21-07-2026, 04:35 AM
Colman wasn’t that much bigger than me, but his damned cowboy hat had to give him another eight inches in height. I’d never seen a man wearing a hat that big, but other than that, Colman was a pretty nice guy. I figured he must have a Napoleonic complex. He grinned as he took my hand in his and tried to shake it off.
“I’m glad you rolled the dice, Bill. I was starting to get a damned ulcer worrying that son of a bitch would get away with it.”
The taller driver was helping a handcuffed, dark haired man dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt out of the back of the cruiser.
“We nabbed him mowing the grass,” Colman said laughing. “He wanted to get changed but I said he needed to get used to a prison jump suit because that’s what he’ll be in for the rest of his life.
“Talk about chewing nails. I was hoping he’d take a swing at me and I think he almost did. But at the last minute he remembered I was carrying a .357 magnum and he thought better of it.”
Sutton was 6-foot-2, slender but broad in the chest and well-muscled. He was probably 220 or 230. A bigger man than he looked at first glance; a big, strong man capable of doing a lot of damage with his bare hands or a metal bar.
It would have been nice if he’d lost control of that volcanic temper, but bastards like that never lost control when you wanted them to.
Colman’s deputy walked him over to us. He looked down on me with that instinctive air of contempt big men have for men who are shorter.
“Maitland. I see you finally developed some balls. It was the old fart’s story that pushed you into filing charges, wasn’t it?”
“Why do you assume it was Bell who dropped the dime on you? And what could he have possibly told us that would have convinced us to charge you?”
I thought he was too smart to fall for it, but if he indicated he knew anything about Bell watching him drive off and come back he’d be digging his grave with his own mouth.
But he was too smart.
“I don’t have to be a genius. You screw me around for months, but you don’t file charges so I can clear my name. You just leave me twisting in the wind.
“And then the crazy old bastard that’s hated my mother and me for 20 years comes back into town and a couple of days later this redneck prick puts cuffs on me. I guessed he’s probably behind it.”
“You’ll get the whole story pretty soon, Mr. Sutton, but you sure you wouldn’t like to confess? I think you’d sleep better if you got it off your conscience. It must be hard at night seeing the face of your wife after you finished working her over with that tire iron.
“And they said you smashed her stomach in so badly that you probably saw part of your son’s ripped apart body. He was your son, you miserable son of a bitch. Even if you hated your wife, how could you do that to your own blood?”
He just looked at me like you’d look at a bug on a windshield.
“It might bother me a little if I’d done it. But I’m an innocent man. I didn’t touch that miserable whore that was screwing around on me behind my back for years. And I didn’t touch her bastard. God knows who his father was, but it wasn’t me. I hadn’t dipped my dick into that diseased cunt for months before she got pregnant.”
“That’s strange,” I said, staring into those dark, bottomless eyes. “I never made it public because I wanted to save it for the jury, but we were able to run a DNA analysis on the embryo’s remains and we got your DNA with a court order. The baby boy you dismembered was William Sutton Jr.”
He just kept staring at me with no change of expression.
“He was your son, Sutton. He probably would have had your eyes, your features. No matter how terrible a slut your ex might have been, he would have been yours.
“Did you really think she might have gotten pregnant by another man? All we’ve been able to discover indicates she never cheated on you. There’s nothing to indicate it. Does your mother know you murdered her grandson?”
“I didn’t murder anyone,” he said, and smiled at me. “You think you’ve got supernatural powers or something, Maitland? You taking your press clippings seriously? All that Angel of Death bullshit? You’re just a cheap little lawyer...a cheap little lawyer whose wife I’m going to bang like a drum someday after I beat this charge.”
He looked down at me and grinned.
“Yeah, everybody knows your story, Maitland. Pitiful little punk. Couldn’t keep your pussy happy at home so she went and found someone younger. I should have some sympathy because I was married to the same kind of bitch. But I don’t. I will walk. There’s no way in hell you’re ever going to convict me with no evidence.
“You don’t have prints. You don’t have blood evidence. You don’t have a weapon. You don’t have anyone who even saw me with the bitch the night someone did the world a favor and beat her brains in. You don’t have anyone who ever heard me talking to her that night, despite her lying bitch friends.
