James Grippando: Last to die

She froze, her eyes fixed on the black hole at the end of the polished metal barrel. It lasted only a split second, but it was as if she were suddenly floating outside her own body, watching the scene unfold. In her mind’s eye, she could see the flash of powder from the barrel, see the windshield shatter, see her head snapping back, her body slumping forward, and the spray of blood on the leather seats. She could even hear the horn blasting as her face hit the steering wheel and came to rest there. And for the second time in the same day, she saw herself smiling a genuine smile.

With the lonely crack of a revolver that echoed off concrete, her living nightmare was finally over.

The sun was setting as Jack Swyteck pulled into his driveway. He lived on Key Biscayne, an island practically in the shadows of downtown Miami, but a world apart. Across the bay, beyond the sprawling metropolis and somewhere over the distant Everglades, fluffy bands of pink, orange, and magenta were slowly dissolving into the darkness of night. It wasn’t until all color had vanished from the sky that it suddenly dawned on him what day it was. Exactly one year to the day that he and Cindy began the separation that ended their five-year marriage in divorce.

Happy Anniversary, he told himself.

Jack was a trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense work, though he was open to just about anything if it interested him. By the same token, he turned away cases that he didn’t find interesting, the upshot being that he liked what he did but didn’t make a ton of money doing it. Profit had never been his goal. He had spent his first four years out of law school at the Freedom Institute, a ragtag group of idealists who defended death row inmates. At the time, Jack’s father, Harry Swyteck, was Florida’s law-and-order governor and staunchly pro-death penalty. Jack’s job didn’t sit well with him, but that was sort of the idea. Four years of tweaking his old man proved to be plenty, and in case anyone had written him off as a bleeding heart liberal, he completely shifted gears and made a name for himself as a fair but aggressive federal prosecutor. He left the U.S. attorney’s office on good terms, but almost two years later he was still trying to find his stride in private practice. To be sure, everything from a messy divorce to a dead client in his bathtub had served as “distractions” along the way, and he was determined to give his own firm a fair shot before changing professional course again.

“Hey, Theo!” he called out across the lawn.

Theo didn’t seem to hear him. He was busily scrubbing down his twenty-four-foot sport fisherman, which at the moment was suspended by davits and hanging over the water. The one saving grace of Jack’s austere rental house was the fact that it was on the water with its own dock. This was his third rental since the divorce, part of his whirlwind quest to find the perfect digs for a divorced man with no kids, no addictions, and surprisingly little interest in dating. His latest experiment was a “Mackle home,” a simple three-bedroom, one bathroom, cinder-block structure with a small screened-in porch and, of course, no central air conditioning. In the early 1950s, the Mackle brothers built scores of these basic beach homes, mostly for WWII veterans and their young families. Back then, Key Biscayne was little more than a mosquito swamp, so Mackle homes were about the cheapest housing around, with a typical closing price of twelve thousand dollars. Today, the lot alone went for about twelve grand per foot of linear waterfront. It seemed that about every third or fourth day a developer would drop by, aching to enter Jack’s living room with a bulldozer and blueprints. His was the last of the waterfront Mackles still standing.

“Yo, Theo!”

Still no response. Working on a boat with the music blasting was enough to put Theo in another world. Since Jack didn’t own a boat, he let Theo dock his behind the house. It was perfect for Theo, who ran his bar at night, fished and slept all day on the boat. He was one of those rare friends who never seemed to age, which wasn’t to say that he didn’t look older from one year to the next. He just refused to grow up, which made him fun to have around. Sometimes.

Theo was hosing down the deck as Jack approached. “Catch anything?” asked Jack.

Theo kept cleaning and said, “Not a damn thing.”

“It’s like they say: That’s why they call it fishin’, not-”

Theo turned the hose on him, giving his suit a good splash.

“Catchin’,” said Jack. He was dripping wet but pretended that it hadn’t happened, wiping the water from his face.

“You know, Swyteck, sometimes you are just so full of-”

“Wisdom?”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what I was gonna say. Wisdom.”

“I guess it takes a real genius to taunt an ex-con who’s holding a garden hose,” said Jack as he brushed the water from his pinstripes.

Theo climbed out of the boat, smiled, and gave Jack a bear hug so big that his feet left the ground. Theo had the height of an NBA all star, the brawn of a football linebacker.

Jack took a step back, surprised. “What’s that for?”

“Happy Anniversary, buddy.”

Jack wasn’t sure how Theo knew, but he figured he must have mentioned something to him about the one-year milestone. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a happy anniversary.”

“Aw, come on. You gonna hold a grudge because I splashed you with a little water?”

“Exactly what anniversary are you talking about?” asked Jack.

“What anniversary are you talking about?”

“It was a year ago today that Cindy and I separated.”

“Cindy? Who the hell gives a rat’s ass about her? I was talking about us.”

“Us?”

“Yes. Ten years ago this week. You and me met for the first time. Remember?”

Jack thought for a second. “Not really.”

“Now you’re hurtin’ my feelings. I remember everything about it. It was a Friday morning. Guard comes and gets me from my cell, tells me I have a meetin’ with my new court-appointed lawyer from the Freedom Institute. Of course, I’m sittin’ on death row without a damn thing to do, except lay there and ask myself, ‘Theo, would you like the mustard sauce or drawn butter with your last meal of stone crabs and fried sweet potatoes?’ So I’m bouncin’ off the walls at the thought of a new lawyer. So I go down, and there you are, sittin’ on the other side of the glass.”

“What did you think when you saw me?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Typical white Ivy League graduate with a save-the-black-man guilt complex.”

“Gee. And all this time I thought I’d made a lousy first impression.”

Theo narrowed his eyes, as if quizzing him. “Remember the first thing I said to you?”

“Probably something along the lines of ‘Got any money, dude?’”

“No, smart ass. I looked you right in the eye and said, ‘Jack, there’s something you need to know right up front: I am an innocent man.’”

“I do remember that.”

“And do you remember what you said?”

“No.”

“You said, ‘Mr. Knight’-you called me Mr. Knight back then-‘there’s something you need to know right up-front: I think you’re a big, fat, fucking liar.’”

“Did I really say that?”

“Oh, yeah. Exact quote.”

“Wow. You must have thought I was an asshole.”

“I still think you’re an asshole.”

“Thanks.”

Theo smiled, then grabbed him by the shoulders and planted a big kiss on his cheek. “Happy Anniversary. Asshole.”

Jack smiled. Theo and his kisses. A last-minute release from death row for a crime you truly didn’t commit could make you want to hug everyone for the rest of your life. Or it could have the opposite effect. It all depended on the man.