Tom Piccirilli: The Last Kind Words

I’d been arrested twice by the time I was seventeen but I was never held for more than a couple of hours. In some eyes, that meant I was just a wannabe outlaw. That was how I liked it. Being someone on the outside but no one really knowing if I deserved the rep I’d been saddled with. It was one way to keep off the radar.

Kimmy was an outsider too, someone who hung around the lake at night with the other kids but was never quite part of their pack. Living at home, taking classes at the college, she was smarter and more sensitive than the rest of them. I could see it in the way she held herself, a hint of lower-middle-class sorrow and hushed desperation in her eyes but hanging on to the chance for something else. She was beautiful but didn’t want to be. She dressed down. She tied her brown hair back, hid it beneath hats and scarves. Others felt the crush of mediocrity and resigned themselves to it with booze or crystal, floating around the fields until it was time to show at their minimum-wage labors the next day. Kimmy bucked the trend, studied harder, glared at you harder, talked harder.

Sitting on the hood of a ’66 Mustang, holding in a lungful of Acapulco Gold, Chub wheezed out, “That one, she’ll send you up or set you straight.”

“Might be worth the risk.”

“Don’t you believe it.”

Like most teens who shared an attraction, Kimmy and I danced around each other for weeks before moving in tight enough that we had to say hello.

First thing she ever said to me was, “My aunt, she manages an organic-health-food-and-vitamins store. Six months ago somebody held her up and cleaned out the register. Was it you?”

“No. I don’t do armed robbery.”

“They didn’t get much cash but they made her give up her jewelry. Everything was junk except for a gold pendant given to her by my grandmother. Inside were two tiny photos of my great-grandparents, taken in Hungary back in the thirties. It’s the only thing left of them. It wasn’t just sentimental, you know? It’s more meaningful than that.”

She wasn’t talking about a pendant but a locket. I nodded. “I think I understand.”

“Any chance you can help me get it back?”

Amy "justify" stickup already six months old. Unless the piece was exceptional and really stood out, there wasn’t going to be much of a shot. But I knew all the fences and could probably get a line on the punk snatcher. I looked into Kimmy’s eyes and liked what I saw there. They were almost mean but I could see a little softness tucked deep inside. I wondered what had happened to her to give her such a hard shell so early on and decided I wanted to hang around long enough to find out.

“If your aunt’s got a photo of herself wearing the locket, give it to me. If not, have her describe it in detail. Any extra information can only help.”

Kimmy was a step ahead. She handed me a photo. There was a stickum note on the back with all the relevant info, including the name and address of the shop and the date and time of the robbery. “This is it.”

“Give me four days. If I can’t get a line on it by then there isn’t anything that can be done.”

She said, “Thank you,” without an ounce of real gratitude. “So… Friday night then?”

“I’ll pick you up.”

She frowned, came this close to hitting me with a sneer. “You don’t know where I live.”

“Sure I do.”

When she climbed into my car four days later the locket was waiting for her on the dashboard. She checked the tiny photos inside, then stuck it in her pocket.

“What did it cost you to get it back?”

“Nothing, the fence owed me one.”

“Did you talk to the guy who stole it?”

“No.”

I couldn’t read the expression on her face in the shadowed interior of the car. I turned up the dash lights.

“I thought maybe you’d have to fight him for it,” she said.

“You wanted me to fight him for it, that right?”

I watched as her lips parted into a grin and then a smile. She kissed the side of my face. It was nothing more than a peck but it started to do its thing.

I said, “Take off the scarf.”

“Why?”

“I want to see your hair.”

“Why?”

“Take off the fucking scarf, right?”

She pulled it down until it was around her neck, then shook out her hair. It was shorter than I’d thought, but the way it framed her face added to everything else I liked about her. My breathing began to grow rough. So did hers. I leaned in and she backed away until the side of her head pressed against the passenger window. I got my hand looped through the scarf and used it to draw her to me. I drove to the dead end at the bottom of the block and then we kissed and she giggled against my chest, and when she bit my neck I growled and we fell into the backseat, tearing each other’s clothes off.

Twenty minutes later I lit us both cigarettes and asked, “You’re beautiful but you don’t like it-why?”

“I do. I just never felt that way before.”

“Before what?”

“Before you, asshole.”

Crawling out 01Dawling ouof the shallows JFK growled while his fur dripped mud and water. I spotted a black Mercedes filled with dark suits and rigid faces at the curb. It was starting already.

Wes Zek got out from behind the wheel. That showed me right there that the Thompson crew were still second-raters. Your driver is never the muscle. Your driver never gets out of the car. Wes had taken the keys out of habit and held them in his left hand. Now if anything happened to him, the others were stranded at the curb.

He looked like he’d been promoted from crew to captain and wasn’t pleased with it. A hundred-and-fifty-dollar haircut, wraparound shades, and a fancy black sports jacket to hide his piece. Couldn’t have been anything larger than a.32 considering how small the bulge was under his arm. Despite the kick up in what he earned, he looked stressed, harried. He’d lost weight but it didn’t look good on him.

I said, “Hello, Wes. A little early in the day for you all to be doing business, isn’t it?”

“We’re still up from last night. Terry, you got a few minutes?”

“Not right now.”

“Eager to get back to your run?”

“I’m going to see someone.”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t live there anymore. She took up with Chub. They got a kid now and live over-”

Before I realized it, I was off the bench and way up close to Wes. I saw my teeth in his sunglasses.

“Heya,” I said, “how about if you stay out of my business and I’ll keep out of yours, right?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Sure, Terry, sure. Mr. Thompson would like to speak with you.”

“Junior or Senior?”

“Senior had a coronary three, four years ago and retired to Arizona. The big one hit him in Phoenix, on a golf course. We don’t call Junior Junior anymore, though. He likes Daniel or Mr. Thompson.”

My family had been doing business with the Thompsons since before Danny’s grandfather had Americanized the name from Tompansano. Danny and I were the same age and had run around together for a while in our teens.

“Fine,” I said. “My dog sits in back with your muscle. Don’t give me any shit about him muddying up your Mercedes.”

“This the beast that snuffed Bernie Wagner?”

“Yeah.”

JFK lolled his tongue and let out a belch that smelled like lake silt. I opened the back door and he hopped in and climbed over the thugs as they bitched and cursed, their suits already flecked with wet fur. Wes climbed behind the wheel and said, “Christ.”

We drove over to the Fifth Amendment, Big Dan Thompson’s bar that fronted all the real action. The name of the place was Big Dan’s way of giving the finger to the feds, who’d been trying to build a RICO case around him for years, and doing it the way he had done almost everything, with a cocky defiance.