The Last Kind Words (2 page)

But none of that had happened. I took a breath, turned, and sat again. I lifted the phone.

“Jesus, you’re still sensitive,” he said. “I only meant that you need to stop thinking about yourself and go see the family—”

“I’m not going to see the family. Why did you call me here, Collie?”

He let out a quiet laugh. He pointed through the huge glass window off to the side of us, which opened on an area full of long tables. His gaze was almost wistful. “You know, we were supposed to be able to talk over there. In that room, face-to-face. On this phone, talking to you like this, it’s not the way I wanted it to be.”

“How did you want it to be?”

He grinned and shrugged, and the thousand questions that had once burned inside me reignited. I knew he wouldn’t answer them. My brother clung to his secrets, great and small. He’d been interviewed dozens of times for newspaper articles and magazines and books, and while
he gave intimate, awful details, he never explained himself. It drove the courts, the media, and the public crazy even now.

And me too. Words bobbed in my throat but never made it out. The timeworn campaigns and disputes between us had finally receded. I no longer cared about the insults, the torn pages, the girls he stole from me, or the way he’d run off on short cons gone bad, leaving me to take beatings from the marks. It had taken a lot of spilled blood to make me forgive him, if in fact I had. If not, it would only matter another few days.

On the long night of his rampage, my brother went so far down into the underneath that he didn’t come back up until after he’d murdered eight people. A vacationing family of five shot to death in a mobile home, a gas-station attendant knifed in a men’s room, an old lady beaten to death outside a convenience store, a young woman strangled in a park.

None of them had been robbed. He hadn’t taken anything, hadn’t even cleaned out the register at the gas station.

It wasn’t our way. It had never been our way. I thought of my grandfather Shepherd again. One of my earliest memories was of him telling us all around a Thanksgiving dinner,
You’re born thieves, it’s your nature, handed down to me, handed down from me. This is our way
. He’d been getting ready to cut into a turkey Collie had boosted from the King Kullen.

Collie turned on the charm, showed me his perfect teeth, and said, “Been a long time, Terry. You look good. Trim, built up. You’re as dark as if you’d been dipped in a vat of maple syrup.”

“I work on a ranch.”

“Yeah? What, busting broncos? Roping cattle? Like that?”

“Like that.”

“Where? Colorado? Montana?”

That question made me frown. I’d been eager to know how he’d managed to track me down. I’d been off the grift for years, living under an assumed name, doing an honest job. I thought I’d covered my tracks well, but four days ago, after coming in from digging fence posts, I’d
received a phone call from a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. She’d told me Collie wanted to see me before he died.

“You already know. How’d you find me?”

“I put in a call.”

“To who?”

“Who do you think?”

He meant our family, who had connections all over the circuit. I’d half-expected that they’d somehow kept tabs on me. They must’ve gotten in touch with the people I’d bought my fake ID from and shadowed me through the years. I should have realized my father wouldn’t let me go so easily.

But that voice on the phone didn’t belong to anyone I knew. I wondered if my other identity had been completely blown and I’d have to start over again, rebuild another new life. How many more did I have left in me?

“It’s been good seeing you, Terry. I’m glad you came. We both need a little more time.”

I’d barely slept over the last four days, and all the miles gunning across the country suddenly caught up with me. I felt tired as hell. “What are you talking about, Collie?”

“Come back tomorrow or the day after. They gave you shit at the door, I can tell. Rousted you, strip-searched you? If they try that again, tell them to fuck themselves.” He raised his voice again and shouted at the screws. “Dead man walking has at least a couple of extra privileges!”

“Listen, I’m not—”

“Take some time to settle yourself.”

“I don’t want to settle myself. I’m not coming back tomorrow, Collie.”

“Go home. Visit the family. I’ll tell you what I need when I see you again.”

I started breathing through my teeth. “What you need. I’m not running drugs for you. I’m not icing anybody on the outside for you. I’m not sending around a petition to the governor. I’m not coming back.”

It got him laughing again. “You’re home. You’re going to see the
family because you’ve missed them. You’ve been gone a long time and proven whatever point you had to make, Terry. You can stick it out on your own. You’re your own man. You’re not Dad. You’re not me.” He cupped the phone even more tightly to his mouth. “Besides, you love them and they love you. It’s time to say hello again.”

Life lessons from death row. Christ. I felt nauseous.

I stared hard into my brother’s eyes, trying to read a face I’d always been able to read before. I saw in it just how plagued he was by his own culpability. He was shallow and vindictive, but he rarely lied. He didn’t often deny responsibility and he never cared about consequences. There was absolutely nothing I could do for him.

“I’m not coming back,” I told him.

“I think I need you to save someone’s life,” he said.

“What?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Or the day after, if you want. And don’t be late this time.”

I hung up on his smile and let out a hiss that steamed the glass.

Already he’d bent me out of shape. It had taken no more than fifteen minutes. We hadn’t said shit to each other. Maybe it was his fault, maybe it was mine. I could feel the old singular pain rising once more.

I shoved my chair back, took a few steps, and stopped. I thought, If I can get out now, without asking the question, I might be able to free myself. I have the chance. It’s there. The door is three feet away. I can do this. I can do this.

It was a stupid mantra. I’d already missed my chance. I’d turned back once already, and I was about to do the same thing again. I knew Collie would still be seated, watching me, waiting. I turned back, grabbed the phone up, stood facing the glass, and said, “The girl in the mobile home.”

He almost looked ashamed for an instant. He shut his eyes and swung his chin back and forth like he was trying to jar one memory loose and replace it with another. He pursed his lips and muttered something to his invisible audience that I wasn’t meant to hear. Then he grinned, his hard and cool back in place. “Okay.”

