“The authorities wouldn’t have understood any more than you can.”
“No, I’m sure they wouldn’t have. What about school? Neighbors? Her friends?”
“I told them all she was visiting with her father.”
“And that’s all it took?”
“Yes.”
It seemed impossible, but who was out there asking about him anymore? You disappeared and nobody cared.
“I don’t know what happened,” she repeated.
“I do.”
The crazy laughter wanted out, but Jenks forced it back down. He shook his head in disbelief but managed to stay silent. What makes you fuck up the worst? Love. Love for a stranger you trusted enough to take hold of your daughter’s hand and walk out onto the streets of New York.
He sat down next to her on the couch, the girl everywhere smiling and laughing and watching him.
He thought again about stopping by his old house, kicking in the front door, listening to the screams of the new occupants as he ran down into the basement and climbed into the crawlspace. He’d back into a far corner and hug his knees and bury his face and somehow that would make things better.
He saw Hale clearly, perfectly, walking with the girl and holding her hand. On fire after the argument about the Danish. Miffed and worried, with his guts burning because Angela was clearly crazy. Now holding the hand of a little girl, the kid probably talking. She was mature and responsible. She probably had a take charge attitude. Tugging on his hand, telling him, this way, careful of the cab, wait for the light. Okay. Hale, startled and trying to go with it, thinking of the girl’s safety, wondering if he should call the cops or tell the other folks at the shelter that Angela was out of her mind. But who would believe a vagrant with no money who sold books without covers in Times Square? He was backed into a corner even as they moved together towards the diner, the girl already well aware that her mother wasn’t right and making the best of it, but doomed as all kids are doomed to the care of their parents.
Hale soon becoming aware that someone was following.
A bald guy with a bristly horseshoe 70s porn mustache, his forearms thick, trying to steal from his own kind.
Jenks should’ve known. What had happened to Hale would happen to Jenks. Jenks had a butterfly blade. Hale had bought one too. Maybe from the same place. Maybe from protection or just out of prophecy, knowing that the knife was needed for his own death.
The rage reached through him like timid fingers, moving backwards and forwards through time. It connected everything he’d been to everything he was now and was about to become. Other men had money and lessons learned from their lovers and fathers and mentors. Hale had figured, Okay, so this is what I’ve been given. It had been accumulating for more than a year, since listening to his wife’s whispering laughter. A dog on the street began to mewl. Or maybe it was coming from inside of his chest. The blackness took him over and he could feel his teeth drying. He realized he was smiling and had been for a while. He couldn’t feel the butterfly blade in his hand but he could hear it spinning and snapping closed. It sounded as resolute as the word of God. The child needed milk. He was still curious about what the proper order of things was supposed to be now, as Baldy descended. Baldy had seen Angela giving Hale whatever, a twenty dollar bill. Maybe only ten. It was more than enough. Baldy pushing him, trying to get him to let go of the girl’s hand, cough up the cash. Just like that, just like that. Jesus, she had an insanely lonely mother, was standing in the care of an unbalanced bastard with nothing in the world, and now some bald prick was going to finish ruining her breakfast. No, enough of this, enough of this. Hale pulling the blade, wondering if the martyrs and the saints would stay his hand.
Hale, unable to do it. Bringing the blade up to Baldy’s face and Baldy seeing it, in his eyes, that Hale wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone. He was gone but not that far gone. So Baldy plucked the knife from his hand and ordered him to turn out his pockets, and the girl having enough of it all started yelling, tears in her eyes. She was mature and responsible. You leave us alone. And Hale hoping to calm her but fucking things up worse, forgetting her name and calling her by his daughter’s name instead. Sandy, you listen to me now. The mistakes piling one on top of the other. Until Baldy reached for Hale’s pocket and Hale tugged the girl to him, and somehow the ballet coming apart despite the fact that it had been rehearsed through the ages a million million times, and maybe Hale resisting, the girl shouting, and the blade going in softly. Maybe into Hale first, stuffing the knife between his ribs. Maybe into the girl. Nothing mattering at all after that, because it had always been meant to happen. How could anyone expect it to have ended any differently?
Hale alive on the concrete and thinking, as he watched the blood pour into a widening lake, Christ, end it if you’re going to get this close. Shove the blade in another two inches. End it.
Jenks angled himself a little closer to Angela on the couch, waiting for her to cry. But she didn’t. Perhaps she never had, maybe should would, someday. Finally allow herself to cry for her murdered daughter and her lost love left dying on the streets of New York. Jenks thought about resting here for a while, getting some food into him, before he went back to the shelter and started looking for Baldy. Baldy would show up, eventually, to rob more people with hungry children. And Jenks would be waiting for him, awake in the black night while the dogs whined and the dead loomed and waited in the high corners with empty, imploring faces. He would listen to the sound of the blade opening and shutting, the way he was listening to it now, and he would discover in that last moment what the next page in the great book of life, written in God’s own hand, would have to say about his sins. God would glare down at him and Jenks would wait at the gates, humbled and on his knees, seeing Hale already inside heaven having passed the final test, and Jenks knowing in his heart, no matter what the divine choir was singing now, that he had failed his own.
