Short Ride to Nowhere (12 page)

“I don’t know what happened.”

“And you didn’t tell the cops anything.
 
You never said a word about Hale.
 
Or Christine.
 
You never went to see him in the hospital.
 
You abandoned her and you deserted him.”

“The authorities wouldn’t have understood any more than you can.”

“No, I’m sure they wouldn’t have.
 
What about school?
 
Neighbors?
 
Her friends?”

“I told them all she was visiting with her father.”

“And that’s all it took?”

“Yes.”

It seemed impossible, but who was out there asking about him anymore?
 
You disappeared and nobody cared.

“I don’t know what happened,” she repeated.

“I do.”

The crazy laughter wanted out, but Jenks forced it back down.
 
He shook his head in disbelief but managed to stay silent.
 
What makes you fuck up the worst?
 
Love.
 
Love for a stranger you trusted enough to take hold of your daughter’s hand and walk out onto the streets of New York.

He sat down next to her on the couch, the girl everywhere smiling and laughing and watching him.

He thought again about stopping by his old house, kicking in the front door, listening to the screams of the new occupants as he ran down into the basement and climbed into the crawlspace.
 
He’d back into a far corner and hug his knees and bury his face and somehow that would make things better.

He saw Hale clearly, perfectly, walking with the girl and holding her hand.
 
On fire after the argument about the Danish.
 
Miffed and worried, with his guts burning because Angela was clearly crazy.
 
Now holding the hand of a little girl, the kid probably talking.
 
She was mature and responsible.
 
She probably had a take charge attitude.
 
Tugging on his hand, telling him,
this way, careful of the cab, wait for the light
.
 
Okay.
 
Hale, startled and trying to go with it, thinking of the girl’s safety, wondering if he should call the cops or tell the other folks at the shelter that Angela was out of her mind.
 
But who would believe a vagrant with no money who sold books without covers in Times Square?
 
He was backed into a corner even as they moved together towards the diner, the girl already well aware that her mother wasn’t right and making the best of it, but doomed as all kids are doomed to the care of their parents.

Hale soon becoming aware that someone was following.

A bald guy with a bristly horseshoe 70s porn mustache, his forearms thick, trying to steal from his own kind.
 

Jenks should’ve known.
 
What had happened to Hale would happen to Jenks.
 
Jenks had a butterfly blade.
 
Hale had bought one too.
 
Maybe from the same place.
 
Maybe from protection or just out of prophecy, knowing that the knife was needed for his own death.

The rage reached through him like timid fingers, moving backwards and forwards through time.
 
It connected everything he’d been to everything he was now and was about to become.
 
Other men had money and lessons learned from their lovers and fathers and mentors.
 
Hale had figured, Okay, so this is what I’ve been given.
 
It had been accumulating for more than a year, since listening to his wife’s whispering laughter.
  
A dog on the street began to mewl.
 
Or maybe it was coming from inside of his chest.
 
The blackness took him over and he could feel his teeth drying.
 
He realized he was smiling and had been for a while.
 
He couldn’t feel the butterfly blade in his hand but he could hear it spinning and snapping closed.
 
It sounded as resolute as the word of God.
 
The child needed milk.
  
He was still curious about what the proper order of things was supposed to be now, as Baldy descended.
 
Baldy had seen Angela giving Hale whatever, a twenty dollar bill.
 
Maybe only ten.
 
It was more than enough.
 
Baldy pushing him, trying to get him to let go of the girl’s hand, cough up the cash.
 
Just like that, just like that. Jesus, she had an insanely lonely mother, was standing in the care of an unbalanced bastard with nothing in the world, and now some bald prick was going to finish ruining her breakfast.
 
No, enough of this, enough of this.
 
Hale pulling the blade, wondering if the martyrs and the saints would stay his hand.

Hale, unable to do it.
 
Bringing the blade up to Baldy’s face and Baldy seeing it, in his eyes, that Hale wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone.
 
He was gone but not that far gone.
 
