The Last Kind Words: A Novel

by Tom Piccirilli

  And then the knife wasn’t there anymore.

  Grey didn’t notice. He stabbed forward with nothing in his fist. Dale squealed as if she’d been skewered, then looked down in surprise and started to back away in a run. I looked down at Gramp and saw the switchblade in his hand. He was snapping it shut. His eyes were still on the television.

  I screamed something. I didn’t know what. I sounded crazy, much more insane than Grey. My belly was hot with pumping blood. I swung around behind my uncle and got the sweet silk tie around his throat, put a knee in the middle of his back, and pulled.

  Dale screamed, “Terry, don’t!”

  JFK spun in circles and howled as if in agony.

  Grey twisted and fell aside and I dropped on top of him. The knife wounds in his back were spurting blood. Dale had done real damage. I held on. He contorted all across the floor and I held on. He whispered a word. It might have been “Why?” I’d never be sure. Dale kept shouting, her face wet, her hands red. Eventually I felt the cartilage in his throat beginning to crack. His struggles weakened. There might still be time to save him. Doctors, psychiatrists, maybe it was possible—and then? Prison? Then he started to convulse and I let go and watched him choke down his last breath.

  His body relaxed and I sat up and drew him into my lap. I thought about Kimmy and wondered how I would ever look my father in the eye again.

  I dropped over onto my back and JFK licked at my face and my belly. I sucked air in and tried to breathe even while I sobbed. Gramp snicked the switchblade open and then shut it again, and then opened it again.

  Dale entered my field of vision. Her eyes were red-rimmed but she wasn’t crying anymore. She leaned down and gripped my shoulders. She said, “What happened? Tell me what the fuck just happened!”

  “He killed Mal,” I said.

  “No …”

  “And Rebecca Clarke. He was sick … the Alzheimer’s … it … he—”

  “No, it can’t be. Not Mal! Grey would never do that!”

  “He couldn’t help himself.”

  “Oh no, no … bullshit! Maybe it’s you who’s crazy!” She stared at the drying streaks of blood smeared up her forearms. “Maybe we both are.”

  There was no reason for her to believe me. I was practically a stranger, whereas she’d seen Grey every day of her life. I’d done hardly anything to make her think of me as her older brother. I’d done nothing to make her believe in me. I looked and acted more and more like Collie. She already had one lunatic brother. She had to be wondering if she had two.

  JFK wouldn’t come near us. He sat on the rug and stared at me with a harsher judgment than I’d ever felt before.

  Dale’s eyes flashed with theories and blazing possibilities, trying to put it all together. I propped myself up against the wall, hands clutching my belly. I was leaking fast. I explained everything as quickly and quietly as I could. What I knew and what I suspected. If she didn’t buy it, she’d call the cops and that would be that.

  “He was gushing blood,” she said. “I killed him.”

  “You saved my life, Dale.”

  She dropped her head back, the tears tracking down her face. I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too.

  “Oh Jesus, oh God, poor Dad … poor Daddy. What’s Dad going to think? What’s he going to do?”

  I struggled to get up and couldn’t do it on my own. She eyed me closely. She would always look at me like this from now on. She would never be completely sure of me again. The tears shimmered and slowed.

  “Terry, you’re bleeding.”

  “Not so bad.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Go get bandages.”

  “Bandages aren’t going to stop this. You need to go to a hospital. We have to call the police.”

  “No. Help me up.”

  She did. I rested my weight on her and she groaned beneath me. She helped me to the bathroom. I tore a couple of towels into strips and made a bandage to knot around my stomach. The wounds hurt, but the black burden of what we’d done blunted everything else. The guilt was just beginning for us. I was drenched in cold sweat. Dale lathered up in the sink and washed Grey’s blood off, then helped me to clean up as well as I could. I found some outdated pain meds in the cabinet and popped a handful.

  There was a lot to take care of. We’d already had too much tragedy in my family. My old man wouldn’t be able to handle losing another brother. He was about to lose his oldest son in three days.

  Grey was going on the long grift. I wasn’t much of a forger, but I wasn’t going to have to be. Grey’s letter would be short and to the point. I had been gone for five years. Grey could vanish for a few himself. It was a better ending than the truth.

