The Last Kind Words (31 page)

It was a nice house, obviously his parents’ place. His Chevy wasn’t around. I rang the bell, and when his mother answered I told her that I was a high school buddy of Joe’s and wanted to catch up on old times. I figured she wouldn’t call him “Butch.”

Despite the gray streak and a few extra years, I was young enough to look like we’d run together. I turned on my most winning smile. She looked at me like she knew I was lying but that everyone who hung around her son lied to her. Her face went hard and drained of all interest and concern. She told me he hadn’t been living at home for some time and shut the door in my face.

Next stop was the Fifth Amendment. Butch wasn’t around. Nobody knew where he might be. Danny was holding court with his crew in their usual spot. A lot of fat cats with lit cigars were rolling their sleeves up. It looked like a big poker game was on the agenda for later tonight. Maybe someone had Butch out picking up some fresh baked goods. I split.

From the road I phoned the house, hoping to talk to my sister. My father answered and put Dale on.

“Where’s Butch?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I wanted to ask him something.”

“What?”

“What to get you for your birthday.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m not pregnant. You don’t have to beat him up. And he didn’t defile me either. I wasn’t a virgin when I met him, you know.”

Some things men weren’t meant to imagine, and a sister’s first time was one of them. “Shut up! Christ! Tell me where he is.”

“No,” she said. “And thank you for the knife.” Then I heard her turn on her blow dryer and she hung up.

I staked out my own house and parked down the street, mostly hidden by a curtain of brush. Dale fixing her hair meant she’d be heading out soon.

Butch picked her up around seven o’clock and I tagged along. There wasn’t much need. I figured they’d be heading over to the lake. Butch parked pretty much in the same spot as before. They reenacted everything that they’d done the other night, except that Butch seemed to be drinking a lot more. Maybe the pressure of the heist was getting to him.

I didn’t spot anyone. I kept the lights off and the music low and I tried not to let myself drift too much, but I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking that I could’ve saved Cara Clarke somehow. I didn’t know how, but I had botched the job. Maybe I never should have visited her. Maybe I
had led the killer to her door. Maybe I had brought the underneath along with me and she’d gotten swept up in it too.

I stared at the headlights of the kids’ cars and watched them dancing and drinking in the firelight until it felt like my eyes were full of splinters. Maybe this was the beginning of Alzheimer’s.

It was a school night and my sister left early enough to make my mother only moderately unhappy. Butch wove around on the road a little and kept crossing the center line. They parked in front of our house and argued for a few minutes, maybe about his drinking, and then made out for a while. Then Butch split.

He was knocking back beers as he drove home. I followed. I wanted to drop a dime on him for drunk driving with my sister in the car, the prick. He pulled into a low-class apartment complex in Wyandanch known for its drug market. I watched him weave up the sidewalk. I sat out in front and waited for ten minutes, then I went to have a look.

I couldn’t even say I crept his place. The lock was broken and his front door was halfway open. The stink of rotting food made me gag.

Butch was passed out on the couch. He had a three-inch doobie still burning in an ashtray. His pad was a catastrophe. Empty beer cans and old bags of Chinese takeout, ribs, burgers, were everywhere. I could hear the roaches skittering. I hoped to Christ my little sister didn’t spend much time here.

There wasn’t much to the douche. He had a .22 with a warped front sight tucked down between the couch cushions where he slept. He had a new wallet. It had someone else’s ID and about a hundred bucks in it. The idiot had juked somebody but hadn’t tossed the driver’s license. Maybe he thought he could pass himself off as Carlos Ortiz Arroyo.

Right out in the open, scrawled on a grease-soaked pizza box, were the name and number of Stan Herbert. He was a fairly small-time fence who took the dirty items nobody else wanted. If you boosted a church, then you brought the silver chalice to Stan. Butch and his string were relying on the wrong guy to move their jewelry. Either Butch was running the heist into the ground or they were all a bunch of amateurs or morons. Danny would want a fat hunk off the top and there wasn’t
going to be much cheese left for the rest of them. Even if they got away with it, they weren’t going to want to give out such a big cut. That would put them on the wrong end with the Thompson crew. They were as good as caught or dead. The cops would sniff out Dale. Whether she was involved or not, it would go bad for her just because of the Rand name.

