The Last Kind Words (6 page)

Danny said, “Wes, go in back and get the prince of Camelot here a couple of burgers.”

Wes did as he was told but I could see where some of his stress was coming from. He’d been promoted but was still stuck flipping hamburgers. And for a dog.

“So, Terry,” Danny said, trying to look hurt. “You never said goodbye to me.”

“I never said goodbye to anyone, Danny.”

“You needed out that bad?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose I can understand that. After what happened with Kimmy. And Collie. Talk about a one-two punch. Still, I wish you’d stuck around. I could’ve used a good man like you.”

“I never would’ve fit in as a member of a crew.”

“What member? You could’ve been my lieutenant.”

It was empty talk, but I smiled graciously. “Still not my thing. You know that.”

“I suppose I do. But anyway that’s in the past. Something else isn’t. Listen, Terry, we have a problem.”

It didn’t surprise me. It was only blind luck that I’d gotten up for an early run. Wes must’ve been on the street in front of our house this morning and shadowed me to the lake. I was angry with myself that I hadn’t spotted the Mercedes behind me. I had too much on my mind.

Danny tried to nail me down with a glare that was equal parts indignation and disappointment. It was another trick he’d stolen from his father.

I was committed to playing dumb. “How’s that even possible? I’ve been home one day and you’ve already got a problem with me?”

“Not with you. Your uncle. He owes me money.”

“Which one?”

“Malamute.”

“You mean he beat the bank at one of your private big-gun card games.”

“Yeah.”

“And you let him play for what reason?”

“Someone thought it would be accommodating to extend a professional courtesy.”

“Who would that someone be?”

He pulled his chin in. “Me. So you see the problem.”

“Not yet. Was he dealing?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Was he?”

“Of course not.”

“Then he wasn’t cheating.”

I was talking out my ass. There were a hundred ways to cheat at cards without ever laying a hand on the deck. Mal could have loaded his jacket, palmed high cards out of dead hands and hidden them until they were needed. He could have marked the deck with his thumbnail in ways nobody else ever would have spotted.

“He doesn’t cheat if he’s not dealing?”

“Not if he’s alone,” I said.

“Explain that.”

“He and my uncle Grey can pull all kinds of grift if they’re partnered. Their cross chatter alone can keep the marks distracted enough that they can slip a full house in. But they need each other. Either one of them alone, without the deck in his hands, isn’t cheating.”

“I’m out almost forty g’s.”

“That’s why they call it gambling, Danny.”

He studied me and I made sure he saw exactly what I wanted him to see. A liar who could lie and never be found out but who,
in this particular case
, right now, was telling the truth. I was a master of self-composition. No one could read my face, except, of course, my family. And Kimmy.

“I’m not sure if I believe you.”

“I really don’t give a shit.”

“Don’t talk to me that way, Terry.”

You had to play Danny Thompson with a soft touch but not too soft. I could sense his insecurities still running wild inside him. He owned the shop and had men who would cave if he so much as cast an
irate glance in their direction. But for all the old-friend bullshit he’d been tossing around I knew he also had to hate me, at least a little. I remembered when his father used to slap the hell out of him with his ham-hock hands. Senior had worn a diamond pinky ring that would sometimes catch Danny across the cheek and open him up like a razor slash. If I didn’t go hard, Danny would run me to ground.

“I might have to come by and talk to Mal,” he said.

“Is that how you run the show now, Danny? You invite old men to play in the game, then you muscle them if they beat you?”

“If they’re cheating.”

“You’d better be sure if you come after my family.”

“If I was sure, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You’d be at the cemetery saying your goodbyes to Mal.”

Big Dan never would’ve made such a threat. He might’ve popped somebody in the back but he never showed his hand.

Danny at least had the good sense to appear sorry for his strong-arm tactics. “Times are tougher than when my old man was chief of this crew.”

“I doubt that, but you play the game however you like. I’m out.”

“You’re not out. You’ll never be out. You Rands stick together, don’t you?”

“Not always.”

“Seems like it. You even went to visit your brother.”

News traveled fast on the circuit. I figured JFK’s reputation hadn’t been the only thing holding his men back from bracing Mal this morning. Danny wanted to get a look at me too, see if I might roll over or become a problem.

“He asked me to visit,” I said.

“Why do you care what a child-killing prick asks you to do?”

“Because he’s my brother.”

“Is that supposed to be an answer?”

“As much of one as you’re going to get out of me.”

I stood. From the lounge, Danny’s men kept their attention focused
on me until JFK lumbered to his feet. Then they watched the dog. They tried not to appear worried.

Wes stepped out of the kitchen carrying a plate with six or seven cooked burgers on it. I said, “Come on, Wes. We’re leaving now.”

With that thin smile still hanging in place, Danny Thompson openly appraised me. He thumbed his widow’s peak. His eyes were hard but bright, his skin ashen as he sweated out last night’s liquor. If nothing else I wanted him to know that I really was sad that Big Dan was gone, but I didn’t know how to make him believe it. A part of me felt sorry for him. I could imagine how shaken I was going to be the day my father died and what kind of lasting effect it would have on me.

But all I said was, “Don’t hang around at my curb anymore, Danny. You might get picked up for loitering.”

“See you soon, Terry.”

“Sure.”

I turned my back on him. Wes had fed the burgers to JFK and JFK’s nub of a tail was twitching, his muzzle pink from the juice. It was a good enough image to leave behind. I marched out with the dog heeling and Wes trailing behind us, his hands covered in grease.

I opened the back door of the Mercedes and JFK hopped in. His knees were still holding up but he looked run-down and overfed. He circled once and with a contented snort fit his chin between his paws and fell asleep.