“I’m glad you let the old bastard convince you to go for it. I don’t want this hanging over my head for months or years. Now I can beat this shit and start my life over - $5 million richer. There’s no way her damned brother and sister can keep me from getting it. We were still legally married when some good Samaritan did me the big favor of sending her to hell.”
He stepped closer to me and I sensed Colman putting his hand on his Magnum but I waved him off.
“In a few months or a year I’m going to be rich, and free. And you better believe I’m going to spend a chunk of that meeting and wining and dining your bitch ex-wife. And after I spread her legs and nail her pussy and ass until you could run a two-by-four up here, I’ll send you a video and polaroids to pass the time late at night.”
He turned his gaze down at Colman and sneered.
“That pig wife of yours is going to be harder to swallow, no pun intended, but I’ll do her just for the pleasure of getting pictures and sending them to you.
“And when you come after me with the big-ass gun, I’ll have security blow you to hell. You’re going to be easy, because at least you’ve got balls and you won’t be able to stand me turning your wife into a whore. Maitland is such a pussy he’ll just lay there and take it.”
I put my hand on Colman’s gun hand and squeezed.
“”You are welcome to fantasize as much as you like, Mr. Sutton. But you’re never leaving the confines of the state penal system again while you’re upright.
“And the only hot sex you’re going to enjoy is some inmate’s big cock stuck up your ass or down your throat. Probably two of three of them at the same time. And probably coal black because I hear they love good looking white boys like you.”
He just shook his head and kept smiling.
“It’s a date. See you in court, Angel of Death.”
As Colman and the deputy led Sutton in the jail, a late model Caddy swung into the parking lot. A white haired old man got out from behind the driver’s side and helped a little old white haired lady out of the passenger side. Leaning heavily on a cane and the old man, she limped toward me. Her gaze chilled me.
“Mr. Maitland, you are going to be sorry you did this.”
“Hello, Mrs. Sutton. I expected you to be along pretty soon. Come to lend moral support to your son? I can’t blame you.”
“You are filth, Mr. Maitland. Just like that bitch wife of his. She deserved everything that was done to her. I just wish I could have seen it.”
“You know her baby was your grandson?”
“That piece of trash was no relation to me. And I’m glad it was tossed into the woods for animals to eat.”
I looked at her and for once words failed me.
“I was 49, Mr. Maitland, when I became pregnant with William. All the doctors told me to abort him. My husband—my fortunately dead husband—tried to make me abort him. But I refused. It was hell, but I bore him and he lived.
“He has always been mine and I have always been his. Someday we will be buried in the same grave, together for eternity. Nothing can ever separate us. Certainly not a miserable ambulance chaser like you.”
I just stared through the ice at her, feeling sorry for the miserable old man who must have been a boyfriend. Although God knows I couldn’t imagine have the nerve to try to shove a penis up inside that frozen vagina.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sutton. I was feeling a slight degree of pity for you. No matter what, no matter how twisted and just plain mean you have been, no matter that you’re lying to help your son get away with beating a woman and embryo to death, I told myself that you’re a mother and mothers have blind spots for their sons.
“But, I don’t have any pity for you anymore. You’re the reason he’s the monster he is today. You molded him into the man he is. If there was any way, I’d have you on the gurney with poison being pumped into your veins alongside him.”
If she had had a weapon in her hands, I would have been apprehensive.
“But it’s better this way, Mrs. Sutton. You’re old, but tough. I think you’ll hang on long enough to see him taken to the Death Chamber at Raiford. I think they’ll probably let you be a witness. If I can, I’ll be there. I want to see your eyes when his eyes close for the last time.
“I’m going to be thinking of Sheila and her baby. I’m going to be thinking of what went through her mind as he beat her and her baby to death. And I hope to God, he hurts like hell as he’s dying and you feel every bit of his agony.
“And then I hope you burn in hell with him.”
I turned and walked away from her although I could feel her gaze burning into my back all the way into the Jail.
There were three or four long palm trees that storms had toppled in past years and the action of wind and water and sun over the years had basically fossilized them.
As the beach eroded, they were left behind, stark black monuments set against the blinding white sand and the clear blue ocean beyond.
