The Coldest Mile (10 page)

Ten o'clock the next morning, Cessy brought him the antibiotics and more painkillers. He paid her another c-note and she said, “I labeled the bottle myself, with instructions. Follow them. If that shoulder doesn't close up in the next few days, you need to get to a real doctor, not some crackhead.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“You don't look good. You're pale.” She went down the hall to the bathroom and came back with a wet hand towel. She washed his face and ran it over his sweaty hair. “You've got a fever.”

“I'll be okay.”

“You take care of yourself. And when you do
whatever it is you're planning to do, just don't blow up the kitchen. Not while I'm in it, anyways.” She smiled, going for the big mama loves her chillun act, but it ended abruptly. “Don't get lazy. These people seem ludicrous to street hustlers like us, but they hold on to their hatred and they never let up. They got nothing to do in life but cause others pain.”

An hour later,
while Chase finished fine- tuning the Ferrari and stood there deciding whether he wanted to escape with the suit or not, a convoy of town cars and SUVs came roaring onto the estate.

The doctors had told the family to make any last calls because Lenny wasn't going to make it through the day. Wiseguys from all over the place showed up to Judas kiss each other on the cheeks—goombahs and blue bloods hugging it out, just waiting to clip each other and take the Langans’ East Coast pie.

A big catered lunch was served while Lenny sucked in his last breaths. People wailed all over the house. The family wasn't Italian but these people sure knew how to act out their grief the way the Sicilians did. Every so often a few of them came outside to have a smoke and hand each other envelopes. The ME rolled Lenny away by one o'clock and the fleet vanished out the gates following the body.

That very afternoon the Langans began to liquidate Lenny's possessions. Neither Jackie nor Sherry put much of a premium on antiques, and they considered
anything over ten years old a relic. All day long appraisers came in and checked out the furniture, the crystal, the artwork.

Then the wiseguys all went out back and played a few holes of golf. All the crying was out of their system. Lenny's demise got them two under par. Chase watched the Langan crew start packing up the necessities for their eventual move.

Smoothing a blue ascot, Jackie strolled out to the garage and said to Chase, “I need you to take me to the city this afternoon.”

“Sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thanks. Not like we didn't have time to get ready. Better this than watching him lie there goddamn brain- dead, turning yellow as his kidneys shut down, tubes up his nose and down his throat and in his ass.”

Chase had nothing to say to that.

“Anyway, I need to get out of here and straighten my head out for a while,” Jackie said.

“Back to the massage parlor?” Chase asked.

Jackie bristled at the words but there wasn't much else you could call the place. “Yeah, I need to get my ashes hauled. My old man, he told me that when his father died he went to Vegas for a weekend, lost eighty g's, snorted a pound of coke, and fucked nine chink hookers, including a couple sisters.”

“The heart wants what it wants,” Chase said.

Jackie glanced over and saw that the Spyder had its hood open. “Are you still fucking with my Ferrari?”

“Yes.”

“You don't learn, do you? Why are you still messing with my car?”

“To get it to do what it was meant to do. Get in.”

“What?”

“It's finished. Let's take it out and I'll show you what it can do.”

“My father's dead.”

“Yeah, I know. Get in. We'll take a cruise, in his memory.”

“What?” Jackie didn't know what to do or say. “But—”

“All the antiques will still be here when we get back.”

“But—”

Chase wasn't sure Jackie was going to go for it, but without his thugs around, he seemed more pliable, eager for acceptance. He was also probably a little more broken up about his father's death than he'd ever understand himself. Chase reached out and pulled the ascot off Jackie's neck and said, “Come on, it'll help you unwind.” Before they left, Chase smeared mud across the plates.

He wanted to
feel the miles whip by. It had been too long since he'd been in charge of some real horsepower. Chase knew he was making another mistake, but the heart wants what it wants.

He decided to open it up a little on the way to Newark, down to Avenue P, where the cops had
been fighting a losing battle against street racing for years. It was still early evening but there was muscle all over. GTOs, souped Mustangs, Vettes with some reinforced bodywork. The air was already thick with nitrous. Chase knew Jackie had never opened her up. He eased on the gas and let his guts lead him through the machine, inch by inch into the engine, feeling the vibrations deep within.

