Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words

“He liked to poke the monkeys with a yardstick, remember?”

I was getting annoyed. I got to my feet and turned to him. “Forget about the monkeys. Listen, do I really need to tell you this? You boost from the fish and from the pros, not from the twitchy fuckers.”

“He made it too easy, I couldn’t resist.”

“You should have tried harder. He knows you worked him.”

“He suspects. He doesn’t know.”

“A suspicion is all Danny needs,” I said. “He’s still trying to prove himself to his father’s old associates. Taking you out would give him a little of the juice he wants.”

Mal’s jagged features flattened a little and re-formed into a grin. “He doesn’t have the heart to move against us.”

“He doesn’t need heart. He just needs to put one of his hitters on it.”

“None of them are pros either. Most of Big Dan’s guys retired. Besides, we’ve got news vans covering the house all day long. You think they’re going to want that kind of coverage? In a few days Danny will forget about it.”

“Don’t sell him too short.”

Mal chuckled. Puffs of smoke drifted from his mouth. “Just short enough? His dealer had a three-card bottom drag and he kept folding the aces back into the deck to feed to himself. Big Dan was a psycho, but at least he always ran an honest game and I played him fair. His son’s a mook who’s already gaining a bad rep. Watch. Some of the other syndicates will come in and pull the Thompson crew apart piece by piece and Danny will wind up getting a cushy captain job in one of the other outfits. Either that or someone will plant one in his ear. He’ll wind up in Shalebrook Lake, floating with the ducks.”

He was probably right but I didn’t like how easily he brushed the potential trouble aside. He was usually more practical than that, more cagey. He seemed to only be half paying attention, and I wondered if my father was right and early Alzheimer’s was already beginning to grind away at Mal’s memories. Being aware that you were losing your past, your own mind, must be the worst thing in the world.

JFK broke through the weeds and stood in front of us, panting. I massaged his jowls.

“You ever see Dale’s boyfriend over at the Fifth?” I asked.

“That punk? What’s he call himself? Butch Cassidy? Like he never saw the movie? He’s got no idea what happened to Butch and the Kid in Paraguay?”

“Bolivia.”

“Yeah, whatever the fuck. He comes and goes, runs errands for the guys. Picking up dry cleaning. Running people in and out to the airport. Nothing major. He doesn’t have the heart for it.”

“I think he might be stepping up.”

Mal frowned, tugged his cigar loose. There wasn’t much left of it. I thought I might finally see him light a fresh stogie. “To what?”

“I’m not sure yet. I met him last night. He offered me a job.”

“What, a bank? He couldn’t even open a checking account, that one, much less take down a bank.”

“A jewelry store,” I said.

“He was just talking out his ass, trying to show off to you.”

“Maybe. Tell me about Dale.”

“What kind of question is that?” He stood and the entire log shook. “What do you want to know?”

“Is she a thief?”

He held his hands up before him like I’d just pressed a.32 into his ribs. “Hey, hey, come on now, right?”

“Come on what? Is it a stupid question because I should know the answer is yes or because it’s no?”

“You know your sister’s not a thief!”

“How the hell do I know that?”

“Because your father would never let her go down that road.”

Clouds began to cover the sun. The wind continued to rise. It whistled through the trees so loudly that JFK perked up and looked to see if someone was calling him. “How about if you save that kind of talk for John Citizen, Mal? What else would she know? What else has she been taught?”

“She’s a smart girl,” Mal said. “Straight A’s. She’s going to go to college.”

“How smart? Smart enough to keep out of a big score or smart and capable enough to want in?”

“Jesus Christ, she’s fifteen!”

“I know that,” I said. “I want to make sure she’s nowhere near the punk when he goes down.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it as a sign of reassurance, but it just hurt like hell. “I think you and her need to have a real conversation,” he said. “As soon as possible. Today. But don’t brace her.”

“I won’t.”

Mal nodded but his mouth tightened. We were uncomfortably close to talking about things that the Rands did not talk about. It was almost enough for me to ask him what he was doing, what his own plans were. Did he ever intend on retiring from the bent life, getting off the grift, or were we all doomed to play the game until we wound up on death row or sitting around watching TV with holes in our heads? Did my father find a way out or was he just dying a different slow death, sitting on the porch drinking his beer, taking care of his family, and bored out of his fucking mind?

An almost undetectable expression of worry crossed Mal’s craggy face.

“Have you seen Grey yet?” he asked.

“No.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end; I put a h of it. Another storm was building. Living in the desert, I’d forgotten what it had been like to get rained on all the time. JFK crawled under the downed tree limb and poked his nose out from beneath Mal’s ankles and stared at me.

“Something the matter?” I asked.

Mal looked foggy, reached into his shirt pocket, and retrieved another stogie butt. He lit it, tucked it into the same corner of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

A vein on his forehead began to thicken and throb.

“What is it, Mal?”

My father had said he’d found his brothers on the back lawn, looking a little lost, almost like they were sleepwalking. Was this the beginning of an episode?

“Mal?”

I stepped to him and gripped his elbow, and he snapped away with a tiny fraction of the force he was capable of but I was still pushed aside. He shifted the stogie to the other side of his mouth. “Don’t grab me.”

“I’m sorry. You just looked a little out of it.”

“I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“I’m getting forgetful. I sleep like shit. I wake up with the sweats and I go sit outside and then I’m suddenly freezing. I lose my way around town. Places I’ve been to ten thousand times and now I’m getting lost. I read road signs out loud to help me remember. I think I might really be losing it like Old Shep.”

“Mal, people who are going nuts don’t think they’re going nuts.”

“That’s what they say, but who knows if it’s true?”

Good point, actually.

“It’s hard to explain the way I feel sometimes.”

“Try.”

He held his enormous hands out before him and plied the air, trying to grab hold of something that had no form. He tried again, clutching at nothing, knuckles cracking. He let out a laugh that made my heart sink, fearing for my own future.

“Intense dreams. Nightmares.”

A fierce shiver ran through me. Christ, don’t tell me I was already showing signs of premature senility. Is that what had happened to Collie? Did he feel himself going crazy and just decided to go with it?

“I’m still sharp with the cards,” Mal said, drawing a deck from his pocket. He did a one-handed quadruple cut and then walked the queen of spades across his knuckles. “I carry a deck with me just so I can see them, shuffle through them, and know that I’ve still got a tour-card draw. That I’m still good at something.”

“You been to the doctor?” I asked.

The cards disappeared. “Yeah.”

“What’s he say?”