The Coldest Mile Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the afternoon. He didn't want to advertise that he was a couple steps slower than usual.
    Chase stood in the window and stared out toward Jackie's golf course and caught the scent of water on the wind. His thoughts twisted. His dreams were growing more intense, the details clearer. Lila had grown up in the back hills of Mississippi and always had a wide superstitious streak. She'd once told him the dead would always make their will known, and it had stuck with him.
    His own history was prominent in his mind. A tangle of emotions and half- understood compulsions and motivations. The Deuce had been right, Chase shouldn't be here, but what else was he going to do? Go back to stealing cars? He had a chance to lay in a big score here, and he'd need the money for the girl—for Kylie. He stared in the direction of the water.
    He tried not to think about what had led him here but something had broken inside of him and he could feel the memories surging forward, wanting out.
    Lila had loved the ocean and Chase had eventually grown to enjoy it too. He'd once thought he'd never be able to sit on a beach again because his old man had snuffed himself by taking a sailboat out into the Great South Bay one winter.
    His father had suicided because he couldn't handle the grief after Chase's mother had been found shot dead in their kitchen. Fifteen years gone now and no one knew who'd done it, but Chase was finally starting to get a few ideas.
    Jonah, his grandfather, a man he'd not only never met before but had never even heard about, plucked him from foster care and convinced him that family was all that mattered, that blood was important. Maybe it was true.
    Jonah—carved from rock and just as feeling. Chase started working professional strings and crews immediately. First short cons and small grifts, and then acting as a second- story burglar and a wheelman. He'd been brought in on bigger scores because he was a first- rate driver and kept his nerve. It had gone on like that for years, until the day he'd watched Jonah ice one of his own men.
    He severed ties with his grandfather and tooled around the South. That was how he met Lila—a deputy sheriff in a Mississippi county—during a score gone bad. He went straight, they got married, and eventually came back to New York where she joined the Suffolk County cops and he taught high school auto shop.
    Chase pressed his forehead to the cold glass, hoping it would cool his heated thoughts, but it wasn't nearly enough. Lila in his head telling him, It's all right, love, I'll help you through this.
    Six weeks ago she'd been murdered on duty while trying to stop a crew heisting a diamond merchant'sstore. The driver, Earl Raymond, parked in the street and waiting to roll, had shot her three times with his left arm hanging out the window
    Chase hadn't seen Jonah for ten years, but his grandfather was the only man hard enough to help him go after the string. The old man showed up with Angie, a woman forty years his junior, who was the mother of his two-year-old daughter, Kylie.
    It was a weird setup and Chase had a hard time picturing what the little girl's life must be like, but he knew that Jonah would ruin it for her. Angie knew it too and asked Chase to take a run at his grandfather, pop him twice in the back of the skull.
    Chase had a lot of resentment, but he couldn't do that.
    He tracked the crew to a motel in Newark, and at the last minute Angie put two in the old man's back. It didn't slow Jonah or stop him. He killed her while Chase had an old- fashioned shootout with Earl in the middle of the parking lot. Earl driving his sweet Plymouth Superbird with the funky extended front end, the 440 V8 tuned up right, while Chase just stood there already shot a couple of times, his ribs cracked, fingers busted, and tried to lift his gun to hit a moving target. Though Chase wasted five shots without even cracking the windshield before he finally put one in Earl's head.
    Jonah in his mind saying,