Ice Chest

by J. D. Rhoades

  Chirelli shook his head. “She’s had a rough time of it. From the police, I mean. Can you believe they were accusing her of being involved with the robbery? So, I made what you might call an executive decision.” Mario Allegretti started to say something, but the man quieted him with a glance. “Now isn’t the time to press her on the details.”

  “And you had nothing to do with the robbery,” Chunk said.

  “If we had,” the gray-haired man said patiently, “would we be here looking for the ones that did?” He smiled thinly. “No, Mr. McNeill, believe it or not, I think we have some common interests. We both want to find the people who took the Fantasy Bra. And Clarissa Cartwright. Why don’t we work together?”

  “Because you’re a bunch of lowlife Jersey thugs, and I don’t trust you as far as I could throw that limo out there. That limo I suggest you get in, and leave in, and never come back.”

  The gray-haired man sighed. “Come on, Mario,” he said. “We need to pursue our other leads.”

  Mario looked up at Chunk, his eyes smoldering with hate. “This isn’t over, asshole,” he snarled.

  Chunk matched him look for look. “Yeah. You said that.” Then something Chirelli had said sunk in. “Other leads?”

  “You had your chance to work with us,” the man said. He walked Mario to the door. Chunk followed silently.

  Halfway down the walk, Chirelli stopped. “What. The. Fuck,” Chunk heard him say.

  Moose Cantone was sitting on the long hood of the limo, his head down. Chunk could hear him sobbing softly. Hermione Starr was seated next to him, one arm around his broad shoulders. She was murmuring something in his ear.

  “MOOSE!” Mario shouted. He broke away from Chirelli and strode angrily down the concrete walkway.

  Moose Cantone looked up, his face registering guilty shock. He slid off the hood of the limo. Hermione slid off, too, smoothing her dress and smiling like the proverbial cat just after ingesting the proverbial canary.

  Mario confronted the big man. “What the fuck have you been doing? You were supposed to be watching our backs!”

  Moose hung his head. “I’m sorry, Mario,” he began.

  Hermione interrupted, still smiling. “Moose has been discovering things about himself he never knew before. Things he really likes. Isn’t that right, dear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Moore said, his head still down. There was a significant bulge in the front of his dress slacks.

  “Ma’am?!” Mario shouted.

  Hermione ruffled Moose’s hair affectionately. “He’s discovered he wants to be a good boy, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes, ma…” Moose began, but Chirelli interrupted. “For fuck’s sake,” he growled. “Everybody just get in the damn car.” The three men piled into the vehicle, with Moose at the wheel.

  Hermione stood next to Chunk, lacing her arm with his as she watched them pull away slowly. “I just want you to know,” she said to Chunk, “that I am having a wonderful time.”

  “Um,” Chunk said. “That’s good.”

  She looked up at him, then gave his arm a squeeze and pulled away. “Is the girl okay? Stephanie, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Chunk said. “She’s with Zoe.”

  “Then she’ll be fine. Let’s go have a talk with her.”

  “SO,” L.B. said, “you think this Gane sumbitch has stewed long enough?”

  Branson looked up from where he’d been lying on one of the double beds, staring at the pages of a tattered Car and Driver magazine without really reading them. The five of them—Rafe, L.B., Branson, and the two Lowman brothers—were holed up in a pair of rooms at another cheap motel, near an industrial park just off I-85. The brothers had been chafing to go back to their house and change clothes, but L.B. had nixed the idea. “Never go home right after a job,” he’d said. “Not till you know you got away without bein’ ID’d and that things have blown over.” The Lowmans had been ready to make an issue of it, but L.B.’s glare and the way he kept reaching into the pocket where he kept his straight razor apparently dissuaded them.

  “I believe he should be nicely tenderized,” Rafe said with a grin.

  “So how and where are we gonna do this?” one of the Lowmans spoke up. Branson thought it might be Elihu.

  “And when do we get our money?” said the other one.

  “Well, we do have the warehouse where we dropped off Ms. Cartwright,” Rafe suggested.

  L.B. shook his head. “I don’t like it. If she remembers where it is, the place will still be crawling with cops.”