  I opened a closet door and found an old black denim jacket. It was tight and hurt like hell to put on, but once I had it buttoned up, constricted against the shredded towels, I felt a little better. I picked the butterfly blade up off the floor and stuck it in my back pocket.

  I checked the window. There was blood on the cracked glass. We had to do something about that. I examined the screen door. The latch was broken and would need to be replaced. The jamb looked fine. My old man would be glad to get out his tools. He wouldn’t even be curious. I could tell him I stumbled. I could tell him I got angry and kicked the door in. One stupid story was as believable as another.

  “What are you doing?” Dale asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I need you to clean the house. Ma and Dad are out at dinner.” I checked my watch. “We’ve still got a couple hours.”

  “They don’t go to dinner.”

  “They went tonight, Dale. You’re going to clean the place. Put everything back the way it was. Wipe the blood up.” I pointed to the living-room window. “There too. Change your clothes. Throw everything bloody into a plastic bag and put it in my trunk.”

  She looked over at Gramp. “Poor Old Shep, he saw it all. He filched the blade. He saved my life.”

  “Both our lives.” He wouldn’t have snatched Grey’s knife if he had any doubts. “He’s still in there someplace.” I put my hand to his stubbled cheek. “Thanks, Gramp.”

  Dale glanced at the corpse on the floor. “What are you going to do with Grey? We need to call … I mean … we can’t just—”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Terry, no.” She reached up and took me gently by the collar, forced me to look into her face. “You can’t. You’re not going to—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Not this too.”

  “Yeah, this too.”

  I blitzed out the back door and got a shovel out of the shed. I looked off at the woods. A shiver went through me so violently that I had to slap the shovel down into the dirt and prop myself up with the handle. I walked back in and Dale was smoking a cigarette.

  “This isn’t the way to do it, Terry.”

  I couldn’t imagine dumping him in the ocean or burying him on some construction site under a thousand gallons of cement. “Leave him in Sheepshead Bay? I can’t do that.”

  “It’s the safest way. We can’t keep him on our property.”

  “I can’t let him go. He needs to stay at home.”

  “You’re going to get caught.”

  “That’s better than the alternative,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’ll be an accessory, damn you.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll keep you clear of it.”

  “You’re not thinking straight. You can’t even lift him.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  But she was right. I got him into a seated position, hooked my arms under his, and dragged him to the back door. I managed to push his body to the top step of the porch, hunch down under it, swing his arms over my shoulders, heft him up behind the knees, and get him into a dead man’s lift. It was possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I carried him through the woods, his lips pressed against the back of my neck. Gases gurgled and escaped his mouth l
ike muted curses.

  JFK followed, sniffing at Grey’s ankles. I dug a grave behind the log where Mal and I’d had our lengthy conversation. The ground was soft from all the rain. It was easier than putting in fence-post railings. It wasn’t going to be deep but it would be deep enough for the time being. It took me only a half hour. I rolled Grey’s corpse in. At the last second, just before I threw the first shovelful of dirt on top of him, I grabbed the photo from his jacket pocket. I didn’t know why I wanted it, but I felt strongly that I had to keep it. I covered him over quickly but well and shifted the log over the grave.

  When I was finished, I started back to the house. JFK stared at the muddy spot until I called him to me. Halfway through the woods, I had to stop to vomit. I was feeling light-headed and feeble. Dale met me on the back porch. She’d changed into a summer dress. She looked beautiful and very young and innocent.

  “Gilmore’s here,” she hissed.

  I used the backyard hose to wash the dirt off my hands and spray the sweat from my face. I opened the jacket and looked down at the red-stained towels wrapped around my belly. The blood was starting to soak through but you couldn’t really tell with the black denim.

  “Did you finish cleaning inside?” I asked.

  “Yes, but—I hurried. I might have missed something.”

  I doubted it. She was too sharp for that.

  “He’s got a pizza,” she said. “He does that sometimes. Brings food for when they play cards.”

  “It’s okay, just go tell him that Dad isn’t here.”

