Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery Read Free

about the departed, and mused on the vagaries of life. We all wondered who would be the next to go. On our island, so filled with elderly people, death is a constant reality. We accept it, mourn our lost friends, and move on. It is only when one istaken violently and without warning that we become the shocked survivors.
    We’d seen Wyatt off according to the instructions he’d left with Donna. Cremation, ashes drifting on an ebbing tide, Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then revelry.
    Wyatt’s friends, who managed the Hilton on the island, opened the upstairs bar for the mourners, a going away party that befitted a man the islanders loved. Wyatt enjoyed a party, loved the gathering of his friends, the laughter, the stories told again and again. Every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, he would feed many of the snowbirds who were far from home and family. Twenty people or more would crowd into his condo for the festivities. They always left sated with food and good cheer. On several occasions, Wyatt had put together what he called memorial parties for friends who had died. He would have wanted the same, and the islanders were out in force to see him off.
    Cracker Dix was there, dressed in his usual — cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops. He’s an expatriate Englishman who has lived on the island for years. He came over to me, sipping from a can of beer. “Can I talk to you for a moment?” he said, and beckoned me into a corner.
    “Matt, do you know Leah, the deaf girl who cooks at the restaurant where I work?”
    “Sure.”
    “She reads lips, you know, and she saw something the other day that didn’t make any sense to her.”
    “What?” I asked.
    “She’d come out of the kitchen and was standing just inside the dining room when she saw a man say, ‘Wyatt’s a dead man.’ She didn’t think anything about it until the next day when she heard about his murder.”
    I made a “come on” gesture with my hand. Cracker tended to drift off subject after too many beers.
    “Leah said there were two men at a table eating dinner. One had his back to her, and the other one was facing her. That was all of the conversation she saw. She just didn’t think anything about it. She sees parts of conversations all the time.”
    “Did she recognize the man?” I asked.
    “No, but she got his name. After she heard about Wyatt, she went to the credit card receipts and got his name and credit card number. I wrote them down for you.”
    I looked at the scrap of napkin he handed me. It had a name, Michael Rupert, and a long string of numbers. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.
    “No,” said Cracker, “I never heard the name. The numbers are his credit card number.”
    “Thanks, Cracker. Have you said anything about this to anybody else?”
    “No. I figured you might want to deal with this yourself. I told Leah not to mention it to anybody either.”
    Chief Bill Lester joined us late in the morning, coming to pay his respects, and bring me up to date on the investigation. “The autopsy results came in last night. No surprises. He was killed by the gunshot behind the ear. The crime scene investigators didn’t find the slug that killed him. It’s probably buried in the sand on the beach. Wyatt was sitting in his chair on the balcony when he was shot. They found the slug fired into the back of his neck under his chair. It had gone through his neck, taking out part of his chin, and then through his left thigh. The techs think Wyatt slumped forward when he was killed, and the second bullet was fired in a downward direction. It was pretty much spent by the time it went through his body twice, and it just bounced around on the floor.”
    “What was it?”
    “The bullet?”
    I nodded.
    “Forty-five caliber.”
    “Can you match it to any other murders?”
    “Not from around here. We’ll run it through the federal database, but I don’t have high hopes for that. The killer picked up his brass