Her parents refused to come up to New York and Sheriff Bodeen insisted that Chase ship Lila’s body back to Mississippi. The man’s voice was empty of strength. He sounded halfway to being dead himself. Chase said he’d get it done after the service the Suffolk County Police Department wanted to have since she was killed in the line of duty. Sheriff Bodeen dropped the phone and started weeping. Hester got on and said more to Chase right then than she’d said during the five years he’d lived down the road from her in Mississippi.
It was all ugly. Chase listened and absorbed every curse and caterwaul. He promised to send her body back. He didn’t know how the fuck something like that was done, but he’d find out and get it accomplished. He knew he’d never see the Bodeens again. He tried to find it within himself to care-losing these people, his in-laws, Lila’s mama and daddy-but it just wasn’t there. He hung up and they were gone from him too.
He slept in fits. He’d wake up from a deep sleep with a noise so loud in his head that he had to press his hands over his ears.
It was the sound Walcroft made after Jonah had shot him in the head. It went on and on, growing louder as it came down through the years to find him.
After the big police production where they played taps and fired their rifles in the air, wearing their fancy gear and little white gloves, with a huge photo of Lila’s face on an easel beside her casket, Chase shook hands with the mayor and took the folded flag they shoved at him, and stood there while they all got in their photo ops. They talked at him for hours and he just nodded when he thought it was appropriate. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes they frowned at him or shook him by the arm.
A lot of cops came up and said how much they admired Lila. Students and teachers and lunch-room attendants took his hand and tried to make him feel better by talking about peace and paradise, telling him to put his faith in God’s wisdom and justice. Before it was all over Chase had given the flag away to somebody, he didn’t know who.
He had to shift gears quickly, get back up to speed.
Two days later, when Lila’s body was on the plane heading back to her parents, he called Hopkins at home and said, “I want whatever you’ve got on the ice knockoff.”
Hopkins went, “The what?”
The Suffolk cops really did have a cush job. So cush they didn’t know the language of action. “The diamond merchant score. I need whatever paperwork you have. I want you to tell me everything. In detail.”
“Christ, no.”
“I have to know what happened that day. From the beginning.”
Hopkins started crying again. Chase hated the sound of it, but let him sob, knowing that in some way, great or small, Hopkins had been in love with Lila. He’d felt protective of her, responsible for her, and buoyed by her. Chase couldn’t fault the guy for that. He waited until Hopkins got a grip, blew his nose, and cleared his throat. Then he broke down again. Chase waited.
Finally Hopkins said, “We don’t allow that.”
Chase let it slide. “Who’s in charge of the case?”
“Detectives Murray and Morgan.”
“Out of your precinct?”
“Yeah. Listen to me, about Lila-”
Chase listened and Hopkins said nothing. He asked, “Well, what about her?”
“I mean, I just wanted to say-” The cop’s voice was tight, and he was about to let go again. He’d never swing a full twenty and make his pension. Chase wondered what Hopkins’s wife thought, having to listen to this, her husband weeping every time Lila’s name came up. “She was a good woman, a good cop, you know, I thought I should-”
Chase hung up and drove over to the station. He asked for Detectives Murray and Morgan and got pointed to the squad room.
Turned out they were two old-school hard-asses, thick and gray, who didn’t like to deal with civilians. They must’ve remembered Chase from the funeral and tried to commiserate with him in that silent mano a mano sharing-the-rough-times vibe bullshit. They’d been at this for so long they didn’t feel anything anymore, and could barely make the effort to pretend to. They didn’t bother to work hard at placating him, just acted as if they deserved to throw off attitude because they were the good guys. As if cops feel pain deeper than the rest of the world. They kept calling him Mister and making it sound like Fuck off, twinky. Chase wondered what it would do to other men who’d recently lost their wives, being forced to deal with these two heartless pricks.
He smiled pleasantly and thanked them for their time.
For two hours he parked out front waiting until Murray and Morgan took off for lunch. Chase walked back inside the squad room, acted like he had a right to be there, and squirreled around Morgan’s and Murray’s desk drawers until he found the right files and a copy of the security tape.
Police precincts have the worst security in the world. It was no surprise their evidence rooms were always being ripped off from either the inside or the outside.
As he was walking away, a cop coming from the other direction gave him the stink-eye and said, “Can I help you with something?”
Chase said, “Nope,” trying hard to make it sound like Fuck off, twinky, and walked out.
A pro job all the way. Four-man string. A diamond wholesaler in Hauppauge. Three inside and the driver not far from the Court building. Chase could imagine the crew having a nice chuckle over that.
He watched the clock in the corner of the tape. In and out in exactly three minutes. One guy watching the employees, another going after the cases in front, a third in the back room clearing out uncut stones. They wore ski masks and black clothing to eliminate any descriptive details. They carried heavy artillery, looked like Colt Pythons. Serious hardware.
