I Told the Mob Boss I Would Not Be Bought, So He Offered to Be Sold novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Marshals

He took off his cap.

He held it against his chest in both hands, a big old man with a seaman's neck gone to cords and white hair flattened where the cap had been.

Even in a hall that size his voice carried.

It was an old gravel voice with the sea in it.

"I ran the Pelham marina's boats for twenty-two years," he said. "I was forty-two on the night of the twenty-sixth of November, and I took Judge Pelham's boat out to the Folly River dock with the judge aboard, at his order."

The judge did not move.

"There was a man waiting on the end of the dock. Mr. Luc Gaillard. He'd come to talk."

A reporter's pen scratched somewhere.

"I tied up. The judge got off. They talked, I couldn't hear what. Mr. Gaillard had a folder under his arm. The judge asked him for it, and he said no."

The old man's hands tightened on the cap.

"The judge hit him with the boathook," he said.

A sound went up from the whole room.

"Across the back of the head. Mr. Gaillard went off the end of the dock into the channel, and the tide was going out."

"Captain," said the judge. His voice shook for the first time. "You are an old drunk, and I paid for your pension."

"You paid me to go to Florida," said the old captain. "You paid me eleven thousand dollars a year for eight years, in cash, in an envelope, to keep my mouth shut, and I took it. I've thought about that boy every day since."

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