City of Grudges

by Rick Outzen

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  CITY OF GRUDGES

  “City of Grudges captures my hometown of Pensacola, Florida, much the same way Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil immortalized Savannah. Rick Outzen’s Southern thriller moves his colorful characters through the corruption of small town politics under the piercing gaze of Walker Holmes—a newspaper publisher that his friends either want to drink with or punch out. Readers get a gripping front row seat of Walker’s wild ride.”

  —JOE SCARBOROUGH

  Host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, former congressman (R-FL)

  “Outzen’s twenty-year experience as a newspaper journalist has shaped him into an innovative and skilled storyteller. His first novel captures the voice of the Deep South in a way that would make Flannery O’Connor proud. I hope City of Grudges is only the beginning of a long series of books we see from this writer.”

  —MIKE PAPANTONIO

  Bestselling author of Law and Disorder and Law and Vengeance

  “With City of Grudges, Rick Outzen directs the Florida glare onto his adopted city of Pensacola as brilliantly as Carl Hiaasen has done for so many years for South Florida. Corruption, dead bodies, and smooth, wise-cracking dialogue pile up as quickly as cars in a I-10 fender-bender. The newspaperman-as-hero is in safe, entertaining hands with this experienced journalist, so move over all you Florida crime novelists—there’s a new pen in town!”

  —W. HODDING CARTER

  Author of Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from Its Friends, Foes, and Florida and five other critically acclaimed books of nonfiction

  City of Grudges is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and events described are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual incidents or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Richard McLean Outzen, Jr.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  This edition published by SelectBooks, Inc.

  For information address SelectBooks, Inc., New York, New York.

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-59079-487-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Outzen, Rick, author.

  Title: City of grudges / Rick Outzen.

  Description: First edition. | New York: SelectBooks, Inc., 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020722

  Subjects: LCSH: Newspaper publishing--Fiction. | City and town life--Fiction.

  | Secrecy--Fiction. | Corruption--Fiction. | Homicide--Fiction. | Malicious accusation--Fiction. | Pensacola (Fla.)--Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.U98 C58 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020722

  10987654321

  “I have stood with my elders and betters and dared the ill-doers to do their worst.

  I have read and glorified in the defiant paeans of editors who are obscure save in the hushed lodges of their homelands.

  This is America. I thank God that I have contributed something to its story.”

  —Hodding Carter, II, the late publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat Times, Quotation is from Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  About the Author

  1

  I begged for a hint of a breeze. The early morning humidity in Pensacola made it difficult to clear my head and focus on the problems that needed to be solved by afternoon. The late night drinking at Intermission hadn’t helped.

  I contemplated this as Big Boy, my seven-year-old chocolate Labrador/beagle/who-knows-what mix, tugged me down Jefferson Street for a daily jog, our only regular exercise before the blazing sun moved across the sky.

  To be clear, no one would ever mistake me, Walker Holmes, for a runner. My wardrobe didn’t include any bright orange or lime green shorts that matched a tight tank top or the stripes of expensive running shoes. I hated coordinated outfits.

  My shoes were five-year-old Reebok tennis shoes that I found at a yard sale. I wore wrinkled khaki shorts speckled with white paint from when I painted an old dresser that was bought at the same sale and a Sandshaker Lounge T-shirt that I won when an Alabama redneck bet he could knock me off my bar stool with one punch.

  Though not a fighter, I knew how to take a punch. Growing up Roman Catholic in the Protestant-dominated Mississippi Delta had taught me that. The trick was to move ever so slightly so that the blow only glanced off me. In this instance, the sunburned would-be pugilist sat on the stool next to me and was so drunk he was barely upright. When he launched his roundhouse, I leaned inside his punch and swayed for a few seconds as his blow struck the back of my shoulder. But I remained on my stool.

  The last part of my ensemble, which was not an ensemble, was my Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap that the damn dog had chewed out of spite one morning when I was too hungover to get out of bed.

  Big Boy stretched his leash to the point of choking. He pulled me south, down the street past Seville Quarter’s parking lot where a couple of taxis were dropping off their disheveled, half-dressed customers so the young professionals could recover their cars and drive home for a shower and change of clothes before reporting to work.

  My dog ignored them and jerked me towards Pensacola Bay, forcing me into a run several times. Well, sort of. It was more like a series of lurches punctuated by the dog stopping at irregular intervals to sniff a weed in the sidewalk or whiz on a tree. He was smart enough—or maybe just taking mercy on me—to not cross my path too closely. Otherwise I would have fallen on my face. I tended to walk with my eyes closed for the first few minutes of every morning outing to let myself acclimate to the sun as it peeked over the horizon.

  The downtown streets were quiet, with no traffic. A gaggle of slim, half-dressed men sprinted by as they did every morning, snickering at my ratty attire as they passed. They wore matching neon shorts and no shirts. Big Boy growled. I imagined him taking bites out of their color-coordinated butts.