He watched the tape again. One of the female employees mouthed off and a gunman shoved her hard against a wall, threatening her with the four-inch barrel in her face. A male employee jumped up and said something and got smashed across the nose for it. Blood spurted and he dropped to the floor, holding his face and rocking.
Only a couple of witnesses had seen the getaway car. They all agreed it was bone white-flashy for a wheelman-but nobody could name the model. Just that it had muscle to it and a loud engine when it tore out onto Vets Highway, squealing in the rain.
Across from the diamond merchant’s was a stationery store. Typical Long Island strip mall, a couple of major businesses on opposite corners tacking down the whole line of shops. At one end, farthest from the entrance to the parking lot, was the diamond merchant, at the other a pizza parlor. Chase remembered Lila talking about it. Fratelli’s, where they called everybody paisano and had wallpaper showing the Colosseum, the Leaning Tower, and gondoliers on the Venice canals.
Flipping through pages in the file, he came to Hopkins’s report, written in a quivering hand, relating how he and Lila had just finished taking an afternoon’s worth of depositions at the court and were driving past the shopping center when they decided to grab a late lunch.
The report was light on human details and heavy on that clear-cut but remote style relating fact after fact.
Chase ran it through his head, heard Lila saying, Son, I need me two slices with extra cheese and if you don’t wanna see the unfortunate sight of me growing light-headed and weak in the knees, you won’t hog the grating cheese.
Hopkins telling her, Christ, you sure do like pizza. Don’t you miss, like, grits?
So they drive in, and Lila spots the bone-white muscle car parked at the curb with its lights on and wipers going. She’s instantly aware, maybe even taken back to the night she met Chase. She decides to check it out, drives through the lot, Hopkins going, Hey, I thought you were ready to pass out from hunger?
Chase flipping pages, putting the pieces together.
The three inside men coming out together, still cool, following the plan. Only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was dark as hell because of the heavy rain. Lots of water glare, cars coming and going with their lights on. It would’ve been tough to differentiate the police cruiser from the strip mall shoppers. Folks parking to shop at the bakery, single mothers washing clothes at the Laundromat next to the pizza parlor.
Lila pulling up, finally close enough to see the bagmen rushing to the car, knowing now exactly what was happening. Probably even grinning, thinking, Well it ain’t no Bookatee’s Antiques & Rustic Curio Emporium heist this time, that’s for goddamn certain.
Teeth clenched, eyes snapped shut, Chase going for the cold spot, letting it do its job. The ice running through his brain.
His eyes flashing open.
Hopkins catching on and reaching for the radio. Lila trying to park diagonally across the other car’s path, but they were too damn close now. The bagmen piling into their car, both engines shrieking. The rain a brilliant haze in front of the headlights, hard to see anything but halo effect and shadow.
Chase wanting to scream, Don’t do it, baby.
Lila throwing it into park, thrusting open the door, and crouching there, getting into position to fire. Hopkins bending low while he shouted into the radio.
The pages tight with tiny scrawls stating what the witnesses saw next. Hopkins unable to confirm because he was ducked down behind the dashboard.
The pro behind the wheel hanging his left arm out the window and firing three times through the driver’s door of the cruiser.
Well, look at that.
The driver had killed her.
Not much time left, he knew. The crew would have a fence on hand, but they wouldn’t get any cash back from the score for at least a couple of weeks. They’d stick around and hole up somewhere nearby. The fence would probably be one of the mob-run outfits in the diamond district of Manhattan. It was a good guess anyway, something to think about.
Chase played the tape a dozen more times, slowing it down, studying every move, trying to see the things he wasn’t supposed to see. Watching the crew move so capably about the place, with no wasted effort, knowing every angle.
So why didn’t they take out the camera? Three minutes was tight but they could’ve spray-painted the lens in five seconds flat. It was pretty much standard operating procedure.
So what was he seeing that he was supposed to see? That they wanted everyone to see?
Chase went with his gut.
There was an inside person you were supposed to see acting like anything but an inside person.
That made it either the woman who’d gotten pushed around or the guy who’d gotten slugged in the mouth.
The file had their names and addresses. James Lefferts and Marisa Iverson.
He needed wheels.
Street racing had come back into style, especially in Queens and Brooklyn, and the law was starting to tighten up. Word was that the drivers were now moving out to Jersey to do their dragging, keeping their merchandise in Manhattan and staying clear of the cops who patrolled Ocean Parkway, Grand Central, Kings Highway, the Palisades, and out around LaGuardia. Jersey cops would catch on soon, and then the kids would probably head out to Long Island and haul ass down Route 25a, the Meadowbrook, or the Wantagh.
Chase knew at least a couple of his kids were tooling around the city picking up extra cash doing some weekend racing. They’d asked him the best way to soup their cars for the fast burn, some of them hoping he could set them up with nitrous. He’d never run nitrous himself and thought it was insane to fuck around like that in New York. It was strictly a West Coast way to kill yourself.