So Baldy plucked the knife from his hand and ordered him to turn out his pockets, and the girl having enough of it all started yelling, tears in her eyes.
 
She was mature and responsible.
 
You leave us alone.
 
And Hale hoping to calm her but fucking things up worse, forgetting her name and calling her by his daughter’s name instead.
 
Sandy, you listen to me now.
 
The mistakes piling one on top of the other.
 
Until Baldy reached for Hale’s pocket and Hale tugged the girl to him, and somehow the ballet coming apart despite the fact that it had been rehearsed through the ages a million million times, and maybe Hale resisting, the girl shouting, and the blade going in softly.
 
Maybe into Hale first, stuffing the knife between his ribs.
 
Maybe into the girl.
 
Nothing mattering at all after that, because it had always been meant to happen.
 
How could anyone expect it to have ended any differently?

Hale alive on the concrete and thinking, as he watched the blood pour into a widening lake, Christ, end it if you’re going to get this close.
 
Shove the blade in another two inches.
 
End it.

Jenks angled himself a little closer to Angela on the couch, waiting for her to cry.
 
But she didn’t.
 
Perhaps she never had, maybe should would, someday.
 
Finally allow herself to cry for her murdered daughter and her lost love left dying on the streets of New York.
 
Jenks thought about resting here for a while, getting some food into him, before he went back to the shelter and started looking for Baldy.
 
Baldy would show up, eventually, to rob more people with hungry children.
 
And Jenks would be waiting for him, awake in the black night while the dogs whined and the dead loomed and waited in the high corners with empty, imploring faces.
 
He would listen to the sound of the blade opening and shutting, the way he was listening to it now, and he would discover in that last moment what the next page in the great book of life, written in God’s own hand, would have to say about his sins.
 
God would glare down at him and Jenks would wait at the gates, humbled and on his knees, seeing Hale already inside heaven having passed the final test, and Jenks knowing in his heart, no matter what the divine choir was singing now, that he had failed his own.

Read on for an exclusive sneak peek at the new novel by Tom Piccirilli

The Last Kind Words

Available in June 2011

Visit
www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com
and send an e-mail to be notified when the book is available to order.

"Perfect crime fiction ... a convincing world, a cast of compelling characters, and above all a great story."
—LEE CHILD,
New York Times
bestselling author of
61 Hours

“For the first time since
The Godfather
, a family of criminals has stolen my heart. A brilliant mix of love and violence, charm and corruption.  I loved it.”
—NANCY PICKARD,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Scent of Rain and Lightning

"You don't choose your family. And the
Rand
clan, a family of thieves and killers, is bad to the bone.  But it's a testimony to Tom Piccirilli's stellar writing that you still care about each and every one of them. 
The Last Kind Words
is at once a dark and brooding page-turner and a heartfelt tale about the ties that bind. Fans of Lee Child will love this hard-boiled, tough-as-nails novel."—
Lisa Unger
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Fragile

“It's Piccirilli’s sense of relationships and the haunting power of family that lifts his writing beyond others in the genre.
The Last Kind Words
is a swift-moving and hard-hitting novel."

—
Michael Koryta
, Edgar Award-nominated author of
So Cold the River

“A stunning story that ranges far afield at times but never truly leaves home, a place where shadows grow in every corner. It’s superbly told, with prose that doesn’t mess about or flinch from evil and characters who are best known from a distance.”

—
Daniel Woodrell
, PEN award-winning author of
Winter’s Bone

"There's more life in Piccirilli's
The Last Kind Words
(and more heartache, action, and deliverance) than any other novel I've read in the past couple of years.”

—
Steve Hamilton
, Edgar Award-winning author of
The Lock Artist

"You're in for a treat.
 
Tom Piccirilli is one of the most exciting authors around.
 
He writes vivid action that is gripping and smart, with characters you believe and care about.”

—
David Morrell
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
First Blood

Tom Piccirilli

“Fear and hope are alike underneath.”

–Richard Ford

“Can’t do it, simply cause underneath ’em is too ugly.”

–Billy Gibbons

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 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 divided 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.