I loved Matanzas for its wildness and those boulders set in the sea, but this didn’t even seem to be on the same earth that existed a few miles away. I’d taken
Debbie and the kids here when they were little and those visits were among the greatest memories of my life.
Aline looked up and down the beach. She was wearing a fairly skimpy red bikini but wore shorts and a shirt over it. We leaned against one of the tree trunks. We could have been the only people on earth. I wished we were.
“It’s like another world,” she said, reaching out to dbang her arms around me. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“It’s not on any maps, but I’ve always thought it’s one of the most special spots on this coast. The only people who know about it are people who grew up here like me or tourists who stumble on it by accident. This is something I could give a French visitor that you couldn’t get from any tour.”
We lay in each other’s arms and smelled the salt breeze coming in off the ocean. There were a lot of things we could have been doing, but nothing that I wanted to do more than hold this woman and stare out at the whitecaps rolling in toward the shore.
Finally, I kissed her on the forehead, pulled her to her feet and we walked through the sand, back through a strip of wooded land and found ourselves back at my Escalade parked on the shoulder of the road, which was deserted.
“Where to now, my personal guide?” she said smiling.
“A little history lesson, Ms. des-Jardins that someone from Europe might appreciate.”
It was only noon and even in early September, the cramped, crowded, tiny little European brick-paved streets of St. Augustine were crowded with cars and strolling tourists from all over the world.
I parked a few streets over from the Castillo de San Marcos and we made our way past the restaurants and the little shops selling fudge and souvenirs of the Old City. In places the little streets were barely wide enough for two small cars to get past each other.
She stopped at one corner and looked one way and then down the other street. Something flashed in her face that she didn’t want me to see and she looked away as if a store awning advertising Authentic 19th Century Salt Water Taffy was the most fascinating thing in all the world.
I let her stand there alone for a few minutes and I could tell from the way she breathed that she was holding in sobs. I came to stand behind her and put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her back to me. I let her hide her face and her eyes because I knew what I’d see if I forced her to look at me.
This was too much like her real life. Although this was anachronistic today even in Paris, it had the feel of France and Italy and Belgium. I knew it brought
back memories of other days and I knew who she remembered standing next to, who she remembered holding her in his arms.
“I’m glad you rolled the dice, Bill. I was starting to get a damned ulcer worrying that son of a bitch would get away with it.”
The taller driver was helping a handcuffed, dark haired man dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt out of the back of the cruiser.
“We nabbed him mowing the grass,” Colman said laughing. “He wanted to get changed but I said he needed to get used to a prison jump suit because that’s what he’ll be in for the rest of his life.
“Talk about chewing nails. I was hoping he’d take a swing at me and I think he almost did. But at the last minute he remembered I was carrying a .357 magnum and he thought better of it.”
Sutton was 6-foot-2, slender but broad in the chest and well-muscled. He was probably 220 or 230. A bigger man than he looked at first glance; a big, strong man capable of doing a lot of damage with his bare hands or a metal bar.
It would have been nice if he’d lost control of that volcanic temper, but bastards like that never lost control when you wanted them to.
Colman’s deputy walked him over to us. He looked down on me with that instinctive air of contempt big men have for men who are shorter.
“Maitland. I see you finally developed some balls. It was the old fart’s story that pushed you into filing charges, wasn’t it?”
“Why do you assume it was Bell who dropped the dime on you? And what could he have possibly told us that would have convinced us to charge you?”
I thought he was too smart to fall for it, but if he indicated he knew anything about Bell watching him drive off and come back he’d be digging his grave with his own mouth.
But he was too smart.
“I don’t have to be a genius. You screw me around for months, but you don’t file charges so I can clear my name. You just leave me twisting in the wind.
“And then the crazy old bastard that’s hated my mother and me for 20 years comes back into town and a couple of days later this redneck prick puts cuffs on me. I guessed he’s probably behind it.”
“You’ll get the whole story pretty soon, Mr. Sutton, but you sure you wouldn’t like to confess? I think you’d sleep better if you got it off your conscience. It must be hard at night seeing the face of your wife after you finished working her over with that tire iron.
“And they said you smashed her stomach in so badly that you probably saw part of your son’s ripped apart body. He was your son, you miserable son of a bitch. Even if you hated your wife, how could you do that to your own blood?”