Chase took the train into Manhattan and found the 24-hour parking garage closest to the Holland Tunnel. Security was lax at two A.M. Chase wandered right in past the college kid on duty in the entrance booth who had his face buried in a textbook, snoring so hard that the plastic windows of the little booth rattled.
It took Chase almost two hours of searching the place before he found what he wanted, up on the fourth level.
A 1970 yellow Chevelle. Cowl induction hood, dual exhaust, and fourteen-inch Super Sport wheels. A machine made of muscle.
He got the door open and popped the hood-454 Four Speed with a 360-horsepower engine. It had been cared for, souped pretty nicely but could still use a little fine-tuning. That wouldn’t take him long.
The VIN number had been filed down and burned away with an industrial acid. Same with the serial numbers on the engine block. There was no paperwork in the glove compartment. He was boosting a car that had probably already been boosted a half-dozen times since it came off the line.
He slid up to the semaphore arm and didn’t even have to run it. He just slowly eased down on the gas and the arm snapped across the Chevelle’s grille while the college kid kept dreaming about advanced calculus or subatomic particle theory.
Chase spent the entire morning adjusting the engine, the brakes, and the suspension, making it all even sweeter. The thief before him had done a damn good job, but now she’d handle even better on the turns.
He switched out the plates and repainted the car a burnished black. While waiting for it to dry he sat in the corner of the garage sucking in the fumes and going back and forth on who might have been the inside person on the ice heist, the man or the woman.
Late afternoon he took the Chevelle out for a test run down Commack Road, ripping it into triple digits and hoping a cop would engage him, but no cruiser ever showed. He pulled it back into the garage and checked a couple of final calibrations. Then, when he’d done all that he could do with the time he had, Chase fell into bed exhausted and dreamed of Lila.
She appeared before him on the bed, twining across his chest the way she usually had during the deep night, and said, “I told you the dead would find a way. You just have to listen to us. So hear me now, love. You gotta let this thing go. I don’t want you to follow through with what you’re planning. How do you expect me to rest easy knowing what’s on your mind? You remember what I say.”
He tried to answer her, but when he opened his mouth all that came out was Walcroft’s sound rattling loose from inside him.
He woke in the morning with the pillowcase soaking wet.
He’d been crying like hell in his sleep.
He wasn’t hard at all.
The phone rang. It was the principal of the school extending his condolences again. The staff and many of the students had taken up a collection and bought flowers for the funeral, and had Chase noticed them? The remaining fund would be given to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association in Lila’s name. The principal told him not to worry about returning anytime this semester. An extended leave of absence with pay was in effect. Was there anything that anyone at the school could do? The principal repeated himself and waited for Chase to say something.
Chase said, “I quit,” and hung up.
Turned out the hero who’d gone up against the crew during the ice heist lived alone in a small two-story house over in Smithtown, the kind of place Chase used to burgle pretty frequently during the early years he ran with Jonah.
It was noon. The time of day when all the kids were at school and the stay-at-home moms and dads and retirees were busy with their soap operas and daytime talk shows, learning how to be better people while slumped on their couches. Nobody ever spotted a cat burglar at noon.
He parked down the block and scoped James Lefferts’s house. Lefferts’s Taurus was in the driveway, the exhaust still dripping. Looked like he had come home for lunch. Chase waited twenty minutes before he saw Lefferts leave, holding his briefcase tightly
The guy had two black eyes and wore a Band-aid across the bridge of his nose. He was going to have a definite tilt to the left for a couple of months until they broke his nose again and could realign the cartilage. Chase watched Lefferts get in his car and head back to the diamond merchant’s.
Chase climbed out and walked through a wooden gate at the side of the house. It led to a fussily kept backyard screened from the neighbors by a high row of hedges. Lefferts lived alone and liked things tidy. Garden gnomes, birdhouses, and little windmills had been planted among the carefully cultivated bushes and flowers edging the perfectly trimmed lawn.
No alarm system. The back door had a dead bolt and the windows were all locked. Took Chase ninety seconds to get inside.
He did a slow and efficient search of the house, going through every closet, drawer, and cabinet. It immediately became apparent that Lefferts was a truly finicky guy. He hung all his shirts on hangers, not just the dress ones but even the V-necks, track suits, and Ts. Kept his sock drawer in perfect order, the whites over here, the blacks over there, his boxers folded and neatly stacked. He recycled and washed out his tuna cans and mayo jars. His electric razor was empty of stubble. All his rolls of masking tape had the first half inch folded over.
