The Last Kind Words (18 page)

“What do you need?”

“I don’t need anything. I want to ask you a few questions.”

“I don’t answer questions.”

“How do you get through life without answering questions?”

“I just do.”

I put a little ice in my voice. “See that, Fingers. You just fucking answered one.”

He checked over his shoulder at Higgins, to make sure he was still close by. “You don’t want to be troublesome now, kid.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But like I said, this can’t wait. I think you know why.”

“We’re through here,” Fingers said.

Higgins drifted nearer and began to brace me. He stuck his chest in
my face and backed me up a step. Like most big bruisers, he underestimated anyone who wasn’t as tall and thick as himself. He got in closer and angled a hip at me so he could yank his sap quickly. His right hand dipped into his pocket. He said nothing. What little of his face I could see held no expression. He started to draw the beaver-tail blackjack.

I grabbed the bowling bag out of Fingers’s lap and hurled it down as hard as I could on Higgins’s left foot. There was a crunch like a box of matchsticks snapping. He let out the first note of a yowl and bent over to grab at his mashed toes. I snapped a knee up into his chin. I couldn’t see his eyes but they had to be rolling. He took one step backward and fought for balance. I knocked his other leg out from under him and he fell flat on his back.

While he was down, I kicked him twice in the face. His glasses cracked and sailed off.

The bowlers in the other lanes kept right on playing. I had to hand it to these folks. They certainly had dedication and passion. Jesus, were they focused.

Fingers didn’t even try to take a swing at me. He just sat with a resigned air, sucking his teeth and shaking his head, probably already plotting how he’d snuff me.

“Did you sell a piece to my brother?” I asked.

“You’re finished, you know. I can’t let this go. Even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

“We’ll cover that later. But for right now, focus. Tell me about my brother.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”