hair, the thin wisps of veins in Sherry's hands hidden now beneath sunburn. She'd been here a day or two already, out on the beach.

“I already know why.”

“It's not the money you stole,” she said.

“I never thought it would be.”

“It's not even because of the disrespectful way you treated me.”

Yes, it was, assuming she meant the fact that he hadn't fucked her.

Chase waited.

“It's because you chose to warn my brother.”

No, it wasn't, but let her tell her lies, it was all she had to live with. “Jackie was a moron. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for acing him. He was no challenge to you.”

“He was becoming a liability. Even my mother knew that.
She
didn't warn him. She understood. We've lost enough respect over the years. I can't afford to waste any more. I already have to deal with many of my father's former business associates, so many of them stealing from our pockets and playing golf during working hours, the ones you mentioned back in Jersey, who were causing so much more trouble. It's now time for the Langan name to regain its esteem.”

Jesus Christ, she said it like she meant it. Chase caught a glimpse of his watch. He figured, maybe three or four minutes left. Maybe not that many.

“So you're through wowing the politicians’ wives with your insights on Ibsen?”