The Last Kind Words

1

I’d come five years and two thousand miles to stand in the rain while they prepared my brother for his own murder.

He had less than two weeks to go before they strapped him down and injected poison into his heart. I knew Collie would be divided about it, the way he was dividednte about everything. A part of him would look forward to stepping off the big ledge. He’d been looking over it his whole life in one way or another.

A different part of him would be full of rage and self-pity and fear. I had no doubt that when the time came he’d be a passive prisoner right up to the moment they tried to buckle him down. Then he’d explode into violence. He was going to hurt whoever was near him, whether it was a priest or the warden or a guard. They’d have to club him down while he laughed. The priest, if he was still capable, would have to raise his voice in prayer to cover my brother’s curses.

I was twenty minutes late for my appointment at the prison. The screw at the gate didn’t want to let me in because he’d already marked me as a no-show. I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be there. He saw that I wanted to split and it was enough to compel him to let me stay.

At the prison door, another screw gave me the disgusted once-over. I told him my name, but the sound of it didn’t feel right anymore.

“Terry Rand.”

The fake ID I’d been living under the past half decade had become a safe harbor, a slim chance to better myself even though I hadn’t done much yet. I resented being forced to return to the person I’d once been.

The screw made me repeat my name. I did. It was like ice on my tongue. Then he made me repeat it again. I caught on.

“Terrier Rand.”

Expressionless, he led me off to a small side room where I was frisked and politely asked if I would voluntarily succumb to a strip search. I asked what would happen if I said no. He said I wouldn’t be allowed to proceed. It was a good enough reason to turn around. I owed my brother nothing. I could return out west and get back to a life I was still trying to believe in and make real.

Even as I decided to leave I was shrugging out of my jacket and kicking off my shoes. I got naked and held my arms up while the screw ran his hands through my hair and checked between my ass cheeks and under my scrotum.

He stared at the dog tattoo that took up the left side of my chest, covering three bad scars. One was from when Collie had stabbed me with the bayonet of a tin Revolutionary War toy soldier when I was seven. I got a deep muscle infection that the doctor had to go digging after, leaving the area a rutted, puckered purple.

Another was from when I was twelve and my father sent me up the drainpipe to a house that was supposedly empty. A seventy-five-year-old lady picked up a Tiffany-style lamp and swatted me three stories down into a hibiscus tree. A rib snapped and pierced the flesh. My old man got me into the car and pulled the bone shard through by hand as the sirens closed in and he drove up on sidewalks to escape. The scar was mottled red and thick as a finger.

The last one I didn’t think about. I had made an art of not thinking about it.

The screw took pride in his professional indifference, courteous yet dismissive. But the tattoo caught his attention.

“Your family, you’re some serious dog lovers, eh?”

I didn’t answer. One last time he checked through my clothes for any contraband. He tossed them back to me and I got dressed.

I was taken to an empty visiting room. I sat in a chair and waited for them to bring Collie in. It didn’t matter that there was a wall of reinforced glass between us. I wasn’t going to pass him a shiv and we werensty qe weren &2019;t going to shake hands or hug out twenty years of tension. The only time we’d ever touched was when we were trying to beat the hell out of each other. I’d been thinking hard about the reasons for that on the ride back east. How could it be that I had such resentment and animosity for him, and he for me, and yet when he called I came running?

They led him in, draped in chains. He could shuffle along only a few inches at a time, his hands cuffed to a thick leather belt at his waist, his feet separated by a narrow chain, bracelets snapped to his ankles. It took ten minutes to unlock him. The screws retreated and Collie twirled his chair around and sat backward, like always.

Like most mad-dog convicts, prison agreed with him. He was a lot more fit than he’d ever been on the outside. The huge beer belly had been trimmed back to practically nothing, his arms thick and muscular and covered in twisted black veins. There was a new gleam in his eye that I couldn’t evaluate.

He had old scars from drunken brawls and new ones from the joint that gave him a sense of character he’d never exhibited before. Like me, he’d gone gray prematurely. He had a short but well-coiffed mane of silver with a few threads of black running through it. I noticed he’d also had a manicure and a facial. He glowed a healthy pink. He’d been moisturized and exfoliated and closely shaved. The nancies on C-Block could open up a salon in East Hampton and make a mint off Long Island’s wealthy blue-haired biddies.

I expected that with his execution only two weeks off, and with five years gone and all the uneasy blood still between us, we would need to pause and gather our thoughts before we spoke. I imagined we would stare at each other, making our usual judgments and taking each other’s measure. We’d then bypass trivial concerns to speak of extreme matters, whatever they might be. With a strange reservation, a kind of childlike hesitation, I lifted the phone and cleared my throat.

Collie moved with the restrained energy of a predator, slid forward in his seat, did a little rap-a-tap on the glass. He grasped the phone and first thing let loose with a snorted, easy laugh. He looked all around until he finally settled on my eyes.

He usually spoke with a quick, jazzy bop tempo, sometimes muttering out of the corner of his mouth or under his breath as if to an audience situated around him. This time he was focused. He nodded once, more to himself than me, and said, “Listen, Ma hates me, and that’s all right, but you, you’re the one who broke her heart. You-”

I hung up the phone, stood, and walked away.

I was nearly to the door when Collie’s pounding on the glass made me stop. It got the screws looking in on us. I kept my back to my brother. My scalp crawled and I was covered in sweat. I wondered if what he’d said was true. It was the best trick he had, getting me to constantly question myself. Even when I knew he was setting me up I couldn’t keep from falling into the trap. I wondered if my mother’s heart really had broken when I’d left. I thought of my younger sister, Dale, still waiting for me to read her romantic vampire fantasy novels. My father on the porch with no one to sit with. My gramp losing his memories, fighting to retain them, now that there was nobody to stroll around the lake with and discuss the best way to trick out burglar alarms.

Collie kept on shouting and banging. I took another step. I reached for the handle. Maybe if I’d made my fortune out west I would have found it easier to leave him there yelling. Maybe if I’d gotten married. Maybe if I’d raised "1e q;d raisea child.

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 myselfnd qree myse. 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 an

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.

2

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 asmetify"›Heok 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.

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 theow ed over t 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 broncs? Moving cattle through rivers, like that?”

I held back a sigh. When I first got out west I thought I’d be busting broncos too. Sitting around campfires eating beans. Being a hero of the rodeo. What the fuck did I know. I’d ridden one bronc and he threw me off in half a second and gave me a concussion.

And yet I somehow pined for my own ignorance. “Like that.”

He continued drinking and the grin never left his face, but I could feel his brisk inspection of me even though he didn’t turn his head. This was as playful as he was likely to get. We danced around any important topics. Stepped to them, rejected them. The silence was full of our unvoiced conversations.

He understood that I’d never gotten over Kimmy and never would. He consoled me without a word. In the darkness I could hear his fierce heart stamping in his chest.

“Reporters hassling you much?” I asked.

“A little, with Collie’s, with his”-he couldn’t say execution-“with all the hustle and activity surrounding him again. They come in groups. Channel 3, Channel 7, Channel 21, all these vans pulling up out front. And then they stand around whiling the time away, eating bagels, drinking coffee. They put the prettiest girl with the microphone out in front, let her lead the charge. And she stands at the door and says, ‘How does it make you feel?’ She asks it like it’s a real question, with her eyes full of false sympathy. Licks her lips like she’s waiting for an answer.”

“They bother Ma?”

“No, I don’t let it get that far. The lawyers say I shouldn’t slam the door in their faces, but if I try to respond I sound like an idiot. Mal and Grey handle it better, so they field for us.”

“Cops?”

“Same as usual, no more or less. You remember Gilmore?”

I remembered Gilmore.

“He still comes sniffing around. Sits in and plays cards, has a beer or two.”

“How much do you let him win?”

“We rob him blind. He doesn’t much care, figures he’s learning something trying to spot the four-card lift, the third-card bottom deal. He hardly even questions us about stolen goods anymore.”

“He thinks he’s rattling you just by showing up, reminding you that someone’s always watching.”

“That’s something I’ll never forget.”

“He’s making sure.”

“We all have to spend our time somehow. He’s a detect"ju;s a deteive now.”

I nodded. Gilmore had always wanted the gold shield. It made sense that he’d still come prowling around even now. If Collie could cross the line then so could I. It must keep him up, wondering if I was out there, going shitstorm crazy.

“How much pressure does he put on you to tell him where I am?”

“A little in the beginning, right after you left. Not so much anymore. He asks in passing, tries to get someone to confess something out of turn. ‘So, how’s Terrier holding up? You get a Christmas card from him this year?’ It doesn’t amount to anything. I think he’s genuinely curious. He always liked you. He’s different now. Has no real edge to him anymore. His wife left him and took the kids. He’s got too much time on his hands. I don’t know what he does with it all.”

“How’s everybody else?” I asked.

“Old Shepherd is worse.” My father’s grief was under control but it still hung heavily in his voice. “Most days he can’t recognize anyone. He doesn’t really talk anymore. He watches a lot of TV. It’s what fills his days now. He likes cartoons. If you get the chance, I hope you’ll sit with him. He might rouse a bit.”

I knew my dad’s subtle nuances. He had more to say, but he was superstitious. He didn’t want his words to give life and form to whatever he was holding back. I waited. It took him a few more minutes. JFK whined in his sleep. The rain started and stopped again. “I think your uncles have a touch of Alzheimer’s too. I’ve found them out in the yard in the middle of the night a couple of times, looking dazed, like sleepwalking.”

I had to move. I got up and put my hands on the rebuilt rail and hung my head over enough so that the rain fell against the back of my neck. I couldn’t imagine Mal and Grey watching cartoons, drooling, unable to crack wise or shuffle and cut a deck eighteen times in ten seconds and still pull four aces from the bottom. Or would those skills last long after they couldn’t form a cohesive sentence anymore?

As much as I loved my grandfather and uncles, my reaction was as selfish and full of fear as it was anything else. I didn’t want to think that in my DNA I had a predisposition to losing my mind. I didn’t want to believe I might one day end up like Gramp, just as I didn’t want to believe that I might one day end up like my brother.

I turned and my father said, “Dale is doing good in school, spends a lot of time performing in plays. She’s always practicing around the house, puts on a southern belle accent and acts out Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Streetcar. Your uncles help. Mal does Newman, Grey does Brando. They walk around asking for lemonade and patting their foreheads, talking about how sultry the steamy south is. She’s a natural. She’s always taking the train into the city to see something on or off Broadway. Has a fondness for Albee and Ibsen. Williams. Surprising for her age, I’d say.”

Ibsen and Albee and Williams. Jesus, it had been a long time since I’d read her little vampire fairy tales to her.

“You must be tired. Your room’s the same as you left it.”

I hadn’t expected anything else. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dad.”

“Good night, Terry.”

I started inside but turned before the screen door closed behind me. “Sheme. Have you ever gone to see him?” I asked.

“No. None of us.” I could hear the steel in his voice. “I wouldn’t allow it. You understand that, don’t you?”

I understood my own reasons but I wasn’t sure his or anyone else’s were the same. But I said, “Of course.”

I stepped in and moved through the darkness of my own home the way I’d crept the prison guard’s. With the same strange sense of quelled excitement and personal dominion. I slipped up the stairs into my bedroom.

My old man hadn’t been kidding. My room was the same, untouched except for maybe the monthly sweep of a feather duster. I checked some of my stash spots and found my old burglary tools and a couple wedges of cash that totaled three grand. I counted the bills. Most were fresh, printed within the last year or two. Somebody had discovered my money, taken it as needed, and then later replaced it. For all I knew, every one of them had riffled through it.

It was good to know that a few rules still hadn’t been broken. Chief among them was that we didn’t steal from one another.

I laid back on the bed and listened to the rain and tried to empty my thoughts, but there wasn’t a chance. I turned over and opened the nightstand drawer. It was too common a place for anyone to look for anything of value.

I took out the last photo of Kimmy and me together. We’re at Jones Beach. I’m grinning because I’m with her. I’m grinning because the latest set of burglary charges against me have been dropped due to insufficient evidence. I’m grinning because the night before I scored over a grand from Gilmore’s house while his wife and kids were out at the movies. He thought he was slick, keeping a chunk of skimmed cash at the bottom of an old cereal box. Always check the dates.

In the photo we’re happy. We’d been talking about getting married. Most of the hardness was out of Kimmy’s eyes by then. It would be another couple of weeks before she miscarried and the grief brought it back and shoved us apart. Another month before Collie would be found drinking beer at a corner dive called the Elbow Room, a trail of fire and blood behind him.

3

I woke to see my mother on the edge of the bed, staring at me with her hand pressed to my heart. She had a bad habit of doing that kind of thing.

Dawn sliced through the blinds. I blinked twice into the glare and she was there with the barest lilt to the edges of her mouth, hazel eyes intense and a little solemn. When I was a kid this had felt comforting. When I got older it started to spook me a bit. Right now it felt somewhere in between.

The pulse in her wrist beat back against the snap of my heart. The wash and pound of our blood made for a strange internal music. She shifted and with two fingers plied my gray patch.

“You get that from my side of the family,” she said. She shook out her auburn hair. She was using some kind of dye that brought out the red highlights.

I’d never met anyone from her side of the family. Apparently, 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 showed up one last time to pack her belongings and found the pictures of her turned to the wall. She never went home adthith e shobed, stagain.

Except for that one story, she never spoke of them.

I realized with some surprise that I didn’t even know her maiden name. I always wondered why she hadn’t just covered and lied about my father’s occupation. Was it because she knew that the truth would eventually come out anyway? Because she had imagined Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house, everybody sitting down to the turkey and, just as the mashed potatoes were being passed around, the cops raiding the house? Her parents with their mouths half full of corn and yams being shoved up against the wall, frisked, billy-clubbed in the kidneys, cuffed, Freeze, dirtbag.

My mother remained a beautiful woman even at an age when such women were often called handsome. Her lips and chin had softened a bit more but she was still lovely, with a natural smile that always made you feel better.

“I started finding gray strands when I was in junior high. I went wild plucking them. My mother would find them all about the house and say, ‘Ellie, being bald is worse than having your face framed by silver.’ ” She curled more of my hair around her fingers. “Looks good on you, Terry, gives you character. If you’re hungry I’ll make you something.”

I was, but I shook my head. Sleep hadn’t done anything to wear away the tension in me. I wanted to burn it off a little. “It’s early.”

We spoke in whispers.

“I just wanted to look in on you.”

“You should go back to sleep.”

“So should you.”

“I’m used to getting up at dawn.”

“So am I. I have to check on Gramp. He sometimes wakes up early and doesn’t do anything but sit and stare until someone at least turns the television on for him. Kids’ shows, if you can believe it. He gets upset with anything else, but you put on cartoons and he settles.”

“Christ, he’s really that bad?”

“The doctors can’t do much. He’s too far gone with Alzheimer’s.” She shrugged, a lissome and graceful movement. “That and being shot in the head.”

“Well, yeah.”

My grandfather had been shot in the back of the head when he was sixteen, and the bullet had never been removed. You could feel the entrance wound, which had never fully scarred over. He’d made everybody do it at least once. When I brought Kimmy home for the first time, she’d grinned, pressed her purple-painted fingernail to his gunshot hole, and said, “If you think nasty thoughts about me now, Old Shep, I’ll know it. I’ll feel them.”

He claimed it never bothered him until he was in his sixties and the headaches started. They grew worse the older he got until they began to fade along with his mind. He’d been getting a touch forgetful and had just started walking in his sleep when I left.

I swung my legs out of bed.

“I’m glad you came back,” my mother said. “I’ve missed you. But I’m sorry it had to be like this.” She shut her eyes and worked her mouth silently for a moment before her voice caught traction. “I’m sorry it was for him.”

“It’s all right.”

“It &it “I#x2019;s not all right. He shouldn’t have… they… he…” She caught her breath and a sheen of tears brought out the flecks of gold in her eyes. “Sometimes I hate him like a poison. I think about what he’s done, what happened, and I wish… I wish they’d hurry up with it. And then I feel guilty for thinking it, and I remember who he is, that he’s my son, and that I love him, and I want him out of there, I want him home again, I want you all home again, and I think, I think…” Her face firmed. “It can never happen, and I’m glad for that. I’m glad we don’t talk about it, even though we’d all be better off if we would. Especially your father. Did he ask you anything?”

