The Cold Spot by Tom Piccirilli Read Free Book Online

showed up at the front door one day and said, ‘I’m your father’s father. You never heard of me, have you?’ I hadn’t and told him so. He said, ‘We’re blood, that’s important, and you’ve got a choice. You can stay with these people and live life on the map, or you can come along with me.’”
    “Life on the map?”
    “I didn’t even know what it meant, but he said it in such a way that I understood and believed him. He said, ‘It won’t be pretty, some of it, but it’s a part of who you are.’ So I went with him.”
    “Just like that?”
    “Yeah. My foster parents raised hell while I was packing, but they were scared of Jonah. He sat in a chair in the living room and stared at them until I was done. The girl with the burned face wanted to come too, if you can believe it.”
    “She liked you, and the two best sides of your face.”
    “No, she liked Jonah. His strength and his calm. So I just walked off the map and out of the system. I didn’t want school and a college education. My mother died in her quaint kitchen. My father was a professor. I wanted to be anyone but them.”
    “An outlaw from the start.”
    “I guess so.”
    With a slight shrug against the sheets, Lila curled beside him, and the dried sweat on her flesh
scritched
against his own. “What would your daddy think of the way your life’s been going these last few years?”
    Chase thought about it, looking up, scanning the ceiling as if searching for the man. He lit another cigarette and smoked it all down to the filter. Lila was still staring at him, expecting an answer. He tried to give her one.
    “I don’t really care. He made his choice and I made mine.”

T he next day, Lila invited him back to her place. A single-story house off in the woods, pretty much on its own, maybe two miles down the road from her parents’, three or four from the center of town where the police station was. He’d followed her here a couple times and cased the place. He showed her what was wrong with the locks on her windows and how easy it was to break in the back door.
    “How romantic,” she told him, “sharing methods on home invasion prevention.”
    He shrugged. “I stick to my strengths.”
    She made roasted wild turkey and stuffing with sharp, tangy flavors he’d never tasted before. While they sat there eating, without the need always to fill the silence, he realized with some surprise that this was his very first date.
    He’d lost his virginity at thirteen when Jonah had brought home two waitresses from a truck stop in Cedar Rapids, where they’d been working a short grift picking up a few easy bucks. Jonah had brought other women around before but no relationship had ever lasted more than a couple of weeks.
    Carrying a mostly empty pint of Dewar’s, Jonah introduced both ladies as Lou, which got them giggling. He said their names again and they guffawed so hard they had to sit down. Chase didn’t get the joke, but what the hell.
    The whiskey reek coming off them filled the room like smoke from a three-alarm fire. Chase couldn’t handle the smell anymore, not since the days when his father had taken bottles to the cemetery. His stomach tumbled and he began to breathe shallowly.
    The cute Lou turned out to be Louise, who gave Chase the eye and licked her lips. She got up and lurched toward him, saying she wanted to dance. She hummed in his ear and pressed her huge breasts to him, where they wobbled proudly. She whispered how she liked younger men because they could ride in the saddle all night long. He’d never heard it called that before, but he was a bright kid and could pick up on the metaphor. It tightened his guts and scared the shit out of him, but the heat rising through his body seared away any doubts.
    The much less cute Lou was Lulu, who was nearly unconscious but still making the effort to hang in there. She gave Chase an unfocused gaze where her eyes mostly crossed. Her chin fell to her chest as she struggled to stay