He just looked at me like you’d look at a bug on a windshield.
“It might bother me a little if I’d done it. But I’m an innocent man. I didn’t touch that miserable whore that was screwing around on me behind my back for years. And I didn’t touch her bastard. God knows who his father was, but it wasn’t me. I hadn’t dipped my dick into that diseased cunt for months before she got pregnant.”
“That’s strange,” I said, staring into those dark, bottomless eyes. “I never made it public because I wanted to save it for the jury, but we were able to run a DNA analysis on the embryo’s remains and we got your DNA with a court order. The baby boy you dismembered was William Sutton Jr.”
He just kept staring at me with no change of expression.
“He was your son, Sutton. He probably would have had your eyes, your features. No matter how terrible a slut your ex might have been, he would have been yours.
“Did you really think she might have gotten pregnant by another man? All we’ve been able to discover indicates she never cheated on you. There’s nothing to indicate it. Does your mother know you murdered her grandson?”
“I didn’t murder anyone,” he said, and smiled at me. “You think you’ve got supernatural powers or something, Maitland? You taking your press clippings seriously? All that Angel of Death bullshit? You’re just a cheap little lawyer...a cheap little lawyer whose wife I’m going to bang like a drum someday after I beat this charge.”
He looked down at me and grinned.
“Yeah, everybody knows your story, Maitland. Pitiful little punk. Couldn’t keep your pussy happy at home so she went and found someone younger. I should have some sympathy because I was married to the same kind of bitch. But I don’t. I will walk. There’s no way in hell you’re ever going to convict me with no evidence.
“You don’t have prints. You don’t have blood evidence. You don’t have a weapon. You don’t have anyone who even saw me with the bitch the night someone did the world a favor and beat her brains in. You don’t have anyone who ever heard me talking to her that night, despite her lying bitch friends.
“I’m glad you let the old bastard convince you to go for it. I don’t want this hanging over my head for months or years. Now I can beat this shit and start my life over - $5 million richer. There’s no way her damned brother and sister can keep me from getting it. We were still legally married when some good Samaritan did me the big favor of sending her to hell.”
He stepped closer to me and I sensed Colman putting his hand on his Magnum but I waved him off.
“In a few months or a year I’m going to be rich, and free. And you better believe I’m going to spend a chunk of that meeting and wining and dining your bitch ex-wife. And after I spread her legs and nail her pussy and ass until you could run a two-by-four up here, I’ll send you a video and polaroids to pass the time late at night.”
He turned his gaze down at Colman and sneered.
“That pig wife of yours is going to be harder to swallow, no pun intended, but I’ll do her just for the pleasure of getting pictures and sending them to you.
“And when you come after me with the big-ass gun, I’ll have security blow you to hell. You’re going to be easy, because at least you’ve got balls and you won’t be able to stand me turning your wife into a whore. Maitland is such a pussy he’ll just lay there and take it.”
I put my hand on Colman’s gun hand and squeezed.
“”You are welcome to fantasize as much as you like, Mr. Sutton. But you’re never leaving the confines of the state penal system again while you’re upright.
“And the only hot sex you’re going to enjoy is some inmate’s big cock stuck up your ass or down your throat. Probably two of three of them at the same time. And probably coal black because I hear they love good looking white boys like you.”
He just shook his head and kept smiling.
“It’s a date. See you in court, Angel of Death.”
As Colman and the deputy led Sutton in the jail, a late model Caddy swung into the parking lot. A white haired old man got out from behind the driver’s side and helped a little old white haired lady out of the passenger side. Leaning heavily on a cane and the old man, she limped toward me. Her gaze chilled me.
“Mr. Maitland, you are going to be sorry you did this.”
“Hello, Mrs. Sutton. I expected you to be along pretty soon. Come to lend moral support to your son? I can’t blame you.”
“You are filth, Mr. Maitland. Just like that bitch wife of his. She deserved everything that was done to her. I just wish I could have seen it.”
“You know her baby was your grandson?”
“That piece of trash was no relation to me. And I’m glad it was tossed into the woods for animals to eat.”
I looked at her and for once words failed me.
“I was 49, Mr. Maitland, when I became pregnant with William. All the doctors told me to abort him. My husband—my fortunately dead husband—tried to make me abort him. But I refused. It was hell, but I bore him and he lived.