  “However,” Rafe said, “it does not appear that the lady has surfaced.”

  “I wonder what happened to her,” Branson said.

  L.B. looked bored. “Hot piece of ass like that, dressed in nothin’ but a tablecloth, in that neighborhood…” He shrugged. “Got about the same life expectancy as a white mouse in the snake cage at the zoo.”

  Branson sat up and set the magazine aside. “No one was supposed to get hurt. That was the deal.”

  “No,” L.B. said, “the deal was that we weren’t plannin’ to hurt anybody.”

  “The vagaries of life, nephew,” Rafe said. “There’s no way to promise that no one will actually get hurt.”

  “Includin’ you,” L.B. said, “if you keep annoyin’ me. Now shut up and let us get this damn job finished.”

  Bran looked at his uncle for support. There was none there. Rafe Valentine just glanced away without meeting his eyes. Bran shut up.

  “Now,” Rafe said, “the warehouse still has a lot to recommend it. It’s reasonably isolated, not well guarded, and we’re familiar with it, unlike many other places hereabouts. We should only be there a very brief time, just long enough to make the exchange, after which we scatter.”

  L.B. considered for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. But someone should go by and scope it out first.”

  “I’ll go,” said the Lowman brothers at the same time.

  “Both of you go,” L.B. said. “But no going home. Remember what I told you.”

  “We promise,” one of the brothers, possibly Japeth, said. They left together.

  Rafe picked up the phone. “I’ll make the call then, and set things up for this evening.”

  “Midnight,” L.B. said. “That’ll give our boy time to get his shit together.”

  “Midnight it is,” Rafe said.

  “I’m going to go in the other room and take a nap,” Branson said.

  Rafe was punching numbers into the phone. “You do that, nephew.”

  Bran walked out onto the sidewalk connecting the rooms. The Lowmans were pulling away in their pickup truck. He used his keycard to get into the other room they’d rented. He was tired, but he wasn’t planning to nap. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the battered telephone on the nightstand. He took a deep breath and picked it up. He thought of calling the police, but something in him still quailed at the idea of betraying his uncle. He dialed the only other number he knew by heart: Stephanie’s.

  “YOU OKAY, kid?” Paul Chirelli looked into the back seat. “You look a little shook up.”

  “I’m fine,” Mario said sulkily. “Where to now?”

  “Let me check and see if we’ve got a line on these Lowman assholes.” He pulled out his phone, looked at his messages, and gave a soft grunt of satisfaction. He hit a button and put the phone to his ear. “Talk to me,” he said, when the person on the other end answered. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Right now? Great. We won’t forget this, my friend.”

  He disconnected the call. “They’ve got a place on someplace called Ponce de Leon Avenue. Moose, use the GPS.” Moose, behind the wheel, didn’t answer. “MOOSE!” Chirelli barked.

  “What?” Moose said. He sounded distant, as if he’d been drugged.

  Chirelli popped him lightly on the back of the head. “The fuck is the matter with you? We got work to do.” He reached out and punched the address into the GPS unit mounted in the dash of the limousine. “Christ, what did that bitch do to you?”


  “Don’t call her that,” Moose said softly.

  Chirelli looked at him as if he’d just responded in Serbo-Croatian. “What did you just say to me?”

  Moose scrunched down in the seat, as if expecting another blow. “Nothin’,” he muttered.

  Chirelli shook his head. “I swear to god, Moose, you’re starting to worry me. Now drive.”

  “REALLY,” THE blond girl on the couch said. “I don’t know anything. We talked. We dated. Once. That’s all.”

  “Well, let’s talk about…” Chunk began, but the looks he was getting from both Zoe and Hermione silenced him. Zoe turned to Stephanie. “Okay. Sorry to shake you up.”

  Stephanie smiled wanly. “Believe me, hon, you aren’t the ones who shook me up.” She looked at the door as if she expected something awful to come through it. “Who were those guys?”

  This time it was Hermione who spoke up. “Bad people, dear. One of them was Clarissa Cartwright’s ex-boyfriend. He’s trying to find what happened to her.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “I don’t know her. I mean, I saw her around the hotel, but…” She drew her knees up to her chest. “Why would they think I know where she is?”

