Substantive editing sample 7:
The text message   (SPOILER)

In this second-edition mystery novel (the first edition had a different editor), I needed to go over it very slowly and carefully. For example, even though the narrator Frank tells the story from his first-person point of view, at one point I discovered “Frank” rather than “I” performing an action. Then there was a serious plot hole to deal with: Frank tells the police that he had no contact with murder victim Miguel Ramírez after two a.m. until he received a text from him at about five a.m., but the narrative has texts between them during that span, arranging for the two of them to meet at the casino. Fixing this entailed some serious revision and exchanges between the author and me. I also suggested that the author insert cinematic “beats,” descriptive actions that interrupt long speeches—often a character-revealing gesture or grimace or perhaps some other action.

You can see (in BLUE BOLDFACE ALL CAPS) how the author responded to my suggestions. A footnote reveals how (with the author’s concurrence by email) I revised one of his responses.

Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to spoil the suspense, Skip this sample and advance to the next one in the series.

This sample is presented here with the author’s permission.

Original
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The police detective interrogates A loud rap on the table jolted my attention back to the detective in front of me. “Mr. Dodge?” Detective Martens of the Moline Police Department was struggling to get my attention. “Hello?” he said as he snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Yeah; sorry,” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Welcome back. As I’ve been trying to explain, the body of Miguel Ramírez was found this morning, floating in the backwaters near Suiter Park. According to his phone records, you were the last person he contacted. He sent you a text message around 5am.” I opened and closed my eyes a few times, trying to focus, trying to remember. The next chapter, a few pages later (for some of the intervening story, in a separate window, see The interrogation continues) “How long were you at the casino?” the detective asked, fiddling with his pen. “I was there until I got a text from Miguel, so I guess that was around five. He was looking for a ride home and was hoping I was still awake.” Martens put his pen down and straightened up. “How do you know it was five?” “Because you told me earlier that he sent me a text at five a.m.” “Right.” He leaned back, sighed, and stood up. “What did he want?” “He asked for a ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park, at the parking lot near the bridge. That seemed like a good time to cut my losses, so I told him I’d come pick him up.” Martens walked over to a wall and picked at a fleck of loose paint. He leaned against the wall and turned back to look at me. “OK, it’s early in the morning now; you’ve been out drinking all night, and you decide to drive from Bettendorf to Moline. Right?” “That’s what I’m saying.” “OK. What happened when you got there?” “Nothing. I couldn’t find him. I got to the parking lot and didn’t see anyone, so I parked and walked around for a few minutes. “I suppose that’s where you picked up the mud on your boots?” I hadn’t given the detective enough credit. He was a quicker study than I thought. “Yeah. The rain last night was pretty heavy. I don’t even remember noticing the mud when I was there.” “So you walked around in the mud. Go on.” “Well, I looked around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer his phone. I eventually gave up and left.” “You just left?” “What else was I going to do?” I sat back and crossed my arms. “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I didn’t know much about him. We had just met, right? I figured something else came up and he got a ride from someone else, maybe that Cody guy. I didn’t see any point to sticking around, especially once it started to rain.” “Where did you go after you left the park?” “I was wet and tired by that point, so I drove back across the river to my motel.” “And that’s the whole night?” he asked, glancing down at my hands. I slid my left hand over my right to hide the scrapes on my knuckles. “Yeah. That was my night.” Martens walked back toward me, placed his hands on the table, and leaned forward. “I still don’t understand. Why do you suppose Ramírez contacted you for a ride at that hour?” “I’m not sure. He’s not from the area, right, so he probably doesn’t know many people here. Maybe he thought of me because we had just been hanging out a couple of hours earlier.” “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The last time you saw him alive was around two a.m. when the Locked Down closed, then you got a text from him three hours later. What do you suppose he did in those three hours? Where did he go?” “I have no idea. I thought he was heading back to his apartment, with Cody. How he got from there to Suiter Park, I don’t know.” 49 pages (nine chapters) later The FBI agent interrogates “When was the last time you talked to Ramírez?” “We said good-bye sometime before two in the morning, when we left the Locked Down Bar. He left with a guy named Cody—that was the guy with the iPhone from the Crooked Spine who I mentioned to the Moline cops—and I went to a casino. That was the last time I talked to Miguel.” “But he also sent you a text message a little while later, right?” “The last time we talked was at the Locked Down, but yes, he sent me a text around five. . . .” A couple of pages later “And you didn’t talk to Ramírez again.” “No.” “What about that text message. What did he want?” “A ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park and wondered if I would give him a ride home. That’s all.” “Is that when you got mud on your boots?” he asked as he glanced over to the corner of my room. Shit. I still hadn’t cleaned them. “Like I told the Moline cops, I went to Suiter Park to pick up Miguel, but when I got there I didn’t see anyone. I got out and walked around the parking lot, to see if I could find him. I didn’t, and when I tried to call him, he didn’t answer his phone, so I left.” “That’s what you told the Moline police. You are sure that there was nothing else in that message from Ramírez?” “Yes.” 43 pages (seven chapters) later A flashback “What are you going to do now?” Miguel asked. “I’m not sure. I’m not ready to call it a night. I may run over to a casino for a while, maybe the Blackhawk, since that’s about all there is to do this time of night.” “How long you gonna be in town?” “I paid for a week at the motel where I’m staying, so I’ll be here at least that long.” “Let me give you my number. We can hang out again before you go. Maybe tomorrow?” “Sounds good to me.” I called a taxi for them. A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the casino episode “I did OK at the table for a while, winning about as much as I was losing, but I still wasn’t getting tired, just increasingly bored. Somewhere during that time I got a text from Miguel telling me he’d had a lot of fun and couldn’t wait to hang out again. I sent a quick response basically saying ‘ditto’.” “I guess you made a good impression,” Jefferson said. “You know me—I’m all about the charm. Maybe punching that pain-in-the-ass Cody helped, too. I responded to Miguel’s text so quickly that he realized I was still awake and at the casino; he asked if he could join me. He had managed to get Cody home and on the couch. After a ‘you bitch’ or two, Cody finally passed out. Miguel, though, was ready to keep going.” “Let me guess: this is another one of those details you didn’t feel a need to tell the cops about,” Jefferson said. “Yeah. I left out that bit.” “That’s not very smart, Frank. The casinos have cameras everywhere—fucking everywhere. Someone’s gonna go check the tapes and see you with Ramírez at the casino, and it’s not gonna look good for you. You think you look suspicious now, just wait ‘til someone sees you on tape at the casino with Ramírez.” “Yeah, yeah; I know. I was hoping that, by the time the cops figured out that Miguel met me at the casino, that the real killer would have been caught.” “Everything you hold back is slowing us down. You want to get out of this mess or not?” Jefferson grimaced and turned away. He was losing patience, something he never had in abundance, anyway. “Of course I do.