The Last Kind Words: A Novel

by Tom Piccirilli

  “What kind would that be?”

  “The illegal kind.”

  “Oh, you’ve gone straight. Good, glad to hear it.” I raised my voice and projected toward the door. “Then you’re not going to try moving any ice you might get from a five-man crew that’s taking down a family jewelry store and expecting to get paid mid-six figures—”

  “Christ, not so loud,” he hissed.

  It was probably true that he’d gone mostly legit. But like every other fence in the world, he’d never turn down a good heist when he was going to pull in a major percentage and do almost no work for it.

  “What’s their score?” I asked.

  He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Stan, you do know. I know you know. Just tell me and I’m out of here. What is it?”

  “I don’t rat. I don’t do that.”

  “It’s ratting if you go to the cops. I’m not a cop. Besides, you’re already going to rob them blind. You lied about the payout and they’re only going in because they think they’re about to be rich. Even if they pull it off, they have to kick up to the Thompson crew. They’re going to walk away with peanuts and they won’t be happy. They might even try to take it out of your ass.”

  “Jesus.” He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and my stomach tightened. I got in much closer and watched him carefully. He pulled out a bottle of J&B and poured himself two fingers in a dirty glass. “Why do you care?”

  “That’s my business, Stan. Your business of the moment is to tell me who’s running the string.”

  “You Rands, you used to be a good family to work with.” He threw back half the glass and made a face. “But now you’re all sick in the head, you know that?”

  I leaned on his desk. “Yeah, I know it. Now, who bosses the string?”

  “Some kid.”

  “Which kid? Use names, Stan. Butch?”

  “No, not that one. He’s a moron. He only goes by Butch because his last name is Cassidy, can you believe it? Fucking idiot. No, the boss is another guy. Young, like Butch, but smarter, you know? His name is Harsh. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Is it his score? Did he put it together?”

  Stan finished his drink, put the bottle back in the drawer, pushed the glass away from him. “I think so.”

  “Is it a tight string?”

  “Who knows? I can’t be sure with this new kind of punk.”

  “Contact info.”

  He tried to stand, but I blocked him and he dropped back heavily into his seat. “You can’t foul the juke, Terrier. If you do and it traces back to me—”

  “I’m not going to foul it. I’m going to make sure it goes off without a hitch. Give me an address.”

  “I don’t have one, but I can give you a number.”

  He pulled it up off his computer. “Password protected and encrypted. Better than a floor safe in the corner.”

  He read the number off. I memorized it and said, “They’re packing.”

  “So far as I know, yeah.”

  “So what happens when they find out you’re not going to give them anything more than a dime on the dollar, Stan?”

  His eyes danced with amusement. “It’ll work out.”

  “A guy named Harsh might be eager to use his piece. You shouldn’t have lied to them on what you were going to be able to move.” I got up and opened the door. “Hey, you have any piano babies or Toby mugs?”

  “What? Porcelain?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “I don’t deal with that kind of crap.”

  “Who does?”

  He thought about it for a second. “Try Rocko Milligan.”

  I left, got in my car, and headed north on Route 231. I called Harsh’s number. When he answered I said, “This is Butch. Meet me at the Rail Cross Diner on Commack Road.”

  “This doesn’t sound like Butch.”

  “I’ve got a cold. Twenty minutes.”

  “Who is this?” Harsh asked.

  “Come find out.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “I’ll be the one calling out, ‘Harsh, you asshole, your jewelry-store score is on the fucking skids.’ Twenty minutes, right?”

  Harsh showed up on time. I was having a cup of coffee and relaxing in a back booth. It wasn’t hard for him to guess I was the one who’d called him. It was a small joint and I was the only one sitting alone.

  He was a little older than Butch, maybe twenty-three or -four. Buzz-cut blondie wearing a tight white T-shirt under a loose jean jacket. He had wraparound shades on. Everybody and their shades. It must be a retro thing, guys falling back on what was hip in the seventies. They were all watching too many DVDs, trying to pick up on classic style. He scanned the place, spotted me, and took his time stepping over.

  It looked like he was carrying a .38 in his jacket pocket. Right off, that meant he wasn’t a pro. I could’ve been a cop. He could get a couple of years just for having a piece on him. You never packed unless you knew what you were packing for.

  He stood before me and I said, “I’m Terrier Rand.”

  “I’ve heard of you. Your people have been in the news. I don’t like that.”

  “You don’t like that?”

  “I don’t like being seen with guys who might have reporters following them.”

  That was actually pretty smart of him. I reassessed Harsh a bit. He sat and the waitress zipped over and he waved her away. He took off his shades. His eyes were youthful but he was trying to keep them mean. I guessed that he’d been in the game since he was young, had pulled a couple of jobs that had gone well, and then he’d impatiently struck off on his own. That’s the only reason I could imagine that he’d taken on a punk like Butch.

  “You know my sister?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I know her.”

  “How well?”

  “Not too well. I never touched her if that’s what you mean.”

