The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (8 page)

“I know all about that already. They stopped over here a couple hours ago and told me they’d been followed from the garage. I knew it was you, you pain in the ass. I had a feeling you’d been watching me. After they shook you, they trailed you home. You nearly shook them a couple of times. The driver was impressed. I can see by your face they told you to go away. So why don’t you go away?”

“They know where I live. My family could be in jeopardy.”

“And whose fault is that? I told you to quit bracing me, Terrier.” He jerked his feet off his desk and leaned forward. “You act like you’re trying to protect my wife and daughter, but I know what you’re really about. You’re hoping I take a header. You want me in the bin. Or dead.”

“It’s not true,” I said.

That got him grinning. Sorrowful and pained, but the old Chub was there, the guy I knew and had once loved. “You can’t even find the guts to sound insulted.” His expression drifted through different shades of the same things: frustration, pity, disappointment. “You gave that crew a reason to distrust me. For the first time my ass is really on the line.”

“It’s always been on the line, ever since you decided to plan escape routes and sell getaway cars. What I don’t understand is why you’re still doing it.”

“Ask your father.”

“Let’s pretend I’m asking you.”

“Why was your old man still a cat burglar climbing across rooftops when he had more than enough cash set aside?”

“He was born into the life, same as me. You weren’t.”

“You have no idea how ridiculous you sound, do you?”

Maybe I did but I ignored the question. “No matter how careful you are you’re going to fuck up. Kimmy—”

He leaped up in a blur of Intimate Clinical Strength Antiperspirant and Deodorant Advanced Lady Solid Speed Stick, Light and Fresh pH-Balanced. h M motion. He was this close to taking a poke at me but held himself back at the last instant. “Don’t. Don’t mention her name.”

“All right.”

“Keep away from her.”

“I have.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Good, you’re wising up. You shouldn’t believe me, even if I am telling you the truth. I’m a thief and a liar. So is that crew. No pro outfit needs that much hardware on a job. Even the driver was carrying. A driver never carries.”

“You scared for me or for yourself?”

“Mostly for your wife and daughter.”

He pulled a disgusted face. “Oh, don’t give me that shit again. We’ve already been through this.”

I nodded. I tried to find the right words. They weren’t there. I licked my lips and almost spoke my brother’s name. I didn’t know why. He wasn’t talking in my head at the moment. “Look,” I said, “I’m a jealous, bitter prick, and for the past couple of months I’ve had a heart full of vipers I wouldn’t wish on anybody. What matters right now is that you wise up about these guys. They’re righteously bad news.”

“Why? Because they beat the shit out of you? You deserved it.”

“Probably,” I admitted.

“You got what you were after.”

“Not quite.”

“If they were as wrong as you make them out to be they would’ve put six in your face instead of letting you walk away. I trust them more than I trust you, Terrier. So back off. I’m not telling you again.
Stay away from me and my family.” He glanced aside. He couldn’t keep his eyes on me anymore. “Just stay away from us.”

There was nothing else to argue about.

Maybe I didn’t know Chub that well anymore but I did recognize a man who was full of fear. For all his bluster Chub was worried. The crew had spooked him. Part of it was my fault. They had probably pushed him hard when they found out I’d followed them. I had meant to protect him and I’d put him in danger. They might think he was leaking info. They might think we were planning a rip-off. Only our reputations had saved us so far. But you could never be sure who might overreact, overindulge, overreach.

“Go on, get out of here,” he said.

I waited. I had a reason. Chub had a screen saver on his computer showing a recent photo of him, Kimmy, and their daughter, whom I called Scooter. It bounced around and grew larger and smaller. When he’d jumped out of his seat the screen saver had cleared. I waited for it to return.

It toomy agony. I&#x

My father stood on the porch with a man who
looked so much like my dead brother that all I could do was sit in my car and stare. I was still a little buzzed on the Percs but I didn’t think I was so far gone that I’d be hallucinating. Maybe I had a concussion. Maybe I was lying in a coma in an ICU while my parents agonized over pulling the plug. JFK trundled down the steps and crossed the lawn. He rose onto his hind legs, put his front paws on the hood, and stood looking at me expectantly through the windshield.

