The Cold Spot Read Online Free PDF

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    That was the beginning.

S tealing different cars and following her around as best he could without being spotted, he watched her for two weeks. She was keen as hell and seemed to know he was out there keeping an eye on her. Always checking her rearview and making crazy U-turns, suspecting a tail and hoping to shake him out of the shadows.
    There wasn’t much to his mustache but he let it grow and eventually dyed it. It made him look like Fu Manchu planning to take down all of Western culture. He wore a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses he picked up at Bookatee’s Emporium.
    The minute he stepped into the shithole store filled with Southern kitsch items—these people had a thing about stuffed animals, a shellacked bullfrog, the hell was up with this part of the country?—he was filled with a new sense of pride for having shot the crew for choosing this place to knock over.
    There were maybe fifty Jeb Stuart statues and Dixie flags hanging from the rafters. Guns, Bowie knives, plenty of Civil War pistols and cutlasses in the cases. The antique jewelry was right back on display. Some of it looked fairly impressive. He paid three bucks for the sunglasses, put them on, and thought for maybe the hundredth time, What am I doing?
             
    Tuesday was her day off. She went out to a matinee with a chunky friend of hers, poofy frizzy hair out to here, bad skin, the two of them heading down to the Piper Cub Movie Theater. It doubled as a place where country bands played on weekends, folks hopping out of their seats, yee-hawing and dancing in the aisles.
    No chick flicks for Lila, she liked the bang-’em-ups. This one was about terrorists who take a cutiepie ten-year-old girl hostage and she turns out to be some secret government assassin trained since birth. Pretty soon she’s flying a jet at Mach 2.0 and handling a high-powered rifle with laser sighting, icing evil dictators. Chase had seen the trailer on his rented room’s television and thought it looked like it might be a decent way to kill a couple of hours.
    He was staying at a boardinghouse two counties west, almost forty miles away, stealing cars over there just in case Lila’s father was still scouting around for his Mustang. The lady who ran the house was crocked on lightning half the time and never quit listening to Conway Twitty. There was a framed picture of the guy hanging on the wall over Chase’s bed where you usually found Jesus or Elvis. Chase felt a little uncomfortable with Conway looking down over him like that, especially considering the weirdo hair on that fucker.
    A pretty big crowd at the theater for a Tuesday morning, lots of toughs with torn-off sleeves who carried snap knives on their belts. A group of teenage girls clamoring for attention, blouses tied at the midriff, showing off their belly-button rings. He wondered if they went in for Conway too.
    Everybody knew Lila and they cooled their action when she walked by. Her friend was loud and talked a lot on her cell phone while they paid for their tickets.
    Playing with the mustache, the damn thing driving him crazy, Chase hung in close enough to hear the friend’s name—Molly Mae—and tried to think of a way to get her out of there. She was an attention hound, practically shouting into her phone at somebody named Hoyt, telling him to fix the busted axle on Lottie Belle’s—seriously, you can’t mean it, Lottie Belle?—truck or she wasn’t going to make briarberry pie this Saturday. Chase tried to figure out how to use this information to his advantage but came up empty.
    He needn’t have bothered. Turned out she was going to help him. At the candy counter she picked up a Mega-Box of popcorn, three candy bars, and a Jumbo Coke, the thing going forty ounces. She’d have to break for the bathroom by the end of the second reel.
             
    The little-girl assassin was poking out the eyes of a big bearded guy in a turban when Molly Mae made a beeline up the