The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel

by Piccirilli, Tom

  The window was open. An icy breeze blew the draperies over the back of a divan, making them whirl as if the dead were hiding behind the curtains. I walked up and Simon Ketch turned and saw me coming. His eyes grew alive with a dark excitement, perhaps a reflection of my own.

  He smiled at me.

  “Heya,” Ketch said. “I’m glad you found us.”

  “So am I.”

  “Help yourself to a drink.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Crank?”

  “No.”

  “There are some girls still around, I think.”

  “No.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and tugged the hat off his head.

  I don’t know how to describe him, Tony had said. He sort of looks like you.

  He did look like me, right down to the white streak in his hair.

  My cousin John said, “You want to know what it’s all about, right?”

  I remembered the poster of Bogie on his editing room wall. If you were going to have another identity, you might as well make it one of your heroes.

  “No,” I said. “I already know what it’s all about.”

  “Can I tell you my story?”

  “No, John, I don’t want to hear your story right now.”

  John doesn’t need any help.

  My uncle Will had been right. John didn’t need any help at all. He knew how to make money. He knew how to ride cultural phenoms. He knew how to use people. He understood how to control and deceive others, his own family, his own blood.

  I had gone deep into him. I had stared into his eyes and sent myself into him and I still had missed the fact that I was looking at two people.

  This guy wasn’t an act. That was the real John and this was the real Simon Ketch. He was both men, the same way that old Crowe was a classy old-world cool cat and a sordid hustler, the same way Will was all style and top-shelf bourbon and drug-selling horror-flick-king rip-off artist.

  “Why’d you tell Tony not to let Dale leave the show?” I asked.

  “I told you I was obsessed. I couldn’t have her abandoning me. ROGUES needs her. I need her.”

  “You need her?”

  “I found her. I made her. I sought her out. I saw the draw she had. Just in the news reports about Collie when the journalists were camping out in front of your house, whenever the camera got a piece of her, whenever she flashed her smile or said a word, I saw the thing in her that made her different. I sent Tony after her to bring her in, to set her up and make her the face of the show.”

  A wave of nausea passed over me. I had practically gift-wrapped my own sister for him. “I trusted you.”

  “Did you really think I would move back to L.A. on a whim? You think you can make that kind of a decision for a grown man?” He went deep into me this time, peering into my eyes, seeing what was inside, my guts strung out for him. “You know nothing about people, Terry. You think that’s how the world works? All you do is overstep your bounds.”

  He was right. I tried to respond but nothing managed to find its way out.

  “And you gave me a pitiful ten grand to help you.” It got him laughing humorlessly. It corkscrewed into my temple and I had to grit my teeth. “I told you I had money. But you didn’t believe me. You really think I want back into Hollywood? That hellhole? Spend all my time beating my brains out making documentaries? You know how much money I have? Do you want to know how much I’m worth?”

  “I know exactly how much you’re worth, John.”

  He smiled. “Two hundred million. And it’s only the beginning. I’m just starting to come into my own. I’ve been siphoning funds from my father and grandfather for years. From All Hallows’ Eve, from Fireshot, the crank, and the money pours in from ROGUES, Terrier. In advertising revenue alone I clear—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re a thief. You want money. That’s all you want. You">No Boundariesre couple of don’t want to have it. You just want to take it. You want what’s mine. What belongs to the Crowes.”

  He was feeling the connection, knowing me, understanding me, like we were partners now, down in the double helix, our fates entwined. I felt it too.

  Protecting your family was a Pyrrhic victory. Even if you could save them they’d just turn on you and set fire to you in the end.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do to Dale?”

  “John—”

  “I’m going to make her a star. You’re going to be proud. You just wait.”

  My breath started to come in bites.

  “You want to kill me, don’t you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Why would you think I’d want to kill you?”

  “You look like you want to kill everybody all the time, Terry.”

  Someone moved behind me. I almost pulled the 9mm, but a familiar voice spoke quietly in my ear and said, “It’s all right.”

  I turned and my parents were standing there.

  My father in his black cat burglar outfit. My mother, wearing her everyday clothes. I could see that my father wasn’t entirely here. He looked at me without any recognition. My mother had brought him along, had aimed him, and had used his skills to keep tabs on me. He didn’t need me to lead him to wherever he needed to be, after all. He had my mother for that.

  She was holding the Sig Sauer.

  “Oh, Ma,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Did you really think I was going to let anyone take my baby girl away without my knowing everything about him? Without my checking? Without my learning all their secrets?”

  “Ma—”

  “You tricked us,” she said to John.

  “No, I didn’t. I told you the truth. I just didn’t tell you everything. Why are you so mad?”

  “I heard what you said—”

  John had no idea what was going on with my dad. “Uncle Pinscher?”

  “—about being obsessive. So am I. I’m obsessive about protecting my family.”

  “What’s the matter with Uncle Pinscher?”

  “I’m dedicated to it, John.”

  She slashed him twice across the nose with the barrel of the gun. “Did you think I’d let any of you Crowes harm anyone in my family?”

  “I am your family!”

  “You’re nothing to me.”