Butch was a dim bulb. I wasn’t going to be able to scare him into laying off the heist. I wasn’t going to be able to talk any sense into him.

Five men in all. I wondered if he’d picked up his fifth yet or if he was still looking. A family-owned jewelry store. Small shop, a lot of employees. Four minutes inside. I tried narrowing down which shop it might be, but there was no way. I looked over at Butch on the couch and tried to see what my sister saw in him. She could do much better. If she went for bad boys she could still go for smarter. Maybe she just dug the Chevy.

As I was heading home, my phone rang again. The noise of it startled me. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to carrying a cell and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it as soon as I could. When that might be I had no idea. Maybe as soon as Collie was dead. Since I was still doing a lot of creeping, I thought maybe I should set the fucker on vibrate.

“Hello?”

“We’ve got a little trouble, Terry,” Wes said. “And don’t bother asking me how I got this number, it’s my goddamn phone. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist juking me.”

“Taking a burner isn’t juking you, Wes. What’s the trouble? Something with my sister?”

“No,” he said. “Your uncles are here at the Fifth.”

“Ah, shit. The poker game.”

“Right. They just walked in a few minutes ago. You’re the one who put it in Mr. Thompson’s head that when Mal and Grey are together they’re cheating. He said you mentioned cross chatter and keeping the marks distracted.”

“What a fucking idiot I am.”

“If you get here fast, maybe we can calm the situation before anything starts.”

“Danny throwing his weight around?”

“No. It’s all nice and mellow so far. But you know Mr. Thompson holds a grudge.”

“How much have they won so far?”

“Nothing. Nobody’s much ahead yet.”

That’s how it would start. My uncles were just loosening up a little. They’d run the hands evenly for a while. Take a pot or two and then feed a couple back to the other players. The next step was to start losing slightly, then more heavily. After they’d gotten five or six grand deep, the others would get in a good mood and grow even sloppier, and then my uncles would come in with the serious rips and finish the fat cats off fast.

“I’ll be there in five minutes. But tell me something else first.”

“What is it?”

“How deep is Gilmore into Danny’s pocket?”

I could almost hear Wes’s stomach rumbling, the acid splashing around. “You don’t need to know things like that, Terry.”

“I really do, Wes. Has he ever pulled a trigger for you?”

“What?” Wes’s voice tightened, and he put some frost into it. “Terry, I don’t understand what’s been going on with you, but this isn’t the kind of thing we should be talking about.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

“Doesn’t the guy eat at your house and drink beer with your father? I thought you knew him.”

“I thought I did too, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. Hurry the fuck up and get here, would you?”

It took me ten minutes. A sign on the front door said
PRIVATE PARTY TONIGHT
. That had always been Big Dan’s euphemism for a major game. It just proved that Danny was still walking in his father’s shadow, afraid to strike off on his own.

I walked in anyway. I started over to Danny’s table, and one of his soldiers stepped up and blocked me. Danny watched it happen but kept me waiting. Wes saw it too and knew he had to let the boss throw his weight around a little. A few minutes went by. I tried hard to be patient.

Danny had a new suit on, one that looked a couple of sizes larger
and fit him more comfortably. His paunch was well hidden. He’d used some kind of thickening gel to give his hair more texture. He still couldn’t keep from thumbing back his widow’s peak.

Mal had one of his stogies lit. He smoked it without ever pulling it from his mouth. Just sucked air through his teeth and then blew smoke out one side of his mouth. In front of him was either a Bloody Mary or a glass of tomato juice, garnished with a stick of celery.

Grey had stopped off at home at some point and now wore a charcoal suit and a power tie. If possible, he looked even sharper than he had last night. He wore his best jewelry. Rolex watch, diamond pinkie ring, a gold bracelet. He said it all served as distraction and decoy. The more flash you wore, the more chance that someone was looking at the shine and not at your four-card pull. It went counter to everything my father had taught me. You wore nothing on your hands so that no one looked at your hands. Both methods seemed to work pretty well.