Forget the skinny Jap chicks kicking the fuck out of your vertebrae, this was the way to get loose and get laid. His nuts were heating up. Jackie stuck his arms out against the dashboard like he expected to hit a wall any second. He was keeping up a steady line of chatter but Chase tuned him out and kicked it higher, up to seventy, eighty, ninety, the road wide and endless ahead of him.

Drivers had been wiping out here for years, kids a lot younger than him, old men looking to get back their hipness, their sweet spots. Chase hit triple digits and Jackie let out a whine like a hurt dog. He flinched and writhed in the passenger seat. Maybe Chase had been thrown off his game by driving the goddamn limo. If he hadn't been so out of it he would've realized he needed muscle to really get better.

Two cop cruisers picked them up just as Chase made a screaming left turn. Other cars flashed their lights and honked in support. The cops flipped a bitch and came roaring up behind him. Jackie looked hypnotized and started to hyperventilate.
Lenny had probably owned DAs, judges, and congressmen, but Jackie was afraid of a speeding ticket. No wonder his sister was taking over the empire.

Chase played tag with the cruisers all around Newark. Two staties joined in as he headed north up US 1 & 9, angling for Palisades Park and ripping toward Fort Lee. The Jersey Turnpike flattened out ahead and dumped traffic right into the heart of the city. Chase punched it and zagged among street-crawling suburbia. No matter how fast your car is or how big a head start you have on the cops, you can't lose them on straightaways. You need to turn off and creep around some burgh, get lost among your neighbors.

Jackie kept leaving himself and then coming back. His eyes rolled in terror and then focused, and then immediately unfocused again. Sherry had called it
— It's what they fear most. Being forced to face up to their own charade, their weakness exposed.
Jackie was scared of his own car, of what it represented on the road.

“Stop!” Jackie screamed. “Jesus Christ, stop it! Pull over!”

“You want to give yourself over to the cops?” Chase asked.

“You're going to crack us up!”

“You haven't been paying attention. Aren't you impressed with how the car handles?”

“Who the fuck cares about that now!”

“You should.”

“They'll get the plates!”

“No, they won't. Jackie, didn't you ever get into any trouble when you were a kid?”

“Christ, not like this!”

“That's why you're a mark.”

Jackie wasn't listening anymore. There were more Jersey cruisers around now, sirens and lights giving a nice background bloom of noise and color, trying to box Chase in. He headed to the Bridge Plaza, sped onto the Palisades, and weaved in and out of the traffic coming off 9W. One hot- dog statie hung with him for longer than the others, but Chase shook him by slicing across a shopping- center parking lot, slowing down enough so that soccer moms in SUVs could pull out around him, clogging the aisles so the trooper got gridlocked even with his siren and lights on. You could always count on the ladies not to look in their rearviews when they wanted to get home to start dinner.

When Jackie next came out of his stupor he looked around expecting cops everywhere and saw none. He let out a chuckle and relaxed in his seat as Chase dropped to forty- five, swung back on the Palisades, then leisurely took the next exit and drove back roads toward the Langan home.

“Holy shit,” Jackie said, reaching around like he wanted his two ice cubes, his Vicks Vapo-Rub, teak-wood sandals, anything to fill his hand and his neediness. “You got away.”

“It's what I do, Jackie.”

“I can see that. You're good, you're really fucking good. But you're crazy, you rotten prick. You're
supposed to be taking care of me. I finally got my inheritance, you think I want to join my old man in the ground?”

But when they drew up to the gates of the estate, Jackie was smiling so wide he looked deranged. It wasn't a whole lot better than the lemon out of somebody's asshole look. “That was really something else. What you did with my car. Jesus.”

“When you said you needed a driver, this is what I thought you wanted.”

Confusion set in, Jackie's eyes wide, still smiling like he was punch- drunk. “But why would I want anybody to do that?”

The phone call
came in half an hour later on Chase's phone, the butler's voice—or whoever it was—telling him in haughty tones that Mr. Langan would be driving into the city for a chiropractic appointment.