  It wasn’t, but I decided to take it at face value. I pulled an envelope out of my pocket and put it in front of him.

  He didn’t make any move toward it. That was another good sign that he wasn’t a complete moron.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Three grand. You’re going to pay off Butch and cut him out of this jewelry-store score. Take a thousand for yourself and give him the rest. Tell him it’s his cut for helping out as much as he did and that you’ll hire him on for the next job.”

  He studied me coldly. “Why would I do any of that?” he said, neither affirming nor denying anything.

  “Because he’s going to be unable to assist you. Find another man.”

  Harsh let out a slow grin. There was more than a hint of cultivated savagery to it. “You, I suppose?”

  “No. I don’t want in. I don’t want to know anything about it. I already know too much. Because Butch talked out of turn. He approached me thinking I’d jump on board. It was a mistake. Not an unforgivable one, but bad enough. He also wrote Stan Herbert’s name on a pizza box and left it out in the open for anybody to see.”

  “And you know Stan.”

  I nodded. “And I know Stan. Whatever he promised you, you won’t get more than ten percent of the ice’s worth in cash.”

  “He said twenty-five.”

  “It’ll never happen.”

  Harsh started running other schemes in his head. His eyes flashed with possibilities, trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of the deal. I could see he already had other scores in the works as he started mentally shuffling through them, wondering about other fences, other people he could talk with.

  “Why were you working Butch’s place?” he asked.

  “Finding out what I could. Is it your heist? You put it together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you wind up with Butch on your string?”

  Harsh wasn’t sure how much he should tell me. I drank my coffee. I looked out the window onto Commack Road. He would either trust me a little furthe
r or not. There was nothing I could do to force his hand.

  Finally he decided he didn’t have much to lose by discussing things with me. “I asked Mr. Thompson for a man who might be willing to help out on a job here and there.”

  “And he actually suggested Butch?”

  “Yeah.”

  Danny should’ve either stepped up and offered one of his own men or kept out of the score altogether. But he wanted to have a thumb in every pie without putting in any time or effort, even if it only ruined the pie. “You should have known better right off.”

  “I did, but I didn’t know how plugged in Butch might be with the Thompson crew.”

  “He picks them up from the airport.”

  “I know that now. I wasn’t comfortable kicking him off the job. He’s good enough to do what I need him to do.”

  “You hope. What’s Danny’s cut of the action?”

  Harsh looked away, a little bothered having to talk numbers. “Mr. Thompson gets fifteen percent of our net.”

  “His father used to take ten.”

  “His father is dead. And there’s no time to find another man.”

  “You’ve still got a couple days,” I said. “I can even provide you with some names if you like. Either way, you’ve got no choice.”

  “I don’t like being braced.”

  “Nobody does.”

  He put his shades back on and ran a hand over his buzz cut. “You’re not going to ice Butch?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Just hurt him a little.”

  “Less than a little, but it’ll be enough.”

  “Right. How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “What would I gain by lying? Like you said, you know who I am.”

  He squared his shoulders. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know he was thinking about it. “Okay, you’re paying me a wad of cash. You’ve got to have a reason.”

  “I do.”

  “Your sister.”

  “That’s right. I want her unconnected.”

  “She’s as connected as they come. She’s from a family of thieves. One’s on death row and due for the needle, and another just bought the farm.” He pushed away from the table and stood. “You people are bad news. You think you’re doing her a favor? You’re doing me one.”

  Butch’s door was open again. He was inside, smoking a joint, listening to his iPod with his earplugs in. His eyes were closed and he was singing loudly and badly along with music I couldn’t hear.

  I still had Higgins’s blackjack. I stepped up behind Butch and caught him on the sweet spot. He slumped over without a sound. I took off his right shoe and tapped his ankle once. He made a little noise in his sleep like a colicky newborn. His foot began to swell.

  There was nothing in his freezer except a half tray of ice. There were no dish towels in the kitchen. I walked the apartment. There were no towels on the rack in the bathroom. Butch certainly led the life. I found a dirty T-shirt on the floor of the bedroom and wrapped the ice cubes in it, then pressed it to his ankle. He’d be off his feet with a minor fracture for two weeks. The score would go down without him. If it went bad and Harsh and his crew wound up in the bin, Butch would be in the clear, and so would Dale.

  I searched the place again. I looked for signs of my sister. I found nothing. Before I left, I dumped the melting ice cubes in his sink and threw the dirty shirt back on the floor.

  When I got home, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in black again. They’d just gotten back from the cemetery. I put my chin to my chest. The funeral had been yesterday and already they were visiting the wet grave again. My mother looked at me like she knew it was too much but she had to do it for my father’s sake.

  He grinned at me without any humor and said, “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s good.”

  I wondered if he was going to ask me again if I knew who had killed Mal. He got up and walked out the door, headed to the garage, still in his suit.

  I followed him. I thought I should stick close.

  He said, “Four months until the stone is ready, can you believe it?”