The guy who looked like Collie was talking animatedly with my old man. He used his hands a lot, waved his arms all around. He bent over violently and guffawed. He flashed teeth. My father showed no emotion and sipped from his beer. He shouldn’t be drinking at all. I imagined the arguments my mother had already had with him trying to get him to stop.

He leaned back against the railing like he was relaxed, but I could read tension in his body language. I swung the car door open and climbed out. I stepped up the walk filled with the same dread I’d felt when visiting death row. For my sins I was doomed to repeat myself. I dry-swallowed another pill. JFK stayed close at my side.

My father said, “Here’s Terry now.”

A chill breeze broke like cold lips on my neck. The guy gazed down at me as I approached. He even had Collie’s white streak in his hair, same as me. It seemed like he could barely contain his joy. Number six. The expression on the face of the man who looks just like your brother, who looks just like you.

My father noted my bruises. He cocked his head, a cloud of worry crossing his features. “You all right?”

“Sure.”

“This is your cousin John.”

“I don’t have a cousin John,” I said.

“You do,” John said. “I’m your mother’s nephew. Your uncle Will’s son.”

There didn’t seem to be much of a reason to point out that I didn’t have an uncle Will either.

I shouldn’t have taken the last pill.

“Hello, John,” I said, putting out the only one I had leftc himself my hand. “I’m Terry.”

We shook. “Oh, I know who you are, Terrier.”

“Yeah?”

I didn’t like the way he said it, as if he’d been checking up on me. He had a rich deep voice. He had a charmer’s grin. He was bad news through and through. I vibed that he wanted to hug me and stepped out of his reach. JFK went and crouched in the corner. He shivered in the presence of a ghost.

My cousin John wasn’t drinking beer. Someone had mixed him a drink with a lot of ice. The glass was nearly empty. He took a deep breath and let out a warm laugh that I knew was going to be the precursor to a long story.

“Let me freshen that up for you,” I said, and snatched the glass out of his hand. I stepped into the house and made sure to shut the door.

On the stove simmered a pot of stew. My mother sat at the kitchen table, talking quietly on the telephone. We were the last people in the western hemisphere who still had a landline and a phone with a cord. The cord was stretched across the length of the kitchen like a clothesline you could garotte yourself on.

I couldn’t read her, which worried me. I threw down the meds and the bag of my sister’s beauty products. I was home by dinner. I had done my duty. Liquor and cola and an ice bucket were out on a tray situated in the center of the table. I sniffed at the tumbler. Smelled like Dewar’s. I drank it down.

The second she got a look at me my ma said into the receiver, “I have to go now, yes, tomorrow, goodbye.” She hung up. She rushed over and checked the tape job and scabbed-over cuts. She gripped my chin and turned my face this way and that, considering it from different angles. She tsked as loudly as a rifle crack.

“You stole the meds,” she said.

“I didn’t steal the meds.”

“And they caught you and they punched you out.”

“Ma, listen—”

She ran a hand through her auburn hair. “Now I can’t go back to Schlagel’s.”

“You can go back to Schlagel’s.”

“We have to find a new pharmacy.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Do you know what a nightmare it is dealing with the doctor’s office and getting them to call in prescriptions to a new place?”

“You can go back to Schlagel’s, Ma. Now, forget that, right?” I motioned toward the porch and nothing but a little groan came out and then my voice kicked in again and I said, “This guy? John? He says he’s my cousin? What the hell?”

“What are you on?” she asked, staring into my eyes. “What did you take, Terry?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me nothing.”

“That’s not important right now.”

“It is important, Terrier. When I ask you a question like this you answer. That’s what you do. So, what did you take?”

“Some Percocet.”

“I don’t like you messing with drugs.”

“Ma, I’m not me the only one I had leftc himselfss—”

She cut me off with a hand slicing through the air. “Don’t drink any more liquor, then. Who punched you out?”

“Some of Chub’s friends.”

“Why did they do that?”

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“You need to stay away from him, Terry. You need to stay away from her.”

