CHAPTER 32

When we arrived at my villa in Ko Olina, Grey Skies didn’t greet me at the door. He liked strangers even less than I did but was usually enamored of beautiful women. I checked his food dish and was surprised and concerned to see that it was full. But I found him a moment later, fully awake and content, lying on my bed in the living room.

“Just move in?” Audra said.

“Moving out actually.”

“When?”

“Don’t know yet. Probably after Turi’s case is over.”

“That’s a long time to sleep in the living room, isn’t it?”

“Not really. I’ve already been doing it for months.”

I went immediately to the liquor cabinet. “Scotch? I have several single malts. I’m going to have a glass of Glenlivet myself.”

“No scotch for me. Do you have anything else?”

I checked the fridge but I was fresh out of Kona Longboards. My liquor cabinet was filled with nothing but scotch. Then I remembered the bottle of red wine that had been hiding in plain sight on my kitchen counter since my last female visitor.

“Red wine? Seventeen eighty-seven Château Lafite,” I joked. “Either that or a cheap bottle of Merlot I shoplifted from ABC.”

She smiled as she leaned over to pet Skies. “Merlot is perfect.”

The bottle had been opened by the previous guest. I popped the cork back out and poured a few ounces into a wineglass.

“Don’t you like red wine?” she asked as I handed her the glass. “Aren’t you Italian?”

“Actually I’m allergic to it. That and grape juice. Doctors tell me it’s the sulfites.”

“That’s too bad. You’re missing out. You can’t even have a single glass?”

“Not unless you want to see me wake tomorrow morning with bright red blotches all over my body.”

She scrunched up her features. “Who says I’m going to be here when you wake up tomorrow morning?”

For a moment our eyes met.

“I’ve gone my whole life being presumptuous,” I said. “Why stop now.”

Audra took a sip of her wine and sat on the bed. I took a gulp of my scotch and contemplated sneaking away for a Percocet.

“So where do you plan on moving to after the trial?” she asked.

“I’m not sure yet. A few places around the globe have crossed my mind.”

“You mean, you’re leaving the islands?”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I think it’s time.”

Audra fell silent. So did I. We sat there staring out my sliding-glass door at the full moon. If I left the States, it would mean leaving the law behind. And that sounded right. I often imagined myself tending bar on the outskirts of Rome or waiting tables at a world-class restaurant in Madrid. A job I could leave behind when I went home.

Finally I shut off my fantasies and excused myself to the bathroom.

Soon as I made it there, I ripped my bottle from the medicine cabinet, uncapped it, and dumped four pills in my hand. As I swallowed them, one at a time, I stared at myself in the mirror. I was thirty-four, hurtling toward thirty-five. Not a single gray hair, but the lines on my face were undeniably more defined. My thoughts these days were turning more and more toward my own mortality. And not just because I recently had a gun pressed to the back of my head.

How long can I keep running? I wondered.

By not settling down I imagined I was somehow fending off time. But the calendar said differently. For a male lawyer who drank heavily and popped Percocet for emotional pain, thirty-five had to be considered middle age. Oddly, it both pained and comforted me to know I was halfway through life.

Suddenly I heard a glass shatter, followed by a woman’s scream. I booked out of the bathroom and rushed into the living room.

There I found Audra lying on the hardwood floor, her body shuddering in pain.

I glanced down at the broken wineglass lying next to her and knew immediately what had happened. Panicking, I reached for my cell phone and dialed emergency services.

“Nine-one-one operator,” a female answered. “What’s your emergency?”

I knelt next to Audra, my whole body trembling. “A woman in my home has been poisoned.”

“Poisoned with what, sir?”

I swallowed but my mouth was dry of saliva. “Strychnine, I believe.”

“Who am I speaking to?”

I gave her my name, rushed through my address. Every word I spoke was an effort.

“Kevin, are you the one who poisoned her?” the operator asked.

“Of course not,” I roared over Audra’s shrieks.

“All right, sir, I’m going to need you to calm down for me. Help is on the way. But in the meantime, I need you to keep her as quiet as possible, since any loud noise will increase the violence of her spasms.”

I talked soothingly to Audra, told her to relax, that everything would be all right. I reminded her how beautiful she looked tonight, how she’d soon own a home smack-dab in paradise. I asked her to calm herself, but even as I said it, her convulsions grew worse.

“It’s not working,” I cried into the phone. “What else can I do for her?”

“Do you have any tranquilizers in the house?”

“Benzos, sure. All types.”

“Any Valium?”

“The generic. Diazepam.”

“Good. Get those and place a few under her tongue. Not too many or you’ll depress her respiratory system.”

I tossed the phone next to Audra on the floor and raced back to the bathroom and snatched a bottle filled with diazepam, which had been prescribed to me by my shrink, Dr. Damian Opono, immediately following Erin Simms’s suicide. I’d taken a few but had little use for them on top of the Percocet.

When I returned, Audra’s convulsions had grown even worse. I opened the bottle and spilled several pills into my hand, then I cradled her head in my lap and did my best to get the pills under her tongue.

“Are you still there, Kevin?” came a far-off voice.

I stared at my phone on the floor a few feet away.

“Kevin? Are you there?”

I didn’t respond to the 911 operator.

She heard the sirens coming from outside my villa and told me to hang on, help was only a few seconds away.

With Audra’s head in my lap, I rocked back and forth, humming.

I don’t remember precisely what happened next, except that I darted downstairs to let the paramedics in. Then I begged them to save Audra’s life.