“No,” I said.

“Then I won’t either.”

“You can.”

“No, I won’t make you discuss it. You’re like all the Rands, you can’t talk about it. Sometimes I’d give my right tit for one of you to get in a gabby mood, be garrulous just for ten minutes.”

“Ma, listen to me.” I made myself form the words. “Collie, he wanted-”

“Shhh… it’s okay. Now that you’re done with him, you can-”

“I’m not done. He wants to see me again.”

“For what reason?”

“He’s got more to tell me.”

“Don’t listen.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t, and you shouldn’t.”

“I do, I have to.”

“Why?”

There was no way to start talking about it and then stop. You couldn’t just explain a piece of it, unwind one thread from the knot. The little girl, the strangled teen, the nights awake, the miles that lay behind.

My mother loved me enough not to expect an answer. She said, “I understand.”

“It wasn’t just Collie. It was time I came back anyway.”

“For Kimmy.”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

Maybe I did. I wanted to ask her if she’d seen Kimmy, heard anything about her or her family. What she was doing, if she was married, if she was still in New York. My chest grew heavy with the number of questions I had, all the unfinished business.

But my mother was right. I had gray in my hair from her side of the family, and from my father’s side I learned to keep stony and mute about anything of real importance. It’s how I’d lost Kimmy in the first place.

While I tried to somehow slip around my own silence my mother kissed my forehead and left the room.

I was used to hard work and exercise now. I felt wired and antsy and decided to take a run. There were some old sweats and sneakers in my closet. I put them on. Everything was tight on my larger frame but manageable.

I walked downstairs and felt some of the old familiarity start to ease back into me. I knew that in ten minutes it would be like I’d never left at all.

The house had been in our family for four generations. Construction had been started by my great-grandfather and his brothers, who’d been adept architects and carpenters but piss-poor thieves who were always breezing in and out of the joint. Because they were often caught and incarcerated together, it took forever to raise the roof beams. The place had been completed a decade or so later with the help of my grandfather and his brother, who were starting to learn what to do in order to stay out of the can.

They’d purchased three lots’ worth of land so that our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile up the road. Only a comparatively small section of the yard had ever been cleared. The rest remained wild and overgrown with trees and brush. As little kids, my best friend, Chub Wright, and I would camp back there and talk about car chases in action movies, listening to my uncles come and go through the house, unloading goods after midnight.

Unless you were an ace heister who pulled in multi-million-dollar scores, owning a house was almost unheard of on the circuit. Thieves by their nature and calling were usually on the move. They had warrants out on them in one state so they ran to another. The heat came down so they moved to cooler climes. They never stayed put. Except that we did. It made things a little hinky. All the cops knew us. All the undercover journalists would show up at our door trying to sell us soap or vacuum cleaners, carrying cases with hidden cameras and digital feeds inside. We could spot them from fifty feet away.

That was another reason why it took so long for the place to be built. The house was a well-crafted magic trick. Unless you were intimately familiar with its interior, you’d never guess just how many crawl spaces, hidden rooms, extended root cellars, and attic areas the place actually had. Whole sections of floorboards could be peeled back, but you had to know where the locking mechanisms were. Walls slid aside. Built-in staircases unfolded and let you climb eight or twelve feet up into recessed chambers. You couldn’t use a hammer to find a hollow spot, because damn near every inch of the extra space was filled with loot. Some of it went back fifty years. My grandfather and his brothers had boosted a lot of shit back in the fifties that they weren’t able to fence. But you never dumped hot property. You sold it or planted it or kept it. When your whole family was made up of grifters and gaffers and second-story men, that meant a ton of excess haul: old machinery, bicycle parts, busted record players, eight-track tape decks, old TVs with missing vacuum tubes, furniture, worthless silverware, and literally tons of other crap I’d never even seen.

Under the living room where my grandfather sat in his chair, with the quiet strains of cartoon characters taking frying pans to their heads, was a cache of unfenced curio bric-a-brac going back decades. My father had never been able to resist small trinkets and novelty gadgets that he felt might have an interesting history. In the middle of a job he’d pocket broken shillelaghs, nutcrackers with busted hinges, dinged Zippo lighters, music boxes with cracked dancers, chipped Dresden dolls, and old tools whose purpose eluded him. He had a healthy respect for hands and couldn’t resist anything that looked like it had been caressed and fondled or well applied.

The irony of a useless man in a room stationed over useless hidden things wasn’t lost on me. I figured if my grandfather grew lucid at all anymore, it wouldn’t be lost on him either. Gramp’s hands twitched and trembled. His eyes never left the television screen.

My mother came in holding a bowl of oatmeal and said, “Do you want to feed him?”

“he y"›ȁNo.”

So she sat on the loveseat and fed him instead. I stood close to his shoulder and watched. She kept up a running monologue of childish banter, and Gramp never reacted in any way. During commercials his chin would droop and his gaze would lower, his whole body slumping forward. When the cartoons came back on he’d sit a little straighter. He’d make noises that might have been laughter.

I took it for as long as I could and then I started out of the room. I made it two steps and knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure what. I turned and Old Shep looked exactly the same, still making his sounds but a little louder now. I looked at the floor. I scanned the room. Then I checked my pocket. My wallet was missing.

Even with the Parkinson’s and the Alzheimer’s he was an ace pickpocket. It took me a minute to find my wallet deep in the folds of his robe. He was still in there somewhere.

I said, “Sweet action, Gramp,” but a commercial was on and he was slumped in his seat with his strings cut.

4

As I trotted down the drive into the road, JFK came lumbering after me. I ran back inside and got his leash. I didn’t know if his knees would hold up, but I didn’t plan to do more than a few miles. I wasn’t even going to pretend to be heading anywhere except Kimmy’s place.

The area had changed some. A few more housing tracts had gone up, a couple of new strip malls. We clung to Old Autauk Highway, which broke through a few small neighborhoods down by the bay, then circled Autauk Park and my old high school. We cut north and covered a couple of miles of the back trails that still surrounded Shalebrook College. I saw there was a new building on campus, looked like a science hall. They’d completed the bridge expansion that connected the dorms to the library with a glass atrium that arched over the parkway.

We reached Shalebrook Lake and JFK took a long drink and then hunkered down in the shallows, the small waves stirred by the wind breaking over his ridged back. He turned his face to me with a regal expression, all of his usual attitude back in place. I’d worried about him, but he was handling the run fine and actually looked healthier for it.

I sat on a nearby bench and almost unconsciously started counting the number of houses that I’d robbed. I only realized what I was doing when I hit twenty. Most of the burglaries had been for pocket change. Even the crappiest joe job would’ve paid better and without the hazard of going away for a three-year jolt.

“You going to be like them?” Kimmy had asked me after meeting the family, while she shook out about half a pound of hot pepper onto a slice of pizza. “For the rest of your days?”

“I’m a thief. Thieves steal.”

“You’re a cat burglar.”

“That just means I steal shit while people are home sleeping.”

“Someone’s going to shoot you in the head too.”

“Then you’ll be able to feel my naughty thoughts.”

She took a bite and her face flushed. “Those I’m already well aware of.”

“Some of them.”

We were nineteen. The world was a contradiction. It seemedhe #x20glar.stify"› both wide open to possibility and set in tracks we’d never be able to alter.

Of course Kimmy knew all about the notorious Rand clan. Everyone in the area did. Sometimes it helped Collie and me in our romantic lives. A lot of girls liked the bad boys, and they’d expect us to take them on scores with us, let them get a feel for what the bent life was all about. Two girls I dated practically begged me to rob their parents’ houses. They knew where the stashes were, codes to the alarms, combinations on the safes. I’d say, “Where’s the fun in any of that?”

If they pushed too hard I tossed their phone numbers. I never knew when one of them might sneak off with her mother’s jewelry and try to blame me for it.

I wasn’t the only criminal around, so I lost some cachet. There were meth cookers on their way up and a few syndicate princes and princesses from the last couple of mob families in the area. Chub was already a first-rate crew mechanic. By the time he was nineteen he owned his own garage and was known for souping up stolen cars for strings putting together bank heists. He’d fine-tune engines until they sang and help the drivers plot out their getaways.

I’d been arrested twice by the time I was seventeen but I was never held for more than a couple of hours. In some eyes, that meant I was just a wannabe outlaw. That was how I liked it. Being someone on the outside but no one really knowing if I deserved the rep I’d been saddled with. It was one way to keep off the radar.

Kimmy was an outsider too, someone who hung around the lake at night with the other kids but was never quite part of their pack. Living at home, taking classes at the college, she was smarter and more sensitive than the rest of them. I could see it in the way she held herself, a hint of lower-middle-class sorrow and hushed desperation in her eyes but hanging on to the chance for something else. She was beautiful but didn’t want to be. She dressed down. She tied her brown hair back, hid it beneath hats and scarves. Others felt the crush of mediocrity and resigned themselves to it with booze or crystal, floating around the fields until it was time to show at their minimum-wage labors the next day. Kimmy bucked the trend, studied harder, glared at you harder, talked harder.

Sitting on the hood of a ’66 Mustang, holding in a lungful of Acapulco Gold, Chub wheezed out, “That one, she’ll send you up or set you straight.”

“Might be worth the risk.”

“Don’t you believe it.”

Like most teens who shared an attraction, Kimmy and I danced around each other for weeks before moving in tight enough that we had to say hello.

First thing she ever said to me was, “My aunt, she manages an organic-health-food-and-vitamins store. Six months ago somebody held her up and cleaned out the register. Was it you?”

“No. I don’t do armed robbery.”

“They didn’t get much cash but they made her give up her jewelry. Everything was junk except for a gold pendant given to her by my grandmother. Inside were two tiny photos of my great-grandparents, taken in Hungary back in the thirties. It’s the only thing left of them. It wasn’t just sentimental, you know? It’s more meaningful than that.”

She wasn’t talking about a pendant but a locket. I nodded. “I think I understand.”

“Any chance you can help me get it back?”

Amy "justify" stickup already six months old. Unless the piece was exceptional and really stood out, there wasn’t going to be much of a shot. But I knew all the fences and could probably get a line on the punk snatcher. I looked into Kimmy’s eyes and liked what I saw there. They were almost mean but I could see a little softness tucked deep inside. I wondered what had happened to her to give her such a hard shell so early on and decided I wanted to hang around long enough to find out.

“If your aunt’s got a photo of herself wearing the locket, give it to me. If not, have her describe it in detail. Any extra information can only help.”

Kimmy was a step ahead. She handed me a photo. There was a stickum note on the back with all the relevant info, including the name and address of the shop and the date and time of the robbery. “This is it.”

“Give me four days. If I can’t get a line on it by then there isn’t anything that can be done.”

She said, “Thank you,” without an ounce of real gratitude. “So… Friday night then?”

“I’ll pick you up.”

She frowned, came this close to hitting me with a sneer. “You don’t know where I live.”

“Sure I do.”

When she climbed into my car four days later the locket was waiting for her on the dashboard. She checked the tiny photos inside, then stuck it in her pocket.

“What did it cost you to get it back?”

“Nothing, the fence owed me one.”

“Did you talk to the guy who stole it?”

“No.”

I couldn’t read the expression on her face in the shadowed interior of the car. I turned up the dash lights.

“I thought maybe you’d have to fight him for it,” she said.

“You wanted me to fight him for it, that right?”

I watched as her lips parted into a grin and then a smile. She kissed the side of my face. It was nothing more than a peck but it started to do its thing.

I said, “Take off the scarf.”

“Why?”

“I want to see your hair.”

“Why?”

“Take off the fucking scarf, right?”

She pulled it down until it was around her neck, then shook out her hair. It was shorter than I’d thought, but the way it framed her face added to everything else I liked about her. My breathing began to grow rough. So did hers. I leaned in and she backed away until the side of her head pressed against the passenger window. I got my hand looped through the scarf and used it to draw her to me. I drove to the dead end at the bottom of the block and then we kissed and she giggled against my chest, and when she bit my neck I growled and we fell into the backseat, tearing each other’s clothes off.

Twenty minutes later I lit us both cigarettes and asked, “You’re beautiful but you don’t like it-why?”

“I do. I just never felt that way before.”

“Before what?”

“Before you, asshole.”

Crawling out 01Dawling ouof the shallows JFK growled while his fur dripped mud and water. I spotted a black Mercedes filled with dark suits and rigid faces at the curb. It was starting already.

Wes Zek got out from behind the wheel. That showed me right there that the Thompson crew were still second-raters. Your driver is never the muscle. Your driver never gets out of the car. Wes had taken the keys out of habit and held them in his left hand. Now if anything happened to him, the others were stranded at the curb.

He looked like he’d been promoted from crew to captain and wasn’t pleased with it. A hundred-and-fifty-dollar haircut, wraparound shades, and a fancy black sports jacket to hide his piece. Couldn’t have been anything larger than a.32 considering how small the bulge was under his arm. Despite the kick up in what he earned, he looked stressed, harried. He’d lost weight but it didn’t look good on him.

I said, “Hello, Wes. A little early in the day for you all to be doing business, isn’t it?”

“We’re still up from last night. Terry, you got a few minutes?”

“Not right now.”

“Eager to get back to your run?”

“I’m going to see someone.”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t live there anymore. She took up with Chub. They got a kid now and live over-”

Before I realized it, I was off the bench and way up close to Wes. I saw my teeth in his sunglasses.

“Heya,” I said, “how about if you stay out of my business and I’ll keep out of yours, right?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Sure, Terry, sure. Mr. Thompson would like to speak with you.”

“Junior or Senior?”

“Senior had a coronary three, four years ago and retired to Arizona. The big one hit him in Phoenix, on a golf course. We don’t call Junior Junior anymore, though. He likes Daniel or Mr. Thompson.”

My family had been doing business with the Thompsons since before Danny’s grandfather had Americanized the name from Tompansano. Danny and I were the same age and had run around together for a while in our teens.

“Fine,” I said. “My dog sits in back with your muscle. Don’t give me any shit about him muddying up your Mercedes.”

“This the beast that snuffed Bernie Wagner?”

“Yeah.”

JFK lolled his tongue and let out a belch that smelled like lake silt. I opened the back door and he hopped in and climbed over the thugs as they bitched and cursed, their suits already flecked with wet fur. Wes climbed behind the wheel and said, “Christ.”

5

We drove over to the Fifth Amendment, Big Dan Thompson’s bar that fronted all the real action. The name of the place was Big Dan’s way of giving the finger to the feds, who’d been trying to build a RICO case around him for years, and doing it the way he had done almost everything, with a cocky defiance.

“Leave the dog outside, all right, Terry?” Wes asked.

“He comes with me,” I said.

Wes groaned but let it slide. “Well, wait here for a minute, okay? Will you at least do that?”

“Sure.”

It gave me time to take in the rhythm of the old place again.

I glanced at the photos on the walls. Big Dan with various celebrities, politicians, sports heroes. Some of the pictures of the old crews had been changed out, probably because so many wiseguys had flipped over the years. Big Dan once told me he’d never pulled the trigger himself unless he was shooting a rat. He said it the way my mother had said she hated Collie like poison. A thing to be mentioned, understood, held on to, then put away.

I’d had my first drink of hard liquor, seen my first thousand-dollar bill, and had my first woman here at the Amendment, all on the same day. In the back room they held private card games, where some of the waitresses earned extra cash by taking the major hitters to the private lounge. When I turned fourteen, Big Dan had invited me in and shown me the delights of that back room, all on his ticket, the same way he’d shown Danny a few weeks earlier on his birthday.

I couldn’t help grinning thinking about it again.

Now Danny Thompson sat at his father’s station, holding court at the corner table where all the real business got done. He was surrounded by a crew of five. I didn’t recognize any of them. All the old-timers had either kicked off, been sent to the bin, or retired when Danny rose up to take over. I wondered what that said about the way Danny handled the operation now.