  A bald, large black man named Tiny greeted us as we passed the Bodacious Brew. “When you gonna put my pretty face on the cover of your newspaper?” he said, smiling and tossing Big Boy a piece of his cinnamon bun.

  Tiny was an Iraq War veteran with no visible means of support. I wasn’t sure where he slept at night, but he bussed tables at the coffee shop in exchange for breakfast and lunch. He refused to go on their payroll.

  He wore a Pensacola Marathon T-Shirt that someone had given to him, and his shorts and shoes were bette
r than mine. He was on a break sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the Bodacious Brew watching Fox & Friends on the flat-screen TV above the door.

  “Well, Mayor, not this week,” I said, “but maybe next month. When can we set up the photo shoot?”

  “It’s about time you write about me, the mayor of Palafox,” he said, as he petted the dog. “I have a lot to say.”

  “I’m sure you do, but I’m not sure we’re the right medium for your story,” I said, pointing to the television. “Have you heard from your friends at Fox News?”

  Tiny shook his head. “No, but I’ll write them again today.”

  I gave the man a dollar as I did most mornings to contribute to the postage. Big Boy and I crossed Main Street and continued toward the bay.

  The humidity soaked the Sandshaker Lounge T-shirt. No breeze came off the water. Both the dog and I panted. Thirty-five minutes. That’s how long I had to endure this torture to work off Tuesday night’s beer.

  Wednesday morning usually was my favorite day of the week. We had gotten the week’s issue of the Pensacola Insider, the newspaper I owned, to the printer, and we shifted to planning mode. We caught our breath and talked about what worked or didn’t work with last week’s issue. Our next press deadline was six days away.

  This Wednesday was different. I had to testify against my friend, Bowman Hines, a man I thought I knew, but who had played me and Pensacola as a bunch of fools. The town’s golden boy would stand trial for embezzlement because of my reporting.

  However, Pensacola didn’t want to see Bo Hines disgraced. I had become the town’s pariah. The trial would be my opportunity to save my reputation, validate my reporting, and avert the demise of my newspaper.

  The dog and I jogged, walked, and stumbled past the Trillium property, thirty acres of vacant land on Pensacola Bay that sat across from Pensacola City Hall. The property was once the site of a gasoline terminal where barges offloaded fuel from Louisiana and Texas refineries. The fuel was stored in huge tanks and shipped by trucks to gas stations along the Florida panhandle.

  In the early 1980s, Phillips 66 closed the facility after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection discovered the soil was contaminated. The oil company determined the terminal wasn’t profitable enough for them to pay for a massive cleanup and left Pensacola.

  A few years later, the city bought the property for $3.5 million.

  Our paper supported the public-private partnership that had won the city’s approval to build a maritime park. This would include a baseball stadium, maritime museum, and commercial development with a huge public space on the waterfront.

  Just as the project was to about to begin, Jace Wittman, a former city councilman and Bo Hines’ brother-in-law, notified the City of Pensacola that he planned to lead a petition drive to halt the construction. Wittman had opposed the project when he served on the council and had already forced one referendum on the park. He lost both the vote on the park and his reelection bid. His new angle was to claim the construction plan was not what the voters had approved.

  Why did Wittman oppose the maritime park? He said it was because the city government had not allowed for enough time for citizens to voice their opinions on how the land should be developed, but the real reason, I learned, was that it was because Stan Daniels supported it. In high school, Daniels had beaten him out for the quarterback position at Pensacola Catholic High School. It was rumored that Wittman never forgave him for this.

  “Grudges—” my late mentor Roger Fairley had told me over dirty martinis at Global Grill, “Pensacola runs on them.”

  I could still see my old friend stirring the drink and plucking the green olive off the toothpick. He said, “When you can’t figure out the grudge, go back to high school. It will be some slight over a girl, sport, or class honor—or maybe even something much deeper.”

  Apparently Wittman would fight Daniels’ park project for the rest of his life because of a grudge over not making quarterback on the high school football team.

  Progress be damned. Forget the plan to revitalize downtown Pensacola after the ravaging by Hurricane Ivan. The hell with the jobs the development would generate. Wittman had to humiliate and defeat Daniels, and he could care less about the negative impact on the City of Pensacola.

  “Grudges are the lifeblood of Pensacola,” Roger told me. “Remember, we are the site of the first European settlement in North America. Before St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Plymouth, Don Tristan de Luna landed on Pensacola Beach. Within days of celebrating the first Mass in America, a hurricane wiped out the settlement. The settlers wanted to lynch Luna and almost did.”

  Roger and I had often enjoyed a few cocktails on Tuesday night before he headed off for choir practice. I had no idea what his singing voice was like but knew he had a crush on the female choir director. She was half his age, which meant she was in her forties.