  “Because they think your friend Branson was in on the robbery,” Hermione said. “And if he was, he’ll know where Clarissa is.”

  Stephanie’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe Branson could have had anything to do with that,” she said. “He seemed so nice.”

  “Maybe,” Hermione said, “he’s in over his head. He’s into something bigger than he thought. And maybe he needs our help.”

  Stephanie didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she spoke in a low whisper, so low that Chunk had to lean forward to catch it. “The one time we went out, he suddenly had a lot of cash. I didn’t really think at the time where he’d gotten it. I figured he’d just been saving up.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Zoe dug in her purse and handed her a tissue. “Thanks,” Stephanie said. She took a deep breath. “Things were going really well. Or that’s what I thought. Then all of a sudden, he got real moody and quiet. He said he wasn’t feeling well. Then he took me home.”

  “So what was it that changed?” Hermione asked. “Something someone said? Something you saw?”

  Stephanie wiped her eyes with the tissue. “All I did was tell him I thought he was a nice guy. You know, real. Solid. Not like all the phonies around.” She sighed. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “Maybe not,” Zoe said.

  “Sounds like an attack of conscience to me,” Hermione agreed.

  “Stephanie,” Chunk said, “did Branson ever mention anything about an Uncle Rafe?”

  She thought for a moment. “When he asked me out, Bran was playing with his new phone. Taking pictures.” Her eyes widened. “In the Grand Ballroom.”

  “Scouting,” Chunk said.

  She nodded. “He said the phone was a present from his uncle.”

  “So this uncle of his is using Branson as his inside man. Willing or not.”

  Hermione reached out and put her hand on top of Stephanie’s. “I know it’s hard, dear,” she said, “but do you still have his number? You didn’t erase it off your phone, did you?”

  The girl shook her head. “I didn’t, no.”

  Zoe spoke up. “Can we try and call him?”

  “Sure. Let me get my phone.” As she left the room, Hermione turned to Chunk. “So who makes the call?”

  “He’d probably respond best to Stephanie’s voice,” Chunk said. “He’s obviously…”

  Sunshine spoke up from the couch. She’d been so quiet, they’d forgotten she was there. “You can’t get her any deeper into this. Whatever it is. She’s fragile enough already.”

  They all looked at her. Then Zoe nodded. “She’s right, guys.” She turned to Chunk. “Looks like you’re on, partner.”

  Stephanie had appeared in the door. “It’s okay, hon,” she said to Sunshine. “I can make the call. But thanks for looking out for me.”

  “You sure?” Chunk said. Stephanie just nodded. She punched in the numbers and held the phone to her ear.

  IN THE limo, the muffled electronic sound of a cell phone ringing came from the glove compartment.

  “What the fuck?” Paul Chirelli said.

  Mario leaned forward. “It’s the phone I took off Clarissa. She said that Branson kid gave it to her.”

  Chirelli opened the glove box and took out the phone. He looked at the screen, then held it up to Mario. The screen read CALL FROM: STEPHANIE. “His phone, she’s calling it. Looks like maybe she’s trying to warn him.”

  “She lied to us,” Mario said. “She must know where he is.”

  Chirelli looked back at the phone. “Maybe. Maybe not. But it looks like she cares about him. Which means he most likely cares about her. We can use that.”

  “We going back?” Moose said.

  “Yeah,” Chirelli said. “We’ll be back, once we visit these Lowman characters. We’re almost at the address our contact gave us.”

  Mario showed his teeth. “Yeah, if these are the ones who touched my woman, I’m lookin’ forward to seein’ them.”

  “Easy now, kid,” Chirelli said. “First we want the information. Like where the item is, and who’s got it.”

  “Oh, they’ll talk,” Mario said. “When I get done with them, they’ll be begging to tell us everything.”

  Chirelli looked to the heavens as if imploring the Lord for patience. “Jesus, Mario, will you stop thinkin’ with your gonads for once in your fuckin’ life?”

  Mario’s tone skirted the edge of insolence. “Well, what do you think we should do?”