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath—something I taught him—and turned back to me. “Of course, you do, even if you don’t act like it. Tell me what happened when Ramírez got to the casino.” ****** “Most of the action in the casino takes place in two big rooms, so it didn’t take long for Miguel to find me. I watched as he got hassled by security when he came in. It had cooled down outside, so he’d changed into a purple hoodie, a college sweatshirt emblazoned with the words South Texas College on the front and a big picture of a jaguar on the back. Security wouldn’t let him in until he flipped the hoodie off his head.” “Casinos are picky about things like that,” Jefferson said. “As they should be, I guess. He came over to the blackjack table where I had camped out, and we got to gambling. At first, it was just dollar bets, but we were relaxed and enjoying each other’s company and before long we were egging each other on and our bets started going up. My five dollar bet became ten, then twenty, then fifty. I won a few times and watched my stack of chips grow taller. Miguel wasn’t doing so well, so I slid him some chips to keep him going. I don’t know how to explain it, but I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: confidence—cockiness, honestly. I began to feel like there was no way I could lose, at least on that night. So I got bolder. I bumped up my bets up to a hundred bucks. I felt nervous about the amount of money I was betting, but a couple of quick wins reassured me and kept me in the game. By then Miguel was broke again, but he was telling me that this was my lucky night and encouraging me to bet more and more. I felt great. I was having fun. I was getting high from the attention, the winning, the risk, and the booze.” I paused, looked at Jefferson, and tried in vain to keep a smile from melting away. “Then the inevitable happened. My luck ran out and I lost a couple of hands—big bets—then a few more hands after that. I should have known better, but I just couldn’t stop. I wanted to feel that high again, to watch my stack of chips grow, to impress Miguel. I told myself to keep riding the confidence bandwagon, and I’d start winning again, so I went to the ATM and got more cash. My stack of chips went up temporarily but quickly shrank lower and lower again until, in one final desperate move, I bet everything I had left. By the time I finally stopped myself, I realized I was almost two thousand dollars in the hole. Two grand. Last month I made two grand—my income for the whole month was two grand!—and here I just lost it in a couple of hours at a blackjack table. I felt shell-shocked and disgusted with myself. We went over to the bar; I needed relief and a chance to get my head back together.” “You had money left after that?” “That’s what credit cards are for, Brian. I ordered a couple of shots of Macallan twelve-year-old scotch. If you’re gonna go out, go big.” “You should have just left.” “Of course, and a lot sooner. But I didn’t. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Miguel answering more texts—who the hell was he texting at that time of the morning?—while I wondered how I was going to tell Miguel that I’d been courting him all night because I wanted to write a story about his connection to John Looney. I was starting to freak out. Real panic was setting in. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have enough cash for the rest of the week, much less to pay bills next month, and I was worried that I might have just scared off Miguel with that grand display of losing. After Miguel put his phone down, he tried to console me.” A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the Suiter Park episode “You freak me out sometimes, Frank. This whole night is one giant cluster fuck. I’m surprised that you weren’t the one who was killed in the park.” He looked over at me. “You did it, didn’t you? Took him to the park.” I finished the rest of the whiskey in my cup. “Yeah. I did.” Frank jumped up and stormed around the room. “Damn it, Frank. This is a new low for you, and I didn’t think that was even possible. Goddamn. You took him to the park where he was killed? What the fuck were you thinking?” He paced back and forth a couple of times, took a couple more deep breaths, then told me to go on. I cleared my throat and continued. “Miguel disappeared for a few minutes to make the arrangements for the sale, so we drove across the river again to Suiter Park. He asked me to wait in the car. He was sure that he’d be back in a few minutes. He said he just needed to hand off the bag and get the cash. Easy. He’d done it a hundred times, he assured me. “He pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack and left, crossing the old iron truss bridge into the park and disappearing in the darkness. I waited. And waited. After half an hour, he still hadn’t come back. I was getting worried, wondering what I should do. I finally got a text from him about, I don’t know, half an hour after I dropped him off. He said he’d left something behind; could I grab his backpack and bring it to him? I was getting nervous sitting in the car by myself at that time of the morning, so I said yes. He sent another text with directions to cross the bridge and follow the trail to the left, that if I kept walking around the curve I’d find him. That was the last message I got from him.” “So that was the five a.m. text?” Jefferson asked. “That was it. . . .” 78 pages (sixteen chapters) later (THE SPOILER) With Agent Sparck, in Suiter Park “I told Ramírez to go join you, to borrow money from you and to encourage you to make bigger and bigger bets. I knew he was a lousy gambler, and you’d probably go broke. Then I gave him the drug deal cover story to get you both to Suiter Park.” “I underestimated you, Starck. You did all that on the fly? What’s your cover story going to be for killing me?” “That’s easy. Suicide. Given your history, you’re not exactly a stable guy. And the police just put you in jail for a night on suspicion of murder. You were depressed and alone, no real connections to anyone, so you caved to the pressure and decided to do yourself in at the spot where you killed Ramírez. You have a flair for the dramatic, I think.” 8 pages (two chapters) later (THE SPOILER CONTINUES) Frank summarizes afterward The coroner determined that Miguel had drowned, that the blow to the head had knocked him out but wasn’t fatal. He had been alive when his body was dumped in the water. Could I have saved him that night if I’d pulled his body from the water? Maybe; maybe not. Starck’s fingerprints were all over Miguel’s phone. Jefferson and I believed that Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel, which would have meant that Miguel was certainly dead when I saw his body floating in the slough. But, I’ll never really know. Maybe it didn’t matter. Starck had made it clear that he was hiding in the woods that night. If I had fished out Miguel’s body and had tried to revive him, Starck would have made sure that both of us had ended up dead.

