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
