Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words

“Butch, this is my brother Terry.” She gripped him around the waist so tightly he let out a little gasp. She glanced back at me. “Terry, meet Butch.”

We shook hands.

His voice had a focused edge to it, strong and clear, which I wasn’t expecting. “You’re the one who’s been out west,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“What’s that like?”

I had a hard time remembering. I strained to come up with an anecdote, a yarn, some kind of an accounting that would be good enough to tell to anyone who asked. But the harder I tried to recall the last half decade the less substantial it seemed. Fences, a lot of fencing, always in need of repair.

Luckily Butch didn’t really give a shit. He hadn’t waited for a response. “I think about heading out that way. You know, just getting on the road. Hitting three or four states in a couple days. Prairies. Farms. All those highways, all those exits. That’s glanwidot to be the life, right?”

I said, “Sure.”

I knew one thing. Dale and Butch might’ve hung around the lake most nights but they did a lot of cruising too. Nobody kept a machine like that and didn’t let out the clutch and tear up the streets. I could see them burning down Sunrise Highway, out past the barrens, flipping off the Hamptons and heading down to the beaches.

He was territorial the way most young men were, and he put on the same show. He kept a hand around her waist, rubbing his knuckles against her bare midriff, telling all the other punks around that she was his and his alone. I’d done it myself. I couldn’t hold it against him, except I did. A part of me wanted to kick his teeth out, but I supposed that was about par. It was his way of proving he had a bloom on her that her own flesh and blood never would.

He asked, “Hey, babe, can you get me another beer?”

“Of course. You want one, Terry?”

“No thanks,” I said.

She climbed into the backseat and I could hear her rattling a cooler. “We’re out. You want a Mike’s Hard Lemonade instead?”

Butch said, “What do you think?”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

“That’s my girl.”

Dale slipped off, walking briskly but with a sexy sashay. As she moved across the area I could see her silhouette appearing every so often in the blaze of headlights.

A fine drizzle started. I liked the feel of it. Trees bucked and branches swept to and fro, the lake showing small whitecaps.

“I might have a job for you,” Butch said.

“A job?”

“Yeah. I can’t say too much about it now, not until I get all the details. It’s not a bank or anything. A jewelry store. Family-owned. We take it a week from Tuesday.”

Now I understood what he meant about hitting three or four states in a couple of days. All the highways and exits. He was fantasizing about a crime spree, taking down scores across America, being a real outlaw. Like you didn’t have to plan as much. Like it was easier to escape the cops on the I-25 in the middle of Wyoming, twenty miles to the nearest exit, than it was dodging the staties on the Wantagh Parkway. I realized why he smelled like oil. It was gun oil.

My mother had good instincts. She knew a criminal when she saw one. This kid stank of trouble. I should’ve been sharper.

“I’ve got three men already,” Butch went on. “We need another for crowd control. It’s a small shop, but they’ve got a lot of employees. Like I said, family-owned, so they’ve got Mom and Dad in back, a couple of uncles doing inventory, sisters and cousins up front working the counters. The hardware will be clean, untraceable. Unless you’ve got your own piece you’d rather use. In and out in under four minutes.”

“I don’t do that,” I said.

He frowned. “You don’t do what?”

“That.”

“Hit jewelry stores?”

“I don’t carry a gun.”

He smiled like I’d just told a joke that hadn’t quite comew undere off. “Since when?”

“Since always.”

“But you’re a Rand.”

“And we don’t do that,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not.”

For some reason I was suddenly offended by the fact that he was standing here without a shirt. That scrawny chest on exhibit. His naked nipples steered toward me.

He bounced like he was being tickled and let out a small burp of a giggle. “You’re old-school thieves. You’re famous. Everybody knows what you’re all about.”

“No armed robbery.”

He cocked his head. “No exceptions, huh?”

“None.”

“Not even for a big enough payday? Let’s say, six figures?”

The kid was a fucking idiot. Jewelry was always the hardest thing to unload on a fence. Some pieces could be identified as readily as fingerprints. It had to pass through a lot of hands before anyone could turn it into cash. You saw maybe a dime off every dollar. For a five-man crew to see a hundred grand each you had to pull down a five-mil score. This mook would never be involved with that kind of a major haul.

In this town he wouldn’t even think about it unless he was in the good graces of the Thompson syndicate.

I asked the obvious question. “You do any work for Danny Thompson?”

“A little of this and that,” Butch said.

“What kind of this and that?”

“You know-things. Stuff.”

I watched Dale across the way, returning with a couple of beers. She could make it only a few steps before someone stopped her, chatted her up, got her laughing. She was pretty and popular and shouldn’t be hooked up with a twenty-year-old hood talking armed robbery. The rest of them looked like punks and assholes but at least they weren’t getting ready to take a five-to-seven rap.

I wondered if she was drawn to Butch because he was a thief like her brothers and father. If she felt more comfortable with him than some straight-A joe working at the Walmart and putting himself through night school. If she liked the smell of gun oil on him. I thought of this mutt on top of my sister. My fists tightened and my knuckles cracked. The pounding bass from his radio beat into my feet and moved up my legs, into my chest, and up through my brain.

I got in close, went nose-to-nose with Butch as he backed up and became trapped against the Chevy’s grille. He turned his hip to me as if to climb away.

He frowned and said, “Hey, man, hey-”

A little of this and that. Butch was one of the hangers-on. Back in Big Dan’s day I watched them come and go, guys trying to mob up who Dan would take advantage of for as long as he could. Get them to do some extra dirty work, the stuff he didn’t want to lay out on his own crew. But he’d always pay them something for the risk and trouble, even if they didn’t get any of the respect they were hoping for. Danny, though, I could see him running guys like Butch out to do everything from shining shoes to cleaning his rain gutters to pulling heists, just so he could skim off the top, paying them nothing and letting them drop wherever they fell.

“Stay away from him.”

“Why?”

“Because he uses guys like you.”

“You shouldn’t talk about Mr. Thompson that way, it’s not healthy. He’s got a lot of ears, even out here, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know what you’re saying.”

He hissed a laugh. He thought he was on the inside track, hip to the action, impervious to injury. I considered proving him wrong, chopping him in the throat or shattering that already ugly nose, but it would hurt Dale, and I couldn’t make my sister suffer any more than I already had.

It took him a few more seconds to realize how badly he’d fucked up. He’d presumed too much, spilled too much. His smarmy expression froze.

“Hey, man, hey. It’s cool, right? We’re cool?”