Markup
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The police detective interrogates A loud rap on the table jolted my attention back to the detective in front of me. “Mr. Dodge?” Detective Martens of the Moline Police Department was struggling to get my attention. “Hello?” he said as he snapped He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hello?” [As much as possible, let’s make the speaker’s words echo in the reader’s mind by ending each dialogue paragraph with a spoken word rather than with descriptive exposition.] “Yeah; sorry,” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Yeah . . .” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Sorry.” [Same comment.] “Welcome back. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] As I’ve been trying to explain, the body of Miguel Ramírez was found this morning, floating in the backwaters near Suiter Park. [Is “Suiter Park” a fictional name (I cannot find it when searching the Internet). Is this actually Sylvan Gateway Park? And is “Suiter Slough” really Sylvan Slough?] According to his phone records, you were the last person he contacted. He sent you a text message around 5am.” around five a.m.” I opened and closed my eyes a few times, trying to focus, trying to remember. The next chapter, a few pages later (for some of the intervening story, in a separate window, see The interrogation continues) “How long were you at the casino?” the detective asked, fiddling with his pen. Martens fiddled with his pen. “How long were you at the casino?” “I was there until I got a text from Miguel, so I guess that was around five. He was looking for a ride home and was hoping I was still awake.” Martens put his pen down and straightened up. “How do you know it was five?” “Because you told me earlier that he sent me a text at five a.m.” “Right.” He leaned back, sighed, and stood up. “What did he want?” “He asked for a ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park, at the parking lot near the bridge. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] That seemed like a good time to cut my losses, so I told him I’d come pick him up.” Martens walked over to a wall and picked at a fleck of loose paint. He leaned against the wall and turned back to look at me. “OK, it’s early in the morning now; you’ve been now. You’ve been [In lively dialogue (in contrast to academic lectures), a compound sentence with two clauses fused together with a semicolon is better broken into two distinct, sharp sentences] out drinking all night, and you decide to drive from Bettendorf to Moline. Right?” “That’s what I’m saying.” “OK. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] What happened when you got there?” “Nothing. I couldn’t find him. I got to the parking lot and didn’t see anyone, so I parked and walked around for a few minutes. a few minutes.” “I suppose that’s where you picked up the mud on your boots?” I hadn’t given the detective enough credit. He was a quicker study than I thought. “Yeah. The rain last night was pretty heavy. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I don’t even remember noticing the mud when I was there.” “So you walked around in the mud. Go on.” “Well, I looked around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer his phone. I eventually gave up and left.” “You just left?” “What else was I going to do?” I sat back and crossed my arms. “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I didn’t know much about him. We had just met, right? [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I figured something else came up and he got a ride from someone else, maybe that else. Maybe that Cody guy. I didn’t see any point to sticking around, especially once it started to rain.” “Where did you go after you left the park?” “I was wet and tired by that point, so I drove back across the river to my motel.” “And that’s the whole night?” he asked, glancing down night?” Martens glanced down at my hands. I slid my left hand over my right to hide the scrapes on my knuckles. [That seems like a suspicious move that Martens should pick up on. Anyway, wouldn’t it be easy for Martens to learn that Frank had decked Cody at the Locked Down? Maybe describe some thought that Frank has here?] “Yeah. That was my night.” [I broke the paragraph here.] Martens walked back toward me, placed his hands on the table, and leaned forward. “I still don’t understand. Why do you suppose Ramírez contacted you for a ride at that hour?” “I’m not sure. He’s not from the area, right, so he area, right? So he probably doesn’t know many people here. Maybe he thought of me because we had just been hanging out a couple of hours earlier.” “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The last time you saw him alive was around two a.m. when a.m., when the Locked Down closed, then you closed. Then you got a text from him three hours later. What do you suppose he did in those three hours? Where did he go?” “I have no idea. I thought he was heading back to his apartment, with Cody. How he got from there to Suiter Park, I don’t know.” 49 pages (nine chapters) later The FBI agent interrogates “When was the last time you talked to Ramírez?” “We said good-bye sometime said goodbye sometime before two in the morning, when we left when he left [not “when we left”; Frank stayed at the Locked Down for about another half hour, until it closed at two a.m. (later in this chapter we have “I stuck around until they closed, maybe another half hour, then went to the casino”)] the Locked Down Bar Down Tavern. He left with a guy named Cody—that was the guy with the iPhone from the Crooked Spine who Spine whom [OK? (Frank is a writer and would use proper grammar—so would Starck, I suppose— but “who” would be OK for most of the other characters)] I mentioned to the Moline cops—and I went to a casino. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] That was the last time I talked to Miguel.” “But he also sent you a text message a little while later, right?” “The last time we talked was at the Locked Down, but yes, he sent me a text around five. . . .” A couple of pages later “And you didn’t talk to Ramírez again.” “No.” “What about that text message. What did he want?” “A ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park and wondered if I would give him a ride home. That’s all.” “Is that when you got mud on your boots?” he asked as he glanced over to the corner of my room. Shit. I still hadn’t cleaned them. “Like I told the Moline cops, I went to Suiter Park to pick up Miguel, but when I got there I there, I didn’t see anyone. I got out and walked around the parking lot, to see if I could find him. I didn’t, and when I tried to call him, he didn’t answer his phone, so I left.” “That’s what you told the Moline police. You are sure that there was nothing else in that message from Ramírez?” “Yes.” 43 pages (seven chapters) later A flashback “What are you going to do now?” Miguel asked. “I’m not sure. I’m not ready to call it a night. I may run over to a casino for a while, maybe while—maybe the Blackhawk, since Blackhawk—since that’s about all there is to do this time of night.” [Here is where Frank signals to Miguel that he will be at the Blackhawk Casino, so there is no need for Miguel and Frank to have a text exchange until five a.m.] “How long you gonna be in town?” “I paid for a week at the motel where I’m staying, so I’ll be here at least that long.” “Let me give you my number. We can hang out again before you go. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] Maybe tomorrow?” “Sounds good to me.” I called a taxi for them. [And here is where they exchange numbers for the five-a.m. text exchange.] We exchanged numbers, and I called a taxi for them. A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the casino episode “I did OK at the table for a while, winning about as much as I was losing, but I still wasn’t getting tired, just increasingly bored. [Revise from here.] Somewhere during that time I time, I got a text from Miguel telling me he’d had a lot of fun and couldn’t wait to hang out again. I sent a quick response basically saying ‘ditto’.” saying ‘ditto.’” [The preceding two sentences need to be completely redone. Per our August 20 email exchange, there is no exchange of texts between Miguel and Frank before the five-a.m. exchange. Please revise with ALL CAPS how Miguel shows up at the casino to Frank’s surprise and delight.] “I guess you made a good impression,” Jefferson said. [This text will have to be redone, too.] “You know me—I’m all about the charm. Maybe punching that pain-in-the-ass Cody helped, too. [The preceding might work, Frank telling Jefferson about Miguel showing up, so happy to be back with Frank for more fun.] I responded to Miguel’s text so quickly that he realized I was still awake and at the casino; he asked if he could join me. [The preceding will have to be redone, too.] He had managed to get Cody home and on the couch. After a ‘you bitch’ or two, Cody finally passed out. Miguel, though, was ready to keep going.” [The preceding might work, Frank telling Jefferson about Miguel showing up, so happy to be back with Frank for more fun.] “Let me guess: this is guess: This is another one of those details you didn’t feel a need to tell the cops about,” Jefferson said. about.” “Yeah. I left out that bit.” “That’s not very smart, Frank. The casinos have cameras everywhere—fucking everywhere. Someone’s gonna go check the tapes and see you with Ramírez at the casino, and it’s not gonna look good for you. You think you look suspicious now, just wait ‘til someone wait ’til someone [apostrophe, not open single quotation mark] sees you on tape at the casino with Ramírez.” “Yeah, yeah; I know yeah, I know. I was hoping that, by that by the time the cops figured out that Miguel met me at the casino, that the casino, the real killer would have been caught.” “Everything you hold back is slowing us down. You want to get out of this mess or not?” Jefferson grimaced and turned away. He was losing patience, something he never had in abundance, anyway abundance anyway. “Of course I do course, I do.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath—something I taught something I’d taught him—and turned back to me. “Of course, you do, even if you don’t act like it. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] Tell me what happened when Ramírez got to the Ramírez joined you at the casino.” [(1) In the draft you sent me, you put a line space and an asterisk divider here, but it wasn’t in the first edition (2014) of your book, and it really does not belong here. The following sentences just continue Frank and Jefferson talking about what happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning, but it is still Monday in the motel, just continuing what the preceding sentences of this chapter were describing. Anyway, I restored what you had in the first edition. No asterisk divider here. (2) Per our August 20 email exchange, the following paragraph needs some (not much) ALL CAPS revision from you, to describe Miguel showing up at the casino, to Frank's surprise and delight (no texts have been exchanged). See my suggestions at the end of each of the ensuing sentences in this paragraph. Remember that the entire paragraph is within a speech: Frank telling Jefferson on Monday afternoon in the motel what had happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning at the casino. Also, please consider inserting cinematic descriptive action between the sentences of the spoken speech rather than having the speech go on uninterrupted for several sentences.] “Most of the action in the casino takes place in two big rooms, so it didn’t take long for Miguel to find me. [Miguel doesn’t “find” Frank; Frank is surprised by Miguel’s arrival, maybe amazed to see Miguel show up in one of those two big rooms.] I watched as he got hassled by security when he came in. [Maybe when “he got hassled by security when he came in,” that is when Frank first notices Miguel’s surprising arrival.] It had cooled down outside, so he’d changed into a purple hoodie, a college sweatshirt emblazoned with the words South Texas College on the front and a big picture of a jaguar on the back. [This is an important detail. Frank notices what Miguel is wearing (because it “had cooled down outside”) and understands why security was giving him trouble.] Security wouldn’t let him in until he flipped the hoodie off his head.” [This sentence can probably stand.] “Casinos are picky about things like that,” Jefferson said. “As they should be, I guess. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] He came over to the blackjack table where I had camped out, and we got to gambling. At first, it was just dollar bets, but we were relaxed and enjoying each other’s company and company, and before long we were egging each other on and our bets started going up. My five dollar bet My five-dollar bet became ten, then twenty, then fifty. I won a few times and watched my stack of chips grow taller. Miguel wasn’t doing so well, so I slid him some chips to keep him going. keep him going.” [Yes, when you end a paragraph of quoted speech without a close quotation mark and then begin the next paragraph with an open quotation mark, the reader is supposed to understand that it is the same speaker. But many readers are confused by this. As throughout this manuscript, I have been suggesting interrupting long speeches with cinematic description ever so often, and I am doing it here at the beginning of the next paragraph, so we can put the close quotation mark at the end of this paragraph.