The fat cats appeared to be having fun. I recognized two of them as mob guys who used to hang around with Big Dan. Both from Chicago, in town for a few days doing business. I suspected Mal was right again. The Chi syndicate was here pulling the Thompson crew apart and stealing their business.

Danny’s boys hung close but not too close. The mook in front of me had on an enthusiastic expression like he was daring me to try to run around him. I thought about picking up a chair and cracking him across the face, but I thought that probably wasn’t the best way to proceed. I was there to keep things from getting out of hand, not to start a riot on my own. I waited.

Finally Danny glanced up from his cards and waved me over with two fingers. The soldier moved aside and a path was cleared to the table.

“What, no dog this time?” Danny asked. “Figured you had him trained to read cards and bark out the suits.
Arf arf!
Queen of diamonds!
Woof woof woof!
Nine of clubs!”

His boys laughed because they had to. The Chi guys went along with it and smiled even though they had no clue.

My uncles knew exactly why I was there. Mal seemed a little disturbed
but Grey was curious, his eyes a bit hot, wondering how this would all play out. He grinned at me and gave me a nearly invisible head wag. He wasn’t telling me not to join in. He was saying,
You’ve got balls, kid, getting laid last night must’ve really fired you up to jump back into the game
.

There was an empty chair on Danny’s right. I swung it around and squeezed in on his left.

“So deal me in,” I said.

“You need ten g’s to join us.”

Like his father, Danny didn’t bother speaking in code the way some of the other outfit guys did. They would’ve said
ten bags of cement
or
ten slices of bacon
or something equally stupid. Big Dan didn’t believe in speaking stupid in his own place, even if the feds were tapping him. Danny was following suit.

“My uncles will spot me,” I said.

“Sure,” Grey said. He gave me the wag again. His eyes were even brighter. He was enjoying himself. He paid ten grand, collected the chips, and set them in front of me. They didn’t amount to nearly as much as I would’ve thought.

Danny’s dealer did have a three-card bottom drag, just like Mal had said. The guy kept folding the aces back into the deck to feed Danny. It didn’t mean anything to Mal or Grey. I saw Mal cut the deck once and knew he’d snapped a face card out and palmed it. I had to fight to stay in the game, though. I sat next to Danny so that I could pull his discards and load myself up. I had wide pockets and kept them stuffed with at least one card each. Danny had a penchant for going for flushes. It was dumb, but it made it easy for me to cheat on his behalf. Once I knew what he was after, I could aim a suit in his direction.

Grey and Mal both had the minutest of tells. No one else would be able to pick up on them, but I could see exactly when my uncles were about to squeeze a pot or feed each other cards. Their cross chatter distracted the others, but I tuned it out. I managed to upset their juke and steal some cards they needed along the way. I fed the pot when they wanted to go light and I threw in my cards when I shouldn’t have.

I was down a couple of grand, which wasn’t so bad considering how little I cared about my own hands. I wasn’t nearly the card manipulator my uncles were. Not even as good a player as a couple of the fat cats. But I was lucky during the game. I managed to swing some tight inside straights and pulled a full house twice on the last card.

Danny had been worried that with three Rands in the game he and his friends would be cut to ribbons. Instead, he was up, with the Chi guys down. I think it made him feel secure, like he was getting back at them a little, showing them that, like his father before him, he could be in charge and take their money whenever he wanted.

Every now and then the conversation would get risque and someone would tell a dirty joke and Grey and Mal would feed into it like it was the funniest thing ever. Mal’s heavy laughter resounded across the Fifth and made heads turn. The girls kept coming around with drinks and taking food orders. I knew they were shills who would be glancing at our cards and giving Danny the information with coy body language. Wes kept mostly clear of the scene, popping over only every once in a while to make sure nobody was getting too badly bent out of shape. He was a good man to have around. I wondered how many times he’d kept Danny from going to war.

My nerves were tight. I tried not to make eye contact with my uncles. Grey still seemed to be having a good time, talking women, talking about the best places in Chi to eat, to score, to shack up. Mal didn’t talk much when he wasn’t chattering with Grey. He looked too intimidating. No one ever wanted to start a conversation with him.