  He moaned and doubled over and spit blood. He reached into his pocket and I grabbed his wrist. He was going for a handkerchief. He dabbed his face. He had a wide cut on the bridge of his nose, and his nose was broken. It leaked blood badly. “I didn’t harm anyone. I’m going to make her a star.”

  “You had her running around with a bunch of little felons while they performed illegal acts.”

  “Why should that bother you? You’re all a bunch of crooks!” this many times beforet or

  “You hire henchmen and stooges. You hide behind a fake name. You play dangerous games.”

  “I’m a businessman. I’m an artist.”

  “You’re going to go away,” my mother said. “You’ll go back to doing or being whatever it is you are. I don’t ever want to see you again. And just in case you think I might be just pretending, that this might just be an act of some kind—”

  She took a step forward. He flung up his arms to protect himself and let out a yelp of terror that almost sounded like “Ma,” a wild cry for mother, which will be the sound we all make at the moment of our greatest horror, when the underneath drags us all down. My mother grabbed a satin pillow off the divan, took two steps to her nephew, the guy who looked like her father, who looked like her brother, who looked like her oldest son, who looked like me, pressed the pillow to his thigh, jammed the barrel tightly against it, and shot him twice in the leg. He shrieked and she stuffed the barrel in his mouth.

  “Do you understand me, John? Nod your head.”

  Tears rippled down his cheeks. He nodded.

  “I don’t care how much money you have, or how many people you hire, or if you try to tug at my heartstri
ngs again. If you don’t stay away from us we’ll have to hurt you even more. I’ll set my son against you. I’ll set my husband against you. And I’ll be against you. You won’t survive.”

  I picked up the hotel phone and dialed the desk. I told the girl on duty that Mr. Ketch had been in an accident and we needed an ambulance.

  My mother and father left the bedroom. I followed them out. The thug I’d nailed with the JD bottle was starting to come around. He tried to make a grab for me again as I passed by. My parents and I walked out of the suite and down the opposite hall toward the freight elevator. My old man was still way out of it.

  I could feel Chub dying out there somewhere. I parked in front of Kimmy’s aunt’s place again. It was two in the morning. I sat and watched the dark house for over an hour. My breath froze. It was turning colder. I had to run the engine to stay warm. I lit cigarettes and cracked the window. I thought about Danny Thompson in the hospital with only the barest brain function. I could see him sitting at a long-term care facility in a white day room, his chin covered in drool, his wife feeding him baby food.

  A light went on in the house. Kimmy stood framed in the bay window. She’d made me.

  I climbed out of the Challenger. I went to the side door. Kimmy unlocked it. She moved out of my way. I eased inside.

  We stood face-to-face, alone in the shadows thrown from a single low-level light left on over the sink, her mother sleeping somewhere in the house, just like the old days. I had the same mixture of excitement, lust, expectation, and vague dread I always had when I was in her presence. Only when you’re with someone who means the world to you do you fear being destroyed if they should ever be taken away.

  She turned her face up toward mine as if waiting for a kiss. I could lunge forward and steal one and spend the rest of my life apologizing for it. It would be worth it to feel her li">No Boundariesre couple of ps again.

  But some measure of self-control I didn’t know I had took over and I stepped away. She turned on the kitchen light and signaled for me to sit.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said.

  “How did you know I was coming by tonight?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you every night. I’ve seen you parked out there, watching over us. Usually you only stay a few minutes. Tonight you didn’t leave.”

  She waited for me to respond. I said nothing.

  “Do you want coffee? Caffeine never used to bother you no matter how late you drank it.”

  “Sure.”

  She made a pot. She checked on Scooter. When she returned she poured us two cups, set one in front of me, and took the far seat. She didn’t bother with milk or sugar. She sipped. She had dark smudges under her eyes. I bet she hadn’t slept for more than three hours straight since this thing started. We stared at each other over a centerpiece of plastic sunflowers.

  On the floor in the corner was one of those toy ovens with knobs that turn and ding. There were little toy pots, frying pans, and cutlery, alongside cans of soup and plastic pieces of steak, ham, turkey legs, eggs, and vegetables. I imagined Scooter standing there pretending to cook alongside her mother.

  Kimmy waited for me to explain myself as the mood between us thickened. I could feel the tension inside her fighting to get out. I don’t know where she got the strength to hold it all in without so much as a grimace. I sat there with my chin tucked in waiting like a frightened child to take a well-deserved punishment.

  “Have you found my husband?&#ly aware. I wa

  I returned to Wright’s Garage. I got that same feeling of someone watching me once more. I sensed death in the air. I could practically smell it.

  I packed the Sig Sauer. I grabbed a flashlight out of Chub’s office and wandered the lot. It was a big lot. Chub had a bunch of restored cars. Others were in various states of disrepair, some that needed new engines, some that would necessitate serious bodywork. In back, lined up against a distant fence topped by loops of barbed wire, were dozens of total junkers.

  Five wouldn’t fit in the fastback.

  They hadn’t carjacked some old lady and held her hostage in her station wagon.

