Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words

“I don’t talk about my customers.”

“Then you’re admitting he was a customer. I’m not the cops, Fingers. It’s not like I’m holding you responsible. But I need to know where he got his pistol.”

He shrugged, his bony shoulders nearly spiking through his bowling shirt. “Why do you care?”

“How about if we don’t chase each other around the track all night long? Did you sell him a clean piece?”

“Yes, I did.”

“How about a knife?”

“That too.”

My heart pounded and I crossed my arms over my chest as if to hold it in. “Right. When?”

“You want the date?”

“I do.”

“How am I supposed to remember that?”

“You remember selling it. I bet you never forget a customer, a price, a date, or a caliber, especially if it’s used in a spree like the one he went on. So tell me. When?”

Higgins let out a moan and started coughing blood. He blinked and tried turning over. I put a foot on his chest and said, “Shh.”

Fingers kept wagging his head. It made that mound of hair waver and flap.

“Even if I wanted to let this go, you think he’s going to?”

“What’d I say? Stay focused, right? Tell me when my brother came to you.”

Fingers told me. It turned out to be the day before Collie went on his rampage. He said, “You’re dead, you know.”

“Bring along someone better than this goon.”

“I will. See you soon.”

I hit the door with my heart tripping. Collie hadn’t gone off on a mad tear. It hadn’t been anything that had happened at the Elbow Room to push him over the edge. He’d either been planning to drop into the underneath or he’d picked up gun fever once he’d held the piece in his hands. A fever that had risen by degrees through the night. My brother, a living storm of urgency and indulgence, sweeping across town.

I wondered if I’d been home, would he have saved the last shot for me?

I drew back my arm and tossed the stick. JFK brought it back and I tossed it onto the lawn again. He hung his head, looked at me like I was an asshole, and laid down at my feet.

I wanted to see Kimmy. I wanted to do more than that. I longed to fold up in her arms and beg forgiveness, but only if she would give it to me. I knew she wouldn’t. I would stand there exposed and empty and begging and she would stare at me with no idea of what to say or do. Her eyes would be steamed with years of tamped-down puzzlement and hate. Scooter would jet around and I would want to call her my girl.

I had apologized to my old man for leaving, and now the urge to run was starting to overwhelm me again. In thirty or forty years my brain would turn to tapioca and I’d die in front of a television, watching cartoons and muttering about a dream I’d once had of carrying a woman to the top of the lighthouse.

I sniffed and smelled Mal behind me, standing in the screen door. I hadn’t thought anyone was home. He was a damn good creeper even though his talents lay on the grift. If he quit the stogies, he could still be a solid second-story man.

I turned and said, “Heya, what’s this?”

He pushed through and came out onto the porch. He had an unlit cigar butt tucked into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it free, peered at it for a moment, then replaced it. “I thought we should talk. You’ve been home for days and haven’t even said hello to me yet.”

His coarse, crude face was split by a smile. It looked like a deep fracture working through the side of a cliff. We hugged.

I said, “Nothing personal.”

“I realize that. It wasn’t an easy call for you to respond to. You’ve got a lot on your shoulders now that you didn’t ask for. But it’s still damn good to see you.” He led me over to one of the thin trails cutting through the brush around our property. “Let’s walk.”

“Like when we used to feed the ducks at the lake.”

H dM"1em" align="justify"›“And bum-rush the neighborhood kids’ birthday parties. Every one of those little fuckers used to have a clown or a magician, some asshole choking the shit out of long balloons and turning them into animals. And petting zoos. Monkeys and llamas and baby brown bears. Every other kid with some poor monkey in a cage staring through the bars, the kid trying to feed him ice cream and pizza. Talk about a crime.”

JFK followed along as we moved through the woods. Mal picked up a stick and tossed it. JFK flicked his tail once but didn’t move for it. I scratched at his ear. He let out a long, contented sigh.

Mal looked a little chagrined, which was hard to do considering the cruelty in his features. My shoulders tensed. So did his.

“When you cut and run you leave unfinished business. Don’t think we all can’t see it in you.”

“I thought I looked trim and fit and tan.”

“You do. You also look like twenty pounds of hammered shit.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “Look who the hell’s talking.”

Mal pulled the stogie butt from the corner of his mouth and let out a booming laugh that echoed through the undergrowth. “My beauty is for more refined tastes, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re still a pretty emotional lot, you know,” he said. “The Rands. All of us. I know this thing is bending you all out of shape. Visiting Collie. Listening to whatever crap he’s pouring in your ear.” He stuck the stogie back in. “You ever need any help, Terrier, I hope you know you can always ask me.”

“Sure.”

“You say that like you don’t believe it.”

“I believe it.”

“Let’s sit.”

We sat on the trunk of a maple tree that had toppled over but wasn’t quite dead. The leaves fluttered when we climbed on it. Squirrels clambered in and out of a knothole, and JFK dropped his chin and watched excitedly, then bolted after them. He could still really truck when he wanted to. He vanished into the brush.

Mal got up the nerve to ask me what Collie had wanted. I turned my chin to look at him and he was staring at the black soil under his feet. Maybe he wanted to know and maybe he didn’t. I didn’t bother to burden him with it.

I wanted to ask why he never married. It wasn’t because he was so ugly. There had been women he’d cared about in his life, women who’d loved him. A couple that I remembered from the time I was very young. Their names and faces remained clear to me. At Christmas dinner twenty or so years ago I remembered calling one of them “Aunt Sally.” She’d put down her silverware and laughed quietly and given Mal a sweet and open look of affection. Everyone else had chuckled pleasantly, but I could tell I’d done something wrong. I’d cried myself to sleep, thinking Mal would hate me forever. In the morning Grey had said, “Some of us aren’t meant for wives and kids, Terrier. The only women we love are the black queens in a marked deck.”

I tried to picture my life if Collie and I had been friends the way my father and uncles were. I saw Collie with a wife and three kids in that house and wondered if I would be able to live the way my uncles did. If a black queen would be enough for me.

I asked, “Did you juke Danny Thompson forty large?”

Mal shrugged his massive shoulders. “More like thirty-seven.”

“Did you know that he’s had men on the street-our street, out in front of the house-waiting for you?”

He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and lit the butt of his cigar. He blew smoke away from me. “Yeah, I spotted them.”

“He’s not Big Dan. He’s insecure and edgy and fairly stupid.”

“I know. He always was, even as a kid. I was surprised you took a shine to him when you were little.”

“The kids of criminals tend to stick to their own kind.”