Read on for an exclusive sneak peek at the new novel by Tom Piccirilli
The Last Kind Words
Available in June 2011
Visit www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com and send an e-mail to be notified when the book is available to order.
"Perfect crime fiction ... a convincing world, a cast of compelling characters, and above all a great story."—LEE CHILD, New York Times bestselling author of 61 Hours
“For the first time since The Godfather, a family of criminals has stolen my heart. A brilliant mix of love and violence, charm and corruption. I loved it.”—NANCY PICKARD, New York Times bestselling author of The Scent of Rain and Lightning
"You don't choose your family. And the Rand clan, a family of thieves and killers, is bad to the bone. But it's a testimony to Tom Piccirilli's stellar writing that you still care about each and every one of them. The Last Kind Words is at once a dark and brooding page-turner and a heartfelt tale about the ties that bind. Fans of Lee Child will love this hard-boiled, tough-as-nails novel."—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Fragile
“It's Piccirilli’s sense of relationships and the haunting power of family that lifts his writing beyond others in the genre. The Last Kind Words is a swift-moving and hard-hitting novel."
—Michael Koryta, Edgar Award-nominated author of So Cold the River
“A stunning story that ranges far afield at times but never truly leaves home, a place where shadows grow in every corner. It’s superbly told, with prose that doesn’t mess about or flinch from evil and characters who are best known from a distance.”
—Daniel Woodrell, PEN award-winning author of Winter’s Bone
"There's more life in Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words (and more heartache, action, and deliverance) than any other novel I've read in the past couple of years.”
—Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award-winning author of The Lock Artist
"You're in for a treat. Tom Piccirilli is one of the most exciting authors around. He writes vivid action that is gripping and smart, with characters you believe and car
e about.”
—David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of First Blood
The Last Kind Words
Tom Piccirilli
“Fear and hope are alike underneath.”
–Richard Ford
“Can’t do it, simply cause underneath ’em is too ugly.”
–Billy Gibbons
PART I
MAKING GHOSTS
I’d come five years and two thousand miles to stand in the rain while they prepared my brother for his own murder.
He had two weeks to go before they strapped him down and injected poison into his heart. I knew Collie would be divided about it, the way he was divided about everything. A part of him would look forward to stepping off the big ledge. He’d been looking over it his whole life in one way or another.
A different part of him would be full of rage and self-pity and fear. I had no doubt that when the time came he’d be a passive prisoner right up to the moment they tried to buckle him down. Then he’d explode into violence. He was going to hurt whoever was near him, whether it was a priest or the warden or a guard. They’d have to club him down while he laughed. The priest, if he was still capable, would have to raise his voice in prayer to cover my brother’s curses.
I was twenty minutes late for my appointment at the prison. The screw at the gate didn’t want to let me in because he’d already marked me as a no show. I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be there. He saw that I wanted to split and it was enough to compel him to let me stay.
At the prison door another screw gave me the disgusted once over. I told him my name but the sound of it didn’t feel right anymore.
“Terry Rand.”
The fake ID I’d been living under the past half decade had become a safe harbor, a slim chance to better myself even though I hadn’t done much yet. I resented being forced to return to the person I’d once been.
The screw made me repeat my name. I did. It was like ice on my tongue. Then he made me repeat it again. I caught on.
“Terrier Rand.”
Expressionless, he led me off to a small side room where I was frisked and politely asked if I would voluntarily succumb to a strip search. I asked what would happen if I said no. He said I wouldn’t be allowed to proceed. It was a good enough reason to turn around. I owed my brother nothing. I could return out west and get back to a life I was still trying to believe in and make real.
Even as I decided to leave I was shrugging out of my jacket and kicking off my shoes. I got naked and held my arms up while the screw ran his hands through my hair and checked between my ass cheeks and under my scrotum.
He stared at the dog tattoo that took up the left side of my chest covering three bad scars. One was from when Collie had stabbed me with the bayonet of a tin Revolutionary War toy soldier when I was seven. I got a deep muscle infection that the doctor had to go digging after, leaving the area a rutted, puckered purple.
Another was from when I was twelve and my father sent me up the drainpipe to a house that was supposedly empty. A seventy-five year old lady picked up a Tiffany-style lamp and swatted me three stories down into a hibiscus tree. A rib snapped and pierced the flesh. My old man got me into the car and pulled the bone shard through by hand as the sirens closed in and he drove up on sidewalks to escape. The scar was a mottled red and thick as a finger.
The last one I didn’t think about. I had made an art of not thinking about it.
The screw took pride in his professional indifference, courteous yet dismissive. But the tattoo caught his attention.
“Your family, you’re some serious dog lovers, eh?”
I didn’t answer. One last time he checked through my clothes for any contraband. He tossed them back to me and I got dressed.