“I am. I will. Ma? This guy? John?”

I dropped heavily into a chair. She grabbed the empty glass from my hand, filled it, and brought it back out to John. His laughter filled the house. I knew he was brimming with schemes and scams and rip-offs that would bring doom on us. I glanced into the living room where Gramp was watching cartoons. He seemed to be grimacing as John’s chortle rang through the place.

My mother returned and said, “It’s disturbing, isn’t it, how much he looks like your brother?”

“I hadn’t noticed. What’s he doing here?”

“My brother Will phoned earlier this afternoon. My father had a stroke last month. He’s dying and wants to see me.”

“And you’re complaining about the fucking pharmacy?”

She took a breath and shut her eyes and found her resolve. “I’m sorry. It was a defense mechanism. I suppose I’m in denial. It’s a lot to take in. I haven’t heard from my family in over thirty years. I haven’t seen them since I got married. Talking to Will again … it brought back a lot of memories.”

I’d never met anyone from her side of the family. I knew absolutely nothing about them. After she and my father started becoming serious her parents asked what kind of a boy he was. She told the truth. They ordered her to stop seeing him immediately. She returned one last time to pack her belongings and found the pictures of herself turned to the wall. She never went home again.

“Was that him on the phone just now?”

“Yes.”

So, I had a grandmother too. “What was that like? After thirty-plus years?”

“It reminded me how much I missed him. And my parents. And how much I still resent them, for what happened.”

My mother was the strongest person I knew, but this family, a family she had married into at the loss of her own, had cost her a normal life. She spent her life in a house devised by crooks, built on fifty metric fuck tons of unfenceable loot stashed away in caches in the walls and ceiling and floors. She’d been braced by the cops a thousand times, had spent all her time holding the Rands together despite our best efforts to destroy ourselves. She’d seen Mal in the yard with his guts hanging, she’d listened to the TV as the crowds outside the prison cheered while my brother died. She watched over Gramp, feeding and cleaning him, engaging him on the off chance that he could still understand enough to deserve human conversation. I suddenly wanted her to leave us and save herself.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “About your father?”

“I’m not sure yet. I have to think about it.”

I wanted another drink. She knew I wanted another drink and moved the tray away from me. I">“Is it?”tp said, “So if you talked with your brother, then why’s this one here? This nephew of yours.”

“He wanted to come.” She peered out the kitchen window at John and my old man freezing their asses off on the porch. My father stayed out there because it was his spot. It was usually the spot where the old dogs rested and kept watch. “I think he’s always wanted to come. He seems quite lonesome.”

Cousin John wasn’t lonesome. He wasn’t disaffected. He wasn’t eager for newfound blood attachments. The restrained joy I’d seen was all about money and action and some kind of score.

“So even though they threw you out of the house they’ve kept tabs on you all this time?” I asked.

“Considering the Rand family history, nobody had to exactly
keep tabs. All they needed to do was watch the police blotter. Or the television.” She poured herself two fingers of scotch and drained half the glass. I had never seen my mother drink alcohol before.

She reached over and with two fingers plied my gray patch. We were both acutely aware that these white streaks were from her side of the family.

I didn’t even know her maiden name. I had always wondered why she hadn’t just covered and lied about my father’s occupation. I was a liar at heart. If you hit a wall you lied your way around it or over it or through it.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked.

“Right now? Just go out and talk with John.”

“Oh Christ, don’t ask me to do that.”

“Please, it’s not his fault that my parents disowned me,” she insisted. “He’s still family. And I think your father has reached his limit of social interaction. I’m going to give Gramp his medication and then I’ll be out too.”

“You don’t trust him either,” I said, noticing the swirl of suspicion in her eyes. “That’s why you didn’t let him in.”

I walked out the door. John was gnawing my father’s ears off, talking about movies. My old man hadn’t been to a movie theater since 1981, when he’d stolen the receipts for the Mayweather on Fourteenth Street and been chased two miles by a fleet-footed security guard. He stood there up against the porch railing like living stone. No one else would call him antsy, but I could see it. His bubbly dead son was blathering at him.