The Coldest Mile by Tom Piccirilli

the wheel, but you don't wear the hat and you don't belly down enough. You ain't long for the job, honey.”
    He was squeezing honeydews making sure they were ripe. He felt sort of pervy, groping the melons. “From what I hear nobody's going to be around for long. The Langans are packing up and moving on, right? You going with them?”
    “There's niggers everywhere. They can find 'em in Chicago, they don't need to bring their own.”
    “So what are your plans?”
    “Oh, don't you worry about me. There's enough rich motherfuckers around who can always use another Polish maid or Mexican gardener or black cook to match the little nigger jockey they got on their lawns.”
    “They still got them?”
    “Fuck sake, yes! And stop holding them cataloupes like they your mama's titties, you gonna bring the vice squad down on us. Anyway, I'll get by better than you will.”
    Sometimes you couldn't do anything but nod.
    “What are you really doing here?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Oh, baby. I've been married four times. All four are in prison. The same prison. I think they started their own gang in there, they're a big brotherhood. I know trouble whether it's tattooed and carrying a semiautomatic or whether it's got cute brown eyes and a ten-year-old boy's smile.”
    He put the melons in the cart and there was a hint of a sugary, fresh scent that reminded him of the wind sweeping down from the hills where the moonshiners hid their stills out beyond the cane fields. He'd sometimes tool around with Lila on the back dirt roads and drive her police car after the runners hauling moon through the county. Listening to her voice as she spoke the code numbers into the radio and he'd turn his nose slightly to the open window and breathe in the sweetness.
    “What are you doing here, sugar?” Cessy asked again.
    “Hoping to save my family.”
    “That's all any of us is trying to do,” she said, then let out a brief but knowing, almost hateful laugh. “If I didn't have five kids to feed, you think I'd be doing this shit, with this rag on my head, dressed in these clothes? But you humble yourself for the cash so you can take care of the ones you love.”
    He thought, If that's all it took.
    He could be humble. He'd learned humility during his straight life. Some, anyway. Working in a garage fixing trucks with three hundred and twentythousand miles on them. Later in the auto shop teaching eleventh- grade girls how to change their oil, showing them the proper way to change a tire. No action, and not needing it, not wanting it, because he had Lila.
    And now with her gone, with no kids, with no home, with no gamble, with no sign of the next exit down the road, his tires spinning on the shoulder in the mud, he was maybe going a little crazy, the dreams getting worse.
    His highway led only to one place. He knew he would have to face Jonah, probably for the last time.
    He wondered how far he would have to go, how far he would be able to go, in order to save the girl.

O ne of the three Polish maids, Ivanka, wasn't Polish at all but Romanian. Nobody at the house could tell the difference, and since the Langans were also at war with a local Romanian outfit, she decided to play Polish.
    Ivanka had a booming sideline business and wasn't very discreet about it. She was the contact for an illegal Eastern European immigrant ring and seemed to be in charge of setting women up with rich spouses. They paid her well to do so. Sometimes, if they didn't have all the cash up front, Ivanka took payment in the form of children under the age of two and worked the black- market adoption racket.
    Chase drove her out to Newark in the stretch and picked up the women. Ivanka offered Chase a big tip as the ladies climbed in. It was a fair wedge of cash in fresh bills. She offered to throw in some sex on top of it. He figured the previous chauffeur had forced her to kick back some of the skim.
    He was given his choice of her or any of the newincoming