I was taken to an empty visiting room. I sat in a chair and waited for them to bring Collie in. It didn’t matter that there was a wall of reinforced glass between us. I wasn’t going to pass him a shiv and we weren’t going to shake hands or hug out twenty years of tension. The only time we’d ever touched was when we were trying to beat the hell out of each other. I’d been thinking hard about the reasons for that on the ride back east. How could it be that I had such resentment and animosity for him, and he for me, and yet when he called I came running?
They led him in draped in chains. He could only shuffle along a few inches at a time, his hands cuffed to a thick leather belt at his waist, his feet separated by a narrow chain, bracelets snapped to his ankles. It took ten minutes to unlock him. The screws retreated and Collie twirled his chair around and sat backwards, like always.
Like most mad dog convicts, prison agreed with him. He was a lot more fit than he’d ever been on the outside. The huge beer belly had been trimmed back to practically nothing, his arms thick and muscular and covered in twisted black veins. There was a new gleam in his eye that I couldn’t evaluate.
He had old scars from drunken brawls and new ones from the joint that gave him a sense of character he’d never exhibited before. Like me, he’d gone gray prematurely. He had a short but well-coiffed mane of silver with a few threads of black running through it. I noticed he’d also had a manicure and a facial. He glowed a healthy pink. He’d been moisturized and exfoliated and closely-shaved. The nancies on C-Block could open up a salon in East Hampton and make a mint off Long Island’s wealthy blue-haired biddies.
I expected that with his execution only two weeks off, and with five years gone and all the uneasy blood still between us, we would need to pause and gather our thoughts before we spoke. I imagined we would stare at each other, making our usual judgments and taking each other’s measure. We’d then bypass trivial concerns to speak of extreme matters, whatever they might be. With a strange reservation, a kind of child-like hesitation, I lifted the phone and cleared my throat.
Collie moved with the restrained energy of a predator, slid forward in his seat, did a little rap a tap on the glass. He grasped the phone and first thing let loose with a snorted, easy laugh. He looked all around until he finally settled on my eyes.
He usually spoke with a quick, jazzy bop tempo, sometimes muttering out of the corner of his mouth or under his breath as if to an audience situated around him. This time he was focused. He nodded once, more to himself than me, and said, “Listen, Ma hates me, and that’s all right, but you, you’re the one who broke her heart. You–”
I hung up the phone, stood, and walked away.
I was nearly to the door when Collie’s pounding on the glass made me stop. It got the screws looking in on us. I kept my back to my brother. My scalp crawled and I was covered in sweat. I wondered if what he’d said was true. It was the best trick he had, getting me to constantly question myself. Even when I knew he was setting me up I couldn’t keep from falling into the trap. I wondered if my mother’s heart really had broken when I’d left. I thought of my younger sister Dale still waiting for me to read her romantic vampire fantasy novels. My father on the porch with no one to sit with. My Gramp losing his memories, fighting to retain them, now that there was nobody to stroll around the lake with and discuss the best way to trick out burglar alarms.
Collie kept on shouting and banging. I took another step. I reached for the handle. Maybe if I’d made my fortune out west I would have found it easier to leave him there yelling. Maybe if I’d gotten married. Maybe if I’d raised a child.
But none of that had happened. I took a breath, turned, and sat again. I lifted the phone.
“Jesus, you’re still sensitive,” he said. “I only meant that you need to stop thinking about yourself and go see the family–”
“I’m not going to see the family. Why did you call me here, Collie?”
He let out a quiet laugh. He pointed through the huge glass window off to the side of us, which opened on an area full of long tables. His gaze was almost wistful. “You know, we were supposed to be able to talk over there. In that room, face to face. On this phone, talking to you like this, it’s not the way I wanted it to be.”
He grinned and shrugged, and the thousand questions that had once burned inside of me reignited. I knew he wouldn’t answer them. My brother clung to his secrets, great and small. He’d been interviewed dozens of times for newspaper articles and magazines and books, and while he gave intimate, awful details, he never explained himself. It drove the courts, the media, and the public crazy even now.
And me too. Words bobbed in my throat but never made it out. The timeworn campaigns and disputes between us had finally receded. I no longer cared about the insults, the torn pages, the girls he stole from me, or the way he’d run off on short cons gone bad, leaving me to take beatings from the marks. It had taken a lot of spilled blood to make me forgive him, if in fact I had. If not, it would only matter another few days.
On the long night of his rampage, my brother went so far down into the underneath that he didn’t come back up until after he’d murdered eight people. A vacationing family of five shot to death in a mobile home, a gas station attendant knifed in a men’s room, an old lady beat to death outside a convenience store, a young woman strangled in a park.
None of them had been robbed. He hadn’t taken anything, hadn’t even cleaned out the register at the gas station.
It wasn’t our way. It had never been our way. I thought of my Gramp Shepherd again. One of my earliest memories was of him telling us all around a Thanksgiving dinner, You’re born thieves, it’s your nature, handed down to me, handed down from me. This is our way. He’d been getting ready to cut into a turkey Collie had boosted from the King Kullen.
Short Ride to Nowhere Page 7