He was giving hell to one of his captains. I picked up a few words here and there. It sounded drug-related. Danny talked loud, much too loud for discussing business. His father had never raised his voice, not even when he was furious.

Danny hadn’t aged well the last five years. He’d put on thirty pounds and looked uncomfortable as he shifted in his seat, packed into a suit a couple sizes too small for him. I could see the sweat gleaming on his face. His silky blond hair had started to recede and he had a nervous habit of brushing the back of his thumb across his prominent widow’s peak. I could imagine what it must be like for him, sitting in that chair and seeing his father everywhere he looked. He should’ve sold the place and set up shop somewhere else.

The meeting broke up and a couple of Danny’s boys walked past. The one who’d been under the gun was flushed from the berating he’d received. He had no idea who I was but he couldn’t meet my eyes. He rattled way too easy. If he was in charge of the drug trade, I could see why there were problems.

Danny looked up from the table and waved me over with two fingers, the way Big Dan used to allow passage to his corner. His son couldn’t even make that his own. I wanted to tell him, Wave someone over with one finger, with three, use your chin, your left hand, anything except the same thing your dad did.

JFK heeled at my left leg as we crossed the bar. I got to the table, put out my hand, and said, “Hello, Danny.”

He tightened up. First words out of my mouth and I’d already made a mistake with him. I wondered what it would cost. His eyes clouded and then immediately cleared, and he let his lips hitch into a thin smile.

He shook my hand. “Terry. You look tan. Sit down.”

Again with the fucking tan. Like Long Island didn’t have two hundred miles of shoreline beaches.

I slid into the choulinto the air across from him. JFK dropped at my feet. Wes stood nearby, ready to take orders. The rest of Danny’s men headed to the back room. The door was open and I could see the remnants of a big game, a lot of beer bottles, and a woman sleeping on one of the sofas.

“Sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thanks for saying so, even if you don’t mean it.”

Except that I did mean it, and it surprised me that Danny would think I didn’t. I’d always liked Big Dan, even if I didn’t agree with some of his practices. He scooped up a lot of my family’s goods and cut a few side deals along the way, sending me after certain specific items he wanted from rivals and occasionally even associates. He knew I could keep my mouth shut.

In all the time I knew him, I’d gone up against him only once. Chub had tuned the getaway car for a crew that had taken down a massage parlor that Big Dan fronted. The heisters blew town with fifty large, and Big Dan thought Chub ought to pay back with cash, his garage, or his legs. I asked Dan to let it slide, explaining that Chub had known nothing about the heist beforehand, even though I was certain he had. Big Dan didn’t like my asking and gave me a chance to change my mind. I didn’t. I put my hand on his wrist and asked him to let it go.

He ordered four of his men to kick the shit out of me in the parking lot. He added that if I fought back, they should break my arms.

I didn’t fight back.

But Big Dan had let Chub slide anyway, as a favor to me. It was two weeks before I stopped pissing blood, but I didn’t take any of it personally. He had to save face and had to make sure that back talk didn’t become an everyday occurrence. He knew I was a pro and that I’d understand, and afterward we continued our amiable relationship right up until I left.

But somehow Danny didn’t realize it. He thought I harbored resentment against his old man. That showed me he was still a piker even though he ran the show now.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” he said.

“Do we?”

“Sure, old friends. We’ve got some years to cover.”

He looked at JFK and beckoned the dog by patting his gut. JFK stood and planted his big head on Danny’s thigh. Danny made good-doggie noises, scratching JFK’s ears and jowls. He kissed the dog and the dog licked him back.

“Jesus, I think I can still smell Bernie’s cologne on his breath.”

The death of Bernie Wagner was an open secret, one I didn’t like being reminded of. Bernie had been a two-bit hood turned meth-mouth tweaker who thought it would be a good idea to score a house full of thieves one night. Everyone was asleep except for me and my father. We were out in the garage, putting a new starter in his car. Oddly enough, everything from the car to the parts to the tools had been bought and paid for.

JFK had never so much as growled at anyone. He didn’t even growl when Bernie sneaked around the side of the house and put a.22 to the back of my father’s head. “Your stash, I want all of-”

In an instant, JFK lunged and champed his fangs in Bernie’s throat and with a small wag of his head tore out Bernie’s windpipe. My old man made the effort of trying to wrap the spurting wound with his own shirt and he even performed mouth-to-mouth as Bernie’s life ran down his chest. There was nothinis was nothg that could be done. It was already over. JFK sat there whining, his muzzle soaked with bloody foam.

My uncles packed Bernie up and drove him to the emergency room and dropped his corpse off at the curb. It was cold but there wasn’t much else that could be done, and no matter how you looked at it Bernie Wagner had called the play.

Turned out Bernie had told a lot of people that he was going to try to boost the Rand house. Even though Gilmore and a few other cops had come around, no one could make anything stick.

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 wicould havloaded 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 tohe asks you 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.

6

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 kI dfor ll ri straightind 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 esst the helup 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.

“And what did all your spy work lead to?” my father asked.

“Exclusive rights to my life story,” Grey said.

“So she wants her money’s worth.”

“Or her money back,” Mal said.

I realized they were talking about the pretty reporter my father had mentioned, the one who stuck a microphone in his face and asked him how he felt now that his son was about to be executed. He stood at the door watching her now, defending the house. Grey sat thinking of his time in bed with her even while he dipped into the cards and tried to give himself a straight flush. Mal slipped aces out of the deck and I thought behind his open expression he must still be jealous of his brother, staring into that handsome face every day knowing he had the power in his fists to crush all the beauty from it.

A young woman I didn’t know was washing dishes with my mother. She moved with a kind of gentle swaying, as if dancing to music only she could hear. I tilted my head to get a better look.

She said, “I can go give a statement. They’ll take a few photos and screw up my comments but at least it’ll move them along for a little while.” Her voice stopped me. She was the woman who had phoned me at the ranch and told me that Collie wanted me to visit him. I looked harder and saw it was my younger sister, Dale, who’d been only ten when I left. I had spoken to her and hadn’t even known it.

“No, I don’t want you talking to them,” my mother said.

“I don’t mind.”

“I know you don’t, but I don’t like the way they descend.”

“It’s their job.”

“That’s not their job. This deathwatch isn’t their job.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Ma. It is.”

“It shouldn’t be.” Dale shrugged.

“Grey, can you get your girlfriend out of here?”

Grey did a five-card lift and shuffle and dealt Mal two deuces and himself two aces. “Ellie, Vicky and I have spent many pleasant evenings in each other’s company over the past month or so, but she’s still a journalist and-”

“That one is not a journalist.”

“-and she mostly hangs around me hoping to get a story anyway.”

“That one hangs around for more than that.”

“I said ‘mostly.’ ”

“The rest is about the roses, the chocolates, and the infiltration,” Mal said.

“And you, Pinscher,” my mother said, directing her attention to my old man, “do you always have to stand in the door like that, watching them? It makes you look guilty.”

“I am guilty,” he said.

“I know you are, but they don’t need to know it.”

“They already know it.”

“They don’t have to know it so much.”

“So for the last five years I should’ve smoked in the house?”

“You should have given up cigarettes when you had your infarction.”

“That was heartburn.”

“Come inside, Dad,” Dale said. “She’s in a mood.”

My sister had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. She held herself with an air of maturity and refinement. Her soft features were highlighted with a touch of makeup. She’d gotten her height from my mother and stood an inch or two over my father, which made her almost as tall as me. She had a casual grace, though, and seemed to prance around the room.

I slipped out the back door and walked around the side of the house, feeling more like a thief in my own home than I had while robbing others.

Two news vans were parked out front. My father was right. They liked to eat their donuts and have coffee before they hassled the family. There was no way I could get to my car without dealing with them. I thought of cutting through the woods and realized how stupid that was and how rattled I’d become. I was running from the warmth of my family so I could visit prison and listen to my brother talk of mad-dog murder.

The pretty blond newscaster with startlingly bright azure eyes came rushing up at me, followed by her film crew. The soft scent of citrus wafted along with her. I pictured her dating Grey, saw him taking her out to the best places on the island as she prodded him for information and he prodded her for pleasure.

She stuck the microphone in my face and licked heprad licked r lips, her gaze full of false sympathy, exactly as my father had said. There was a lot I wanted to tell her. I had a few questions of my own that I felt like asking. I thought about this deathwatch, as my mother called it, and wondered if anyone really cared at all about the victims. When Collie got the needle there would be hundreds of folks out in front of the prison who would cheer. Maybe they had the right. Maybe I would be one of them. The idea of it made my guts twitch.

“You there, hello!” she shouted, somehow still smiling. “Who are you?”

It was a righteous question. I held my chin up. I stammered out the other name I’d been living under the last five years. It didn’t come easily to me. I think I might’ve botched it. I could barely hear my own voice. There was too much running wild inside me. If I started talking I might not ever stop.

“I’m from Freddy’s Fix-It,” I said. “This house here, their hot-water tank burst, flooded the basement. A real mess.”

“But you don’t have a truck.”

“Emergency call, came here straight from home. Heading back to the shop now. I’ll be back in a little while with parts.”

“It’s the other one,” the cameraman said. “The younger son. Terry. Terrier Rand. He looks just like his brother.”

“Is it?” she asked. “Are you?”

“Freddy’s Fix-It, lady.”

The other news crew caught wise and started shouldering me. Their newscaster wasn’t nearly as pretty but she had a real gleam in her eye. She wanted to spike me to the ground, pin me there, and force me to fess up.

I yanked open my car door and ducked behind the wheel, but they didn’t let up. The camera guy leaned over the front hood and pressed the lens into my windshield. Azure eyes tried to make some kind of contact with me. I knew she didn’t give a shit about the news. She had the expectant expression of all of Grey’s former lovers. I could practically hear her thoughts. Has he talked about me? Will he see me again?

“Your brother is scheduled for execution in eleven days. What do you think about that? Do you have a message for the families of his victims?”

“How about if you back the fuck off me?”

That was going to look great on the six o’clock news, edited down to me saying “fuck off” to the victims’ grief-stricken families.

The sharper reporter and her cameraman had already turned back to their van. Channel 14. They were going to pursue me. I shook my head in disbelief and cursed Collie under my breath. I’d sworn that I wouldn’t visit my brother again, but I had to find out what the hell he needed from me. I wanted to see Kimmy. I wanted to see her child. I wanted to protect her from men like Collie and men like me. But I’d lost my chance. I’d abandoned my girl. I’d failed her and myself. I’d sacrificed my own happiness to the underneath. I wasn’t ready to be a part of my own family yet. I knew the truth of it, I really had broken their hearts. I glanced at the front door and saw my sister standing there, watching me run away from home again.

7

Kimmy had finally decided to embrace her beautvicon t Dhy. She’d grown her hair long and allowed it to lap over her shoulders and drift in the breeze. It whirled to a rhythm I could hum along with. She was dressed comfortably but fashionably in summer clothing that accentuated her contours. I wasn’t close enough to look into her eyes, but I could tell from the way she moved, more carefree than I’d ever seen her move before, that the hard shell had been peeled away.

I should’ve been happy for her but I was a miserable selfish prick. My fingers trembled against the steering wheel.

She and Chub lived in a new development. Once this area had all been pumpkin fields. Kimmy and I had taken a hayride through the thick trails one Halloween while an old farmer told ghost stories that smacked of truth. He was so intently fixed on his own tale that his dentures worked themselves free every so often and he had to press them back in with his fingers. It gave us the giggles. Afterward he let us off to pick as many pumpkins as we wanted for free. We were late to the patch and the choosings were slim, but we found a few fairly sizable pumpkins that we brought home to her family and carved on her kitchen table. We tried to retell the ghost stories but we couldn’t finish without laughing. One jack-o’-lantern sat in the front window, while the others perched out on her front stoop. She kept them lit through most of November, even after the first snow fell and they began to rot and sink in on themselves.

I shut my eyes and tried to place where the house stood in relation to that hayride. I thought I had the spot down and remembered the two of us snuggling beneath a blanket, my hand on her warm belly.

She’d picked up a knack for gardening. Most of the morning she spent trimming azalea bushes and clipping roses while the baby staggered around the lawn, playing with various objects, none of which appeared to be a real toy. She pawed a plastic bowl, a flyswatter, and a chain of pink barrettes clipped together.

I listened to Kimmy talking to the baby. Every time her daughter toddled away too far Kimmy would chase after her and say, “Here now, Scooter, don’t you motor off.” The sound of her voice made my chest hitch. She dug deep in rich soil, planting new roses, and I thought of all the desert dust I’d breathed in over the past five years. I’d been a coward. I deserved to be alone. The fact of it made me squirm behind the steering wheel.

I could picture the inside of their home. I could feel myself moving through it the way any good thief could. I took one look at the place and immediately started plotting, deciding which tools I might need, what time I would go in. I’d enter through the quaint French doors that opened up to the patio deck, where Chub had actually staked tiki lamps ringing the yard. The outer edges of the doors didn’t match the house paint, meaning they’d been installed after Kimmy and Chub had moved in. Any alarm system probably wouldn’t be attached.

I’d slip into the dining room where a large breakfront would have Kimmy’s mom’s china on display. It was the kind of thing her mother would do, handing the good stuff down. Family history had always meant something to Kimmy. We’d met because of it.

No chimney, so no fireplace. So no mantel. But there’d be shelves for the photos. A huge wedding portrait hanging on the far wall. They would’ve been married out at Shalebrook Lake. A smallish gathering of only close friends and Kimmy’s family. Chub had been on his own since he was sixteen. I had no idea who his best man might’ve been. Kimmy’s father? That sounded right. Chub in a white-jacketed tux, Kimmy in a subdued but still breathtaknedl breathting dress. The photographer telling them to gaze into each other’s eyes, hold up the champagne glasses as if in a toast, stand at the rim of the water. They would’ve had to be careful because of the duck shit.

The opposite wall would be devoted to Scooter. A few large and fancy baby pictures. At least a couple of those family portraits with the child looking one way and Chub and Kimmy with faraway expressions and faintly perplexed smiles. One or two of the hanging frames would be slightly askew. I’d straighten them as I passed by.

The living room would have formal but comfortable furniture, the kind that had no real personality but that you could lie on without fear of wrecking it. Scooter’s toys would be piled in their own corner. Dolls and stuffed animals and pull-string gadgets that would teach her a cow said moo, a cat went meow. All of them neatly stacked. Chub was a neat freak in his own way, carefully organized and meticulous. It’s what made him such a good mechanic and getaway planner. The carpeting would be gray, something to hide dirt. There would be doormats to wipe your feet on and a small tiled foyer where you were expected to leave your shoes.

The banister leading upstairs would be polished and glossy, the corners of the stairs well vacuumed. Their bedroom would have a little more character, at least a couple of pieces of antique furniture. The headboard from some nineteenth-century captain’s home on the North Fork, with a carving of a three-mast square-rigged blowing-mainsail whaling ship dead center. When they made love, they’d have to prop the pillows just so, to keep from getting welts.

At around three in the afternoon Chub pulled into the driveway. I slid farther down in my seat even though he didn’t glance in any direction except Kimmy’s as he crossed the lawn. She brushed her hair back with the side of her glove and left a dirt smear across her forehead. For some reason it made me groan.

Chub had lost a little weight and grown a Vandyke that he kept well trimmed. It suited his face. He’d started losing his hair as a teenager and now kept his head shaved. He walked with a light step. He practically skipped after Scooter, who squealed with laughter and tried to run away. He scooped her up, set her on his shoulder, and spun around while she held her arms high, fingertips brushing blossoming buds on the ends of tree branches. She slid down into his arms, where he held her tightly against his chest and marched over to Kimmy. They kissed and then he pressed his forehead to hers for a moment.

Nothing they did was out of the ordinary, but it seemed exceptional to me. I saw the life I wanted, or the life I thought I wanted. The only part that was ugly was the creeper parked on the other side of the street, staring at them.

