Read Online Collateral Damage by H. Terrell Griffin - Free Book Online

stories. There are no others that tall all the way up the island.”
    She pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll get a crime-scene unit up there now. It’s probably too late, but we’ve got to check it out.”
    She made arrangements to meet the crime-scene people at the Tropical in thirty minutes. “If your theory is correct,” she said, “there had to be at leasttwo shooters.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI’ll meet you later at the Hilton,” she said, and was outthe door.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    July on our key is a time when there are few tourists and we islanders meet for drinks and jokes and stories of other lives, those we lived before we found our paradise on Longboat Key. Some of the stories were probably even true, although we didn’t much care and never tried to sort out the truth from the fantasy. Everybody is entitled to start over, and our little island was as good a place as any for that.
    I was sitting at the outside bar at the Hilton talking to Billy Brugger who had been slinging drinks in the place for a quarter of a century. He knew everybody, those still with us and those who had departed for other venues, those who had died and those who had simply moved away, perhaps tired of the essential sameness of our lives, bored with the little stimulus that island living provided, needful of the stress they’d left behind in the cities of the Midwest, or simply craving the daily contact of family and the familiar friends of their youths. He knew their secrets, the ones whispered to him over the bar late at night, when the whisperers had drunk too much and were a little maudlin, perhaps thinking of the homes they’d left to chase the sun to Florida. And Billy kept those secrets. He was as closed-mouthed as a sphynx, judicious in his friendships and in many ways a repository of all the island’s ills.
    I’d stopped by Tiny’s after J.D. left. The chief was already into his second drink, chatting with one of the regulars, a commercial fisherman from Cortez. A couple of other locals sat at a table in the corner, intent on the golf game playing on the big flat-screen TV. Bill Lester never had more than two drinks when he was driving. We talked while he sipped on the last one and then headed home. I paid my tab and drove three miles south to the Hilton.

    Billy looked at his watch. “She’ll be hitting the water in about five minutes.”
    He was talking about the sun. He enjoyed the sunsets as much as I did, but would never admit it lest the locals think him as crazy as I. The people who lived on our key figured that when you’ve seen thousands of sunsets, the beauty pales into insignificance. But not for me. Each one was different from the others, the colors splaying across the water in ever changing patterns, the birds, a new flock each day, flying across the face of the sun on their way home for the night, the small formations of clouds hanging at the edge of the horizon, reflecting the last rays of the day. I was mindful of the fact that perhaps my fascination with the sunsets was that it was the last vestige of Old Florida, the land I’d known growing up, that part of my youth now buried under the condominium towers, parking lots, and thousands of new homes that fed the beast called progress.
    â€œI know,” I said. “I can always depend on the sun.”
    J.D. came up the ramp from the parking lot. “Hey, Billy,” she asked, “is he still sober?” She was pointing at me.
    â€œYeah. You can always tell. He’s not nearly as interesting when he’s not drinking much.”
    J.D. took the stool next to mine. Billy poured her a glass of wine. “It’s time,” he said.
    I turned my stool toward the Gulf, my back to the bar. The sun was just beginning to dip into the horizon. I watched as it sank, moving quickly as if glad to be done with this day, seeking a little rest before it started its rise over