The Last Kind Words Read Online Free PDF

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 seemed 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 oflower-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