Jesus, how the hell did I end up here?
The interior of the cabin cruiser took shape around him. He was lying on the starboard bunk facing the rear sliding door and the stern. He swung his feet over to the cabin sole and stared pitifully at a group of empty bottles, clinking against each other as the boat rocked in the wakes of early departing fishing boats. He could hear men speaking in Spanish and a few local guys barking back and forth about what they were going to catch.
How long have I been here?
He was clad in only a frayed pair of cargo shorts. The shirt he’d been wearing was in his lap, sweaty and balled up. He shook it out, then did a double take and held it up with both hands. It wasn’t a shirt at all. It was a skimpy, mostly see-through black cover-up that Halle had left on the boat. She had worn it over a bathing suit most of the time, or thrown on after sex when they were down below the season before, the summer of 2016. He laid it aside and stood up, placing a steadying hand on the cabin top.
He was fishing a bottle of water out of the icebox when he saw Detective Hernandez and another cop he didn’t recognize pause on the dock. Joe always backed in, so the dock was just a step beyond the stern platform, where he kept a couple of rickety wooden chairs and a little table. He thought about tossing the cover-up forward into the V-berth up front, but he left it where it was for the time being. He fished around for his boat shoes.
“Detective Hernandez?” he asked, sliding the glass door open.
“Joe, we need to talk,” she said. Her face was grim, and the guy with her seemed jacked up. He kept his eyes glued to Joe, tracking his every movement.
“Let me grab a T-shirt,” he said. “I’ll be right out. Come aboard if you want; there’s some shade here.” Joe ducked back inside. Now he did stuff the cover-up into one of the drawers in the V-berth. He pulled on a white T-shirt. When he emerged, Hernandez had stepped aboard the boat and sat on one of the gunwales closest to the stern. The male detective stayed on the dock, his feet shoulder-width apart. He looked cautious, ready for anything.
“I’m sorry. I just woke up.” His eyes moved from Hernandez to the male detective and back. “Is everything okay?”
“We need to know where you were last night, Joe,” Hernandez said. “Holly Rossi was murdered.”
After a few moments, the male detective, named Gallagher, seemed to tire of the sunlight and stepped aboard. He rested his butt against the gunwale on the other side of the boat from Hernandez and folded his arms. His eyes mostly stayed on Joe but slid about to various things around the boat—the old five-gallon fish bucket, some coiled dock line.
“You need to think, Joe,” Hernandez said. “Think about where you were all night. This is very serious for you.”
“I . . . I must have been here,” he said, shaking his head for the hundredth time. “At least after some point.” He was beyond bewildered. It wasn’t really sinking in, though—not like it would in a few hours.
Halle.
Dead.
Murdered.
It would get in, though, and it would shatter him. In the meantime, he was a prime suspect. Underneath all that, still scratching through, was the image he knew he was projecting, sitting potbellied in shorts and a T-shirt like some piece of trailer trash, unable to explain his whereabouts because of a half dozen mismatched bottles behind him.
“That’s not good enough,” Hernandez said. She spoke low and smooth, but there was something blunt and steely underneath it. “I know you cared for her. Now something terrible has happened to her, and we need to figure out what.”
“I just saw her,” he said, aware of how spaced out he probably sounded. “I mean . . . for the first time in months.”
“What day was that?”
“The day I found out Lois was dead. Saturday, I guess. The fifteenth. She went with me to identify the body.”
“How did she know about your mother’s death?” She was taking notes.
He sighed. “I had called her . . . a few hours before. I . . . I didn’t remember calling her, because I was drunk, but that’s what happened. I called her after you found me, you and the other detective.”
“Detective Dougherty,” she said.
“Yes, exactly. Anyway, I don’t remember making the call, but she was at my house the next day, around 11:45 a.m. We spent a few hours together, went to OCME, and then had lunch. When we got home, my brother, Robbie, was there, waiting for me. She left. Robbie and I talked for a few minutes. He wanted to give me some money for the cremation costs.”