Tom Piccirilli: The Last Kind Words

The house had been in our family for four generations. Construction had been started by my great-grandfather and his brothers, who’d been adept architects and carpenters but piss-poor thieves who were always breezing in and out of the joint. Because they were often caught and incarcerated together, it took forever to raise the roof beams. The place had been completed a decade or so later with the help of my grandfather and his brother, who were starting to learn what to do in order to stay out of the can.

They’d purchased three lots’ worth of land so that our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile up the road. Only a comparatively small section of the yard had ever been cleared. The rest remained wild and overgrown with trees and brush. As little kids, my best friend, Chub Wright, and I would camp back there and talk about car chases in action movies, listening to my uncles come and go through the house, unloading goods after midnight.

Unless you were an ace heister who pulled in multi-million-dollar scores, owning a house was almost unheard of on the circuit. Thieves by their nature and calling were usually on the move. They had warrants out on them in one state so they ran to another. The heat came down so they moved to cooler climes. They never stayed put. Except that we did. It made things a little hinky. All the cops knew us. All the undercover journalists would show up at our door trying to sell us soap or vacuum cleaners, carrying cases with hidden cameras and digital feeds inside. We could spot them from fifty feet away.

That was another reason why it took so long for the place to be built. The house was a well-crafted magic trick. Unless you were intimately familiar with its interior, you’d never guess just how many crawl spaces, hidden rooms, extended root cellars, and attic areas the place actually had. Whole sections of floorboards could be peeled back, but you had to know where the locking mechanisms were. Walls slid aside. Built-in staircases unfolded and let you climb eight or twelve feet up into recessed chambers. You couldn’t use a hammer to find a hollow spot, because damn near every inch of the extra space was filled with loot. Some of it went back fifty years. My grandfather and his brothers had boosted a lot of shit back in the fifties that they weren’t able to fence. But you never dumped hot property. You sold it or planted it or kept it. When your whole family was made up of grifters and gaffers and second-story men, that meant a ton of excess haul: old machinery, bicycle parts, busted record players, eight-track tape decks, old TVs with missing vacuum tubes, furniture, worthless silverware, and literally tons of other crap I’d never even seen.

Under the living room where my grandfather sat in his chair, with the quiet strains of cartoon characters taking frying pans to their heads, was a cache of unfenced curio bric-a-brac going back decades. My father had never been able to resist small trinkets and novelty gadgets that he felt might have an interesting history. In the middle of a job he’d pocket broken shillelaghs, nutcrackers with busted hinges, dinged Zippo lighters, music boxes with cracked dancers, chipped Dresden dolls, and old tools whose purpose eluded him. He had a healthy respect for hands and couldn’t resist anything that looked like it had been caressed and fondled or well applied.

The irony of a useless man in a room stationed over useless hidden things wasn’t lost on me. I figured if my grandfather grew lucid at all anymore, it wouldn’t be lost on him either. Gramp’s hands twitched and trembled. His eyes never left the television screen.

My mother came in holding a bowl of oatmeal and said, “Do you want to feed him?”

“he y"›ȁNo.”

So she sat on the loveseat and fed him instead. I stood close to his shoulder and watched. She kept up a running monologue of childish banter, and Gramp never reacted in any way. During commercials his chin would droop and his gaze would lower, his whole body slumping forward. When the cartoons came back on he’d sit a little straighter. He’d make noises that might have been laughter.

I took it for as long as I could and then I started out of the room. I made it two steps and knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure what. I turned and Old Shep looked exactly the same, still making his sounds but a little louder now. I looked at the floor. I scanned the room. Then I checked my pocket. My wallet was missing.

Even with the Parkinson’s and the Alzheimer’s he was an ace pickpocket. It took me a minute to find my wallet deep in the folds of his robe. He was still in there somewhere.

I said, “Sweet action, Gramp,” but a commercial was on and he was slumped in his seat with his strings cut.

As I trotted down the drive into the road, JFK came lumbering after me. I ran back inside and got his leash. I didn’t know if his knees would hold up, but I didn’t plan to do more than a few miles. I wasn’t even going to pretend to be heading anywhere except Kimmy’s place.

The area had changed some. A few more housing tracts had gone up, a couple of new strip malls. We clung to Old Autauk Highway, which broke through a few small neighborhoods down by the bay, then circled Autauk Park and my old high school. We cut north and covered a couple of miles of the back trails that still surrounded Shalebrook College. I saw there was a new building on campus, looked like a science hall. They’d completed the bridge expansion that connected the dorms to the library with a glass atrium that arched over the parkway.

We reached Shalebrook Lake and JFK took a long drink and then hunkered down in the shallows, the small waves stirred by the wind breaking over his ridged back. He turned his face to me with a regal expression, all of his usual attitude back in place. I’d worried about him, but he was handling the run fine and actually looked healthier for it.

I sat on a nearby bench and almost unconsciously started counting the number of houses that I’d robbed. I only realized what I was doing when I hit twenty. Most of the burglaries had been for pocket change. Even the crappiest joe job would’ve paid better and without the hazard of going away for a three-year jolt.

“You going to be like them?” Kimmy had asked me after meeting the family, while she shook out about half a pound of hot pepper onto a slice of pizza. “For the rest of your days?”

“I’m a thief. Thieves steal.”

“You’re a cat burglar.”

“That just means I steal shit while people are home sleeping.”

“Someone’s going to shoot you in the head too.”

“Then you’ll be able to feel my naughty thoughts.”

She took a bite and her face flushed. “Those I’m already well aware of.”

“Some of them.”

We were nineteen. The world was a contradiction. It seemedhe #x20glar.stify"› both wide open to possibility and set in tracks we’d never be able to alter.

Of course Kimmy knew all about the notorious Rand clan. Everyone in the area did. Sometimes it helped Collie and me in our romantic lives. A lot of girls liked the bad boys, and they’d expect us to take them on scores with us, let them get a feel for what the bent life was all about. Two girls I dated practically begged me to rob their parents’ houses. They knew where the stashes were, codes to the alarms, combinations on the safes. I’d say, “Where’s the fun in any of that?”

If they pushed too hard I tossed their phone numbers. I never knew when one of them might sneak off with her mother’s jewelry and try to blame me for it.

I wasn’t the only criminal around, so I lost some cachet. There were meth cookers on their way up and a few syndicate princes and princesses from the last couple of mob families in the area. Chub was already a first-rate crew mechanic. By the time he was nineteen he owned his own garage and was known for souping up stolen cars for strings putting together bank heists. He’d fine-tune engines until they sang and help the drivers plot out their getaways.