“He has always been mine and I have always been his. Someday we will be buried in the same grave, together for eternity. Nothing can ever separate us. Certainly not a miserable ambulance chaser like you.”
I just stared through the ice at her, feeling sorry for the miserable old man who must have been a boyfriend. Although God knows I couldn’t imagine have the nerve to try to shove a penis up inside that frozen vagina.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sutton. I was feeling a slight degree of pity for you. No matter what, no matter how twisted and just plain mean you have been, no matter that you’re lying to help your son get away with beating a woman and embryo to death, I told myself that you’re a mother and mothers have blind spots for their sons.
“But, I don’t have any pity for you anymore. You’re the reason he’s the monster he is today. You molded him into the man he is. If there was any way, I’d have you on the gurney with poison being pumped into your veins alongside him.”
If she had had a weapon in her hands, I would have been apprehensive.
“But it’s better this way, Mrs. Sutton. You’re old, but tough. I think you’ll hang on long enough to see him taken to the Death Chamber at Raiford. I think they’ll probably let you be a witness. If I can, I’ll be there. I want to see your eyes when his eyes close for the last time.
“I’m going to be thinking of Sheila and her baby. I’m going to be thinking of what went through her mind as he beat her and her baby to death. And I hope to God, he hurts like hell as he’s dying and you feel every bit of his agony.
“And then I hope you burn in hell with him.”
I turned and walked away from her although I could feel her gaze burning into my back all the way into the Jail.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2005 1 P.M.
The beach curved out and bent to the right as the coast curved away to the south down beyond St. Augustine. We were on a stretch of isolated white sand beach tucked in away behind an undeveloped spit of land between St. Augustine and Marineland. There was a newish-paved two-lane highway a few hundred feet away but we could have been on a deserted island.There were three or four long palm trees that storms had toppled in past years and the action of wind and water and sun over the years had basically fossilized them.
As the beach eroded, they were left behind, stark black monuments set against the blinding white sand and the clear blue ocean beyond.
I loved Matanzas for its wildness and those boulders set in the sea, but this didn’t even seem to be on the same earth that existed a few miles away. I’d taken
Debbie and the kids here when they were little and those visits were among the greatest memories of my life.
Aline looked up and down the beach. She was wearing a fairly skimpy red bikini but wore shorts and a shirt over it. We leaned against one of the tree trunks. We could have been the only people on earth. I wished we were.
“It’s like another world,” she said, reaching out to dbang her arms around me. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“It’s not on any maps, but I’ve always thought it’s one of the most special spots on this coast. The only people who know about it are people who grew up here like me or tourists who stumble on it by accident. This is something I could give a French visitor that you couldn’t get from any tour.”
We lay in each other’s arms and smelled the salt breeze coming in off the ocean. There were a lot of things we could have been doing, but nothing that I wanted to do more than hold this woman and stare out at the whitecaps rolling in toward the shore.
Finally, I kissed her on the forehead, pulled her to her feet and we walked through the sand, back through a strip of wooded land and found ourselves back at my Escalade parked on the shoulder of the road, which was deserted.
“Where to now, my personal guide?” she said smiling.
“A little history lesson, Ms. des-Jardins that someone from Europe might appreciate.”
It was only noon and even in early September, the cramped, crowded, tiny little European brick-paved streets of St. Augustine were crowded with cars and strolling tourists from all over the world.
I parked a few streets over from the Castillo de San Marcos and we made our way past the restaurants and the little shops selling fudge and souvenirs of the Old City. In places the little streets were barely wide enough for two small cars to get past each other.
She stopped at one corner and looked one way and then down the other street. Something flashed in her face that she didn’t want me to see and she looked away as if a store awning advertising Authentic 19th Century Salt Water Taffy was the most fascinating thing in all the world.
I let her stand there alone for a few minutes and I could tell from the way she breathed that she was holding in sobs. I came to stand behind her and put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her back to me. I let her hide her face and her eyes because I knew what I’d see if I forced her to look at me.
This was too much like her real life. Although this was anachronistic today even in Paris, it had the feel of France and Italy and Belgium. I knew it brought
back memories of other days and I knew who she remembered standing next to, who she remembered holding her in his arms.
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