When I woke, my pulse was radiating throughout my body. My head ached with each beat. I took short breaths to get relief from the piercing pain in my chest. The left side of my face was numb. I couldn’t hear out of that ear.
I slowly pulled myself up to a sitting position. The storm had passed, and the sea was calm again.
Bo sat across from me, propped up against the glass door with a web of cracks behind his head. Somehow it hadn’t shattered.
Bo’s eyes were open but had no life. Dark red blood emanated from a hole in his chest and covered his Pensacola Country Club white polo. Blood had puddled under him.
Jace and Julie Wittman held each other on the couch. The father stroked the hair of the sobbing girl. The gun was lying on the floor near their feet.
“How . . . how long have I been out?” I asked.
“Not sure, maybe an hour,” said Jace. His bravado had evaporated. He sounded sober.
“Julie shot Bo when I went at him,” he said. “She was defending me.”
Julie took her head off her father’s shoulder. “But I didn’t think,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I just pulled the trigger, and he fell.”
“Hush, angel, you did what you had to do,” Wittman said.
But I sensed Julie wanted to talk. No, she needed to talk.
“Julie, what did you mean when you said you were the secret,” I asked.
Jace warned, “Holmes, this isn’t the time or place for your investigative reporting. Leave her—”
Julie shouted over her father. “I want you to understand.”
Jace shut his eyes. He didn’t want to hear this but wouldn’t stop her.
“At first Uncle Bo was fun to be around,” she continued. “He wanted to hear about my day, listened to my stories. Like he didn’t cut me off or tune me out. It seemed like he really cared, you know.”
I nodded to encourage her to continue talking. I didn’t want to interrupt her.
“I really looked forward to seeing him. I loved his hugging me, the smell of his cologne—he was so funny . . .”
Tears ran down Wittman’s cheeks.
“Daddy, you were away a lot and Aunt Sue went to sleep early. Uncle Bo would watch movies with me. I stretched out on the sofa, and he sat next to me. Then one night, he turned out the lights, and soon he was lying down behind me.”
She talked as if she were describing a scene in a movie. “He put his hand underneath my shirt and began to touch my breasts.”
Jace clenched his fists.
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Julie, who cried softly as she told how her uncle then began visiting her bedroom. She said Hines would talk to her about their “strong connection.”
“I was afraid,” she said. “But he made me feel important and I really liked him.”
“And your aunt found out?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think so.”
Julie burrowed into her father’s shoulder and started sobbing again.
After a third attempt to get up from the floor, I stood.
Jace asked, “What are we going to do? I can’t let my daughter suffer through the humiliation of a trial. I can’t.”
He was crying, too. “I’ve been so stupid,” he said shaking his head. “Right under my nose.”
“Grudges,” I whispered to myself.
“What?” asked Jace.
“Nothing. Where’s my cell phone?”
He pointed to his windbreaker on the counter near the bar. “It’s in my pocket,” he said. “What in the hell are you going to do?”
The phone had a signal, but the battery was low. I dialed Gravy.
“Walker, where are you?” he asked. “Childs is dead. Harden has looked for you everywhere.”
“I’m on a boat with Jace Wittman and his daughter.”
“What?”
“Gravy, be quiet and listen. I’ve killed Bo Hines.”
“Shit.”
“It was self-defense,” I said and looked at the Wittmans. Jace nodded his head. “Have police and EMS meet us at Palafox Pier.”
“Are you hurt?”
My phone died.
“Anyone else have a phone?” I asked, but their phones had lost their charge, too.
“Okay, we need to get back to Pensacola,” I said. “But first, Julie, you must scrub your hands with the strongest soap on this boat. We’ve got to get as much powder residue off as possible.”
Jace said, “Won’t they still detect it?”
“This isn’t CSI,” I said. “I’m giving them a better target.”
I picked up the gun. It was heavier than I thought. “Jace, go below with Julie. I’ll start the engines, but you may still hear a gunshot. It’s me putting another bullet in him.”
“But I deserve to go to jail,” Julie said.
“No one is going to jail. We were having a friendly discussion. Bo became enraged and started beating me. Jace, you tried to stop him, and Bo knocked you unconscious. He pulled the gun. I wrestled with him and the gun fired twice killing him.”
Holding his daughter tightly, Jace agreed. “Julie, we can make it work. We’ve got about a thirty-minute ride. We can get our stories together.”
After they had gone below, I started the engine and fired the gun. The glass door behind Hines shattered from the additional force. The motors drowned out the noise. I draped a blanket over Hines’ corpse and called for the Wittmans to come back.
I was in no shape to steer the Sundancer. My equilibrium was shot, making it hard to stand.
“You need to lay down,” Jace said. “You’re bleeding.”
Julie was worn out, but she wouldn’t leave her father’s side. Behind them, the sun began to peek over the horizon.
Jace said, “Let’s take you downstairs and put you on one of the beds.”
“But we need to get our alibis straight.”
“Julie and I will handle our end,” Jace said.