Uh huh. By the time Jackie was ready to start off for the Japanese massage parlor, he'd gotten into a nice, cool funky groove. He came out of the house grinning and clapped one of his thugs on the arm, even tried making a bit of small talk. His cheeks were still a little flushed and he kept running one hand through his hair, tugging at tufts like he could still feel his scalp crawling.

In the limo he asked a lot of questions about driving. He wanted to know specifically what Chase had done to the Ferrari. He came close to apologizing for ordering the brawl on the first day but didn't
quite do it. Jackie had a compadre now. Chase wondered if he'd be bumped up to strongarm or whatever the hell these people called their main crew. There might be time to hang around and figure out what happened to the cash that came in and somehow jug the safe.

Turning off of Houston, double- parking in front of the massage parlor so Jackie could get his spine snapped and de- stress from his father's death, Chase's cell rang. Jackie returned to form and said, “Hey, no private calls while you're—”

Chase answered. It was the Deuce. “I might have a line on your grandfather.”

A homeless guy with a spritz bottle moved out from behind a couple trash cans across the street and started staggering over.

“Can't talk any more right now, Deuce,” Chase said. “There's a hit going down.”

T
he Langan shooters had been having so much luck
the last couple months that they'd gotten a touch sophisticated and more than a little sloppy. You always came out fast and blasting, it was the only way to do it. But they were taking time to have a little fun now, getting slick. Maybe because they were making a move on the head of the family.

Chase watched the squeegee man shuffle across the street with a spritz bottle. There hadn't been a squeegee guy in New York since before 9-11, when Rudy Giuliani promised to get the homeless off the streets. Who knows what the hell he did with them, but the squeegee guys had been gone for years.

Chase recognized the hitters from around the house. Young turks trying to make their bones, thinking too much and making a game of it. They should've just walked up with converted automatics and sprayed the car.

Better yet, Bishop should've taken care of it himself. He must've been worried about the politics of
the hit, even though it had to be obvious to everybody that Jackie was a dead man. Sherry stepping up was the right thing to do, but still, the wiseguys had a thing about openly whacking one of their own family members. Just because Pacino did it didn't mean everybody else could. If you did it, you had to do it quietly. You had to act like it was breaking your heart. Had to hire out, bring people in from another country who didn't speak English. Otherwise it looked bad to the other outfits.

But dressing in costume? Chase could just imagine this guy with a pad and pencil writing notes to himself on the perfect way to ambush a limo. Drawing pictures of himself wearing different disguises, fake noses, beards, yarmulkes.

Chase watched him shuffle step by step toward the windshield of the Super Stretch. In the movies, it was always the shoes that gave the bad guy away. Walking through a hospital wearing the lab coat and a stethoscope plugging his ears, and he's got muddy black boots on.

But the squeegee guy wore scuffed shoes, had a black plastic trash bag with holes cut out for his head and arms. He was playing the part too well. Only the schizophrenics on antipsychotics wear trash bags, and then only when it was raining. This one, he had his spritz bottle out, and Chase noticed a flash off his finger.

The hitter had a pinkie ring on. Chase had shaken his hand once and felt the bulge of that thing. Probably worn it for so many years that he
couldn't get it off anymore no matter how much butter or cold cream he slathered around it. It was a diamond setting, he'd just twisted it around to face the diamond the other way, pointing toward his palm. But the sun still picked it up.

Acting on Sherry's orders, Bishop would have told the guy the windshield was bulletproof. But the windows all rolled down, which meant they were regular safety glass. He tried to figure out who would bother to take half measures like that? What was the point? Like a torpedo was only going to stand right in front of your headlights and try to—

Chase shut his eyes for a moment, not the smartest thing to do under the circumstances, but he was seeing Earl Raymond's head exploding inside the Roadrunner again.

One of the ugliest images Chase had stuck in his skull, but the one that he got the most pleasure from prodding.

His stomach tightened. The 9mm was still at the back of his closet. Okay, he could deal. Chase clicked the lock button just as Jackie tried to get out of the back.