The only suspicious items Chase came up with were a box of magazines and videos that bordered on child pornography. Not quite over the line, but man was it close. Some of the stuff was in other languages and came with subtitles. What passed for erotica in Romania would get you strung up in Birmingham. There were also Russian mail-order bride catalogs, featuring mostly pale, seminude chubby girls in ads that read, My name is Mischa, and I am looking for a successful American businessman who I can love in bed and out. Must own his own home. No children. I prefer no pets but won’t mind one small dog or cat. I enjoy oral sex. These Russkie chicks laid it on the line.
James Lefferts got home at seven. He was putting in the hours, no doubt about his taking the job seriously. Someone like that would probably mouth off at three Colt Pythons when one of his fellow employees got shoved around.
Chase couldn’t afford Jimmy getting tough with him now. He needed information fast. He could feel the hours evaporating, the crew getting ready to make their move. They were out there, burning away the downtime until their fence came through with the cash. A couple of them thinking about spending the long green, a couple of others only caring about the juice of the next score. Every string was about the same.
Lefferts walked in and saw Chase in the living room and said, “Who the hell are you?”
Chase punched him in his already broken nose. Lefferts let out a squawk of agony and dropped like he’d taken an ax to the head.
Blood burst down his chin and across his shirt. He tore at his face with both hands, writhing on the carpet, tears flowing down his cheeks as he flailed and rolled. Chase got some ice cubes out of the freezer, put them in a dish towel, and crushed them against the countertop. When he got back to the living room he saw that Lefferts had vomited all over himself and was only semiconscious.
Pressing the towel to Lefferts’s nose induced another cry of pain, but at least it roused him from his stupor. Chase propped Lefferts onto the couch and gave him a minute to wake up.
“Jimmy,” Chase said. “Hey.”
“Oh Christ, my face-”
“Jimmy, listen to me now. I’ve got a question to ask you. And I’d appreciate your honesty here. It’s very important to me.”
“Oh God,” Lefferts said, choking on his blood.
“I can’t breathe, I can’t think.”
On display in one of the high glass-door cabinets were two bottles of Chardonnay. Chase opened one and poured some into a fancy wine-glass.
“Here,” he said, “have some of this.”
“Is that the Chardonnay?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you let it breathe?”
You had to hand it to him. Blood and upchuck aside, he was as finicky as ever. “Just drink it.”
Lefferts drew the dish towel away and tried to sip. It made him gag and he started to moan. “I can’t taste anything except blood! My nose-”
“You’ll be fine. They’re going to have to break it again anyway, eventually.”
“Lord, no-”
“Now, Jimmy, you listening? Seriously, I need you to pay attention here.”
“What? Who are you?”
“I want the names of the crew you were working with.”
“The what?”
Chase had the box of naughty porn on one of the end tables and pulled out some of the magazines. “I wonder what the feebs will think of this stuff. I wonder what they’ll find on your computer when they take it in.”
“The who?”
“The FBI. You can delete stuff and rewrite over it on your hard drive and they’ll still be able to pick it up. I wonder how many lists your name is on in Czechoslovakia. These child brides that you buy from the former Soviet Union, they know English already or do you have to teach them?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Do you have any idea who I am, Jimmy?” Chase asked. “If you knew who I was you might understand the lengths I’m willing to go today in order to get the information I want.”
“I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you!”
“You want me to punch you in the nose again, is that it?”
“Fuck no!”
“I’m the husband of the police officer murdered outside your place of business.”
Jimmy Lefferts’s eyes widened, but it wasn’t with fear. It was simply with an even greater confusion. “So what the hell do you want from me? What are you doing? Why are you here?”
“I want to know who killed my wife.”
“I don’t know anything about that! How would I know anything about that?”
Chase got in close, his nose two inches from Jimmy Lefferts’s misshapen schnoz, the bloom of blood wafting so pungently, such a painfully human stink. He looked deep and read the man’s face. The confusion, the ineffectual anger, the willingness to please, but the uncertainty of not knowing how. Chase finally had to admit that he believed him.
“Okay, Jimmy, I’m leaving now.”
“You are?”
“And I can trust you to keep this little conversation between just the two of us, right?”
“Absolutely!”
“I’m sorry about knocking you around, really I am. But if you call the cops or tell anybody else at all about this I’ll make sure the feebs come breathing down your back.”
“All of my erotica is completely legal! You can’t hurt me with that!”
Chase toed through the magazines and thought maybe Jimmy was right. He kneeled, rolled up one of the zines, got it nice and tight and swatted Jimmy Lefferts across his mashed nose. Jimmy screamed and a new stream of blood started running into his mouth.
He waited for Jimmy to focus, pressed a finger to the man’s red lips and went, “Then I’ll just come back and kill you in your goddamn bed one night.”
Her name was Marisa Iverson and she lived only a few miles across town from Jimmy Lefferts. Similar small home but she went in for a pretty high-tech alarm system. It gave Chase some pause while he tried to remember the proper way of tricking it out. Took him a lot longer than he expected. By the time he was finished he was bathed in sweat.