  “He knows you’re home. He saw your car. It’s got the bloody towels and sponges and some of my clothes in a bag in the trunk. That window in the living room is broken. I cleaned the blood off and closed the curtains over it. And the front screen is busted to shit.”

  “Tell him Butch did it. You broke up with him and he came here and kicked the door in. I beat the crap out of Butch and sent him home.”

  She nodded. One side of her mouth lifted in a pained half smile. “Good thinking. In case there’s any blood left around. Or on you.”

  “I’ll be inside in a minute. You split.”

  “No, I’m not leaving you alone,” she said.

  “You’ve done enough, Dale. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this.”

  I couldn’t say any more. This was family. These were the things of which we do not speak.

  She went inside. I put on my game face. I knew I didn’t have much of one, but I made the effort. The pain meds were wearing off and my belly burned. Every time I moved a little, I could feel my skin splitting further. I waited another minute, then followed her in.

  Dale had cleaned the place up fine. You couldn’t tell there had been a fight in the living room. You couldn’t tell a man had died here. Gilmore was sitting at the card table, holding a slice of pizza, the box open and turned to the seat opposite. He looked up at me and said, “Thought we could share a pie. You hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  I got a couple of beers out of the fridge. I checked the clock. I hoped my parents would be gone at least another half hour. The thought of facing them weakened my resolve. I sat down, passed Gilmore a bottle, and he gave me that fucked grin.

  I wondered if I should play up to him, smiling and kicking back, wasting time until he got his fill of the Rands for the night and took off. But looking at his teeth I was overwhelmed with rage. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to scream. I picked up the beer and pressed it against my lips and drank deeply and tried to fight off the urge.

  “Your old man went out?”

  “To dinner with my mother.”

  Gilmore nodded like a proud father whose son has just gone off on his first date. “Good for them. I keep telling them they should do that kind of thing more often. Spend time together out of the house.”

  He really did think of himself as some lost begotten son. I wiped my mouth and said, “What’s the word on Mal’s murderer? Anything yet?”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “You bastard. You actually said ‘ongoing investigation’ to me?”

  He quit grinning. “I’m not on the case. And even if I was I couldn’t tell you anything pertinent. You know that.”

  I nodded. This had nothing to do with cards, with friendship, with checking up on my father. Gilmore was reaching out. He couldn’t do it with his wife and kids, so he came here. Pizza is what you had on family nights.

  “How’s your father holding up?” he asked.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “He seems like the rock, rugged, solid, but your mother is really the strong one who can handle the serious hurt. She holds it all together. Your old man, he’s a little softer than you might think.”

  “Because he takes photos of your family for you? Because he crept my old girlfriend’s house?”

  “He told you about that?”

  “No.”

  “But you found out anyway.”

  I wasn’t in control and I knew I was going to make a bad mistake. Maybe I already had. Gilmore’s expression could mean anything. I reached over and slid a slice of pizza out of the box and chewed a hunk off. My stomach surged with bile, but I kept eating.

  He wasn’t a fool. He saw me sweating. He could sense the bad news coming. The question was whether he’d follow up or let it drop. He scanned the room. He checked out Old Shep. He eyed me carefully and I kept on chewing.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  “Your asskicking scraped me up pretty good.”

  “Dale said you got into it with her boyfriend.”

  “Nothing major.”

  “It looks like he did some damage.”

  “It’s tough to make a stoner see reason.”

  “A lot of people refuse to see reason.”

  He took a last bite of his crust, then sat back and stared at me. His shoulders shifted a little. I fed the rest of my slice to JFK and cleaned the grease off my fingers. I saw that I’d left the slightest dab of dirt under a pinky nail. Then I took another slice. I forced myself to down it bite by bite. I thought of Grey out there in the mud. My brother would be dead in three days. My sister and I would share this sin for the rest of our lives. I heard the faint sound of metal snapping against metal. It was Gramp playing with the switchblade.

  Gilmore pursed his lips. “You’re in trouble. You can talk to me, Terrier. I can help you, if you want. You’ve been looking in all the wrong places for a killer. I can imagine what you’ve found. Or what you think you’ve found. I heard about you pulling a piece at Danny Thompson’s place. That was really fucking stupid. A Rand with a gun—I never would have believed it. What if he comes after you?”