  There’d been two getaway cars. When the driver wiped out, the crew piled into the second car. With a second driver. Someone who knew the route. Someone who was sharp behind the wheel.

  Those scrapped cars were laid out in heaps. Piles of bumpers, engines, crankshafts, undercarriages, hoods, doors, stacks of tires. Cairns of spare parts rose up all around me. I drifted among them, scanning the roofs of the houses that backed up to the lot. Cheap A-frames, saltboxes, and double-wide trailers. It took me a while of meandering before I could see a pattern emerging to the maze. Another route through the lot came into focus. It led to a well-hidden little alcove shored by gutted, topless convertibles covered in bird shit. Inside the niche was a tarp-covered vehicle.

  I untied the tarp and pulled it off. Beneath was a ’62 Crown Vic with a battered body and a souped engine. It was big enough for all five of them, but Chub would’ve wanted to go his own way afterward. That’s why the two cars. The tight four-man crew heads off in one direction, Chub speeds off on his own. But after the botched bank job, and the driver breaking his neck, Chub got stuck taking the rest of the heisters out of there and babysitting them until the heat was off. Except with all those dead ex-cops the heat would never be off.

  Thank you, Scooter. Two pictures of houses, one hidden behind the other, helped to point the way.

  Last time I was here I thought about how Chub would have land, a house, or a pad already prepared. Maybe out of state, maybe upstate.

  Or maybe right behind the garage.

  Just like hiding a second safe beneath the first. I could see him being brazen enough to buy a hole-up space within spitting distance of his own place of business. It was ballsy as hell. Maybe it was smart too, I wasn’t sure.

  There would be a well-hidden locked gate somewhere nearby. I didn’t bother with searching for it. I took out the passenger-side car mat of the Crown Vic and tossed it over my shoulder. The ten-foot fence had metal slats like Venetian blinds woven through the chain links for privacy. It made it hard for me to get a grip as I jumped onto the hood of the Vic. I reached, clung to the fence, and started to climb. When I got to the top I finagled the car mat over the b embplasarbed wire topping and managed to scurry over without tearing my flesh or my clothes. I leaped down and found myself in the small grassless yard of a dark saltbox.

  It didn’t matter. I knew someone from the crew would be patrolling and watching, just like he had that night I staked out the garage. There was a reason I’d felt eyes on me.

  I stood there and lit a cigarette. I smoked in the cold air and said, “I want to see Chub.”

  The guy was careful. It took him a couple of minutes to work around and sneak up behind me. He pressed the barrel of a gun into my ear. “You didn’t learn the first time you ran up against us?”

  “I wasn’t running up against you then or now, even though everybody else in the world is. I just want to talk to Chub.”

  “You’re packing. Lose the piece.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll shoot you in the head right now.”

  I took another drag on the cigarette and flicked it away. “It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. You’ll wake up a lot of people. This might not be the best neighborhood on the island, but I bet a .44 going off nearby would still get a few folks dialing 911.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I led him toward the back door of the saltbox. The door was unlocked. I walked in and lights were on. The place had been blacked out like a London apartment during the Blitz. The window shades were made of an especially thick material and were pinned in place.

  The other two crew members stood there in a kitchen empty of furniture. Empty beer bottles had been carefully restocked inside the cardboard case containers. I smelled recently overcooked meat. Plates, glasses, and silverware had all been washed and stacked in the drain-board. Like me, they’
d probably heard a lot of the same stories of guys on the run who’d wiped down all the prints from some hideout, forgetting about the dirty dishes. They weren’t going to make such a dipshit mistake.

  The other two held their hardware on me as well. All three of them were carrying .44s. Without their little black wool caps on and their coats zipped to the collar, they still looked similar, cut from the same cloth, but I could pick them out of a lineup now.

  I knew their names. “Dunbar, Edwardson, Wagstaff. Which is which?”

  “That shouldn’t matter to you.”

  It didn’t. I applied the names just to keep the three of them straight in my head.

  “He’s carrying,” Dunbar, the guy who’d been roving the area, told them.

  “How about if you lose the piece,” Wagstaff said, emphasizing his words by pointing his gun at my face. I removed the Sig Sauer from my pocket and Dunbar shoved the barrel of his .44 a little harder against the back of my head, reached over my shoulder, and snatched the pistol from my hand. He jammed it into his own coat pocket.

  “Didn’t we make our point well enough last time, little doggy?” Wagstaff asked.

  “That was before you guys turned a score into a bloodbath and lost your driver.”

  “He wants to see Chub,” Dunbar told them.

  Edwardson and Wagstaff shared a weig">No Boundariesre couple of hty look and then Edwardson shrugged and Wagstaff nodded. “Let him.”

  Dunbar pushed me forward into the next room. Calling it a living room would’ve been gracious. The walls were empty. A small television had been set up in the far corner. At one window sat a chair. On the sill was a pair of binoculars. A slit had been made in the shade. Chub had it worked out that he could look into his office window from here and check on cops, feebs, or hitters who wandered into the garage. I guessed that some of the metal slats in the fence had been removed in certain places so the crew could take turns checking on anybody nosing around. That’s who I’d felt watching me.