Last to die

“Say what?”

“Listen to me. Here’s the story. Jack, you, and me came over to confront Miguel the pussy here. He confessed to the killings and shot Jack. Then you shot Miguel. We’re home free, brother. All we gotta do is get rid of Jack.”

Theo didn’t answer.

“You thinking about it, ain’t you?” Tatum said through his teeth. “Half of forty-six million dollars. Come on, do right by your brother. Shoot Jack with Miguel’s gun.”

Theo was stone silent.

“Do it now, damn it!”

Theo knelt down beside Miguel’s body. He pressed the gun into Miguel’s hand and raised it slowly.

“Even better,” said Tatum, his voice racing. “Let Miguel’s own finger pull the trigger.”

It was as if the gun were in Miguel’s grasp. Theo held Miguel’s lifeless hand between his own huge hands, taking aim at Jack’s head.

“That’s right, Theo. One little squeeze.”

Jack’s heart skipped a beat. Theo was a friend. He’d never shoot his buddy, the lawyer who’d saved his ass on death row. Not in a million years. Not for anything.

Except maybe twenty-three million dollars.

“Theo,” said Jack. “This is crazy, pal. Tatum screwed you before, he’ll screw you again.”

“Do it!” shouted Tatum.

In a flash, the gun jerked, a shot whistled across the room. Tatum’s gun was airborne, and his head snapped back violently. Jack dived forward to the floor. Theo rushed to his wounded brother.

Tatum was flat on his back, gasping and holding his throat. The bullet had passed through his neck. Blood was pouring from the severed carotid artery, pumping in surges with each beat of his fading heart until he was surrounded by a growing circle of red. His eyes glazed over with a helpless expression, a look that Jack hadn’t seen since his days of defending death row inmates, that unmistakable, almost incongruous look of fear and bewilderment in the eyes of a murderer who was suddenly forced to come to grips with his own mortality.

Tatum looked up at Theo. He could barely speak, his throat filled with blood, but the bullet had passed through his neck off-center and had spared his voice. “You piece of shit,” he said in a thick, distant tone, choking on his own blood. “You shot your own brother.”

Theo looked at Jack, then back at Tatum, his expression deadpan. “Wrong again, Tatum. I saved him.”

Tatum’s head hit the floor, and his body was suddenly still.

Sixty-three

Jack watched from the helm as Theo walked alone to the bow of the fishing boat and scattered the ashes. It was early Sunday morning. The horizon was still orange from the rising sun, and a warm wind carried the ocean’s whispers from the east-from Nassau maybe, which seemed fitting, since Tatum used to love to go there and gamble. Seagulls trailed their boat across the deep blue swells, ready to steal a fisherman’s bait. One of them splashed into the waves, snatched up a floating fragment of bone in its beak, and then dropped it from mid-air.

“Not even the scavengers want him,” said Theo, his voice falling off in the breeze.

The burial at sea had been Theo’s idea. Fishing out on the boat was the one place he’d felt co

The two of them had told all to the police at the crime scene. Jack took the media calls in the ensuing frenzy, not because he enjoyed the publicity but because Theo hated it even more. Within hours, it was all over the evening news that Tatum Knight had shot Sally Fe

“I’m ready,” said Theo, wiping the salty sea spray from his brow.

“Let’s go in.”

“This is a good thing you’re doing,” said Jack.

“Yeah. At least this way I won’t be tempted to come piss on his grave.”

Jack started the engine and steered for home. The ride back took almost an hour, completely in silence. Jack thought it would do Theo some good to get out of the house, and Theo was always up for eating, so they went for a leisurely breakfast at Greenstreet, a sidewalk café in Coconut Grove. Before the Sally Fe

All that was complicated, too complicated for a simple Sunday breakfast. Winter was just a couple of weeks away. The sun was shining warmly, joggers and cyclists everywhere; people wearing shorts and T-shirts were out window shopping and walking their dogs-all the telltale signs that life went on and that December in south Florida definitely didn’t suck. Jack was too wrapped up in the newspaper to notice that Theo had already finished his pancakes and was halfway through Jack’s. He skimmed through the rehashed material on page one A, then picked up the second half of the feature story on Sally Fe

“Sally was dying of AIDS,” says her sister Rene Fe

Eventually, that unhappiness led her to a murder-for-hire that was effectively a suicide. According to sources close to the investigation, Sally could apparently think of no better way to check out of this world than to let the people who had ruined her life fight for her millions-a deadly game of survival of the greediest in which a hired killer and a stalker known only as “Alan Sirap” were sure to make things interesting.