Chub had put in only a half day. His clothes looked too clean and fresh for a grease monkey. Maybe he’d gone legit and let other mechanics work under the hoods and transoms at his garage, but I couldn’t see him stepping out of the game completely. He certainly hadn’t crawled under any soccer mom’s SUV today. So what else was he doing with his time? Paperwork? He’d still be known on the circuit. Crews and strings would still be coming to him for engine work and plotting getaway routes. Was he turning them away? Or did he just pick and choose more carefully now?

I grabbed the door handle like I might climb out. And do what?

I could step up their brick path and watch as Chub turned and saw me, hit his usual pose of cool, sort of locking his legs and leaning back. He’d invite me in and it would be awkward at first, Kimmy unsure of what to say or how to act, il th to act, l at ease that I was there at all because I’d be staring at her. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. But soon things would loosen up. We’d act a little stupid, joke around, and share old stories. Nothing serious would be broached until later, after the beer bottles started to pile up. Chub would be thankful I’d deserted Kimmy. It had allowed him to step in. But he’d still resent me and consider my leaving a betrayal of our friendship if nothing else. His face would fall and that wounded expression would cross it inch by inch, starting with the frown lines in his forehead and down to his lower lip, which he’d be chewing on. Eventually he’d taste blood and stare at me for a lengthy time, steeling himself to either grab one of the bottle necks and crack me across the temple or let most of his anger slide and give me a hug.

Kimmy wouldn’t have any of it. She would still hate me. She would always hate me. I didn’t blame her. I hated me too.

Even as she said, It’s good to see you. How’ve you been? I’d know what was really moving through her heart. The real questions she wanted to ask, the honest indictments she would make. I’d left her alone to wallow through the misery of the miscarriage and our broken engagement. I’d left her to endure the onslaught of questions and insinuations by her family and friends as they snapped open the headlines and came at her, saying, This mass murderer, this sicko. He’s your boyfriend’s brother, isn’t he?

All those bodies left behind in Collie’s wake, but the only one that meant anything to her would be ours, the one that hadn’t come to full term, which she’d lost without anyone knowing, without anyone to console her. Not even me.

With a sharp tug I angled the rearview mirror so I could see them in it. See myself with them. I ran different scenarios. I saw other ways to impress myself upon the world. I could ease out of the car, move across the lawn as if it had been me who spent a thousand hours pushing the mower back and forth, using the edger to trim the borders, the way my father did, the way Chub did. Drop him with a shot to the kidneys. Kneel before the baby and hand her a teddy bear, get her to giggle, draw her into my arms. Lift her up and move to Kimmy, then press my forehead to hers, smell the loam, taste her life. Turn my back to Chub coughing in the grass and dream him gone. It’s what we all did when we wanted something badly enough. Let the irrational thoughts slip through, the idea that by sheer force of belief we could make things change, adjust, divert, back up. It’s what a thief does in the shadows, willing himself to vanish.

Step inside with my family and put the baby in her crib and take Kimmy by the hand to the bedroom and love her the way I would’ve if I hadn’t run away in my weakness and fear. I clutched the door handle until my fingers were white and cramped. I forced myself to let go. I cocked the rearview mirror back to where it belonged. When I looked over again, the front lawn was empty except for one pink barrette and the plastic bowl, tilted on its side.

8

The screw whose house I’d crept made me go through the same regimen as the day before. I spoke my true name. He led me to the small side room where I was frisked. He was a little rougher this time and clenched my nuts hard enough to make me grunt. Again I was politely asked if I would voluntarily succumb to a strip search.

I thought, I know what your wife’s lingerie looks like. Youust fix Tl drove to work today without a license, without any credit cards in case of an emergency.

He repeated the question.

I told him to fuck himself.

Instead of telling me to leave, the screw moved me along.

I was led to the visiting room full of long tables that Collie had pointed out to me yesterday, where we could talk face-to-face. It was rough enough talking to my brother on a phone with reinforced glass between us. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get so close to him.

The screw held me in place with his palm against my chest. I could see Collie seated across from a woman who was talking animatedly. Pages of open books and legal pads in front of her flipped to and fro. She tapped them angrily. When she tossed her head a lash of glossy black hair whipped through the air. She wore a dark business suit with killer heels and glasses with thin black frames that accentuated the sharp Asian angles of her face. No matter how she turned I couldn’t see her eyes, only the glowing reflection of the ceiling lights in her lenses. Collie looked cowed, his chin down like he was a berated child. I thought, What in the fuck. I’d never seen my brother shrink like that before. It simultaneously elated and unnerved me.

“Don’t shake his hand,” the screw told me. “Don’t pass him anything or take anything offered.”

“Right.”

Three minutes later the woman gathered up her belongings and packed them into a briefcase. She leaned in to say goodbye to him and their lips met briefly. She pushed her seat back and moved to the door. It opened and she walked past me. She stepped like a thief, her footsteps silent.

I was ushered in. Collie stood and sort of jumped forward just to spook the screw. It worked. The tension thickened. Then Collie let loose with a laugh. The sound of the door slamming and the lock turning bothered me worse than it had yesterday.

Collie gripped me in a bear hug.

“We’re not supposed to touch,” I said.

“I’m going to die in less than two weeks. If I want to hug my own brother I goddamn will.” He pushed me off, took me by the shoulders. “Thanks for coming back. I knew you would.”

“Yeah, how?”

“Because you’re a good man.”

I didn’t know what the hell to say to that. He gestured to the visitor’s chair like we were about to have a beer and watch a ball game together.

“Who was that woman?” I asked. “Your lawyer?”

“That’s Lin. My wife.” He tried to grin but all it did was bring out the deep furrows in his face. “I got married a year ago. I didn’t tell the family about it, figured they wouldn’t want to know. In the beginning I just thought she was another one of these jailbird pen pals. I get boxes of mail a week. Everybody on death row does. It’s a weird cultural phenomenon, the way some women get turned on by-” He knew enough not to go on. “Well, anyway. But something in Lin’s letters reached me. She started visiting and one thing led to another.”

I tried to process everything he’d just said. “One thing led to another?”

“Yeah.”

A demented lonely hearts reads about a mass murderer and decides this is her psycho soul mate, hersoul matethis is the man she’s been waiting for all her life? A guy who butchers children?

I thought, Jesus Christ. What if he goes out with a bang and gets her pregnant? I could see the woman showing up on my parents’ porch, holding a half-Asian baby, going, Say hello to little Li, your grandson.

My father wouldn’t even sigh. My mother would turn away, grit her teeth, steel herself, then smile and feed and welcome them. Later, perhaps years later, she would lock herself in the bathroom and fold herself up in the corner and cry silently until someone needed something from her.

Collie let out a chuckle. “Well, say something.”

My tongue felt covered in moss. I fought not to glare. I pushed off my disgust. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“What was she so angry about?”

“We’ll get to that.”

“All right.”

He showed those teeth and I loathed his smile. It said that he had me in his hand, that he could make me come to him whenever he called. I’d thrown a hundred fists into that smile and I’d never hit it even once. Collie was faster than me, stronger than me. I could feel the superiority in him bleeding through even under these circumstances. I listed the things he might say that would force me to leave.

If he mentions Kimmy, if he asks me to help pay for a new attorney, if he talks about my fucking tan again. I thought, The minute he opens his mouth I’m out of here. It took me another moment to realize that I didn’t have to be here. That I wanted to be here. That I needed to be here for some reason I didn’t understand but my brother did. Maybe I hated him. Maybe I wanted to see him die. Maybe I wanted to pull the switch.

“You saw the family,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“How’s it been?”

“Fine. It’s been good.”

“Everybody okay?”

“They’re fine. They’re good.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You’re lying, Terry.”

“So fucking what?”

“Don’t break Ma’s heart again.”

“I don’t take advice from dead men walking.”

He was making me question myself again. I wondered how he managed to swing it so easily.

His smile dropped and he ran a hand through his gray hair and a lot of my rage receded. He looked like an elderly man to me now. His manicure had dimmed, his nails had dirt under them. Then I realized they were paint chips. In the long night he probably scratched at the walls or the bars. What else was there for him to do? His freshest scars shone pink in the light. I wondered if he’d fought with other cons or the guards or both. For an instant it seemed to matter. I wanted to ask him who his enemies were. If the victims’ families ever tried to see him, if he ever spoke with them. If the rest of his mail was from people wishing him slow agony or a quick pop of city-grid voltage. I wanted to ask him about his nightmares. I knew he had them. I wondered if they were worse than mine.

“Collie, "1e1C;Collieyou said you wanted me to save someone.”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” He muttered under his breath, like he was speaking to someone else in the room. “The next one.”

“The next one?” I said. “The next one what?”

“The next girl.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Rebecca Clarke.”

The girl he’d strangled in Autauk Park a mile from the Elbow Room, where he’d been drinking, a couple miles from the trailer park where the mobile home had been parked. “I don’t understand. She’s already dead.”

“Listen to me, Terry, this is important. I need you to do something for me-”

“I need something from you first, Collie. I want you to tell me about that night.”

The temperature in the room felt like it dipped twenty degrees. My flesh started to crawl. Our gazes caught and held. I had once loved him more than anyone else in the world. I had once feared him more than anyone else as well. Maybe I still did. We were too much alike. There are sibling rivalries that dissipate and others that become wars of wills and knives. I remembered all the faces of all the girls he’d stolen from me. I recalled their names, the taste of their lips, the feel of their bodies in my arms. I knew my brother wouldn’t recollect any of them. The nerves in my fingertips tingled. My tongue was too large for my mouth. My teeth were too sharp. I needed to know the answer.

“You’ve already read about it,” he said. “You already know most of it.”

“I want to hear about it from you.”

“What’s that going to give you except nightmares? You remember how you used to wake up screaming as a kid?”

I leaned forward. I thought, We could do it. We could cut loose and kill each other in less than a minute. The guards wouldn’t be able to get in here fast enough.

“How about if the child-killer doesn’t fucking analyze me, huh?”

“Hate me if you want but-”

“What, you think I need your permission to hate you? You think this is something new?”

“No.”

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 beat to death outside a convenience store, a young woman strangled in a park.

“The little girl. Say her name, damn you.”

“Susan Coleman.”

“Suzy.”

“Suzy Coleman.”

“Say the rest.”

“There’s no point to this, Terry.”

“Say them or I’m out of here forever.”

He spoke without expression. The words dropped from him like he was reading a baseball lineup. “Paul Coleman. Sarah Coleman. Tom Coleman. Neal Coleman. Suzy Coleman.”

“The rest.”

“Doug Schuller was the guy I knifed in thvacnifed in e gas station. Mrs. Howard I pummeled with my fists. I hit her four, maybe five times.”

No remorse. No scourging of conscience. It wasn’t hidden in the folds of his face, it wasn’t hovering beneath the surface of his calm. His eyes were the eyes of my brother, no different than they’d ever been.

“None of them was robbed, Collie. You didn’t even take anything from the register at the gas station.”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“There is no answer. I just did it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

Gramp Shepherd had called it going down into the underneath. That moment when desperation, rage, or momentary madness drove you out of your head and forced you to do something stupid and terrible. He’d always warned us. He told us to be aware of it, to watch for it, to know that when that trapped feeling hit, you couldn’t let it make you lose control.

“What made it happen? What provoked you?”

“There was no provocation, it just happened.”

“You went mad dog for nothing?”

“It just happened.”

“Suzy Coleman. The girl in the mobile home-”

“Why are you hung up on the girl? Not the old lady? Nobody else? Only the girl, huh?”

Saying it like I should be ashamed.

“You told me you were making ghosts. What’s that mean?”

“Don’t talk about them. Don’t think about them. That’s not what you’re here for.”

“Don’t think about them?”

“No. It’ll just be distracting for you. There’s only one person you need to wonder about, that you need to ask about. Rebecca Clarke.”

“Why only her?”

“Because I didn’t kill her.”

I rubbed my eyes. I made a scoffing sound.

“So why didn’t you say anything about it before now?” I asked.

Collie looked at me with a mischievous expression, almost wearing a sad grin. He said nothing.

“What? You thought maybe you didn’t remember strangling a teenager?”

He said, “I wasn’t sure.”

“Then how can you be sure now?”

“There have been more.”

“More?”

“More young women who look an awful lot like Rebecca Clarke have been killed.”

I couldn’t look at him anymore. I stared over his shoulder at the wearisome white stone walls and tried to make sense of what he was saying. “How do you know that?”

“Lin’s been doing research. There have been other women murdered in similar ways since I’ve been in here. And at least one that happened about six months before I-”

“Tell the cops.”

“They don’="jdonȁt believe me.”

“I don’t either.”

He paused and the pause lengthened into a heavy silence, and finally he snapped his fingers to get my attention again. “I want you to look into it.”

“Look into what?”

“Becky’s murder. And the others.”

“Becky?”

He pursed his lips and turned away to say something to his audience. His stony eyes focused on me again. His tongue prodded the inside of his cheek. He cleared his throat.

“Talk to Lin, she has notes for you. She’s been investigating.”

“Oh, Christ, Collie.”

He started getting excited. The jazzy bop rhythm worked back into his voice. “Young women strangled around the island. Some even near the park, like Becky was.”

“Stop calling her Becky as if you were friends.”

“There’s been at least three more since I’ve been in here.”

“Collie, what the hell are you saying?”

“Someone else murdered Rebecca Clarke. And it looks like he’s been snuffing others. As many as five in the last six or seven years, maybe more, I don’t know. But the others, they all looked like her. Brunettes, pretty.”

I couldn’t hold back a bark of laughter. “That’s the description? Pretty brunettes? Someone’s killing pretty brunette teenagers?”

“They weren’t all teenagers. But they all looked similar, from what they tell me.”

“From what who tells you?”

“Lin.”

The new wife. The new psycho wife. If it was true and other women were being murdered, I figured that maybe she would be doing it. Trying to put the whole case in doubt. Strangling young girls because she’d always been turned on by the thought of murder. It was why she married a murderer. And now she had the perfect reason. She was killing for love.

“Fuck this,” I said.

“Listen to me, Terry. You’ve got to listen.” He pawed at his face but he wasn’t sweating. I was. “Someone’s out there snuffing women.”

“What do the cops say about all this?”

“They still think I did her.”

“So do I.”

“Check with Lin.”

“Check with Lin?”

“Stop repeating everything I say, Terry. Just do it.”

“Why? Why should I?”

“Because I’m asking you to.”

I slumped back. “You haven’t actually asked me anything, Collie. And that’s how I know you’re bullshitting. You’re giving orders, you’re pushing me around the way you always do. Fuck this nonsense.”

“Please, Terry. Please. I’m begging you.”

“You’re not begging me. You’re simply saying that you’re begging me. But why? Why do you care so much?”

Collie leaped up in frustration and I slipped out of the chair, put some space between us, got my fists up. My brother could be a fearsome sight, the way he moved like a caged beast waiting for the proper moment to strike. His eyes settled on me and he frowned, like I was an idiot to be afraid of him. He was detached from the horror of his own crimes. He had no idea how intimidating it might be for me to sit across from him, from those hands. They were powerful and menacing. They could strangle a young woman easily. They could do the same thing to me.

“Why wouldn’t I care?” he asked.

“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”

“I did. But no one believed me. Look, you’ve got to trust me on this.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Wait. Wait.” I mouthed the word again but nothing came out. Then there was a trickle of sound that turned into a chuckle thick with revulsion. “I have to trust you? And what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Ask questions.”

“Ask questions? That’s what you’re telling me to do? What does that even mean?”

“Find out who did it. Stop them.”

“Why do you care? What difference does it make now? Five years later?”

“I’ve been thinking about it a long time.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense. You iced one young girl but you want to see justice for another you claim you didn’t kill?”

“It’s not a claim, Terry. I didn’t kill her. I man up for my own crimes.”

“You’re not even sure!”

“I am sure now. Find Gilmore. You remember Gilmore?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, I remember Gilmore.”

“He still hangs around the house. He can probably put you in touch with the dicks who handled my case and the cases involving the other girls.”

“Why the hell would I want to surround myself with cops?”

“Because they think I’m lying.”

“I think you’re lying too.”

“No, you don’t. You think I was wrecked out of my mind and can’t remember, but you don’t think I’m lying.”