The system hadn’t been wired to a security service or the police. Chase wondered about that.
Once inside he made a careful search of the home. A wide living room opened into a dining area, and behind that you had to go through a swinging door to the kitchen. The place was tastefully furnished. She went in for soft blues and paisley, modern lightweight furniture and lots of potpourri and handcrafted wares.
Candles everywhere, a huge CD collection, lots of DVDs held in a large oak bookcase. Mostly guy movies-action blockbusters, shoot-’em-ups, Westerns. The fridge held a lot of beer. A fancy liquor cabinet was filled with a row of half-empty bottles of Jameson, Dewar’s, Wild Turkey, and Jack Daniel’s. Looked like Marisa Iverson entertained the dudes.
It took him ten minutes to find a Browning 9mm, safety off, buried way at the back of the breakfront behind some fake china and cheap crystal.
Like you’re having a holiday dinner with the whole family and somebody says they don’t like the soup, so you make like you’re going for the gravy bowl and put two in his head.
He pocketed it.
In the bedroom, clipped behind the head-board, he found a.22. He could just see how she’d use it. Lure the mark into bed, take charge and get on top, ride him until he was an incoherent mess, then reach over and yank the little squeaker up, press it to the guy’s forehead, pull the trigger. Hardly any blood to clean up. Wouldn’t even have to throw out the sheets. A heavy cotton cycle would do it.
He’d have to send some flowers and a get-well card to Jimmy Lefferts. Marisa ran with the crew.
Maybe she didn’t trust the string that much. So she kept them lulled and contented with booze and sex and cowboys and Indians. Did she fear a double cross? Did she plan one herself?
He pocketed the.22 as well, walked out onto the front stoop, and went through the mailbox. Nothing but bills and a real estate flyer claiming home sales in the neighborhood had doubled in the past eighteen months. Chase could believe it.
He continued combing through the house, looking for anything to tie her to the crew that had scored the ice. An address book lay open on her desk. Not many names, most of them local businesses. A dry cleaner’s, a carpet steamer service, a local Chinese restaurant. The diamond merchant’s office. There was James Lefferts.
Chase figured almost any of the entries could be code and she might be hiding the crew’s contact number out in plain sight.
He got on her computer and found a bunch of password-protected files. He tried “diamond,” “rock,” “ice,” and a dozen other words. Driver. Wheelman. Python. Before long a feverish buzz was reaching through his skull. By the time he typed in “Lila” he knew he was starting to uncoil and had to get a grip.
At the back of her bottom desk drawer he found the paperwork for the house. Turned out she was only renting the place and had only been here four months out of a one-year lease. All the blue and paisley and tacky modern furniture belonged to the true owners, cheapo crap left behind for their tenant.
Four months. Just enough time to establish her identity. He doubted she’d been working at the diamond merchant’s for any longer than that. He realized then how close he’d come to missing the crew entirely. She wasn’t an inside woman at all. She was part of the crew and would be packing up soon to join them.
He stood in her kitchen and checked the dishwasher. A couple of dirty plates, a handful of utensils, one glass. Exactly what you’d expect from a woman living alone. He looked in the fridge again and counted four different brands of bottled beer. He thought the booze was left over from a recent party. She entertained but didn’t live with anyone, had nobody dropping by on a nightly basis. Wherever the crew had gone to ground, they weren’t near enough to stop by much.
There was no reason for her to continue the ruse now. The longer she hung around the more of a chance the cops would tumble to the fact she was part of the heist. She should’ve bailed already. Why hadn’t she pulled up stakes yet?
Two hours later, at 6:10, the woman who called herself Marisa Iverson walked in the front door clutching her purse and the day’s mail. She deactivated and reset the alarm. She put her purse down on the coffee table and tossed the bills in a pile. Then she headed to the bathroom on the first floor. She closed and locked the door. One of those people who followed form even when they were alone in their own houses.
Chase stepped out from the corner of the living room and went through the purse. Another.22. He figured he’d find more goodies in her car, but he’d let that go for the moment. He took her cell phone and checked the numbers. Maybe she’d slipped up and left him a connection to the crew. He pocketed the phone and the revolver. For a guy who hated guns, he was now packing three of them.
When Marisa stepped out of the bathroom he met her in the hall, said, “Hiya,” and clipped her on the chin.
Man she was good.
Even though he’d caught her unaware, she faded back and rolled with the punch. She was lissome as hell and sweet to watch, landing nimbly on the carpet, tucking in, and immediately getting to her feet. He’d hardly even tapped her. He knew it was his own fault. He’d never struck a woman before and had a natural resistance to this kind of situation.
She rubbed the back of her hand against her jaw. No fear in her at all. Completely cool, a total pro, living out on the wire. Maybe she’d been in the bent life since she was a kid, or maybe the crew had picked her up along the way and had taught her well. Chase really wanted to meet this crew.