  “Guess there’s a backlog.”

  “We got a nice one, did your ma tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Not sure how to describe it. Big. Square but rounded at the top. Has a kind of silhouette of his face on it. The profile. Not really his face, just sort of his face. Who the hell would want that face on marble? Not him. Nobody. And no angels, nothing like that. But … well, anyway, it’s nice.”

  “Right.”

  My father stood before his treasured figurines. He seemed to be showcasing a couple of new ones. A Japanese boy pulling a wagon. And a rooster just standing there. I looked at the rooster and tried to figure out why any artist skilled in making porcelain figures would make a rooster just standing there and why anyone would want it.

  I wanted to tell him I’d heard voices that night, but I didn’t know how it might help. I sat in the garage, watching him at his hobby, cleaning the pieces and rearranging them, and I could feel the waves of fury coming off him. I thought, One of these days he’s going to pick up a hammer and smash the shit out of each one of those pieces. In a week, in a month. He’ll destroy the display case and it still won’t be enough. He’ll cut himself. He’ll be slashed and bleeding and won’t even notice. There will be a thousand pounds of glass on the ground and he’ll stamp on it. He’ll take the hammer to the walls, to the windows, and he’ll keep at it until he’s too tired to hold it anymore. It’ll fall from his sweaty, bloody, trembling hand and he’ll drop to his knees but he won’t weep.

  My mother will find him like that and go to him and hold him, and they’ll both continue to carry their burdens separately and together. They’ll bandage his wounds and clean up the shards and continue on with their day. She won’t cry either, not in front of him, but when she’s in the laundry room, a week or a month later, she’ll drop and sob into a dirty towel for maybe twenty or thirty seconds tops, and she’ll finish throwing in the fabric softener and then go make lunch.

  “Should I show up?” my dad asked. He was moving the rooster around. He tried it on one shelf, then another.

  “Show up?” I said. “To what?”

  He dipped his chin, shuffled more pieces about. “You know. The execution.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “No. Don’t do that.”

  “Collie shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I’m going.” I hadn’t realized that I’d been planning to attend, but there it was, and it was the truth.

  “You don’t have to,” my father said.

  “I think he wants me there.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means something, Dad.”

  He finally settled on where the rooster should go. He closed the case. He appeared to be extremely calm. I looked over my shoulder at the workbench and thought I should hide the hammer. “To you or to him?”

  “Maybe to both of us.”

  My old man placed a hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into a half hug, the same way Mal had done outside the Fifth Amendment.

  We walked back into the house together. My father went to change. My mother was cooking. Dale stood waiting for me. While our parents were busy she took my hand, drew me in to the living room, and said, “Something happened to Butch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her grip tightened. “He fell while he was stoned. Banged his head up and broke his ankle. He doesn’t want to call an ambulance, and I don’t want him driving himself to the emergency room with a bad foot. Plus he’s got no money or insurance and … well, his license is suspended and doesn’t have his current address on it. Will you drive me over there and help me get him squared away at the hospital?”

  “Sure. Where’s he live?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  I went to one of my caches in the house and pulled out two grand. It should cover the
emergency-room costs. Dale got into the car. So did JFK.

  She said, “God, does this dog have to always drive around with us? What if someone sees me?”

  “They’ll think better of you being with John F. Kennedy than with Butch.”

  She pulled a face. “You don’t know my crowd.”

  “No, I don’t.” I decided to ask her the question that was still going around in my head. “Do you love him?”

  Dale grimaced, her lovely features falling in on themselves. “Are you nuts? Hell no. But he’s sexy. In a dumbass kind of way.”

  “I thought he was your beau?”

  “I’m getting a little tired of his shit, to be honest.”

  I liked hearing it. I hoped it was true. I tried to imagine her studying hard and nailing the SATs and worrying about university acceptances, but I just couldn’t do it. There was still time for her to break away from the rest of us.

  “Did you get the role?” I asked. “Blanche?”

  She twisted a lock of her hair and drew it over her ear. “No, but I’ll be helping out as stage crew.”

  I squinted and almost chuckled. She was lying to me again. Toying with her hair was her tell, I could see it now that I knew what I was looking for. She’d gotten the role and turned it down. It was an act all right, for our mother’s benefit. Dale knew Mom came to watch the audition. Now my sister could mislead our parents and say she was at rehearsal while she was really out with Butch. It wasn’t a big lie. It was a rather average lie, the kind any teenage girl told her family.

  I nodded. I took a breath.

  “Let’s talk about Mal.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I think we probably need to.”

  Dale pressed herself as close to the passenger door as she could. She burst into tears.

  “I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said.

  “I need to know if you saw anything.”

  “I would have told you!”

  “You told me that you thought someone has been following you. You said it was just a feeling.” She still had her face turned from me, the back of her hand to her mouth with tears dripping across her wrist. “Were you telling the truth?”

  She screwed up her face and regained some control. She sniffed hard and gasped for air. Then she glared at me.