  “These guys are local talent. Hired muscle. One’s a driver for hire, one’s a leg breaker. They don’t have any loyalty to any crew. They work for the highest bidder. That bidder could easily be us.”

  “So you want to cut them in?” Mario shook his head. “How many ways we gonna cut this pie?”

  “We let them think they’re being cut in. It’s easy to be generous when you got no intention of actually payin’ off. We offer these mooks the sun, the moon, and the rings of freakin’ Saturn, and when the time comes…” He trailed off.

  Moose spoke up, sounding more animated than he had since they’d left the girl’s place. He took one hand from the wheel and made a pistol with it. “Bada bing, bada boom, right, Paulie?”

  “Moose,” Chirelli said, “you watch too many fuckin’ movies. But yeah, that’s the general idea.”

  Mario nodded. “I like it.”

  “Thought you might. We get what we all need, you get to get rid of some of this agita you’ve been feeling. Everybody wins.”

  “Except the Lowmans,” Mario said with a grin. “And those other assholes. And the girl.”

  “Right,” Chirelli said.

  “NO ONE’S answering,” Stephanie said. “Wait. It’s going to voice mail.”

  “Let me see it,” Chunk said. Stephanie hesitated, then handed the phone over.

  Over his years of police work, Chunk had developed a reputation as an interrogator who could crack the defenses of some of the toughest, most hardnosed criminals, and get them to confess sins they wouldn’t even tell their priest. A lot of his colleagues gave the credit to his size and his intimidating face. But Chunk had learned that the quickest way to get a suspect to talk was to make him think you were on their side, that the guy asking the question knew they really weren’t bad people, and if they just came clean and confessed, the interrogator would help them out as best he could. It was mostly bullshit, of course, but even criminals who’d been around the block enough to know the trick would find themselves falling for a soothing voice and the offer of a sympathetic ear, even as they knew in the back of their minds that ear was being backed up by a hidden microphone and a video camera behind two-way glass.

  “Branson,” Chunk said as the canned outgoing message finished. “This is Charles McNeill with…” he hesitated before plunging into the li
e, “Paragon Security. We want to help you, son. And we know you want to do the right thing. Call us. Please.” He closed the line. “If he calls back, let us know.”

  Zoe took out a pen and paper. “Here’s my number,” she said. “Call any time.”

  “Okay,” Stephanie said. “Thanks.” She looked at Chunk. “Are you really trying to help him? Or is that just something the cops say to get someone to talk?”

  Nothing gets past this one, Chunk thought. He could feel Zoe’s and Hermione’s eyes on him.

  “We want to help him.” Chunk was mildly surprised to realize that he actually meant it.

  “DAMN IT,” Branson said as his call went to voice mail. “Hey, it’s Stephanie,” the message said, and the sound of her voice brought a lump to his throat. “Leave a message.”

  Branson forgot everything he wanted to say. With a sigh, he closed the line. Then he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He just wanted to go home.

  AMARYLLIS LOWMAN was worried. It wasn’t like her boys to go so long without calling their mama. She knew that some of the things they got involved in were less than savory, and some, she feared, were downright illegal. But she indulged them. After all, what was man’s law in comparison with God’s commandment to Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother?

  They were good boys, and they’d suffered so in life. Their time with the Church of the First Fruits Unto God and to The Lamb (which unbelievers often crudely shortened to “The Church of the Fruits”) had been traumatic, especially their thirteenth birthdays, when they underwent what Reverend Billy Mark Chadbourn called their Ascension.

  In retrospect, she could hardly blame them. When they’d gone to sleep the night before (aided by the sleeping pills mixed into their birthday cakes), they’d thought they were getting puppies.

  It was tough to make them understand the nature of the sacrifice required of his elected ones, “those who were not defiled of women,” in order to be “redeemed from among men, the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb,” just as it was said in the Book of Revelations. The COTFFUG&TTL had a lot of mysteries that could be difficult to understand, such as why Reverend Billy Mark didn’t seem to have any problems himself with being “defiled of women.” Sometimes he was defiled three or four times a night, in ways that still made Amaryllis blush to remember.