  “She doesn’t know that I’m not as harmless as I look,” he said with a smile. Roger had always dressed up for choir practice. He often wore a seersucker suit with a bow tie and white buck shoes. His thinning gray hair was combed over to hide some new bandage on his scalp or ear.

  Roger battled cancer but never complained. I rarely mentioned the bandages or the fedora he had worn the last few months before he died.

  “For the next four hundred and fifty years after the hurricane, Pensacola has repeatedly tried to recapture the excitement of the Conquistadors and the first settlers when they entered Pensacola Bay and achieve its potential,” said Roger, before paying our tab as he always did.

  “What has held it back?” he continued. “Grudges.”

  When the dog and I got back to our loft, I stripped off the damp T-shirt as we climbed the three floors past the back entrance of the restaurant on the first floor and the Insider’s offices on the second to our apartment on the third floor. I put on the coffee, filled Big Boy’s bowl with water, and jumped into the shower. As I toweled off, I glanced into the mirror and saw a six-foot-tall Mississippi Delta boy with brown hair that was starting to gray on the temples and what some called “piercing” blue eyes. My forty-one-year-old face still seemed youthful enough, even with a few faint distinguishing scars on both cheeks, nose, and a corner of the mouth from fights long forgotten. The belly had thickened some, but I could still see my feet.

  I turned on the television to watch a few minutes of the local morning news before I walked downstairs to our offices. Everyone else owned flat screens, but my TV still had a booty and occasionally lost its color.

  Bo Hines was on the screen. A local hero and the symbol of what made Pensacola great, people always tried to curry his and his wife Sue’s favor. His smile made everyone feel that all was right in the world. If he chaired a charity event, the donations poured in, especially when he served as the master of ceremonies and auctioneer. He coaxed thousands of dollars out of the wallets and purses of those sipping fine wines and bourbon. Yes, everyone loved him.

  And I was responsible for his arrest.

  I turned up the volume. The morning host, who showed none of the aftereffects of celebrating her promotion to the anchor spot on the ten o’clock news with her buddies at Intermission the previous night, said, “Mr. Hines, what prompted you to write a $25,000 check to help the Warrington Middle School buy new band instruments?”

  Hines smiled. “When my wife Sue heard of the fire that destroyed the school’s band room, she insisted we do something.”

  The station showed video of the smoldering blaze that was caused by lightning. He said, “Sue and I have always been committed to children, public education, and the arts.”

  The host said, “Earlier this year, the governor bestowed upon you the prestigious Patron of Florida Culture in recognition of your long history of supporting arts and culture—”

  Hines cut her off, “Yes, but we don’t do what we do for any recognition. It’s about giving back to a community that helped raise me.” The only thing missing was applause from the sta
tion crew.

  Reluctantly the TV host brought up his pending trial. Bo acted like nothing was wrong in his world.

  “Mr. Hines, your trial for embezzlement and organized fraud starts today. Would you like to comment?”

  Hines smiled, even broader. “I’m guilty of nothing but placing too much trust in an executive director of a nonprofit—who still hasn’t been located, I might add. I was a volunteer who signed the checks and raised funds, nothing more. My attorneys and I are confident my name will be cleared of all charges. The trial might not even last beyond tomorrow.”

  I felt like bashing my head against a wall. The man was a fake. Why was I the only one who saw it?

  The trouble with being a publisher of a small town weekly paper is that you can’t control the facts or where they may lead you. The path can be surprising and appalling. The facts can destroy lives and shatter dreams forever. But they remain the facts, immutable and damning.

  I had spent days agonizing over the story about Hines. People don’t like to see their heroes disgraced, not ones that they have known all their lives. What made this especially hard for me was that the man was my friend.

  The first time I met Bowman Hines was three years earlier when he asked for my help with the Surfer’s Ball, a fundraiser to help victims of domestic violence.

  Bo stood six foot two inches tall and was tanned and lean with a dazzling smile. His blonde hair blended with a little gray was still unusually full for someone in his mid-fifties and always stayed in place, defying all laws of physics. The Pensacola Insider had facilitated the formation of the Pensacola Young Professionals to give those under forty, like me at the time, a more organized voice to weigh in on issues like the maritime park, and I had served on its board until my fortieth birthday. PYP also helped potential Insider advertisers visualize our paper’s readership. Bo wanted to tap into PYP for his fundraiser and needed my help to make the event cool enough to bring fresh dollars into the kitty.

  Eighty thousand dollars later we became friends, or as good friends as an alt-weekly publisher who was focused on battling injustices and challenging the status quo can be with someone like Bo. Over countless mugs of beers and baskets of spicy buffalo wings, we brainstormed on how to pull Pensacola into the twenty-first century. The conversations were deep enough to put Bo on my very short Christmas card list—if I ever got around to sending Christmas cards.