I didn’t like being corrected. “Actually, Collie, I do think you’re lying and I think you’re setting me up to take some kind of fall here. I don’t think you want to go out of the game alone.”

My brother didn’t have the capacity to look hurt. It wasn’t in his nature. I wasn’t sure if it was in his nature to even be hurt. But the look that crossed his eyes came as close as I’d ever seen.

I knew every muscle and vein and scar in my brother’s face. I’d seen him with a 106-degree fever and his eyes rolling back and showing only white from the agony of sepsis. I’d walked in on him more than once while he was in flagrante delicto, usually with one of my girls. I knew every twitch and tell he had.

I got in close. “Say it again.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

Maybe it was the truth. I jify truth. Iust didn’t understand why he was bothering to tell it now. It earned him nothing. He couldn’t buy his freedom or his life for it. And a mass murderer couldn’t possibly care about justice for a victim that wasn’t even his own.

The exhaustion and miles and edginess caught up to me in that moment. I slumped into the seat and dropped my chin to my chest, and before I knew it I felt tears on my face.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“No.”

“You are. For me?”

“Fuck no. I want to know what set you off.”

“Nothing.”

He’d spent the evening drinking at the Elbow Room. He’d gone on his spree and then returned to the bar, ordered a beer, and casually informed the bartender and patrons that he’d just murdered several people. He’d cracked open the.38 and unloaded the weapon. His knuckles were bruised but not bloodied or torn. It didn’t take much to beat an old woman to death. He waited without incident for the cops to show up. He confessed on the spot to what he had done.

I lifted my shirt and wiped my face. I breathed deep. I tried to calm myself. I could be cool and steady burgling the house of a cop while he slept six feet away from me. But my own brother made me a heaving mess.

“Something had to,” I insisted.

“No.”

“You had no drugs in your system. You’d only had a few beers.”

“Yeah.”

“So you were sitting in the Elbow Room, minding your own business, having a pilsner by yourself-”

“A Corona.”

“-having a Corona by yourself, and you decided, Hey, I need to go out and kill a bunch of people.”

“It wasn’t a decision,” he said. “It just… happened. I’m not lying. I haven’t lied to you yet, Terry.”

“You told me you were making ghosts. Why did you do it?”

“Stop asking.”

“Was it because of a woman?” I asked.

“What woman?”

“How the fuck do I know what woman? Any woman.”

“Why would a woman make me-”

“How the fuck do I know why? For any reason.”

“No, it wasn’t a woman, Terry. Listen to me.”

“Listen to you!” I jumped out of the chair. His voice, or my own, was too loud inside my head, and I couldn’t hear myself anymore. “You listen to me!” I shouted. “Are you…?” The words caught in my throat. I tried to cough them free. I couldn’t catch any air. I tried again, my voice sounding nothing like me, sounding, in fact, more like him. He stood and reached for me. I backed away. “I mean, I know you’re crazy, you had to be, you have to be… but man, Jesus, Collie, really, just… just… are you fucking insane?”

“No.”

I stumbled toward the door while he continued to plead with me. He said her name agai4; &r name agn. Becky Clarke. It’s all he cared about. Not the other kills on his conscience, not what he was doing to our family. I hammered at the door like a terrified child. It brought the screws running. I was so pale that they checked me for shiv wounds.

My Christ, I thought, I have the same blood running through my veins.

9

You walk into a department store and there are security cameras and undercover employees everywhere. You try to creep an apartment building and you have to get past a front door, a security door with an automatic lock, closed-circuit television, and a doorman who gets paid by the pound. You want to score a warehouse and you’ve got a couple of twenty-year-old fuckup minimum-wage rent-a-cops patrolling the grounds just waiting to pull their revolvers, dive and roll, snap off six wild shots, and blow somebody’s face away.

But if you want to slip in somewhere that’s full of people, action, money, drugs, weapons, where no one even looks at you much less questions you, then try a police station about six P.M., dinnertime.

Cops are hungry and tired and wanting to get home. They’re sloppy and sign out early. The ones left around figure that if you’re in the squad room you must have a good reason. You’re a victim, you’re waiting to make a complaint, look at mug shots, sign a statement. If they don’t recognize you and you’re not part of their caseloads then they don’t want anything to do with you. They’re already burdened with unsolved crimes and vics and pains in the ass of every stripe. They pretend to be busy and refuse to meet your eye. They don’t check up on you. They hope the next cop down the line will take care of you instead.

First thing I did when I walked into the squad room was scan the on-call board. Gilmore had the late shift and wouldn’t be on until midnight. I went looking for his desk.

I recognized the framed photo of his two daughters, Maggie and Melanie. It was an old picture. No snapshots of his wife. A happily married man always puts a photo of his wife on his desk. He changes the pictures of his kids and keeps them up-to-date, unless they no longer live at home with him. Like my father had said, Phyllis had finally walked out and taken their daughters with her.

I sat in his chair and went through his desk hoping I might find Collie’s jacket or files on the case. It was a long shot and I came up empty. I did find an old rent receipt that gave me Gilmore’s new address. I knew the apartment house. The neighborhood was good, but he wasn’t paying much. Police discount.

Cops walked past me by the boatload. They dragged in suspects who whined and complained and tried to look menacing. They threatened to sue, wanted their lawyers, proclaimed their innocence. The cops ignored them. So did I.

Under Gilmore’s phone was a directory sheet of extension numbers. I called the archives room and asked them to bring up Collie Rand’s file. Some old-timer gave me static about proper channels.

I kept my voice quiet but filled with a self-righteous sharpness. “Move your wrinkled ass, pops. Protocol takes time and we don’t have any to waste.”

The geezer sputtered. I told him to leave the file on my desk in the next ten minutes, even if I wasn’t there. That brought another round of protests. I cut him off. “If you don’t get moving now you fiI kn d’ll work the last of your thirty on the bay this winter. It’ll be the boat for you. You got insulated drawers, old-timer? You ever seen hypothermia of the ball sac? You want to go out of the game with your ex-wives knowing you’ve lost your package?”

I hung up.

The desk next to Gilmore’s was also unoccupied. I went and sat over there and watched the squad room fill and empty. I went to the little kitchenette area and got myself a cup of coffee and a stale bagel. It wasn’t until I took the first bite that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was starving.

Gilmore was one of those cops who had more in common with the criminals he was trying to put away than with the rest of the joe-citizen world. He’d been in trouble himself as a teenager, orphaned early and kicked around the foster-family system, spent some time in the juvie reformatory and then county lockup later on. He’d steal a car, go joyriding, get laid in the backseat, then return it a couple of days later.

He had his big turnaround when he tried to outrun a statie with his girlfriend riding shotgun and got into a minor crackup on the LIE that cost her the full use of her right arm. He did a nine-month jolt, came out, and started going to a community college. Must’ve stood on tippy-toes to get him over the police height requirement and graduated middle of the pack at the academy. For years he kept changing divisions-bunko, vice, narco-but they all brought him around to Big Dan Thompson.

Big Dan had a way of working his magic on a cop like Gilmore. Gilmore wasn’t dirty but he was just bent enough to help Big Dan out on occasion. So if Dan knew a little about one of the rival syndicates-the Chinese, the Colombians, the Russians-maybe what time a shipment was coming in or who pulled the trigger on some witness for the D.A., he’d turn Gilmore on to it for some kind of trade. Nothing that couldn’t be considered a legal gray area. Maybe Gilmore would let one of Big Dan’s boys off on a leg-breaking rap or he wouldn’t get around to popping one of the big games even when he knew about it. I never found out if Big Dan gave Gilmore a monthly envelope, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Gilmore had a wedge of Dan’s cash hidden in a lockbox buried in his yard someplace.

Gilmore hooked on to me when I was sixteen because he suspected I was the one pulling burglaries in Dix Hills, a ritzy neighborhood where some of the residents had clout with the town council. He was right, I was. He followed me for days, trying to catch me climbing into someone’s window. He dragged in known fences and tried to get them to roll on me.

He braced me hard the first time-cuffs, twelve hours in the holding tank without a phone call, no food or toilet break, threats against the family-and then later he tried playing soft, telling me about his own run-in with the law, giving me his whole life story. I thought he was lying but later on found out it was all true.

While he chased after me, I watched him. He was a little bulldog who seemed to be running from himself. It was written in his face. He eventually caught on that the Rands were satellite members of the Thompson crew and started coming around the house. At first he just rousted my father and uncles and Collie, trying to pick up information in exchange for favors. Except the Rands didn’t play that kind of game.

For some reason, he seemed to like the family. He couldn’t hide his interest in us. I knew it was because he’d never had a family of his own, no father to talk to about guys like Big Dan. He rousted us less and less and starwidss and stted hanging around. Eventually he began sitting out on the porch, having beers with my father. My mother knew the birthdays of his kids and would send cards.

One time Gilmore found me reading to Dale and said, “That’s not how you do it. You have to work the voices, put on a show. When the vampires bite, you have to pull back your lips, show teeth.” He told me how he read children’s books to his two daughters, the way he’d get into character, the different voices he’d use. At the time his daughters were three and four, and Dale was ten. He didn’t think it mattered.

When Collie dove into the underneath Gilmore actually came around and tried to console my parents. He hugged my mother and patted my father’s arm. He brought flowers like he was attending a funeral. He didn’t cry with them but I could see that he was trying to. I thought, even then, Gilmore, he’s going to be the one in the end who gets close enough to stick in the knife.

I finished my bagel and scarfed down two more. When I returned to Gilmore’s desk Collie’s file was there. Five files, actually, stuck inside a huge accordion folder. I photocopied everything. I had a stack of about a hundred pages. I found a couple of thick rubber bands in Gilmore’s junk drawer and snapped them around the bundle. I called the geezer back and told him to come pick up the file. He started yelling and I said, “You did good, pops, you may have just saved a life,” and walked out.

10

JFK met me at the bottom of the driveway. He looked regal and aware, his eyes lit by the setting sun. I got the sense that he knew there was potential trouble coming down from different quarters and he planned on being ready for it.

I left the thick sheaf of paperwork under the passenger seat and slid out of the car. As I moved up the walk I called JFK to me, but he remained staunchly on guard, continuing his watch.

I passed the trash can and thought of chucking all the pages in and forgetting my brother had said anything at all. I thought I could very easily live in denial back at the ranch or at another one like it. I had already done it for five years. I could do it for another fifty. If anyone asked if I had a brother I could say no or say yeah, he lives back east, or say he was dead without explaining anything more. I could sleep well without any remorse for never following up.

My old man was inside with my mother, watching television with Gramp. My uncles and sister were nowhere in sight. I could hear my dad talking to his father as if he might get coherent responses. My mother did the same thing. They were having a lively conversation that would sound buoyant to anyone else but sounded strained to me.

They weren’t doing it just for Gramp’s benefit, hoping to keep what little personality he had left alive for as long as they could. They were doing it for themselves because it was the only way they could possibly accept the burden of caring for him. Pretending that it mattered. I imagined that when my father spoke to Old Shep he heard the man’s deep voice talking back to him. His thunderous laughter so forceful that you had to lean away from it.

I tried to figure out how much I should tell them. Would it make them feel any better that Collie now admitted to killing only seven people instead of eight? Hell, I decided to say nothing. It wasn’t much of a decision. It was the path of least resistance. When you heard someone at the door, you dove out the window. Avoides ›You tl confrontation, hide or run away. I’d been doing it my whole life.

I walked in and my parents immediately quit their little performance. I vibed that there was a darker subtext to their benign chatter. I wondered if the news crews had been more aggressive after I left, banging on the door, asking my mother where I’d been these last few years, why I was back, if I’d been in prison too. If I had blood on my hands too.

My father asked me, “Hungry? Got some leftovers. Steak and mashed potatoes, yams, corn on the cob. Your favorite.”

It was my favorite. It was also Collie’s favorite. I had no doubt he’d ask for it for his last meal. All I’d eaten today were the rubbery stale bagels. My guts were knotted and I had cramps. My stomach made a weird sound and I said, “Maybe later.”

“You know where the fridge is.”

My mother was watching me intently. I could tell that she knew I’d visited the prison again despite her warning not to go. Her eyes flashed and I could feel her reading exactly where I’d been each minute of the day. The meeting with Danny, the stalking of Kimmy, the face-to-face with Collie. I wondered if I should tell her that Collie had gotten married behind bars like all the rest of those death-row douche bags.

She tucked a few coarse strands of Gramp’s hair back behind his ear, then did the same with her own soft auburn curls. She was gathering herself.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Jesus Christ, considering you’ve lived with second-story men all your life, you’re a really awful liar. What is it, Ma?”

“You should rest, Terry, you look tired.”

“I should rest? What is it? Dale?”

She glanced at my father.

So there it was. “Okay, it’s Dale. What about her?”

My mother pulled a face. I looked at my father as he sipped his beer. He grinned at me in that way that said, Your ma, you know how she is.

My father took the lead. “Your mother found a pack of condoms in Dale’s jeans in the wash.”

“Okay. That just proves she’s being careful.”

Ma shook her head. “It’s not that she’s having sex… well, all right, I’m having some issues with that, but it’s natural and we’ve had our woman-to-woman talk already. But-” She drew air through her teeth.

My father and I waited. We kept waiting. I cracked before he did.

“But what?”

“We don’t like the boy very much.”

I looked at my dad. He shrugged.

“The Rands are now judging character?” I asked.

“No, I’m not saying that, not at all. Not really. But there’s something about him, Terry. I don’t trust him. I don’t like him. He’s older. Technically it’s statutory rape.”

“We calling the cops?”

She wasn’t being overprotective and wasn’t really worried about Dale because she’d found a pack of condoms. I could see that in the way my mother was forcingthaust the issue. This was something else. She turned, and her gold-flecked gaze not only pinned me to the wall but frisked me as well.

“Go talk to her,” she said.

I let out a small nervous laugh. I didn’t know my teenage sister. I couldn’t imagine talking to her about her boyfriend. “Ma-”

My father drained the rest of his beer. “It might not be such a bad idea.”

“No,” I said. “It’s a very bad idea.”

“You’re her brother. The only one she has left. She wanted to have breakfast with you. She saw you book out.”

He stopped short. I knew what was supposed to come next, those things my father would never say. We all wanted to have breakfast with you. We waited. We were in good spirits. But you ran off. What does Collie want with you? Why did you choose him over us?

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Where else?” my mother said. “The lake. It’s still the place where all the kids go. That boy, he’ll be there. See what you think of him. Whether I’m just being overly concerned.” She hit me with a hard gaze. “Or whether he’s trouble. Real trouble.”

I nodded. I trusted her. It wasn’t about the condoms. It wasn’t her being clingy. She knew he was bad news and wanted me to check it out.

Dad got up, went to the fridge, and made me a steak sandwich. “Here, eat this. Those ranch hands might not mind listening to a man’s guts growling, but you don’t want to embarrass your sister in front of her friends.”

But that’s exactly what I was going to do. You don’t just show up to check out your little sister’s boyfriend and wind up on her good side.

My dad sat again and my parents started talking to Gramp as if the hollow conversation had never stopped.

I thought, We as a family, we Rands, we have some significant issues.

I ate my sandwich in five bites and then raided the fridge for whatever else I could find. I made two more sandwiches, finished up some potato salad, two slices of apple pie, and a half gallon of milk.

I needed to regroup. It had been a long and emotional day already and my head was still ringing like a call to vespers. I sat on the porch digesting and looked out over the yard thick with shadows. There were a lot of places I wouldn’t let my mind go. Too many bear traps that made any kind of reflection difficult to maneuver. I couldn’t think of Kimmy and Scooter any more tonight, couldn’t imagine Collie’s victims for another minute. I didn’t want to think that Chub might still be working with strings pulling scores, that he was going to go down hard one day and leave his family all alone. I didn’t want to be faced with the realization that I almost hoped it would happen soon, that I’d have my chance with her again once he was tucked away for twelve to fifteen.

11

I got in the car and forced my attention away from my brother’s files stuffed under the seat. I called JFK to see if he wanted to come along to the lake. He took a step forward like he might clamber in, shook his head as if he’d thought better of it, then marched up the porch steps.