Marisa Iverson stood and glared at him, her unforgiving mouth tugged into the barest grin. She was maybe thirty, on the pretty side but made down so you wouldn’t notice. He saw that she used eyeshadow, rouge, and lipstick to slightly alter the contours of her face. Blond hair drawn back in a tight ponytail, with two twists framing but obscuring her jawline. Big round glasses concealed a lot of details to her features. It was a damn good disguise.
The bone-colored business suit fit her well, but it still somehow looked all wrong on her. Chase just knew it wasn’t her real style, and he could see the other person beneath emerging now.
A hard-stepper, she always went at life head-on, and took it as rough as she could because she liked it that way.
“And who might you be?” she asked.
Eyes as dark and lifeless as shale. Alert and sharp as she ran through the current setup, figuring all the different angles, already plotting and scheming.
Chase said, “I might be the Minister of Culture and Communications, but I’m not.”
The grin widened. “So sorry to hear that.”
“I’ll bet.”
She had to be wondering if he was just your usual second-story man or a hitter hired by one of the crew to betray the rest. Or if she’d somehow stepped on the mob’s toes and now had a syndicate torpedo out here looking for restitution. A lot had to be going through her head, but she revealed nothing, just kept giving that knowing look.
“You don’t like to hit girls, do you?” she asked. “That was hardly even a love tap.” Saying it like an insult, trying to get under his skin right from the start and shake him up, force him into making a mistake. Soon she’d try to sex him, and then she’d go for one of the guns.
Chase waited. Marisa took off her glasses and tossed them on top of the television. She reached up to her hair and yanked free the scrunchie holding it in place. Shook it out and let it get wild around her shoulders. It had nothing to do with intimacy and everything with baiting the trap.
Clearly she didn’t think he was worth being subtle for, and that pissed him off a little.
“So what’s next?” she asked. “You plan on spanking me? I hope you are. I know of a much more comfortable place we can do that. I have lots of toys upstairs.”
“Let’s stay here. I’ve already seen the accessories you keep around your bed.”
It brought a humorless smile to her lips. “Well of course you have.”
This one, he thought, this one right here could empty six in my head while making love, and then she’d spit in my blood.
Stepping away very slowly, Marisa eased backward across the living room and forced Chase to follow along. It was a very crafty act and showed she had a lot of patience, moving them toward the table where her purse sat.
“You have any idea why I’m here?” he asked. It wasn’t the way to start off, but she’d thrown him already.
“Is that a serious question? I mean, do you actually expect an answer?”
He wanted to take it back and try again. He said, “Listen, I don’t care about you or your string or the diamond heist. I just want the driver.”
“Oh? Which driver?” She slithered away another inch, inviting him closer.
“He’s all I want. The rest of you can walk with the score.”
She cocked her head, jutted her bottom lip, and tried to make her eyes soften. As if whatever she said next, that would be her being completely, totally, utterly honest. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Really. That’s the truth.”
Chase sighed.
It was such a forlorn sound, advertising his frustration and sorrow so clearly that it made her let loose with a small yip of laughter.
Marisa Iverson shrugged and held her hands up in front of her, telling him, You expected me to say something else?
It was only an impasse if you didn’t have what it took to force your way through. “Your crew was slick but no wheelman carries a gun, much less makes flash moves like firing out the window. Left-handed.”
“You smacked Jimmy Lefferts around some last night, didn’t you? He was even uglier when he came in to work today.”
“It was either you or him.”
“Well, I dare say it’s him.”
“No,” Chase said, “it’s you, Marisa.”
“You’re an intense one, honey. Tell me your story. Did some poor girl break your heart?”
“Yes,” he said, “you did.”
He tagged her hard. Backhanded her so fiercely that she was propelled across the room and over the arm of the couch. She flipped backward and hit the floor, blood already pulsing from her mouth. She turned over laughing and dabbed at her bottom lip with her fingers. She looked up at him.
“I was wrong,” she said, “you do like to hit girls. But only sometimes. You’re quick on the button.”
So he’d told her something about himself. That was inevitable. But she’d let him know something about herself, too.
She only cracked out of turn and broke character when he insulted the driver. There was something there.
She spit blood on the floor, got to her feet, turned, and sprinted for the china closet. Her first instinct wasn’t to try for the door but to get the Browning, cap him, keep everything quarantined, under control. She dug behind the crystal and grimaced when she found the weapon gone.
“Got that one too,” Chase said. “And I hate guns.”
It didn’t stop her. She started hurling the plates and glasses at him.
Chase covered up and rushed forward. She kicked out and connected with his shin, then twisted her knee into his groin. It hurt like hell but he fought through the pain. A black shimmer bordered his vision. He slapped her again and she flew into the wall, laughing. She threw herself into his arms and kissed him with her bloody mouth.
