Free The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel by Tom Piccirilli Page A

I’d felt when visiting death row. For my sins I was doomed to repeat myself. I dry-swallowed another pill. JFK stayed close at my side.
    My father said, “Here’s Terry now.”
    A chill breeze broke like cold lips on my neck. The guy gazed down at me as I approached. He even had Collie’s white streak in his hair, same as me. It seemed like he could barely contain his joy. Number six. The expression on the face of the man who looks just like your brother, who looks just like you.
    My father noted my bruises. He cocked his head, a cloud of worry crossing his features. “You all right?”
    “Sure.”
    “This is your cousin John.”
    “I don’t have a cousin John,” I said.
    “You do,” John said. “I’m your mother’s nephew. Your uncle Will’s son.”
    There didn’t seem to be much of a reason to point out that I didn’t have an uncle Will either.
    I shouldn’t have taken the last pill.
    “Hello, John,” I said, putting out the only one I had leftc himself my hand. “I’m Terry.”
    We shook. “Oh, I know who you are, Terrier.”
    “Yeah?”
    I didn’t like the way he said it, as if he’d been checking up on me. He had a rich deep voice. He had a charmer’s grin. He was bad news through and through. I vibed that he wanted to hug me and stepped out of his reach. JFK went and crouched in the corner. He shivered in the presence of a ghost.
    My cousin John wasn’t drinking beer. Someone had mixed him a drink with a lot of ice. The glass was nearly empty. He took a deep breath and let out a warm laugh that I knew was going to be the precursor to a long story.
    “Let me freshen that up for you,” I said, and snatched the glass out of his hand. I stepped into the house and made sure to shut the door.
    On the stove simmered a pot of stew. My mother sat at the kitchen table, talking quietly on the telephone. We were the last people in the western hemisphere who still had a landline and a phone with a cord. The cord was stretched across the length of the kitchen like a clothesline you could garotte yourself on.
    I couldn’t read her, which worried me. I threw down the meds and the bag of my sister’s beauty products. I was home by dinner. I had done my duty. Liquor and cola and an ice bucket were out on a tray situated in the center of the table. I sniffed at the tumbler. Smelled like Dewar’s. I drank it down.
    The second she got a look at me my ma said into the receiver, “I have to go now, yes, tomorrow, goodbye.” She hung up. She rushed over and checked the tape job and scabbed-over cuts. She gripped my chin and turned my face this way and that, considering it from different angles. She tsked as loudly as a rifle crack.
    “You stole the meds,” she said.
    “I didn’t steal the meds.”
    “And they caught you and they punched you out.”
    “Ma, listen—”
    She ran a hand through her auburn hair. “Now I can’t go back to Schlagel’s.”
    “You can go back to Schlagel’s.”
    “We have to find a new pharmacy.”
    “You don’t have to—”
    “Do you know what a nightmare it is dealing with the doctor’s office and getting them to call in prescriptions to a new place?”
    “You can go back to Schlagel’s, Ma. Now, forget that, right?” I motioned toward the porch and nothing but a little groan came out and then my voice kicked in again and I said, “This guy? John? He says he’s my cousin? What the hell?”
    “What are you on?” she asked, staring into my eyes. “What did you take, Terry?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Don’t tell me nothing.”
    “That’s not important right now.”
    “It is important, Terrier. When I ask you a question like this you answer. That’s what you do. So, what did you take?”
    “Some Percocet.”
    “I don’t like you messing with drugs.”
    “Ma, I’m not me the only one I had leftc himselfss—”
    She cut me off with a hand slicing through the air. “Don’t drink any more liquor, then. Who punched you out?”
    “Some of Chub’s