It wasn’t until I was on the road that I realized I didn’t know what kind of car the boyfriend drove, or if he drove at all. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t even know his name. Worse than all that, I feared I might not recognize my own sister.

The kids had taken over the parking area of Shalebrook Lake and spread out with their cars, pickups, and Jeeps across the back fields. They’d set up mini tailgate parties the way we used to do it, truck radios on, milling around coolers packed with beer. The park lamps did a fair job of illuminating the paths and picnic grounds.

I started searching among the groups for Dale. I had no idea where to look. There had to be two hundred kids drifting about. I wandered among them. I was young but not quite young enough, and the gray patch made me stand out. I caught some glowers and scowls. I looked just like what I was: an edgy older brother.

Heavy bass tracks and guttural lyrics moaned from car to car. They kept their radios low so there wasn’t a war of music, just a low humming and groaning punctuated by an occasional caterwaul or whine.

So long as no one started a bonfire and everybody threw their beer bottles in the trash cans or took them back home again, the cops wouldn’t come down too hard. Cruisers usually stopped in a few times a night on the weekends just to make their presence known and keep the peace.

Chub and I used to get badgered by the cops a little more frequently than everyone else. It didn’t matter. It helped to build the legend, something that seemed important when I was seventeen. I had some small claim to fame and hung my hat on it. I wondered if Dale did the same thing.

I’d glimpsed her for only a minute this morning, and I knew how different a girl could look hanging out with the crowd at night than she did at home in the daylight. I imagined walking up to a teenager and discussing condoms, only to get hauled off by the cops for talking to the wrong girl.

Those teen-vampire romance novels she adored so much had left their mark on her generation. Most of the girls were dressed in black and red, tight low-slung jeans, lace and velvet blouses, long leather coats. A lot of makeup attentively applied to accent lips and eyes.

I made two complete circuits of the area before I finally homed in on her.

Dale seemed to be in her element among the crowd, weaving between tribes, drifting. I took up a perch beside a tree, lit a cigarette, and watched. She was the popular chick, everyone focusing on her, circling her, asking her opinion. She held a bottle of beer but sipped from it rarely. She was offered a joint and a cigarette and passed them both by. She laughed quaintly, almost shyly, but with a gorgeous smile and her neck tilted back. Her lips were strikingly red, cheekbones heavy with purple makeup that almost looked like bruises. Boys put their arms around her but only briefly. She kept on the move. I couldn’t tell which might be the boyfriend, if any of them.

Beneath a tight, short leather jacket she wore a skimpy black T-shirt that left her midriff exposed. She had a lot of shake when she walked. I saw that she’d gotten a small tattoo near her navel. At this distance I couldn’t make the tat out. You couldn’t get a tattoo if you were under eighteen, not even if a parent said it was okay, and my mother never would have. That meant she had a fake ID. That sort of shocked me and it shouldn’t have. Damn near everyone had fake identification. Fifteen seemed so much younger to me now than it once had.

I kept trying to see my little sister within the young woman before me. I’d missed out on some of the most important years of her life. I wondered how well she remembered me. I thought she must hate me. Not only had one of her brothers totally fucked himself and the family over and then vanished from her life, but almost immediately afterward so had the other. I wondered how I could have done it to her. I wondered how I could have done it to any of them.

A thousand fatuous questions wafted through my head. I tossed the butt and lit another cigarette. A hard breeze made the branches flap and residual rainwater shook across the field. Kids laughed. A bottle broke and hysteria-laced giggles erupted. Car engines rumbled. A drunk kid took a header and almost fell into the lake.

Dale was breaking from one group and heading toward another. I made my way toward her on an intercept course. She sensed me before I’d taken five steps and turned. She made a beeline for me. I saw that her tattoo was of her namesake, an Airedale. She had a ring through her navel, and the dog was posed as if leaping through it. I thought that was kind of cute. She wore no expression but her eyes blazed.

“What are you doing here, Terry?” she asked.

“You called me, remember?”

“Not here in New York. I mean what are you doing here right now.

At the lake.”

“I just-”

“Mom sent you.”

I’d be stupid to deny it. After all this time the first words out of my mouth shouldn’t be lies. “Yeah.”

She sneered. The flickering golden light threw pools of shadow across her face. “Did you really come two thousand miles just to check on me?”

“No,” I said.

“But you’re going to do it anyway.”

“I thought we could talk a little.”

Her lips flattened. They were as red as if she’d just chewed through her wrist. “Now you want to talk?”

“I do, Dale.”

“About what?”

She was like the rest of the Rands. Her anger and hurt had been locked so far down inside that when they sluggishly awoke and crawled out they became a monstrous and frightful thing. I saw them emerging. I turned my face aside.

It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have cut out and run this morning. And I definitely shouldn’t have let her catch me doing it.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Anything.”

“Anything.” The word hung there. “I don’t know that I like you following me. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’ve been here for a while watching me. What gives you the right? You haven’t even said hello. You haven’t even asked me how I am, how I’m doing. You never called, Terry. Not even on my birthday. Never. You could’ve called.” Her voice was a low growl. “Even if you didn’t want to see any of us, you could’ve picked up the phone. You could’ve written. You could’ve let me know you were alive. You could’ve shown some concern, for even one minute. You could’ve done any of a thousand things, Terry, and you didn’t. Now you want to talk?”

I reached out and drew her into an embrace. My timing was off, as usual. I should’ve let her vent longer, bue d01D;t I thought that once she got started it might never stop. I was still avoiding responsibility.

She didn’t resist. She didn’t hug me back either. It was like holding on to a mannequin dressed like a young woman who sort of looked like my little sister. I kept at it, but there was no point. I let her go.

She said, “Is this where I’m supposed to forgive you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just that I wanted to hug you, all right?”

“You going to give me a lecture?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“About whatever you think I need lecturing on, Terry. That’s really why you’re here.”

“You’re confusing me, Dale.”

I wanted to ask her what she felt about Collie. I wanted to know how his reputation had affected her in school and elsewhere. If instead of being known as a child of the nefarious Rand clan of thieves she was now marked as the sister of a thrill killer. I stared at that smear of blood-colored wax over her lips. I was as bad as the rest of my family. I didn’t want to ask anything of real consequence for fear of being asked something meaningful in return.

“What did Mom and Dad say?”

“They found condoms in the laundry and they don’t like your boyfriend.”

“Ah, shit. So that’s where that pack went.”

“Always double-check your pockets, Dale. Always.”

“So now you’re reporting back to them.”

“I’m here because I wanted to see you and say I was sorry for running out this morning.”

We locked eyes. I tried to let her read me. I didn’t know what it would mean or how it would go down, but I made the effort. She seemed about as satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, and her lips eased into a small, soft smile. She turned aside for a moment, and when she turned back the smile was gone.

“You really came back for Kimmy, didn’t you? Not us. Not Collie.”

“I don’t know why I’m here, Dale.”

“At least you’re telling the truth now. That’s something. Did you see her yet?”

“I saw her. I didn’t talk to her.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

I shrugged. It was my father’s gesture. It was meant to deflect honesty, intimacy, and insight. I couldn’t make it a habit. “She’s married to Chub now. They have a kid. It’s not my place.”

“But you watched her.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“So what was the point of that?”

“Good question,” I said.

“Five years out there on a ranch beneath the big blue sky, lots of time to clear your head, and you come home with a brain as full of snakes as when you left.”

I lifted my chin and studied her face. “Fifteen and you know everything there is to know, eh?t? & br”

“Not quite.”

“Right.”

“Okay, so she found condoms. What parent is going to like the guy who’s having sex with their little girl?”

“That’s a mature way to look at it, Dale.”

“I do my best.”

“I’m glad. So how about if you introduce me to the guy and we leave it at that?”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you don’t.”

The wind grew stronger. I could smell more rain in the air, another storm rolling in. Dale’s hair flapped in the breeze and for a second I saw the little girl I remembered, slipping off to sleep with her head on a Princess Lilliput pillowcase while I read about hepcat James Dean-looking blood drinkers who romanced the ladies across deep black fields beneath a hunter’s moon. A twinge of regret banked through me.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go meet the beau.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “seriously, that’s what you call him? The beau?”

“I do.”

She locked arms with me and drew me along as we threaded through the parked cars and the kids talking and getting wasted. She took me to a ’69 Chevy that looked like a 396-a speed demon, a racer with wide tires to hug the curves. Only the parking lights were on, glowing bright yellow as we approached. The radio groaned with a heavy bass.

The beau was propped up on the hood, laid out across his windshield, holding a beer and taking in the starshine. He was much older than I’d expected, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He shouldn’t have been dating a fifteen-year-old girl. My shoulders hitched.

He had darting eyes, and his nose had been broken at least once and badly set. It lent him a touch of character he hadn’t earned. He went shirtless and wore four black leather wristbands on his right forearm. Jeans cinched his waist, the seams straining as he slid off the hood. He was so skinny he looked half starved. He smelled of oil, acne ointment, and second-rate pot. A tattoo of foreign words was scrawled in black script along his left shoulder. His nose and bottom lip were pierced. He had a pencil beard that rode around the very edge of his jaw, no mustache.

“Butch, this is my brother Terry.” She gripped him around the waist so tightly he let out a little gasp. She glanced back at me. “Terry, meet Butch.”

We shook hands.

His voice had a focused edge to it, strong and clear, which I wasn’t expecting. “You’re the one who’s been out west,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“What’s that like?”

I had a hard time remembering. I strained to come up with an anecdote, a yarn, some kind of an accounting that would be good enough to tell to anyone who asked. But the harder I tried to recall the last half decade the less substantial it seemed. Fences, a lot of fencing, always in need of repair.

Luckily Butch didn’t really give a shit. He hadn’t waited for a response. “I think about heading out that way. You know, just getting on the road. Hitting three or four states in a couple days. Prairies. Farms. All those highways, all those exits. That’s glanwidot to be the life, right?”

I said, “Sure.”

I knew one thing. Dale and Butch might’ve hung around the lake most nights but they did a lot of cruising too. Nobody kept a machine like that and didn’t let out the clutch and tear up the streets. I could see them burning down Sunrise Highway, out past the barrens, flipping off the Hamptons and heading down to the beaches.

He was territorial the way most young men were, and he put on the same show. He kept a hand around her waist, rubbing his knuckles against her bare midriff, telling all the other punks around that she was his and his alone. I’d done it myself. I couldn’t hold it against him, except I did. A part of me wanted to kick his teeth out, but I supposed that was about par. It was his way of proving he had a bloom on her that her own flesh and blood never would.

He asked, “Hey, babe, can you get me another beer?”

“Of course. You want one, Terry?”

“No thanks,” I said.

She climbed into the backseat and I could hear her rattling a cooler. “We’re out. You want a Mike’s Hard Lemonade instead?”

Butch said, “What do you think?”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

“That’s my girl.”

Dale slipped off, walking briskly but with a sexy sashay. As she moved across the area I could see her silhouette appearing every so often in the blaze of headlights.

A fine drizzle started. I liked the feel of it. Trees bucked and branches swept to and fro, the lake showing small whitecaps.

“I might have a job for you,” Butch said.

“A job?”

“Yeah. I can’t say too much about it now, not until I get all the details. It’s not a bank or anything. A jewelry store. Family-owned. We take it a week from Tuesday.”

Now I understood what he meant about hitting three or four states in a couple of days. All the highways and exits. He was fantasizing about a crime spree, taking down scores across America, being a real outlaw. Like you didn’t have to plan as much. Like it was easier to escape the cops on the I-25 in the middle of Wyoming, twenty miles to the nearest exit, than it was dodging the staties on the Wantagh Parkway. I realized why he smelled like oil. It was gun oil.

My mother had good instincts. She knew a criminal when she saw one. This kid stank of trouble. I should’ve been sharper.

“I’ve got three men already,” Butch went on. “We need another for crowd control. It’s a small shop, but they’ve got a lot of employees. Like I said, family-owned, so they’ve got Mom and Dad in back, a couple of uncles doing inventory, sisters and cousins up front working the counters. The hardware will be clean, untraceable. Unless you’ve got your own piece you’d rather use. In and out in under four minutes.”

“I don’t do that,” I said.

He frowned. “You don’t do what?”

“That.”

“Hit jewelry stores?”

“I don’t carry a gun.”

He smiled like I’d just told a joke that hadn’t quite comew undere off. “Since when?”

“Since always.”

“But you’re a Rand.”

“And we don’t do that,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not.”

For some reason I was suddenly offended by the fact that he was standing here without a shirt. That scrawny chest on exhibit. His naked nipples steered toward me.

He bounced like he was being tickled and let out a small burp of a giggle. “You’re old-school thieves. You’re famous. Everybody knows what you’re all about.”

“No armed robbery.”

He cocked his head. “No exceptions, huh?”

“None.”

“Not even for a big enough payday? Let’s say, six figures?”

The kid was a fucking idiot. Jewelry was always the hardest thing to unload on a fence. Some pieces could be identified as readily as fingerprints. It had to pass through a lot of hands before anyone could turn it into cash. You saw maybe a dime off every dollar. For a five-man crew to see a hundred grand each you had to pull down a five-mil score. This mook would never be involved with that kind of a major haul.

In this town he wouldn’t even think about it unless he was in the good graces of the Thompson syndicate.

I asked the obvious question. “You do any work for Danny Thompson?”

“A little of this and that,” Butch said.

“What kind of this and that?”

“You know-things. Stuff.”

I watched Dale across the way, returning with a couple of beers. She could make it only a few steps before someone stopped her, chatted her up, got her laughing. She was pretty and popular and shouldn’t be hooked up with a twenty-year-old hood talking armed robbery. The rest of them looked like punks and assholes but at least they weren’t getting ready to take a five-to-seven rap.

I wondered if she was drawn to Butch because he was a thief like her brothers and father. If she felt more comfortable with him than some straight-A joe working at the Walmart and putting himself through night school. If she liked the smell of gun oil on him. I thought of this mutt on top of my sister. My fists tightened and my knuckles cracked. The pounding bass from his radio beat into my feet and moved up my legs, into my chest, and up through my brain.

I got in close, went nose-to-nose with Butch as he backed up and became trapped against the Chevy’s grille. He turned his hip to me as if to climb away.

He frowned and said, “Hey, man, hey-”

A little of this and that. Butch was one of the hangers-on. Back in Big Dan’s day I watched them come and go, guys trying to mob up who Dan would take advantage of for as long as he could. Get them to do some extra dirty work, the stuff he didn’t want to lay out on his own crew. But he’d always pay them something for the risk and trouble, even if they didn’t get any of the respect they were hoping for. Danny, though, I could see him running guys like Butch out to do everything from shining shoes to cleaning his rain gutters to pulling heists, just so he could skim off the top, paying them nothing and letting them drop wherever they fell.

“Stay away from him.”

“Why?”

“Because he uses guys like you.”

“You shouldn’t talk about Mr. Thompson that way, it’s not healthy. He’s got a lot of ears, even out here, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know what you’re saying.”

He hissed a laugh. He thought he was on the inside track, hip to the action, impervious to injury. I considered proving him wrong, chopping him in the throat or shattering that already ugly nose, but it would hurt Dale, and I couldn’t make my sister suffer any more than I already had.

It took him a few more seconds to realize how badly he’d fucked up. He’d presumed too much, spilled too much. His smarmy expression froze.

“Hey, man, hey. It’s cool, right? We’re cool?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a Rand. It’s not like you’re going to cause any trouble, am I right? Tell me if I’m wrong.”

I was a Rand. “Old school, Butch. I don’t blow anyone else’s scores.”

“Righteous.”

I backed away from his car, let the throbbing hum ease out of me, taking some of the agitation with it.

Dale returned and handed me a beer even though I hadn’t asked for one. What the hell. I drank quickly while Dale discussed how she and Butch met. It was my story. It was the same story as most of the kids here and the ones from my day and before, going back to my old man and my uncles and maybe to the Indians who’d originally owned the land. You hung around and eyed one another until someone eyed you back and then you decided if it was worth your time to launch ahead.