“You gonna rape me now, big daddy? Come on.”
“The driver,” Chase said.
She got her hands on his neck, dug her nails in, and tore them across his throat. He grunted in pain and the gouges dripped blood down his chest. She’d felt the guns in his jacket while pressed against him, and now she had her hand in his pocket, fumbling for the Browning and trying to get her finger on the trigger.
“Christ,” he said, and elbowed her in the sternum. She fell to her knees and tried to hammer him in the crotch. He slid backward, got his hands up in front of him like he was in the ring.
He watched her, intrigued and a little sick to his stomach. All his years with Jonah and they’d never worked with a female professional thief. Were they all tough like this? He supposed they’d have to be in order to run with crews that carried Pythons and blew away police officers.
“So, he’s your man, eh?” he said. “The driver. He your guy?”
“They’re all my guys.”
“You must get a lot of chocolate on Valentine’s Day.”
“You don’t have what it takes to roll with me,” she told him.
“We can find out if you really want to push the point.”
“Oh,” she said, chin already swelling and growing black with bruises, gums purple with blood. “I do. I certainly do, baby.” Turning action into fore-play. “Your hand is shaking.”
“All I want is the getaway man.”
“Hold your arms out, maybe he’ll fall through the ceiling right into them.”
Chase was tough, but he didn’t know if he could do whatever it took. Not even now. Not with Lila still alive in his mind, imaging her eyes filled with disappointment and love for him. Jesus, what the hell was he going to do?
“Marisa, I’m kind of appealing to you here, okay? Really. Neither one of us wants to go down this road.”
“You are such a cunt,” she said. “You’re easy. You want to know how easy. Watch.” She came at him again, and when he tried to hold her off, she went at him with her teeth. She turned her head and chewed into his wrist.
He smacked her and then backhanded her, rocking her off her feet. It was a couple of mean shots but not nearly enough to make her stop giggling. Her eyes had told him that she didn’t think he could do the things he would have to do. She kicked out at him and he hit her again. She struck the floor with a snarl and lay there with her shoulders trembling, spitting out looping ropes of blood. He watched her, knowing she was laughing at him.
“Like I said, you’re easy.”
“Marisa, don’t make me do this.”
“I’m not making you do anything, baby. But it’s all right, we’ll be done here soon anyway, and then you’ll get yours.”
Here it was, finally. He was meeting the worst part of himself. He thought of the men who hurt women. The driver blasting Lila. The animals out there that he’d always despised. The bastard murdering his mother.
Chase raised his fist and punched Marisa in the face, the sound of bone cracking bone making his belly twist. She had guts and she stuck to the rule that you never gave up your crew. She’d never break and he felt an odd respect for her, mixed with all the disgust and hate. How far could he go?
Mouthing Lila’s name, he slugged Marisa Iverson again. She barely rocked back on her feet. Her eyes were beginning to close up. She wobbled and dropped, and then shot to her feet again, moving for her purse. He let her go. When she found that the.22 was gone she hurled the purse at him. It bounced off his chest. She turned to face him, still grinning, she’d be grinning in his dreams, he knew, for the rest of his life.
“The driver.”
“You’ll get nothing out of me, baby,” she said.
The Jonah in his head said, Shoot her in the stomach.
Sneering, Marisa came at him once more and pummeled him twice in the chest. She knew how to throw a punch the right way, trying to stop his heart. Then she drove an elbow in his ribs and he almost went down. It filled her with joy and adrenaline. No wonder she and the driver had paired up. She was a lunatic too.
She ran in and tried to bite him in the throat. He slapped her two, three, four times bringing loud grunts and weird laughter from her. She fell to the carpet, tried to stand once more but couldn’t. The surge of crazed energy was fading.
She started panting and moaning a little singsong that reminded him of the preacher overtaken by the power of tongues at his wedding.
Finally she managed to stand, weaving a bit.
“You think I can’t take a few love taps?” she said. She spit at him, her blood landing on his shoes. “I’ve been getting worse than this since I was seven years old. You can’t hurt me. You can’t do anything to hurt me.”
Jesus Christ, she might be right.
He was teeming with sweat. He wanted to moan or roar. He would fucking beg her if he thought it could work.
She was better than him, much harder than him. As icy and tough as they came. But he couldn’t shake the thought, even now. Why hadn’t she pulled out of town yet? What was keeping her here?
And then he knew why she hadn’t run yet.
He’d botched it.
If only he’d waited and watched a few more days, he could’ve caught them all. He’d messed up, hadn’t been thinking clearly.
The crew planned on scoring the diamond merchant again.
“You’re going to have to kill me now, you know,” she told him. He wasn’t sure that she could even see him anymore. “You don’t have any choice. The minute you leave I’ll just call my boys and they’ll scatter. Or worse for you, they’ll hunt you down.”