They placed me on a bed in the bow of the Sundancer and used pillows to keep me from rolling off. I tried to work out what I would tell the police at the dock, but I only got to “Bo beat the crap out of me . . .” before I passed out.
“Mr. Holmes?”
I opened my right eye and saw a female police officer standing over me.
“Can you get up?”
I shook my head. “I want my attorney.”
Her bulletproof vest made her look like one of the Teletubbies, but I couldn’t remember there being a blue one. Maybe she was a Care Bear.
She said, “Your attorney is on the dock. The paramedics are going to take you off the boat and check you out.”
“I can walk with some help,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
“Good thing,” I heard a male voice say from the deck. “There’s no way in hell we can get a stretcher down there.”
Slowly, painfully, they walked me up the curved steps, past Hines’ body and helped me off the boat. They lifted me onto a gurney on the Palafox Pier dock.
Gravy appeared at my side. He whispered, “My God, Walker, what happened?”
“Hines attacked me . . . his gun went off,” I said.
A crime scene technician stopped the EMTs before they put me in the ambulance.
“We need to swab his hands,” she said.
“No,” said Gravy. “Not without a warrant.”
A thin man in a blue windbreaker came to the technician’s aid. “Is there a problem here, counselor?” he asked.
Gravy apparently knew the man. He must have been with either the police or state attorney’s office. Gravy said, “Jack, my client needs to get to the hospital. I’m not letting your guys maul him. Clearly he’s a victim here, not a suspect.”
Jack said, “We have sufficient probable cause to swab Mr. Holmes’ hands. You know that, Gravy.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said giving Gravy a slight nod. “Let’s get it over with.”
He said, “This is over my objection, but he’s the client.”
I noticed a young, sandy-haired man talking with Jace and Julie Wittman away from the police officers.
“Who’s that?” I said nodding in their direction.
Gravy said, “Charlie Wilbrant, an attorney friend. I suspected Wittman might need representation. Don’t worry; it helps us.”
While the tech swabbed my hands for gun powder residue, Gravy conferred with the head EMT, police investigator, and Clark Spencer. I hadn’t noticed him earlier.
Gravy returned. “They are taking you to Sacred Heart Hospital. You need to be fully checked out. They will keep you overnight.”
“Just get me home,” I said.
“Listen. The police and state attorney’s office will leave you alone while you’re under the care of a doctor at the hospital,” said Gravy. “I’ve agreed to have you at the state attorney’s office at 10:00 a.m. on Monday.”
“It was self-defense—” I started to say.
“Stop, no more talking,” he interrupted. “Tell the doctors and nurses about your injuries, but say nothing else. You understand?”
I nodded.
“I’ll see you at the hospital,” he said as they hoisted me into the ambulance. “Don’t say a fucking word.”
The next eighteen hours were a blur of x-rays, shots, and stitches. I threatened to strangle a male nurse when he tried to insert a catheter. I won that battle.
I remember seeing a different person sitting in my room reading the same copy of People magazine every time I opened my eyes. Gravy, Mal, Summer, Jeremy, Theodore, Bree, and even Tiny took turns in the chair. The only ones from the Insider missing were Big Boy and Yoste, who had taken time off to work as deckhand on a charter boat in Destin and was oblivious to my status. Summer told me that Dare was taking care of the dog.
“She visited you once while you were sleeping but couldn’t stand to see how badly you were injured,” said Summer. “Watching over Big Boy is her contribution to your recovery.”
I dreamed Mari visited me. She sat in the chair with her legs folded under her. Her long brown hair draped over her shoulders and a red Hotty Toddy T-shirt. I could smell her. She smiled.
Oddly I wasn’t shocked that she was visiting me. Mari was never far away, always waiting to reappear and make me face my past. I tried to keep the guilt in a box in the corner of my mind, but my memory refused to be restrained.
The police never found her killer. Campus security discovered her nude body in the woods behind the Tad Smith Coliseum near fraternity row. They first questioned me, but I had plenty of witnesses that verified where I was. Later forensics found the attacker had red hair, which kept me off their suspect list permanently.
I cried and sat with the Gaudet family at her funeral. I almost dropped out of Ole Miss. Everywhere I went on campus and in Oxford reminded me of Mari. I contemplated suicide. Dare stood by me and refused to let me give up.
But I knew that Mari’s death was my fault. I should have been at the crisis center to pick her up. The damn story wasn’t more important than her. It was my dark secret, something I never said aloud or admitted to anyone—not to Dare, Mari’s parents, or my priest.
I became a journalist to prove, in some weird way, that Mari’s death wasn’t in vain. I pushed myself hard, did the dangerous, impossible investigative pieces to show her I was a great writer and could save the world, even though I couldn’t save her.
My editors speculated I had a death wish. Maybe they were right. No, that sounded nobler than it was. I had a dark secret that drove me to expose evil and corruption so I could find redemption.
I said, “Mari, I am so sorry.”
She said, “I know. Walker . . .”
A shadow blocked my view of her. She was about to say something else. A nurse stood over me to take my temperature and pulse. When she left, Mari was gone.