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spite of herself. He looked bad, pale and sweaty, like he’d been on one of his legendary benders, which would explain why he’d just staggered and fell into her arms. Where had Wally been all this time?
    She reached to wipe the beads of sweat off his forehead and realized that her hand was bloody. A crowd of onlookers was gathering. Joe was already out of the boat, shouting for somebody to call a doctor.
    “I’m sorry, Faye. About Douglass.” Wally wheezed hard, and Faye could tell it hurt him to talk.
    “Don’t say anything, Wally. Just lie still. Joe’s getting you some help.”
    Wally’s small watery eyes scanned the faces gathering on the dock. He wheezed again. Ignoring Faye’s efforts to calm him, he tried and failed to rise up out of her supporting arms. “Need to tell you…sorry…sorry for everything. Tried to stop…never meant to…”
    His mouth worked to form the words. “Remember before. You have to remember before,” he said, looking hard into her eyes. The light was already fading from his. “Remember. Before,” he said one more time, his voice urgent.
    “I do remember. We were friends, Wally. We are friends.” She called out for someone to get a doctor, but it was too late. Wally was gone.

Chapter Seven
    Faye had seen death before, but she’d never seen this much blood. Everything in her world was red. The blood. The fiery sunset that reflected in the eyes of a sea of confused bar patrons. Liz’s hair, hanging over her face as she wept for Wally, who had been her friend and her boss and maybe her lover.
    Even the warm highlights in Chip’s chestnut hair were red, as he cradled his weeping mother against his chest. And that chest was covered with a cherry red polo shirt, wet with her tears. The sheriff’s mechanical pencil was the color of blood as it scratched notes on a white sheet of paper. There was a red ambulance and its red lights circled pointlessly, because the patient was dead.
    Blood coated Faye’s hands and arms and chest—the parts of her that had touched Wally as she cradled him in her lap. It still lay in red puddles around her feet, even though the emergency personnel had gently lifted his body onto a stretcher quite some time ago.
    She couldn’t focus her mind enough to get up and get out of the boat. Where would she go? Joe, God bless him, didn’t try to tell her what to do. He just sat beside her and held her hand.
    The sheriff and his forensics team seemed happy to let them sit in the gory mess, probably because it meant they weren’t messing up the crime scene. They weren’t tracking through the blood, dropping hairs, or strewing fibers hither and yon. All they were doing was sitting there in a pool of congealing gore while they answered questions.
    No, she hadn’t seen anybody lurking in the shadows when she walked out to her boat. And neither, Joe said, had he.
    No, she hadn’t even seen Wally until he dropped into her lap. Neither had Joe. And neither of them had seen the knife that had gouged a hole in his back. It seemed to have disappeared into that mysterious place where Wally had been hiding for years now.
    No, Wally didn’t say any more about Douglass, beyond being sorry. Sorry for killing him? Sorry somebody else killed him? Sorry for Faye’s pain? Sorry he cheated him at poker? Neither Faye nor Joe could say.
    No, neither of them knew of anyone in particular who would have wanted Wally dead. Wally had been the kind of person who generated murderous feelings in everyone around him at one time or another. He lied at the drop of a hat. He manipulated people for the sheer hell of it. He cheated at cards, even when he wasn’t playing for money. If Faye had been asked to guess which of her friends was most likely to wind up dead of a stab wound, it would have been Wally. But, no, she didn’t know who did it.
    She noticed that Joe had climbed onto the dock, and he was talking to the sheriff. When had he done that? Even Joe was wearing Wally’s blood.