“They won’t have to.” He found an unused pad and pen next to the phone and wrote his address down. “They can come find me whenever they like.”
“You’re insane,” she said, the smile gone at last.
“You can’t just walk away.”
“Sure I can.”
“I won’t let you.”
“Tell them I’ll be waiting.”
“Cunt.”
After all of this she still managed to launch herself at him, trying to scratch out his eyes. He caught her in midair easily, held her closely for a moment, and then laid her onto the couch. Her adrenaline finally gave out and she slumped back across the cushions, out cold.
Shadows lengthened across them both. He stared down at her unconscious form as the room grew darker, the sun starting to set. His hands were sticky with her spit and blood. He didn’t move. He didn’t know when he would be able to move again but he knew he couldn’t move now.
She was protecting the one who had squeezed off three shots into his wife.
He should take her kneecaps out.
He should put two in her eyes.
The guns were heavy in Chase’s jacket. He tried to will himself to accept and become a part of their exacting pitiless nature, even while Lila said loudly within him, Oh sweetness, what’ve you done?
Chase found himself in the dining room drinking a beer. He finished the bottle and left it in the sink. On the couch, Marisa Iverson gurgled, hissed, and snorted, having a hard time breathing with her face so swollen. He made for the door and another thought hit him.
Carpet steamer service.
Marisa Iverson had only been planning to stick around for a few months at most. Establish an identity at the diamond merchant’s, make the move on the video cameras, stay long enough for the heat to dwindle, and then she and the crew would score the merchant again.
So why the hell would she feel the need to clean the carpets? How dirty could they get that someone in the bent life would care enough to pay to have them cleaned and keep the number on hand?
Chase ran upstairs and got her address book, made a note of the steamer service address and phone number.
Maybe this was her one mistake.
She’d be unconscious for another hour at least. He had that long to see if he could track the crew on his own.
It took him fifteen minutes to get there. The address was real. He drove by it and found an industrial park. She knew the area and had gotten just a touch too clever trying to cover every detail in order to make her sham life seem authentic. She was organized and compulsive. She couldn’t put a number down in the book without an address too. She couldn’t put an address down if it wasn’t an actual place.
The number would belong to a cell phone. It would be untraceable, and it would be ditched a minute after he called.
He had only one shot at this, and he had to make it count.
There was probably a code they stuck to when contacting each other. Two rings, hang up, three rings, hang up, some kind of shit like that. A lot more discriminating than on Jonah’s circuit.
Chase called the number. After it rang twenty times, he disconnected and tried again.
They weren’t a twitchy bunch but there would be rules to follow. No matter what though, even if they figured the cops were on the line, they’d eventually have to answer. It was Marisa’s phone, they’d need to find out what happened to her and see how badly their action was blown.
After another twenty, a dead-calm voice said, “Yes.”
“Are you the getaway man?” Chase asked.
Silence.
Let him roll it around for a while, get the questions burning, but without being able to ask any of them. Give nothing.
Chase said, “Are you the driver? All I want is the driver. I left a message with Marisa Iverson. I’ll leave it with you too. I don’t care about your knockoffs or what happened inside the ice merchant’s. I just want the driver. Don’t tell me he was your regular guy. A maniac like that firing out a car window on a heist is a wild dog. The cop killing has got to have put a lot of heat on your ass. Give him to me and the rest of you can walk.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll take you all down. You the driver?”
Silence.
“If not, pass the word on.”
Chase broke the connection and threw the phone out the car window. He got onto the Long Island Expressway heading east and put the hammer down until he hit 110. The world blurred around him but not enough. Traffic parted before him like flesh opening before the intent of a knife.
He shut his eyes and drifted, hearing Jonah telling him he’d fouled up again, leaving the girl alive and warning the crew. When Chase opened his eyes again and checked the rearview he had three cruisers trying to box him in, the sirens and lights suddenly surrounding him. He smiled his first real smile in weeks, squeezed out 135 from the engine and watched them fade behind him as he jockeyed around family SUVs. Before any more backup showed he took the next exit off, parked behind a firehouse until all the sirens dissipated in the distance, and stole a fresh pair of plates. He took back roads toward home. Every time he looked in the rearview and saw his own eyes he got a minor jolt. He kept thinking someone else was in the backseat, scrutinizing him.
He called Murphy in Fort Wayne and found out the man was dead-heart failure, six hours on the table, ten weeks in a coma before finally giving it up-but the elder son, Georgie, had taken over the crime line while the younger son ran the used-car lots. Georgie knew who Chase was and said, “You still a grease monkey?”
More stupid-ass code. The old men had been using it since 1958. They still said “dropped a dime” and never knew how much a phone call cost. If the feds were listening, how hard would it be for them to fucking reverse the numbers?
Chase said, “Georgie, listen closely. Forget the double-talk. Tell me where Jonah is. I need to see him.”