  “What if he does?” I said.

  “You don’t need that kind of grief.”

  It almost got me laughing. “Anybody question him about Mal’s murder?”

  “Of course. And they’ll stay on him.”

  “Even if it turns up dirt on you?”

  Gilmore leered at me with surprise. “You think if he killed Mal I’d hush it up to hide my dirt?”

  I looked into his eyes. They were like tidal pools heavy with flotsam. A couple of days ago I’d thought he might be a serial killer. Now I almost felt sorry for him. And I feared him. In his own way he had loved Mal the way he loved my father, the way he loved me. Like a child standing outside in the snow, staring through a window at a family he wished he was part of on Christmas Day. I thought, This guy is crazy, but he’s not our kind of crazy.

  “You’re making bad moves,” he said. “Like with Cara Clarke. She hanged herself, but who knows what pushed her buttons. Who pushed her over the edge. You think you might’ve had something to do with that, Terry?”

  I kept eating. We were just two pals enjoying some pizza together.

  “You never should have come home,” he said.

  He wasn’t going to get an argument from me there. He shifted his weight. I thought, If he takes another poke at me, even if
he is a cop, I’ll break his jaw. He must’ve realized it, because we each held our ground.

  I still had the butterfly knife. I wondered if this was the moment when I became my brother, when I became my uncle. What would I do to stay out of prison? What would I really do to protect my sister? Gramp’s snicking blade beat into my temples until I could barely hear myself breathing. Gilmore was here because he wanted a family, and we Rands were losing ours, one by one.

  Dale sashayed into the room then. She’d been listening. She’d done another quick change and had on the clothes I’d seen her wearing the other night at the lake. The tight leather jacket, the sexy pants. She looked twenty-five and gorgeous as she paraded in front of Gilmore. “Ugh, anchovies and onions?”

  Gilmore kept glowering at me. It was his default expression. Dale bent over the table, grabbed my bottle, and took a long sip. Beer leaked over her chin. I wanted to tell her not to overplay it. He’s too crafty. He shifted his gaze to her. He looked at her hips, her chest, her pulsing throat. He wasn’t thinking about reading tween vampire romance novels to her now.

  “Where are you heading out to this evening?” he asked. “The lake?”

  “No, I’m going out on a first date.”

  “No wonder Butch crashed your door. He seems like the jealous type.”

  She worked the bottle around her bottom lip. “He’s history now that Terry shooed him off.”

  “Good, you’re too young to settle for someone like that punk. This new one a football star?”

  Dale smiled sexily, her face full of amusement. “No, he just got out after a nickel in Sing Sing for armed robbery. But he’s completely reformed. Wants to go to night class and become an IRS auditor.”

  Gilmore blinked and shrugged. “Well, that’s … good.”

  She said nothing. I said nothing. But we’d closed ranks. You could feel the change in the air as we waited for the next thing to happen. Gramp kept playing with the blade beneath his blanket. It sounded impossibly loud to me but no one else seemed to hear it. Finally Gilmore stood.

  He wasn’t a fool. He was a solid, sharp cop despite his vices. He knew us. In a very real way, he was us. His gaze whipsawed around the room one more time. Even with the cleaning, we’d left a million clues for him to spot. I tried to hold my leaking guts in. His knowing grin faded. He carefully wiped his hands off with a napkin, crumpled it up, and tossed it on the table. He frowned at Dale. She was a good actress but not good enough, not after having helped kill a man. A man she had loved. Gilmore’s gaze hardened. He shook his head like he was very disappointed in her. He went stone-cold-killer cop. He even looked at JFK, who let out a moan in the corner. The dog knew we’d botched it. Gilmore glanced at Dale again, made sure she had her hands in view. He turned his hip to me so he could draw his gun easily. He zeroed in on the dirt beneath my pinky nail. He read the guilt in me. He was a bad boy. He was bent. He might’ve even been in on a few body dumps himself, who knew. I wondered if we would have to get rid of him too.