She hugged him. She mothered him. She cared about him. When the drizzle grew a bit harder, she got in the backseat and pulled out a shirt for him. He put it on reluctantly. She fixed the collar for him. I wasn’t going to be able to talk dirt with her.

“I’ve got to run,” I said.

Butch and I shook again. I looked at him like he was already in the can, his head shaved, tattooed with swastikas, on his knees for the Aryans.

“Good meeting you,” he said.

“You too.”

Dale took my hand and walked me back to my car. I found myself almost unconsciously studying the texture of her palms and the pads of her fingers. Had Dad sent her scurrying up drainpipes too? Could she pull a five-card lift?

She gave me a hug. “I’m glad you came out here to see me.”

“I am too.”

“What are you going to tell Ma?”

“That of all the things there are for her to worry about, you’re not one of them.”

“That’s sweet, but do you believe it?”

“I believe you’re smart and sharp. It won’t help, though. You know she’ll keep on her course.”

“I don’t expect anything different from her. That’s what we all do. Stay our course.”

I wanted to ask, And you? How are you handling everything?

“Love you,” she said, and spun away.

I got in behind the wheel and snapped the dome light on. I opened Butch’s wallet. I’d picked his pocket when he’d turned his hip to me. I hadn’t even intended to. It was as if he’d offered me the chance and my body had reacted.

I found out that his real name was Joe Cassidy. Now I knew where the Butch came from and probably where the crime-spree fantasies had originated too. He had six dollars in singles. A suspended driver’s license with a Freehold address. No condoms. That’s why Dale made sure she always kept a pack on her, because our good friend Butch here just didn’t give a shit about protection.

He also had no credit cards. That meant either Dale was fronting him pocket change for beer and gas and the like or he had a problem. Gambling or drugs or something else. I wondered if she had a part-time job or if she was nimble-fingered and following in the rest of the family’s footsteps.

The question became: Did Dale know what Butch was up to? Or, worse, was she in on the score with him? The idea of it made the back of my skull ache. But she was fifteen. At fifteen, the rest of us Rands had been creeping around second-story bedrooms and stealing silverware and jugging tiny safes.

I pocketed his six bucks and tossed the rest out the window as soon as I hit the highway. Butch Cassidy. Motherfucker. I gunned it down the road, thinking, When Butch went down, would he take Dale with him? What was I going to have to do to protect her? How far was I willing to go? And how many of these kinds of questions had filled my brother’s head before he got caught in the underneath and never came up again?

12

My head was full of the dead. I sat at the bar in the Elbow Room with the photocopied files and ordered a Jack and Coke.

The place was a dive. It had gotten worse since the last time I’d had a drink here. The men looked the same except maybe a bit more desperate. The drinks were watered down, the felt on the pool tables that much more worn. The mirror behind the bar had a thick film of grime on it so you could barely see your own face. Maybe it was a blessing.

The whores worked the losers a little more brazenly. They didn’t bother with subtlety. They didn’t play the buy-me-a-drink-and-maybe-I’ll-go-home-with-you-and-oh-by-the-way-I-cost-a-C-note-sorry-I-didn’t-mention-that-sooner game. It was all out front. I wasn’t sure if I liked it better or not. At least you didn’t waste time or get your heart chipped away when you realized the girl with the cool blue eyes and the slow smile wasn’t really turning it on because you might be Mr. Right. You knew at the start you were wrong, and so was she.

The cops had interviewed the owner and two bartenders who had been working the night Collie went on his spree. All three swore he hadn’t been drunk. That he hadn’t started any kind of a ruckus or been involved in any sort of disturbance. That he hadn’t been pestering anybody. There had been no fights. He hadn’t pawed any of the girls. He hadn’t tried to rob the place. No one reported having their pockets picked.

The juke purred a trio of female voices, low and tempting. The speakers beat at my back. I chowed on cocktail peanuts and sucked beer. My concentration skittered around the room, picking up pieces of conversations and lonely muttering. Men were talking standard shit. Who’d beenwas-year9;t b of a ripped off by the boss, the government, the wife. Men with preteen sons talked proud. Men with older sons talked about intense disappointment. It was times like these that I was glad my family was full of men who kept quiet.

Someone bumped my shoulder and I spilled a quarter glass down my shirt. He didn’t say excuse me. I turned and glowered. I wondered if this could start a chain reaction that would land me on death row.

I glanced at the register. I could have it cleaned out in under ten seconds. I could wait for the bartender to go get another case of beer from the storeroom. Or I could sucker-punch him and nab the cash. No one would try to stop me. That kind of draw was always there for me. Knowing I could reach out and grab what I wanted at any time. Of course it was. I was a thief. The devil had to be in Collie’s ear all the time as well.

I wondered what set of circumstances would have to come together to send me on a spree where I would kill old women and nine-year-old girls. I knew my rage could send me into barroom brawls. But Suzy Coleman. I just couldn’t imagine anything pushing me to murder a little girl.

I stood and moved toward a table in back. As I passed the end of the bar, a middle-aged pro with greasy eyes put her arm out and grabbed my wrist. She smelled of Four Roses and stale hamburger. I thought if she was making a play for me this was the wrong way to go about it. She held on tightly without so much as lifting her gaze or saying a word. She was sitting with a john who either hadn’t been buying her whiskey fast enough or was taking too long cracking open his wallet and paying for her services. Now I saw she was using me to make him jump. He glanced up as if I was disturbing him and gave me the death glare.

I thought about Collie. I was going to be thinking about Collie for a long time to come, but especially in this place. Every scent, motion, action made me wonder. Was this what did it? Could this do it to me?

She opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind when she looked into my eyes.

I walked on, snapping her grip.

I got a table and eased into the bench seat and thought about my brother doing the same thing. It would’ve been a tight fit for him five years ago. He’d had a substantial gut. He would’ve had to suck it in. The table edge would be cutting into him. He’d try to ignore it, throw back another Corona.

I didn’t want my brother in my head, so why was I so desperately trying to get into his? It was a setup. I knew it. I could feel it. He was positioning me in some kind of a play in a game that wasn’t even mine.

I started to slide out of the booth just as the waitress came around. She was thin-lipped, frizzy-headed, bony-shouldered, and small-breasted, yet somehow exuded sensuality.

“Get you?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Was there any possibility Collie was telling the truth? He seemed to believe it, but what kind of proof was that? He was at least as nuts as everyone else on death row, and that was a heap of crazy.

I slid back into the booth and knew I had to make a decision. Read the files or burn them. Stay or book. Give in or get the hell out. I’d gone this far for reasons I didn’t understand. Maybe I should head back out west. Maybe I should pull the job with Butch. Maybe I could show up at Kimmy and Chub’s front door and invite myself in. Had I come home to flame out like my brother?

“Fuck,” I said.

“What’s that?”

The waitress was watching me. She didn’t seem bored waiting. A hint of talcum powder trailed across her cleavage. She probed a bad back tooth with her tongue and winced but didn’t stop.

“Sorry. Give me a Dewar’s and Coke. A lot of ice.”

“You okay, man?”

“Sure.”

She tilted her head back toward the bar. “Flo over there wants you to buy her a dirty martini.”

I could guess who Flo was. “And why would she expect me to do that?”

The waitress shrugged. “It’ll make her more friendly to you, you know?”

“I’ve got all the friends I can handle.”

“The guys like her. Some of them anyway.”

“Not tonight.”

“Okay, man.”

I spent the next forty-five minutes reading and slowly getting drunk. My stomach was empty by now, and the liquor hit me harder than it should have. It didn’t slow me down. I kept knocking them back, hoping to disconnect. The pages flashed before me. Facts, dates, blood-spatter patterns, interviews. I knew the picture but details kept adding color and texture. More than I wanted to know.

The reports were about as cool and dry as they came. There wasn’t a hint of emotion anywhere, not even in my brother’s confession. He’d told the cops the same thing that he’d told me. There was no reason. He explained what he’d done that night step by step. How he’d moved from one victim to the next. He named the seven. He didn’t name Rebecca Clarke. She’d been completely left out. No one seemed to care.

The victims soon emptied of whatever personality I’d instilled them with. Paul Coleman. Sarah Coleman. Tom Coleman. Neal Coleman. Suzy Coleman. Doug Schuller. Mrs. Howard.

He said he hadn’t known any of them prior to that night. He’d had no grudges with any of them. He didn’t even know their names. He’d never seen them before. He’d chosen his victims completely at random. He’d driven around town until he felt the urge to kill and then he’d climbed out of his car and headed off on foot. When he was finished with one he’d proceeded to the next. He hadn’t done a thing to hide his crimes. He hadn’t muffled the gunshots. The noise awoke other vacationers in the trailer park, who’d called the police. Collie had been long gone by the time they arrived.

Why go on a spree and end it of your own accord? Why not go out in a blaze? Had his rage really been vented? Had he been angry at all? The papers described him as coldhearted, methodical, meticulous.

Collie hadn’t taken the stand. He’d never attempted to explain himself in court. His attorneys hadn’t bothered to dispute the Becky Clarke snuff. They figured he was already up for seven charges of murder so an eighth didn’t matter. They were adamant on a plea of insanity. It was a bold and stupid play, but they were strapped-Collie refused to recant his confession. Still, they should have homed in on that dispute and made it the central theme of their case. If they could cast doubt on that one killing, then they might shake the D.A.’s case a little. Becky Clarke had been strangled with a sash of some kind. They hadn’t pulled anyThe019 fibers. Collie had used a blade and a gun and his fists to commit his other murders. When the cops arrested him they found the gun unloaded on the bar where he’d put it.

So where were the knife and the sash? Why would he toss those and not the pistol?

The whole fucking thing was ridiculous.

I went through the paperwork again. I had the feeling I’d missed something. I dug around and came up with one of the forensics sheets. I scanned it, and most of the terminology didn’t mean anything to me.

And then there it was. No one had made a big deal out of it.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

Saliva. They’d found dried saliva on each victim’s forehead. No one suggested what it might mean. They only dealt in facts.

But I knew. Collie had kissed each of them on the forehead before, or after, he’d murdered them.

Every one of them except Rebecca Clarke. There’d been no saliva found on her.

I shut the folders and shoved them away from me. I sat back and listened to the juke crooning and droning. I kept seeing Scooter bolting across Kimmy’s front lawn. I thought about Chub playing it on the straight and narrow, running a completely legit garage. I saw my brother press his lips to the old woman’s brow an instant before he beat her to death.

No matter how I tried, that night didn’t piece together right. Where had Collie gotten the S &W.38 and the knife? He was a Rand. Rands didn’t use guns. It had been a clean drop. No serial numbers. Had he already been armed in the Elbow Room? I tried to picture it. If he’d been on the verge of going mad dog, why not start here, in this kind of crowd? Why drive around first? It seemed to me that he would’ve been cooling off then. Or had he run into one of his cronies and purchased the weapons then? There didn’t seem to be enough time. Collie had left the Elbow Room at eleven P.M., and the murders began about twenty minutes later. He returned before closing at two A.M. and announced he was a murderer and someone should call the cops.

I didn’t see him rushing around looking to buy a piece. It wasn’t his way. But neither was knifing an old woman. Not until that night.

Where and when had he picked up the weapons? If it had been days or weeks before, then how could anyone consider his rampage a spur-of-the-moment occurrence? There were at least a couple of names I was familiar with who might have sold Collie an untraceable piece. I decided I’d pay them a visit.

A shadow crossed my table. I looked up and Flo was standing there, watching me.

The whiskey-and-hamburger smell had given way to tequila and bland salsa. Her lips appeared to be even more unnatural as she hit a pose beneath the weak barroom lighting. She had on a pair of diamond stud earrings that looked like the real thing.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “You look just like your brother. With that same white streak in your hair.”

That got my attention. I drew the files back toward me in a display of something like protection. Then I took a final pull of my drink. When I finished I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stared at her. “What do you know about my brother?”

“It’s a compliment. Hep width=;s a nice-looking man. Looks like your uncle. That Grey. He still comes in here sometimes. Handsome. A touch of class. He knows how to treat a woman.” Without any invitation she slid into the other side of the booth. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little company? I can see that you’re lonely. A young man like you, hurting so bad.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting that, lady.” I held the file close, like it contained a catalog of all my own sins. “I’m merry. I’m full of mirth.”

“You’re melancholy and you’re pining for an old girlfriend, right? The one that got away. The one that you’d give anything to be with.”

“That’s not a bold guess, Flo. Everybody in here is pining for the losses of his youth. Including you.”

“Not me, hon. I’ve got no sentiment left in me.”

“You were going to talk about my brother,” I said.

“Was I?”

“Yes. Did you know him? Collie Rand?”

“Everyone knew Collie.”

I sat up straighter. “Were you here that night?”

“Which night?”

“The night he was arrested.”

“Why don’t you buy me a dirty martini?”

“Why don’t you answer my question first, Flo?” I grinned at her. I hoped it looked like a john’s drunken smile. The pulse in my throat began to burn. I leaned toward her as if she was beginning to arouse me.

“I can make you forget, you know,” she said.

“Let’s stay on topic, Flo. Collie, my brother. The night he was arrested.”

“You won’t even remember her name after me.”

She reached for my wrist and held on. I didn’t want to be touched. I wondered about these people who thought they had some kind of a right to put their hands on you, to pull and pluck at you. I felt a surge of anger. “How about if you quit working me like I’m a lonely-hearts drunk with a wife who won’t suck my pud and answer my fucking question, right?”

She pulled her hand back. “You’re an abrasive son of a bitch, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know that.”

I pulled a twenty out and slapped it down in front of her. She snatched it away and tucked it into her bra.

“You got a bad temper,” she said. “Just like the other one. We can’t even sit here and have a friendly talk?”

It was a cheap shot but it hit home. I tried to let the tension out of me but it was a losing game. The waitress appeared and I downshifted to beer. Flo watched me expectantly. Jesus Christ, the corners you could get backed into.

I said, “Fine. And you can have a dirty martini.”

The waitress nodded and went to get our drinks.

“Look, about my brother-”

“I was here,” she said.

“Tell me what happened.”

“He was around, then he left, then he came back and he said for somebody tligk mo call the police. The cops came and they busted him. Didn’t even have to wrestle him, he just laid flat on his face on the floor.”

“Think you can go into deeper detail than that?”

I’d shown too much interest. She thought if I started getting the answers I needed then she could hold out on the rest of the facts and reel in more cash. Her greasy eyes were full of hunger. She repeated the story and tried to flesh out the scene with minor specifics, but she couldn’t remember much. I got the feeling she had been bored. Collie hadn’t done much that was noteworthy. He put the gun on the bar, drank his Corona, and laid down. It was barely a ripple in her night.

She finally realized I wasn’t going to turn over any serious cash, and she slipped back to the bar and found herself a new guy to hang on to.

I was too swilled to be disappointed that I hadn’t gotten more out of her. I opened the file again, then closed it, then opened it. I hissed, shut it, and got to my feet. My stomach twisted with the alcohol. I headed for the door. I wanted to go home to my bed.

Why did it matter to Collie now five years too late, and why the hell should it matter to me?

Maybe it was in the blood, this thing that made us so bent, so wrong. The veins in my wrist ticked away, black and twisted.

13

I knew I’d have to talk to Gilmore eventually. I didn’t expect him to come around the back of my car in the Elbow Room parking lot and give me a left hook to the kidneys.

The pain forced me to my knees. I puked up the liquor and nearly went over but managed to keep my face out of the asphalt. I made a noise that sounded like an animal about to start gnawing its leg out of a trap, then I vomited again. I’d tossed my cookies more in the last two days than in the twenty years prior.

Gagging, trying to catch a sip of air, I looked up and saw Gilmore standing over me. He wore a sorrowful grin even while he sucked on a cigarette. His eyes were dancing pinpoints of dejection. His hair was short and chopped across the front, messy but still fashionable. His face had some alcoholic bloat to it.

Maybe he’d been following me and had seen me duck into the Elbow Room. Maybe he watched as I turned pages, and he recognized the photocopied files. Or maybe the old man from the archives had left a message on Gilmore’s voice mail and given him shit for circumventing protocol. Gimore would question the guy and eventually put it together. Who else would grab Collie’s jacket except me?

