The Last Kind Words Read Free Page A

wouldn’t ask me about my life away from home unless I broughtit 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.
    After I took my thirty-foot fall, my father slowly withdrew himself from the bent life. He pulled fewer and fewer scores until he was no longer a criminal. I knew it was my fault, as much as having a busted rib pulled through your flesh can be your own fault. But having my blood on his hands eventually forced him out of the game. He played the stock market frugally, took three or four trips down to Atlantic City a year and sometimes hit big. He wrote his travel expenses off on his tax forms. So far as the IRS was concerned, my father and uncles were professional gamblers, and they each paid out a fair hunk of cash to Uncle Sam every year to keep the feds off their backs.
    I finished the beer and he handed me another. We could go on like this for hours. The silence was never awkward between us. I sipped and listened to JFK sputter and snore.
    My father said, “I wish he hadn’t put out the call to you.”
    “You didn’t have to pass it on, Dad.”
    “Yes, I did. He’s my son. You didn’t have to answer.”
    “Yes, I did. He’s my brother.”
    “I thought you hated him.”
    “I do hate him.”
    That actually got my old man chuckling. I knew why. He was thinking about how he’d lived in the same house his entire life alongside his father and two older brothers, Mal and Grey. The four of them under the same roof for more than a half century and a sour word had never passed between them. They were partners, trained to function as a gang on the grift. My father had once taken a bullet meant for my uncle Mal. It had done little more than clip the top quarter inch off his left pinky. The wound had been sutured closed with three stitches. He’d lost maybe a squirt of blood. But none of that altered the fact that Mal owed his life to my dad. He recognized the truth of it every day since the incident had occurred more than twenty years ago.
    And here I’d despised my brother since I was old enough to walk and get knocked down by him. And here we’d never had a kind word for each other. And here we’d slugged it out and crashed through the porch railing together. And here I was home again, answering the whistle.
    The rain overloaded the gutters and poured over the edge of the roof in vast sheets. It never rained like this out west. I’d forgotten how much I missed it. The chill spray felt good against my face.
    My father said, “You doing okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You look healthy. Fit. Your hair’s a little longer. Suits you. Hard to tell out here but you seem tan.”
    “I work on a ranch.”
    “When you were a kid you always said you were going to own one someday.”
    “I don’t own it, but I help run it.”
    He nodded. “Herding sheep? Breaking