“So tell me,” I said.

“What do you want to hear?”

“You already know. Just say it.”

“You want to hear that I did it? Okay, I aced her.”

“She was nine.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me why.”

“Would you feel better if she was nineteen? Or twenty-nine? You feel better about the old lady? She was seventy-one. I killed her with my fists. Or—”

“I want to know why, Collie.”

“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

“Tell me or you’ll never see me again.”

His icy eyes softened. Not out of shame but out of fear that I would leave him forever. He licked his lips, and his brow tightened in concentration as he searched for a genuine response.

“I was making ghosts,” he said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I appreciate you showing up. Really. Come back tomorrow, Terry. Okay? Or the day after. Please.”

I thought of a nine-year-old girl standing in the face of my enraged brother. I knew what it was like to be caught in that storm. I imagined his laughter, the way his eyes whirled in their sockets as he made her lie down on the floor beside her parents and brothers, pointed a .38 at the back of her head as she twisted her face away in terror, and squeezed the trigger.

I made it to my car and threw up twice in the parking lot. I drove through the prison gates and waited on the street until I spotted the guard who’d made me repeat my name three times.

He eased by in a flashy sports car so well waxed that the rain slewed off and barely touched it. For a half hour I followed him from a quarter mile back, until he turned in to a new neighborhood development maybe ten minutes from the shore.

The rain had shifted to a light drizzle. I watched him pull in by a yellow two-story house with a new clapboard roof and a well-mown yard. There was an SUV in the driveway and the garage door was open. Two six- or seven-year-old boys rolled up and down the wet sidewalk wearing sneakers with little wheels built into them.

I drove to the beach and sat staring at the waves until it was dark. I’d been surrounded by mountains and desert for so long that I’d forgotten how lulling the ocean can be, alive and comforting, aware of your weaknesses and sometimes merciful.

Five minutes off the parkway I found a restaurant and ate an overpriced but succulent seafood dinner. I’d been living on steak and Tex-Mex spices for so long that it was like an exotic meal from some foreign and romantic land. The lobster and crab legs quieted my stomach and loosened the knot there. I listened in to the families around me, the children laughing and whining, the parents humorous and warm and short-tempered.

The wind picked up and it started to rain harder again. Streams of saturated moonlight did wild endless shimmies against the glass. I drank a cup of coffee every twenty minutes until the place closed, then I sat out at the beach again until the bluster passed.

It took me three minutes to get into the screw’s house. I stood in the master bedroom and watched as he and his wife spooned in their sleep. She was lovely, with a tousled mound of hair that glowed a burnished copper in the dark. One lace strap of her lingerie had slipped off her shoulder, and the swell of her breast arched toward me.

I found his trousers and snatched his wallet. He had a lot of photos of his children. I left the house, drove to the water, and threw his wallet into the whitecaps. I didn’t want his money. I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t even especially want to hurt him. I was testing myself and finding that I’d both passed and failed.

I was still a good creeper. The skills remained. My heart rate never sped. I didn’t make a sound.

I hadn’t broken the law in five years, not so much as running a yellow
light. My chest itched. My scars burned. The one where Collie had stabbed me. The one from my broken rib. And the largest one, made up of Kimmy’s teeth marks from the last time we’d made love. She bit in so deep under my heart that she’d scraped bone.

I drove home through the storm, thinking of the ghosts I had made.

My
old man was waiting for me on the front porch. The rest of the house was dark, and the wet silver lashed the yard with dripping, burning shadows. Gutters pinged and warped wood groaned like angry lovers.

He had a twelve-pack on ice and had already killed off eight bottles. He wasn’t drunk. He never lost control, not even when he was tugging bone slivers out of his own kid.

John F. Kennedy sauntered out from his usual position at my father’s feet. JFK was an American Staffordshire terrier, a second cousin to the pit bull. He was nine now and I could see the gray of his muzzle lit up in the moonlight. He recognized me immediately and met me on the top stair, got up on his hind legs, and greeted me with savage kisses. He remained muscular and his breath was just as bad as I remembered. I hugged and patted him until he eased away, returned to his spot, circled and dropped. Besides Collie, JFK was the only member of the family to ever kill a man.

My father proffered me a bottle. Our hands touched briefly but it was enough. I could still feel the power within him. He barely came up to my chin, but he was wiry and solid. By the yellow porch light I could see that he still had all his hair and it was still mostly black. I had more gray in mine. I had more gray than even the dog.

I sat beside my father and took my first drink in five years.

I knew he wouldn’t ask about Collie. We hadn’t discussed the murders when my brother was brought down and we wouldn’t talk about them now. The urge would be there but my old man would keep it in check, the way he kept everything in check.

He wouldn’t ask me about my life away from home unless I brought
it up. I might be married. He might have grandchildren. I could be on the run from the law in twelve states, but he’d never broach the topic. We were a family of thieves who knew one another very well and respected one another’s secrets. It was dysfunction at its worst.

Still, I knew what would be bothering him more than anything else. The same thing that filled me with a burden of remorse that wasn’t mine to carry. It would eat at him the way it ate at me. We’d flash on the little girl a couple of times a day, no matter what we were doing. Step through a doorway and see her on the floor of the mobile home, intuit her terror. We would suffer the guilt that Collie either didn’t feel or couldn’t express.

My father had never been comfortable as a thief. He was a good cat burglar but wasn’t capable of pulling a polished grift. He couldn’t steal from someone while looking him in the eye. He disliked working with the fences and the syndicates that the Rand family had always worked with. He stole only to bring home cash to the family, and so far as I knew he hardly ever spent a dime on himself. He didn’t live large, had no flash, preferred to be the humble and quiet man that he was by nature.