Forty years! Charlie thought. Don’t seem possible I been clean that long. I might get to heaven yet.
Getting to heaven worried Charlie. He was sure that was where Sarah was — so, that’s where he wanted to go. The trouble was there had been a time when he was young and angry and made his living killing people. A free agent working for anyone with enough money to pay his fees — a target that was mean enough and clever enough to make the hunt exciting and bad enough to make the police less than industrious in looking for the one that did it.
Sarah had changed all that and brought him to the lonely, sleepy lake in central Florida both to hide and live. Now he was old and Sarah was gone and he stood on the porch barefooted, wearing faded overalls and a clean blue work shirt, wondering if he would ever get up there with her. This lonely thought soon faded back among his other gentle memories and Charlie took in a deep breath of the fresh morning air and sipped his coffee.
Patches of his thick white hair were drying and starting — to escape in random tufts from the two handsful of water he had used to glue them down and his lined brown face was still shining from the sharp edge of the old straight razor he used. Flecks of shaving soap were stuck in the deep folds of his ear lobes, giving him a fresh clean fragrance, and his pale blue eyes were warm with an expression of satisfaction. The weather was beautiful and he felt it was going to be a fine day.
The sight of the red lights, however, changed his satisfied expression to one of intense curiosity. Such activity was not common in this quiet corner of the county. Only twice in recent years had he seen such a sight. Once when he had been forced to fall back on his old skills to remove a man that had come to kill his young neighbor and favorite of all people alive — Jan Semmes. This man had made a bad mistake and paid for it. The other, when the County Sheriff came to Charlie for help in solving a murder. Rumors of his strange talents were spreading through the area. Charlie did not like that too much.
Without taking his eyes off the rotating lights, Charlie bent slightly, carefully set the coffee on a low wooden table, shoveled another spoonful of cereal into his wide mouth and padded soundlessly over the wooden boards. Then he stood in front of the screen door, chewing thoughtfully and trying to make out what was taking place.
It was less than half a mile across the jutting finger of Lake Kachimee that separated his house from the Andersons’, but the distance was such that he couldn’t see too much. The cars looked like toys and the people moving around in the yard were little more than sticks of color. It was also hard to see because the lake was rippling gently under a soft breeze and the warm morning sun made the whole surface of the lake glitter and sparkle as if handfuls of diamonds had been scattered over it.
Charlie stood squinting across the restless water until the bright flashes hurt his eyes enough to make him turn away. Then he blinked, rubbed his eyes hard and gave up in disgust.
“Getting weak. Guess you’ll want sun glasses next!” he growled to his eyes, as if they were a separate person. “Well, you jus’ forget it. We ain’t that bad off yet. And whatever’s happenin’ ain’t none ’a our business anyway.” He spoke firmly, turning and walking back through the house and out into his small orange grove.
Twice more during the morning, curiosity pulled him back to the front of the house where he could watch the random activity still going on over at the Andersons’. But each time the heavy pride of old age drove him back to his oranges. “If anybody wanted you over there, they’d call,” he told himself sharply.
As the day wore on, however, he reached the point where he was too hot and bored with the routine work to fight off his curiosity any longer. Even Jan Semmes and her children were gone for the day. Finally, he gave up and, cursing himself for a senile old fool, Charlie walked around the house, down to the dock and climbed into his small fishing boat. The well-oiled motor caught with the first pull of the cord and he swung away from the landing in a shallow semicircle toward the Anderson house.
“Sometimes people don’t even know when they need you,” he assured himself, heading toward the excitement.
When Charlie killed the motor and coasted alongside the Anderson dock, Lester Gilman, the county sheriff was waiting for him. As he caught the line Charlie threw to him, Lester smiled around his cigar and said, “I been wondering how long ’fore you’d show up, Charlie.”
“Yeah, I’m like an old cat. Cain’t stand not to know what’s goin’ on.”
Lester stuck out his hand and pulled Charlie onto the pier, all the while chewing fiercely on the stub of his soggy cigar. As usual, his tie was pulled loose, his grey cowboy hat was pushed to the back of his head and his dark suit looked as if he had been living in it for at least a week.
“Then I might not be the one you want’a see, Charlie, ’cause I ain’t sure myself,” Lester admitted. “Looks like a suicide.”
“Then why didn’t you call me?”
“Probably would have,” Lester smiled, “but you get all bent out’a shape every time I do.”
Charlie glared at Lester, his thick white eyebrows hooding his pale blue eyes. “Only when you devil me with all that fool gossip ’bout me being some kind’a criminal.”
Lester shrugged and grinned. “You sure hold a grudge, don’t you? All I said was there’s a rumor in Miami that you were a big man in the mobs one time and you get all excited.”
“Well, wouldn’t you?” Charlie snapped.
“I don’t know, I ain’t never been big in the mobs.” Lester laughed. “Here, where you going?” he called as Charlie started to climb back m his boat.
“Home! Where I ain’t gonna he insulted by no small town sheriff. That’s where!”
“Come on, Charlie,” Lester pleaded. “Don’t get all het up. That stuff ain’t none’a my business and I need some help like you gimme with that golf course case.”
Charlie paused and crawled back up on the dock. “Aw-right”, Charlie agreed. “But don’t you make no more bad remarks about my character!”
“I promise!” Lester smiled.
Charlie eased himself down onto one of the dock pilings and said, “Whatcha mean it ‘looks’ like a suicide?”
The sheriff shifted the cigar butt to the other side of his mouth and said thoughtfully, “That’s about the only way I know to put it right now. There’s a lady up in the house with a bullet in her and the gun it came out of is in her right hand.”
“Where’s the bullet?”
“In her chest. Jus’ under the left breast. Got the heart. She died pretty quick.”
“That’s a funny place for a suicide shot, ain’t it?” Charlie said, “Most people go for the head. And there’s an awful lot’a water around here. Be a cleaner way to do it.”
“Yeah,” Lester agreed, “but who knows what goes through a person’s mind when they pull a fool trick like that.”
“Powder burns?”
“Plenty.”
“She leave a note?”
“Maybe,” Lester said flatly, spitting out a soggy piece of cigar butt.
“What the hell you mean, ‘maybe’? Lester, ain’t, you looked good at nothin’?” Charlie yelled.
“Course I have! But that don’t mean I got answers. You call this a suicide note? And you handle it easy!”
Charlie took the small piece of paper Lester handed him carefully by the edges and looked at both sides of it. One side was blank. The other had writing on it. The top and bottom of the page had been cut off above and below the beginning and ending sentences.
I’m sorry, the note read. I never meant for things to end this way, but I guess it has to be Charlie saw there was no period to end the last sentence.