Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words

I didn’t spot anyone. I kept the lights off and the music low and I tried not to let myself drift too much, but I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking that I could’ve saved Cara Clarke somehow. I didn’t know how, but I had botched the job. Maybe I never should have visited her. Maybe I had led the killer to her door. Maybe I had brought the underneath along with me and she’d gotten swept up in it too.

I stared at the headlights of the kids’ cars and watched them dancing and drinking in the firelight until it felt like my eyes were full of splinters. Maybe this was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.

It was a school night and my sister left early enough to make my mother only moderately unhappy. Butch wove around on the road a little and kept crossing the center line. They parked in front of our house and argued for a few minutes, maybe about his drinking, and then made out for a while. Then Butch split.

He was knocking back beers as he drove home. I followed. I wanted to drop a dime on him for drunk driving with my sister in the car, the prick. He pulled into a low-class apartment complex in Wyandanch known for its drug market. I watched him weave up the sidewalk. I sat out in front and waited for ten minutes, then I went to have a look.

I couldn’t even say I crept his place. The lock was broken and his front door was halfway open. The stink of rotting food made me gag.

Butch was passed out on the couch. He had a three-inch doobie still burning in an ashtray. His pad was a catastrophe. Empty beer cans and old bags of Chinese takeout, ribs, burgers, wer

There wasn’t much to the douche. He had a.22 with a warped front sight tucked down between the couch cushions where he slept. He had a new wallet. It had someone else’s ID and about a hundred bucks in it. The idiot had juked somebody but hadn’t tossed the driver’s license. Maybe he thought he could pass himself off as Carlos Ortiz Arroyo.

Right out in the open, scrawled on a grease-soaked pizza box, were the name and number of Stan Herbert. He was a fairly small-time fence who took the dirty items nobody else wanted. If you boosted a church, then you brought the silver chalice to Stan. Butch and his string were relying on the wrong guy to move their jewelry. Either Butch was running the heist into the ground or they were all a bunch of amateurs or morons. Danny would want a fat hunk off the top and there wasn’t going to be much cheese left for the rest of them. Even if they got away with it, they weren’t going to want to give out such a big cut. That would put them on the wrong end with the Thompson crew. They were as good as caught or dead. The cops would sniff out Dale. Whether she was involved or not, it would go bad for her just because of the Rand name.

Butch was a dim bulb. I wasn’t going to be able to scare him into laying off the heist. I wasn’t going to be able to talk any sense into him.

Five men in all. I wondered if he’d picked up his fifth yet or if he was still looking. A family-owned jewelry store. Small shop, a lot of employees. Four minutes inside. I tried narrowing down which shop it might be, but there was no way. I looked over at Butch on the couch and tried to see what my sister saw in him. She could do much better. If she went for bad boys she could still go for smarter. Maybe she just dug the Chevy.

As I was heading home, my phone rang again. The noise of it startled me. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to carrying a cell and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it as soon as I could. When that might be I had no idea. Maybe as soon as Collie was dead. Since I was still doing a lot of creeping, I thought maybe I should set the fucker on vibrate.

“Hello?”

“We’ve got a little trouble, Terry,” Wes said. “And don’t bother asking me how I got this number, it’s my goddamn phone. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist juking me.”

“Taking a burner isn’t juking you, Wes. What’s the trouble? Something with my sister?”

“No,” he said. “Your uncles are here at the Fifth.”

“Ah, shit. The poker game.”

“Right. They just walked in a few minutes ago. You’re the one who put it in Mr. Thompson’s head that when Mal and Grey are together they’re cheating. He said you mentioned cross chatter and keeping the marks distracted.”

“What a fucking idiot I am.”

“If you get here fast, maybe we can calm the situation before anything starts.”

“Danny throwing his weight around?”

“No. It’s all nice and mellow so far. But you know Mr. Thompson holds a grudge.”

“How much have they won so far?”

“Nothing. Nobody’s much ahead yet.”

Thatȁhon9;s how it would start. My uncles were just loosening up a little. They’d run the hands evenly for a while. Take a pot or two and then feed a couple back to the other players. The next step was to start losing slightly, then more heavily. After they’d gotten five or six grand deep, the others would get in a good mood and grow even sloppier, and then my uncles would come in with the serious rips and finish the fat cats off fast.

“I’ll be there in five minutes. But tell me something else first.”

“What is it?”

“How deep is Gilmore into Danny’s pocket?”

I could almost hear Wes’s stomach rumbling, the acid splashing around. “You don’t need to know things like that, Terry.”

“I really do, Wes. Has he ever pulled a trigger for you?”

“What?” Wes’s voice tightened, and he put some frost into it. “Terry, I don’t understand what’s been going on with you, but this isn’t the kind of thing we should be talking about.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

“Doesn’t the guy eat at your house and drink beer with your father? I thought you knew him.”

“I thought I did too, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. Hurry the fuck up and get here, would you?”

It took me ten minutes. A sign on the front door said PRIVATE PARTY TONIGHT. That had always been Big Dan’s euphemism for a major game. It just proved that Danny was still walking in his father’s shadow, afraid to strike off on his own.

I walked in anyway. I started over to Danny’s table, and one of his soldiers stepped up and blocked me. Danny watched it happen but kept me waiting. Wes saw it too and knew he had to let the boss throw his weight around a little. A few minutes went by. I tried hard to be patient.

Danny had a new suit on, one that looked a couple of sizes larger and fit him more comfortably. His paunch was well hidden. He’d used some kind of thickening gel to give his hair more texture. He still couldn’t keep from thumbing back his widow’s peak.

Mal had one of his stogies lit. He smoked it without ever pulling it from his mouth. Just sucked air through his teeth and then blew smoke out one side of his mouth. In front of him was either a Bloody Mary or a glass of tomato juice, garnished with a stick of celery.

Grey had stopped off at home at some point and now wore a charcoal suit and a power tie. If possible, he looked even sharper than he had last night. He wore his best jewelry. Rolex watch, diamond pinkie ring, a gold bracelet. He said it all served as distraction and decoy. The more flash you wore, the more chance that someone was looking at the shine and not at your four-card pull. It went counter to everything my father had taught me. You wore nothing on your hands so that no one looked at your hands. Both methods seemed to work pretty well.

The fat cats appeared to be having fun. I recognized two of them as mob guys who used to hang around with Big Dan. Both from Chicago, in town for a few days doing business. I suspected Mal was right again. The Chi syndicate was here pulling the Thompson crew apart and stealing their business.