The Last Kind Words

Advance praise for The Last Kind Words “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. This is a brilliant mix of love and violence, charm and corruption. I loved it.”— Nancy Pickard, bestselling author of The Scent of Rain and Lightning “You don’t choose your family. And the Rand clan, a family of thieves, 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.”— Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Darkness, My Old Friend “Piccirilli straddles genres with the boldness of the best writers today, blending suspense and crime fiction into tight, brutal masterpieces.”— James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Colony “Tom Piccirilli’s sense of relationships and the haunting power of family 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 The Ridge “A stunning story that ranges far afield at times but never truly leaves home, a place where shadows grow in every corner . . . superbly told, with prose that doesn’t mess about or flinch from evil.”— Daniel Woodrell, PEN USA award–winning author of Winter’s Bone “There’s more life in The Last Kind Words (and more heartache, action, and deliverance) than in 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 in and care about.”— David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of First Blood “ Mystic River set the bar for classic literary mystery, and The Last Kind Words is a novel on the same superb playing field. Compassionate, fascinating, and with an adrenaline narrative that is as gripping as it is moving, this book is pure alchemy.” —Ken Bruen, Shamus and Macavity Award–winning author of The Guards and Headstone “Piccirilli’s family of heartbroken thieves, bound by love, secrets, and family codes, kept me turning the pages until the very end. It pained me to put this book down at night. Tom Piccirilli is the leader of a new pack of writers combining the best elements of crime, mystery, and literary fiction in a way that would make Chandler proud. I loved this book, and can’t wait for the sequel.” —Sara Gran, author of Clare DeWitt and thexa0City of the Dead “Tom Piccirilli’s The Last Kind Words is a story born of the dark legacies of family violence and loss. With vivid prose and palpable urgency, it succeeds utterly as a crime tale. At the same time, it reminds us that crimes can emanate from both the darkest and lightest of places, and renders the heart of a damaged family with clear-eyed yet fervent beauty.” —Megan Abbott, author of The End of Everything “Piccirilli has created a world so real you can smell the mildew.xa0 After writing crime and horror for presses well known and obscure, he deserves a breakout novel and this just might be it.” — Booklist (starred review) “A searing examination of the ties that bind brother to brother…a soulful, shivery edge to this tale of an unhappy family that’s assuredly unhappy in its own special way.” — Kirkus “[A] sharp slice of contemporary noir….Piccirilli’s mastery of the hard-boiled idiom is pitch perfect, particularly in the repartee between his characters, while the picture he paints of the criminal corruption conjoining the innocent and guilty in a small Long Island community is as persuasive as it is seamy.xa0 Readers who like a bleak streak in their crime fiction will enjoy this well-wrought novel.” — Publishers Weekly Tom Piccirilli is the author of more than twenty novels including SHADOW SEASON, THE COLD SPOT, THE COLDEST MILE, and A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN.xa0 He's won two International Thriller Awards andxa0four Bram Stoker Awards,xa0as well as havingxa0been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter oneI’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 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.“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 weren’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 a 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... Read more