My father had said that Gilmore had no edge to him now that he’d lost his wife. I couldn’t quite agree with that.

I crawled forward a bit and tried to stand. Gilmore gave me another shot in the same place. He grunted a little like it caused him pain. It hurt me ten times worse than the first punch and I went down flat on my face.

He lit another cigarette and leaned back against the trunk of my car. He stared off in the distance like he couldn’t bear to look at me.

“Terrier. Didn’t think you’d ever come back. Been keeping your snout clean out there wherever it is you’ve settled?”

Cars drove by. The front door of the Elbow Room opened and closed. I heard hushed voices punctuated by mean girlish laughter. Gilmore took me by the armiveil an19; and got me to my knees.

A few of the other patrons walked by on their way to their cars. Gilmore acknowledged them and said, “Evening.”

I deserved what I’d gotten. I accepted it the way I’d accepted the beating from Big Dan’s boys. I took my chances with my eyes open.

Still, I thought Gilmore was overreacting a bit. It was a petty move. He knew I’d never punch a cop, not even in self-defense.

He tried to help me to my feet, but I was still too wobbly. He left me kneeling on asphalt and patted my back tenderly.

“You know, Terrier, you broke your mother’s heart.”

Jesus Christ, I thought, here it comes.

He toed the paperwork scattered across the ground. He said nothing about it.

“I always liked you. You and your whole family. From the start, or nearly so, we understood each other. There are lines you cross and those you don’t. Your grandfather knew that, your uncles, your father. But it got crossed up when it came to you and your brother.”

I wanted to tell him I was nothing like Collie, but I still couldn’t speak. The pain was lessening. I breathed deep. As I listened to him talking quietly behind me, I couldn’t stop picturing him pulling his piece and popping me in the back of my head, execution style.

“I wish you would’ve called me. I wish you would have asked. I deserve that much respect, no matter what you think of me or cops in general.” He rubbed my back again, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and let the smoke out over my shoulder. “I thought you were the bright one. I thought you might be going somewhere. I had hopes, Terry, I really did. I figured you and Kimmy would get out of that house and go your own way. You’d leave the life behind and raise a family. It would’ve been a good thing. I knew you had it in you.” He sighed. “But then you ran out on everyone. You showed a real lack of character there, you know?”

I knew.

“You got a wife wherever you been living? Kids?”

I coughed and shook my head.

“That’s too bad.” He flicked his cigarette butt away, lit another. “Did you really come back just to stir up trouble?”

“No,” I groaned.

“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m happy to hear that. You still on the grift wherever it is you’ve gotten to?”

“No.”

“Good, that’s good to know. But there’s something about home that brings it out in you again, huh?”

I thought it might be time to try standing. He slung one of my arms over his shoulder and helped me up. When I was on my feet again, I propped myself against the back bumper of my car. I slumped there for a couple of minutes, watching him smoke.

When I was able to, I bent and retrieved the copied files, opened the car door, and stuffed them back under the passenger seat.

“I bet you could use a beer right about now,” Gilmore said.

My voice sounded exactly like I felt-sick, weak, trembling. “I think I’m done for the night.”

“Then you can buy me one. Come on, Terry.”

He turned away from me and headttedth="1ed into the Elbow Room. I followed him, limping along. I smelled like asphalt and vomit. I thought I might get sick again the second I stepped back into the bar. Gilmore breezed over to the table I’d been at and took the opposite bench. I sat exactly where I’d been sitting all night.

The waitress came by and Gilmore ordered us two beers. She returned with them and he paid her and said thank you. I grabbed the wet bar towel from her tray and wiped my face with it.

Gilmore sipped his beer and stared at me like I was a long-lost friend he’d been searching for and had finally found. “You look well,” he said.

“I’ve been better.”

“You deserved worse from me, but we’ll let that slide for now.”

His eyes were dark and lonely. His kids were gone. He probably saw them only on alternating weekends, if that. When he was forced to drop them off at their mother’s again, the grief would try to drown him from the inside.

“You didn’t hang around for your brother’s trial,” he continued. “You never got to see the evidence against him. Hear the witnesses. Listen to the testimony. Take the stand in his defense. Your mother did, you know. She wept the whole time but she tried to put in a righteous word. You could’ve said something too, if you’d cared.”

“What would the point have been? He admitted his guilt.”

“That’s right, he did.”

I started to feel better. Suddenly I wanted the beer that was in front of me. I took a swig. Gilmore finished his and ordered another round. He paid again. Our eyes met.

“You know what he says now?” I asked.

“That he didn’t smoke the teenage girl. Rebecca Clarke.”

“That’s right. Is there any chance it’s the truth?”

“None,” Gilmore said. “He did them all.”

“He never confessed to killing her.”

“He didn’t have to. Maybe he just forgot. Isn’t that what he said? That he wasn’t sure at the time? A night like that, a crazy murder spree. Who wouldn’t want to forget?”

I nodded and sipped. “What about the kiss?”

He pulled that tight and wistful grin again. He couldn’t help himself, his face fell into it so naturally now. It showed me how forlorn he’d become. He let out a false chuckle that told me even more about how his life had smashed up since I’d last seen him. “You spotted that, huh? Sharp eyes.”

“Yes. He apparently kissed them all on the forehead. But not Rebecca Clarke.”

“So he was too excited. So he was too juiced up on rage or adrenaline to perform that specific sick ritual that one particular time. He still choked her to death.”

“Maybe not. What about the sash or cord? What about the knife? They were never found.”

“So he ditched them. He admitted to knifing the gas-station attendant, Douglas Schuller.”

“Right, he admitted it to me again the other day. But he said he didn’t snuff Becky Clarke.”

“Did his wife put you up to this?” Gilmore asked.

I drew my chin back. “You know about her?”

“Yeah, she haunts me on a weekly basis.”

“But you never mentioned her to my mother or father?”

“They’ve cut themselves off from your brother. It wasn’t my place to lay something like that in their laps. Have you told them?”

“No,” I said. “You’ve met Lin?”

“She’s made it her life’s mission to cause me heartburn. She camps out in my office, brings me information. What she calls evidence. Jail-house lawyers are bad enough, but jailhouse wife attorney-wannabes are much worse. You know who falls in love with death-row inmates?”

“Mentally unstable individuals.”

“That’s right. Imagine what Christmas dinner is going to be like if she ever shows up on your doorstep.”

I took a pull of beer and propped myself up lengthwise in the booth. I swallowed a grunt of pain. I watched Gilmore. There was a certain air to him that it took me a moment to place. He was doing his best to assure and console me.

“He told me there’d been others,” I said.

Gilmore angled himself closer. “What others?”

“Not others he’d iced. Other girls who fit Rebecca Clarke’s profile, murdered in similar ways. Some while he was in prison.”

“Three or four.”

“Doesn’t that make it suspicious?”

Gilmore held back a mocking laugh, the strength of it causing his body to shake. “You know how many unsteady drunken bastards kill their wives or girlfriends every year? You know how many do it by choking them to death? How many of those women are young, cute, and brunette?”

“You’re saying they were all snuffed by their boyfriends?”

“No, I’m not saying that, Terrier.”

“Then what?”

He threw back his beer and looked for the waitress. I wondered if he was going to step up to double shots of scotch. I wondered how much booze he had to kill every night to help him get to sleep. I was curious as to how often he was allowed to see his kids and if he could still come up with those unique and colorful voices to entertain them. I imagined Phyllis with a new boyfriend, trying to get on with her life, and Gilmore holding on to the past like so many of us did. I could picture him in the darkness, reaching out to clench a woman who was no longer there.

He caught the waitress’s eye and she came by with another round. He pushed one to me and I pushed it back to him.

Gilmore’s lips jacked up as if someone had jammed their thumbs into the corners of his mouth and pushed. “Listen to me,” he said. He tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. It clicked as loudly as if he’d pulled the trigger on an empty gun. “One of those women was found behind a motel in Riverhead, garroted with her own bra. It looks like a rape job gone bad.” He tapped his finger again. “One had her hyoid bone broken, which probably happened in an accidental fall. She was drunk at the time. She was nineteen and out of work. She’d spent an hour that night arguing with her father on the phone because he wouldn’t send her enough money to pay her rent. Neighbors heard her stumbling arour l width=nd. When they found her she was lying on a futon, her throat crushed against the wooden arm.” Again that click, like we were playing Russian roulette. “Someone used a belt on the last girl. She was a distributor for a low-level meth dealer. She was hooked on her own product and undoubtedly shorted her supplier. That’s why she bought it.”

“Did you personally investigate those cases?”

“No, they weren’t mine. But I looked into them when Lin brought me her concerns. I do my job. There’s nothing there.”

“Give me those files too. Give me names.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

His eyes went hard as shale. “You’re a burglar, Terrier, like the rest of your family. You don’t get to see police files. Let me amend that. Let’s make that, you don’t get to see any more files. I don’t need you running around out there stirring up strife, putting your nose in business that doesn’t concern you. You want to talk about Collie or discuss his case, I’m here to help. He’s going to be gone in a week and a half. You need someone to give you an ear, I’ll do that. But you have to keep away from the rest of it.”

“The kiss,” I said.

“I hate to tell you this, Terrier, but just in case you haven’t realized it yet, your brother is out of his goddamn mind. Anytime you get too curious about what was going on in his head, remember where that kind of thinking leads. You really want to start down that road?”

Gilmore stood. I could tell he wanted to shake my hand or give me a hug. His eyes were full of regret and remorse and a hope toward friendship. He walked away and took his fucked little grin with him out the door.

14

Like the last lone soldier defending a fort, my father stood guard on our house. He leaned against the veranda railing. Backlit by the porch light, he was lent a kind of mythic presence. He had the grave bearing of someone thinking hard on a particular subject. He showed no sign of restlessness at all, but I knew it was there. Maybe his tension was merely calling to my own.

Pinscher Rand had become a criminal for the same reason that I had. Because he’d been born to it. I wondered if he ever pulled a cheap score nowadays just to keep the old skills sharpened and to remember how exciting and awful it had once been. I imagined him picking a wallet and not pulling the money, just poking around the contents, looking at the driver’s license photo, the credit cards, the carefully folded sheets of paper that rarely made any sense. A note from an ex-girlfriend that the mark valued, a frayed motto or private joke that had gone through the wash a couple of times. He’d pass by a mailbox and dump the wallet in. He’d feel some strange sense of accomplishment, knowing his fingers were still supple enough to get the job done.

He should’ve been a carpenter. It was the only other skill that was in the Rand blood. Maybe I should have been too. I imagined us razing the house and building another one, a smaller one, without the hidden caches, maybe with a nursery.

I wondered what he did with himself now that he’d quit creeping houses. What shit he wasted his time on. He and my mother should be out enjoying themselves, making the most of life. Except thaep d guay"›t I knew the burden of the murders tore him up with guilt in a way that none of his own crimes ever had. My father hid himself away out of shame.

JFK lay across the top stair and I had to jump over him. My side hurt so badly that I almost flubbed it. He gave me a resolute eye roll and coughed out a small belly bark.

I lit a cigarette and sat in a chair, trying to hide my discomfort. It was too late. My old man had already noticed.

“Someone worked you over,” he said.

“I’m okay.”

“Not Dale’s boyfriend?”

I frowned. “Hell, no.”

“Didn’t think that one would get over on you.”

“Not likely.”

He nodded, took a step toward me, and looked me deep in the face like he was checking for bruises. “That’s not what’s on your mind, though.”

“No, Dad, it’s not.”

My father sat, opened his cooler, and handed me a beer. I shook my head. He dug around in the ice chest until he came up with a small carton of orange juice. I drank and felt a little better.

We relaxed and watched the road and the black brush beyond it. JFK had picked up on my mood. He came over, circled and pawed and collapsed. His ears kept snapping up and he let loose with a deep-throated whine. I wanted to do the same.

We nodded. We sipped. We smoked. We took turns patting the great beast at our feet who’d once been young and fierce and was now only well muscled, noble, and old. The immense topic of our lives loomed between us.

We’ve failed. We’ve failed to hold our family together. We’ve failed to protect one another.

My old man started to clear his throat like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the proper words. I turned and watched him until our eyes met.

He said, “You want to talk about it, Terry?”

I sat up like someone had just lobbed a grenade. It was a question that my father never asked. I thought, Christ, I must look really bad.

Or maybe it was just his way of getting me to start a conversation that he himself needed to have.

I listened to my mother inside murmuring to Gramp, the way new parents talk to infants. She sounded elated. I waited for her to say, “Look at these chubby cheeks. Who’s got such chubby cheeks? So big!” I thought about the toll it must be taking on her. If ten years ago Gramp had been able to see himself in this state, he would’ve put one in his head. Another one, that is.

Clouds swarmed the moon. JFK got up and wandered down to the lawn, parading back and forth like a fitful ghost.

I said, “Collie says he didn’t strangle the girl. He says someone else did it and that they’ve racked up at least four or five other murders before and after he was arrested. He says the killer is targeting young women of the same description. He wants me to look into it with his wife.”

My father waited. The information sank in. “His wife?”

“He got married in prison.”

“To a guy?”

It almost made me smile. “No, to a pen pal.”

“O19;tify"›I ne of those,” my father said with a disgusted nuance. “Celebrity stalkers, but they only like the mass murderers. They’re just as psychotic.”

“He says she’s been trying to help him. Gathering evidence, I suppose.”

He waited. “If it was anybody else I’d say it was a ploy to get a stay of execution, an appeal, or a new trial.”

I shook my head. “He doesn’t want any of that, he says. He just wants me to find out who’s killing these women. He doesn’t even want his own name cleared of that one killing.”

“So why’s he care? Why now?”

“He says it’s because he wasn’t certain if he’d killed the girl or not, but now his wife’s been bringing him information and he knows for sure there’s someone else out there.”

“He’s manipulating you.”

“I get that feeling too, but I can’t see any reason for it.”

“Your brother doesn’t need a reason to do things anymore. Maybe he never did.”

“Does Fingers Brown still sell clean pieces?” I asked.

“Haven’t heard much about him in a while. But I can’t picture him retiring and doing a lot of fishing.”

“Still got the bowling alley?”

“As far as I know. You’re going to pay him a visit?”

“I want to ask him a few questions.”

My old man finished his beer and took another, held the bottle to his chest. “You’ve decided to help Collie?”

“It’s for me. I want to figure out as much as I can about what happened.”

He went to the porch railing, stood against it, and looked at the moon. “Can you let it go?”

“No.”

He was a sensitive and astute man, but I was still surprised that he was able to slice to the heart of the matter.

“You’re not him, Terry.”

I got up and took my place beside him. We watched JFK sniffing around the yard, lumbering across the grass, chasing moths. I said nothing because I had nothing to say.

“I’m sorry I put the call through, son.”

“You were only doing what you had to do.”

“I should’ve let you stay out west on your ranch.”

“It wasn’t my ranch. And it’s all right. I never should’ve left. The last five years were a waste, Dad. I’m sorry I went. I’m sorry I left the family. I never should have gone. It was a mistake to run.”

“Because of Kimmy.”

“Because of everyone.”

He put an arm around me and ruffled my white patch. It was a caricature of what your average American father might do to his son, but I appreciated the effort he was making. I only wished I could make more of one myself.

He whistled and opened the screen door. JFK galloped out of the brush and up the porch stairs, made sure he licked at my hand as he passed, and then rushed into the house.

I said, “Good night, Dad.”

“Good night, Terry.” My old man followed the dog inside. But my father, who wasn’t a talkative man, who had lost one son forever and another for five years, who was worried about his teenage daughter, who had a phantom of a father waiting for him hunched in the corner as a constant reminder of what the future might make of him, still wasn’t done speaking his mind. He hovered in the shadowed entranceway and turned back to me. I couldn’t see his eyes. Silhouetted like that, silent as stone, he seemed more myth than man.

“Finish whatever it is you have to do,” he said. His voice was hard, stoic, and indignant. “And let him go forever. Don’t allow your brother to take you with him.”

Then I was alone in the night.