Wes put on his wraparound shades, got behind the wheel, and asked, “You want me to take you back to the lake?”

“No.”

“You want to go to Kimmy’s place?”

“Just take me home, all right?”

“Okay, Terry.”

We said nothing the rest of the ride. When we pulled up in front of the house, I asked, “Chub still got a garage?”

“Yeah. A different one from before. This one’s bigger and on the other side of town.”

“He still helping out heisters?”

“I don’t think so,” Wes said, shrugging. “But I don’t really know.”

Chub had won Kimmy’s heart. He had stuck by her. He had fathered a child. He’d stood firm where I’d failed.

But if he was still plotting getaways he’d eventually be taken down. I pictured Chub on the six o’clock news, dead or in chains, Kimmy alone again, a kid in her arms waiting for a daddy who might never come home. The guy had to have gone straight, I thought, he wouldn’t risk Kimmy and a baby for anything. But I wanted to be certain.

I
stood on the front porch and listened to my family talking over breakfast. They were in a good mood. My father said something that had the quality of an anecdote and the others yapped comebacks. My mother allowed herself a strained but genuine kind of singsong laughter.

I needed a hot shower and a little more time to brace myself. I slipped off the porch and around the side of the house and in through the back door. I took the stairs three at a time, grabbed some fresh clothes, and hit the upstairs bathroom.

My head was louder than the steaming water blasting down. I shut my eyes as the past broke against me—snippets of old conversations, whispers in the dark. Flashes of Kimmy’s face seen as dawn muscled through the curtains, sunlight catching the stray downy hair beneath her ear. I thought of Chub on top of her. Imagined her screaming in labor with Chub crouched next to the doctor, waiting for his baby to crown. Collie’s victims turned their eyes on me. I scrubbed until my stomach burned from tasting too much soap and my skin felt raw. I tried to remember anything about life on the ranch and came up empty.

I got dressed and realized I didn’t want to see anyone except Collie. He’d known his story would get under my skin, that I wouldn’t be able to hide from it.

I think I need you to save someone’s life
.

I stared in the mirror and wondered who the hell he might be talking about. My eyes were shot with red and I checked the cabinet for drops. There weren’t any.

I stood at the top of the stairs and listened to my family talk. I wanted to run again but I didn’t know where. I sat on the top step and
looked down through the railings, which gave me a view of the living room and the kitchen.

My father was leaning against the screen-door jamb, having a smoke. He stood silhouetted in the sun, as dark and powerful as he had been last night in the rain.

Mal and Grey were at the table, practicing their card grifts and cross chatter. I knew what to look for and I could still barely see when they pulled five-card lifts and bottom- or third-card deals. They’d played half a million hands of poker but never tired of the game.

Grey still had his ladies’-man looks. He projected a boyish charm, smiling with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of first-rate dentistry, his head cocked and his perfectly combed silver hair falling just right. He always put on a show even when no one was watching. He’d had hundreds of women, owned them, cared for them even, but the one he truly loved had left him at the altar when he was seventeen and he’d never gotten over it. There was the faintest glint of regret in his eyes, which made him even more attractive to women who liked that sad puppy-dog look.

Mal had the hard appearance of a stone killer. There was no softness in his face at all. It looked like it had been sandblasted out of rock and then pounded at by storms for centuries—craggy, coarse, and crudely fashioned. He had a generous laugh and a warm, beaming expression, but his teeth were yellowed by years of smoking Churchill stogies. It hadn’t only been JFK that made Wes and his boys too afraid to bust in and take him on. Mal looked vicious enough to ice a pregnant schoolteacher.

But so far as I knew, he’d never even thrown a punch. When I was a kid he used to take me to the park and we’d feed the ducks in the lake. On the occasional weekend he’d lead me around town until we found some children’s party somewhere and crashed it. We’d load up on cake and ice cream and watch clowns, magicians, and puppet shows. He’d sometimes even work the grill and barbecue for the kids and their parents. No one ever dared ask him who he was or what he was doing there. They either knew he was a Rand or they took one look at his face and
decided to shut the hell up and stick to the other side of the yard and hide behind the toolshed.

Grey took little notice of me until I hit twelve or so. Then he was the one who showed me the correct way to shave, how to dress, how to tie a tie. I’d already been given the birds-and-the-bees speech by my father a few years earlier. It had mostly scared the hell out of me. Grey reinterpreted the information for me and made me realize it sounded sort of fun. He told me, “The next couple of years you’re really going to learn what it means to sting and burn, kid. I envy you getting to go through it for the first time, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything.”

Mal and Grey’s banter at the kitchen table was quick and fun but with a slight angry undertone, the way the best long green chatter is played out. No one suspects that two people who sound as if they don’t like each other might be working together. It was already getting on my nerves. I wondered how my parents could live with that noise day in and out. I wondered how I’d lived with it for so long.

My father turned from the front door and called to Grey, “Your girlfriend’s back.”

“Taking a beautiful woman out for a night of dancing doesn’t make her my girlfriend,” Grey said.

“Maybe not,” my father admitted. He drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled smoke as he spoke. “But what about the three, four weeks of courtship that have followed?”

“That’s not courtship, Pinscher, it’s infiltrating the enemy.”

“That what they calling it nowadays?” Mal put in. “Infiltration? You write that on the notes you leave on her pillow? ‘Before you, my life was an unfinished poem. You complete me. I shall always remember our wondrous night of love and song, what with all that infiltration of your sexy bits.’ Now it makes sense why she keeps coming around. She can’t live without the romance.” Mal grinned. If anything, it made his features seem even more brutal.