The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli

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 citruswafted 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 her 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