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] “I don’t know how to explain it, but explain it,” I continued, [as you know, something like the preceding two words are necessary with a new paragraph of the same speaker's speech (unless you rely on the convention of no close quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph and the open quotation mark at the beginning of the ensuing paragraph)] “but I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: confidence—cockiness, honestly. I began to feel like there was no way I could lose, at least on that night. So I got bolder. I bumped up my bets to bumped my bets up to a hundred bucks. I felt nervous about the amount of money I was betting, but a couple of quick wins reassured me and kept me in the game. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] By then Miguel then, Miguel was broke again, but he was telling me that this was my lucky night and encouraging me to bet more and more. I felt great. I was having fun. I was getting high from the attention, the winning, the risk, and the booze.” [I broke the paragraph here.] I paused, looked at Jefferson, and tried in vain to keep a smile from melting away. [I got rid of the paragraph break here.] “Then the inevitable Now I needed to tell him the denouement: [Suggested insertion OK? We need to indicate that it is still Frank speaking.] “Then the inevitable happened. My luck ran out and out, and I lost a couple of hands—big bets—then a few more hands after that. I should have known better, but I just couldn’t stop. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I wanted to feel that high again, to watch my stack of chips grow, to impress Miguel. I told myself to keep riding the confidence bandwagon, and I’d start winning again, so I went to the ATM and got more cash. My stack of chips went up temporarily but quickly shrank lower and lower again until, in one final desperate move, I bet everything I had left. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] By the time I finally stopped myself, I realized I was almost two thousand dollars in the hole. Two grand. Two grand! Last month I made two I’d earned two grand—my income for the whole month was two month had been two grand!—and here I just here I’d just lost it in lost that amount in a couple of hours at a blackjack table. I felt shell-shocked and disgusted with myself. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] We went over to the bar; I needed bar. I needed relief and a chance to get my head back together.” “You had money left after that?” “That’s what credit cards are for, Brian. I ordered a couple of shots of Macallan twelve-year-old scotch twelve-year-old Scotch. If you’re gonna go out, go big.” “You should have just left.” “Of course, and a lot sooner. But I didn’t. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Miguel answering more texts—who the hell was he texting at that time of the morning?—[as we agreed in our August 20 and 21 email exchanges, this “texting” (no doubt with Starck, who is giving instructions to his prey) must be through untraceable Snapchat, a fact that will come out in what Starck himself says in chapter 35 and in the chapter 36 debriefing that Jefferson does with Frank] while I wondered how I was going to tell Miguel that I’d been courting him all night because I wanted to write a story about his connection to John Looney. [I got rid of the paragraph break here.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I was starting to freak out. Real panic was setting in. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have enough cash for the rest of the week, much less to pay bills next month, and I was worried that I might have just scared off Miguel with scared Miguel off with that grand display of losing. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] After Miguel put his phone down, he tried to console me.” A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the Suiter Park episode “You freak me out sometimes, Frank. This whole night is one giant cluster fuck giant clusterfuck. I’m surprised that you weren’t the one who was killed in the park.” He looked over at me. “You did it, didn’t you? Took him to the park.” I finished the rest of the whiskey in my cup. “Yeah. I did.” Frank jumped [tsk, tsk (this was in the first edition); any action that character Frank does in this novel must be expressed in first person; the name “Frank” must appear only in dialogue, when another character is addressing him or referring to him] Jefferson jumped up and stormed around the room. “Damn it, Frank. This is a new low for you, and I didn’t think that was even possible. Goddamn. Goddamn! You took him to the park where he was killed? What the fuck were you thinking?” He paced back and forth a couple of times, took a couple more deep breaths, then told me to go on. I cleared my throat and continued. “Miguel disappeared for a few minutes to make the arrangements for the sale, so we sale, then we drove across the river again to Suiter Park again. [They hadn't been to Suiter Park before, though they had crossed the river before (to Moline).] This time to Suiter Park. He asked me to wait in the car. He was sure that he’d be back in a few minutes. He said he just needed to hand off the bag and get the cash. Easy. He’d done it a hundred times, he assured me. he assured me.” I could see Jefferson rolling his eyes up in his head, but I just continued, letting it all out. [Inserted sentence OK? (or something similar, so we can avoid the quotation mark trick with the paragraph breaks in the middle of a single long speech); another possibility is to describe Jefferson’s reaction a little more precisely: We readers don’t know it yet, but in chapter 24, we learn that on the previous night (Sunday night), just a few hours earlier than when Frank is telling this story here in this chapter on Monday morning, Jefferson tailed Noah to Suiter Park.] “He pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack and left, crossing the old iron truss bridge into the park and disappearing in the darkness and left. There’s an old single-span iron truss bridge across a canal, a tailrace built in the late 1800s for a power plant. [Inserted sentence OK? (this sentence was redundant in chapter 21 but belongs here, when Frank first mentions the bridge. Also, the detail is part of Frank’s effort to delay getting to the really gruesome part of the story.)] Miguel crossed that bridge into the park, and he disappeared into the darkness. I waited. And waited. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] After half an hour, he still hadn’t come back. I was getting worried, wondering what I should do. I finally got a text from him about, I don’t know, half him, about—I don’t know—half an hour after I dropped after I’d dropped him off. He said he’d left something behind; could I behind. Could I grab his backpack and bring it to him? I was getting nervous sitting in the car by myself at that time of the morning, so I said yes. He sent another text with directions [We need to make this one single text exchange, the single text of five a.m.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] He continued with directions to cross the bridge and follow the trail to the left, that if I kept walking around the curve I’d curve, I’d find him. That was the last message I got from him.” [Yes, and as I mentioned in our August 20 and 21 email exchanges, we need to deal with the possibility that the cell phone service doesn’t report the physical location of sender and receiver (or that such information is unreliable), since the location information would prove that Frank is not receiving this text from the casino but rather from the Suiter Park parking lot.] “So that was the five-a.m. text?” Jefferson asked. “That was it. . . .” 78 pages (sixteen chapters) later (THE SPOILER) With Agent Sparck, in Suiter Park “I told Ramírez to go join you, to borrow money from you and you, and to encourage you to make bigger and bigger bets. I knew he was a lousy gambler, and you’d probably go broke. Then I gave him the drug deal cover story to get you both to Suiter Park.” Suiter Park. Finally, while you were waiting at the parking lot, I disposed of Ramírez here and sent you a regular text from his phone to get you to come to the scene of the crime that the cops would charge you with.” [I inserted the preceding sentence (which you might want to revise) to cover how the single text from “Miguel” (really Starck) to Frank came at five a.m. and to explain how the murder could have happened during that short span between that text and when Frank found Miguel’s body (Martens in chapter 31: “So sometime during those ten or fifteen minutes, someone found Ramírez, hit him in the head, and threw his body in the water? That’s an efficient criminal.” I am suggesting this sentence rather than the one you had in chapter 37, before my suggested revision there (“Jefferson and I believe that Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel, which would mean Miguel was certainly dead when I saw his body floating in the slough”—a problematic sentence in any event, because the syntax implies that Starck sent the last text to Frank rather than to Miguel, which would be absurd)] “I underestimated you, Starck. You did all that on the fly? [Please insert a sentence here describing how Frank (his POV) perceives Starck’s reaction to what he just said. Narrator Frank can tell that Starck is doing all this confessing (bragging) because he is very proud of himself. Proud for being a vigilante, dispensing justice to the Looney gang and their deplorable descendants. And, with what Frank just said, proud for being so clever.] What’s your cover story going to be for killing me?” “That’s easy. Suicide. Given your history, you’re not exactly a stable guy. And the police just put you in jail for a night on suspicion of murder. You were depressed and alone, no real connections to anyone, so you caved to the pressure and decided to do yourself in at the spot where you killed Ramírez. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] You have a flair for the dramatic, I think.” 8 pages (two chapters) later (THE SPOILER CONTINUES) Frank summarizes afterward The coroner determined that Miguel had drowned, that the blow to the head had knocked him out but wasn’t fatal. He had been alive when his body was dumped in the water. Could I have saved him that night if I’d pulled his body from the water? the slough? Maybe; maybe not. Maybe, maybe not. Starck’s fingerprints were all over Miguel’s phone. Jefferson and I believed that Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel, which would have meant that Miguel was certainly dead when I saw his body floating in the slough. Miguel’s phone, which essentially confirmed what Starck had boasted to me: that it had been he, not Miguel, who had sent that last text to me. This would mean that Miguel was certainly dead when I’d seen his body floating in the slough. [Why this suggested revision and replacement of your text? “Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel” implies that Starck sent the last text to Frank rather than sending it to Miguel (an absurdity), whereas you mean that Starck, not Miguel, sent the last text to Frank—but there are other problems with the original sentence, and I suggested a sentence in chapter 35 that covers this five-a.m. text business, where Starck is bragging about it, as well as his having lured Frank with that text to the scene of the crime that he would get mud on his boots and be conveniently charged with] But, I’ll But I’ll never really know. Maybe it didn’t matter. Starck had made it clear that he was hiding in the woods that night. If I had fished out Miguel’s body and had tried to revive him, Starck would have made sure that both of us had ended up dead. [Consider inserting a short paragraph here: “Miguel’s phone also confirmed one more thing. That and Starck’s own phone had a Snapchat account, which explained how Miguel had been “texting” so much during his night with me but the cell service had no record of that. Actually, now I remembered that Starck had bragged about sending Snapchat messages that wouldn’t leave a record.”]

The Author’s Review
in BLUE BOLDFACE ALL CAPS
Click to go to the second-pass result.

The police detective interrogates A loud rap on the table jolted my attention back to the detective in front of me. “Mr. Dodge?” Detective Martens of the Moline Police Department was struggling to get my attention. “Hello?” he said as he snapped He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hello?” [As much as possible, let’s make the speaker’s words echo in the reader’s mind by ending each dialogue paragraph with a spoken word rather than with descriptive exposition.] “Yeah; sorry,” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Yeah . . .” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Sorry.” [Same comment.] “Welcome back. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] DETECTIVE MARTENS TAPPED A PEN REPEATEDLY ON THE TABLE BETWEEN US. As I’ve been trying to explain, the body of Miguel Ramírez was found this morning, floating in the backwaters near Suiter Park. [Is “Suiter Park” a fictional name (I cannot find it when searching the Internet). Is this actually Sylvan Gateway Park? And is “Suiter Slough” really Sylvan Slough?] YOU HAVE GOOD RESEARCH SKILLS! SUITER PARK IS NOT REAL BUT IS BASED ON SYLVAN ISLAND/SYLVAN SLOUGH IN MOLINE. According to his phone records, you were the last person he contacted. He sent you a text message around 5am.” around five a.m.” I opened and closed my eyes a few times, trying to focus, trying to remember. The next chapter, a few pages later (for some of the intervening story, in a separate window, see The interrogation continues) “How long were you at the casino?” the detective asked, fiddling with his pen. Martens fiddled with his pen. “How long were you at the casino?” “I was there until I got a text from Miguel, so I guess that was around five. He was looking for a ride home and was hoping I was still awake.” Martens put his pen down and straightened up. “How do you know it was five?” “Because you told me earlier that he sent me a text at five a.m.” “Right.” He leaned back, sighed, and stood up. “What did he want?” “He asked for a ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park, at the parking lot near the bridge. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I FOLDED MY ARMS IN FRONT OF ME AND ROCKED BACK UNTIL THE FRONT LEGS OF THE CHAIR STARTED TO ELEVATE, THEN LEANED FORWARD JUST ENOUGH TO KEEP FROM FALLING BACKWARDS. That seemed like a good time to cut my losses, so I told him I’d come pick him up.” Martens STOOD UP AND walked over to a wall and DELETE "AND"; REPLACE WITH "WHERE HE" picked at a fleck of loose paint. He leaned against the wall and turned back to look at me. “OK, it’s early in the morning now; you’ve been now. You’ve been [In lively dialogue (in contrast to academic lectures), a compound sentence with two clauses fused together with a semicolon is better broken into two distinct, sharp sentences] out drinking all night, and you decide to drive from Bettendorf to Moline. Right?” “That’s what I’m saying.” “OK. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] HE SCRATCHED HIS HEAD. What happened when you got there?” “Nothing. I couldn’t find him. I got to the parking lot and didn’t see anyone, so I parked and walked around for a few minutes. a few minutes.” “I suppose that’s where you picked up the mud on your boots?” I hadn’t given the detective enough credit. He was a quicker study than I thought. “Yeah. The rain last night was pretty heavy. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I LOOKED DOWN AND NOTICED A COUPLE MORE CLUMPS OF MUD ON MY PANTS. I MADE A MENTAL NOTE TO BRUSH THEM OFF WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY ROOM. I don’t even remember noticing the mud when I was there.” “So you walked around in the mud. Go on.” “Well, I looked around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer his phone. I eventually gave up and left.” “You just left?” “What else was I going to do?” I sat back and crossed my arms. REPLACE "I SAT BACK..." WITH "I LEANED FORWARD AND RESTED AN ELBOW ON THE TABLE, LOOKING RIGHT AT MARTENS." “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I didn’t know much about him. We had just met, right? [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I THREW MY HANDS UP, SIGHED, THEN SLID BACK IN THE CHAIR. I figured something else came up and he got a ride from someone else, maybe that else. Maybe that Cody guy. I didn’t see any point to sticking around, especially once it started to rain.” “Where did you go after you left the park?” “I was wet and tired by that point, so I drove back across the river to my motel.” “And that’s the whole night?” he asked, glancing down night?” Martens glanced down at my hands. I slid my left hand over my right to hide the scrapes on my knuckles. [That seems like a suspicious move that Martens should pick up on. Anyway, wouldn’t it be easy for Martens to learn that Frank had decked Cody at the Locked Down? Maybe describe some thought that Frank has here?] KEEP COOL, I TOLD MYSELF. NO NEED TO VOLUNTEER WHAT HE DOESN'T ASK ABOUT. “Yeah. That was my night.” [I broke the paragraph here.] Martens walked back toward me, placed his hands on the table, and leaned forward. “I still don’t understand. Why do you suppose Ramírez contacted you for a ride at that hour?” “I’m not sure. He’s not from the area, right, so he area, right? So he probably doesn’t know many people here. Maybe he thought of me because we had just been hanging out a couple of hours earlier.” “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The last time you saw him alive was around two a.m. when a.m., when the Locked Down closed, then you closed. Then you got a text from him three hours later. What do you suppose he did in those three hours? Where did he go?” “I have no idea. I thought he was heading back to his apartment, with Cody. How he got from there to Suiter Park, I don’t know.” 49 pages (nine chapters) later The FBI agent interrogates “When was the last time you talked to Ramírez?” “We said good-bye sometime said goodbye sometime before two in the morning, when we left when he left [not “when we left”; Frank stayed at the Locked Down for about another half hour, until it closed at two a.m. (later in this chapter we have “I stuck around until they closed, maybe another half hour, then went to the casino”)] the Locked Down Bar Down Tavern. He left with a guy named Cody—that was the guy with the iPhone from the Crooked Spine who Spine whom [OK? (Frank is a writer and would use proper grammar—so would Starck, I suppose— but “who” would be OK for most of the other characters)] I STILL PREFER WHO, ESPECIALLY IN CONVERSATION I mentioned to the Moline cops—and I went to a casino. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I COULDN'T TELL IF HE BELIEVED ME OR NOT. THE EXPRESSION ON HIS FACE DIDN'T CHANGE. That was the last time I talked to Miguel.” “But he also sent you a text message a little while later, right?” “The last time we talked was at the Locked Down, but yes, he sent me a text around five. . . .” A couple of pages later “And you didn’t talk to Ramírez again.” “No.” “What about that text message. What did he want?” “A ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park and wondered if I would give him a ride home. That’s all.” “Is that when you got mud on your boots?” he asked as he glanced over to the corner of my room. Shit. I still hadn’t cleaned them. “Like I told the Moline cops, I went to Suiter Park to pick up Miguel, but when I got there I there, I didn’t see anyone. I got out and walked around the parking lot, to see if I could find him. I didn’t, and when I tried to call him, he didn’t answer his phone, so I left.” “That’s what you told the Moline police. You are sure that there was nothing else in that message from Ramírez?” “Yes.” 43 pages (seven chapters) later A flashback “What are you going to do now?” Miguel asked. “I’m not sure. I’m not ready to call it a night. I may run over to a casino for a while, maybe while—maybe the Blackhawk, since Blackhawk—since that’s about all there is to do this time of night.” [Here is where Frank signals to Miguel that he will be at the Blackhawk Casino, so there is no need for Miguel and Frank to have a text exchange until five a.m.] “How long you gonna be in town?” “I paid for a week at the motel where I’m staying, so I’ll be here at least that long.” “Let me give you my number. We can hang out again before you go. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] HE STOOD UP AND FACED ME. Maybe tomorrow?” “Sounds good to me.” I called a taxi for them. [And here is where they exchange numbers for the five-a.m. text exchange.] We exchanged numbers, and I called a taxi for them. A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the casino episode “I did OK at the table for a while, winning about as much as I was losing, but I still wasn’t getting tired, just increasingly bored. [Revise from here.] Somewhere during that time I time, I got a text from Miguel telling me he’d had a lot of fun and couldn’t wait to hang out again. I sent a quick response basically saying ‘ditto’.” saying ‘ditto.’” [The preceding two sentences need to be completely redone. Per our August 20 email exchange, there is no exchange of texts between Miguel and Frank before the five-a.m. exchange. Please revise with ALL CAPS how Miguel shows up at the casino to Frank’s surprise and delight.] I THOUGHT ABOUT GIVING UP AND GOING BACK TO MY ROOM UNTIL I FELT A TAP ON MY SHOULDER. THE FOLLOWING EXCHANGE IS IN A FLASHBACK "LOOKS LIKE YOU AREN'T BROKE, YET," I HEARD MIGUEL SAY I TURNED AROUND AND SMILED. "I THOUGHT YOU WERE DONE FOR THE NIGHT. HOW'S CODY?" "CRASHED ON THE COUCH AFTER CALLING ME A BITCH A COUPLE MORE TIMES." HE SMILED, THEN LOOKED AWAY. "I DIDN'T SEE ANY REASON TO SIT AROUND AND WATCH HIM SLEEP, SO I THOUGHT I'D COME DOWN HERE AND SEE HOW YOU'RE DOING. SEE IF YOU NEEDED SOME ADVICE ON HOW TO WIN AT THESE GAMES." HE RESTED A HAND ON MY SHOULDER. “I guess you made a good impression,” Jefferson said. [This text will have to be redone, too.] DELETE THIS SENTENCE “You know me—I’m all about the charm. Maybe punching that pain-in-the-ass Cody helped, too. [The preceding might work, Frank telling Jefferson about Miguel showing up, so happy to be back with Frank for more fun.] I responded to Miguel’s text so quickly that he realized I was still awake and at the casino; he asked if he could join me. [The preceding will have to be redone, too.] He had managed to get Cody home and on the couch. After a ‘you bitch’ or two, Cody finally passed out. Miguel, though, was ready to keep going.” [The preceding might work, Frank telling Jefferson about Miguel showing up, so happy to be back with Frank for more fun.] DELETE THIS PARAGRAPH “Let me guess: this is guess: This is another one of those details you didn’t feel a need to tell the cops about,” Jefferson said. about.” “Yeah. I left out that bit.” “That’s not very smart, Frank. The casinos have cameras everywhere—fucking everywhere. Someone’s gonna go check the tapes and see you with Ramírez at the casino, and it’s not gonna look good for you. You think you look suspicious now, just wait ‘til someone wait ’til someone [apostrophe, not open single quotation mark] sees you on tape at the casino with Ramírez.” “Yeah, yeah; I know yeah, I know. I was hoping that, by that by the time the cops figured out that Miguel met me at the casino, that the casino, the real killer would have been caught.” “Everything you hold back is slowing us down. You want to get out of this mess or not?” Jefferson grimaced and turned away. He was losing patience, something he never had in abundance, anyway abundance anyway. “Of course I do course, I do.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath—something I taught something I’d taught him—and turned back to me. “Of course, you do, even if you don’t act like it. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] HE RUBBED HIS FOREHEAD. Tell me what happened when Ramírez got to the Ramírez joined you at the casino.” [(1) In the draft you sent me, you put a line space and an asterisk divider here, but it wasn’t in the first edition (2014) of your book, and it really does not belong here. The following sentences just continue Frank and Jefferson talking about what happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning, but it is still Monday in the motel, just continuing what the preceding sentences of this chapter were describing. Anyway, I restored what you had in the first edition. No asterisk divider here. OK (2) Per our August 20 email exchange, the following paragraph needs some (not much) ALL CAPS revision from you, to describe Miguel showing up at the casino, to Frank's surprise and delight (no texts have been exchanged). See my suggestions at the end of each of the ensuing sentences in this paragraph. Remember that the entire paragraph is within a speech: Frank telling Jefferson on Monday afternoon in the motel what had happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning at the casino. Also, please consider inserting cinematic descriptive action between the sentences of the spoken speech rather than having the speech go on uninterrupted for several sentences.] “Most of the action in the casino takes place in two big rooms, so it didn’t take long for Miguel to find me. [Miguel doesn’t “find” Frank; Frank is surprised by Miguel’s arrival, maybe amazed to see Miguel show up in one of those two big rooms.] SO I WAS SURPRISED THAT MIGUEL FOUND ME SO EASILY.1 I watched as he got hassled by security when he came in. [Maybe when “he got hassled by security when he came in,” that is when Frank first notices Miguel’s surprising arrival.] "HE TOLD ME THAT CASINO SECURITY HAD HASSLED HIM WHEN HE SHOWED UP." JEFFERSON WAS LISTENING BUT HIS EYES WERE STILL CLOSED. It had cooled down outside, so he’d changed into a purple hoodie, a college sweatshirt emblazoned with the words South Texas College on the front and a big picture of a jaguar on the back. [This is an important detail. Frank notices what Miguel is wearing (because it “had cooled down outside”) and understands why security was giving him trouble.] Security wouldn’t let him in until he flipped the hoodie off his head.” [This sentence can probably stand.] “Casinos are picky about things like that,” Jefferson said. “As they should be, I guess. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] He came over to the blackjack table where I had camped out, and we got to gambling. REPLACE THE PRECEDING SENTENCE WITH: "I WAS STILL CAMPED OUT AT THE BLACKJACK TABLE WHEN MIGUEL SHOWED UP. AFTER OUR QUICK HELLOS, I TURNED AROUND AND GOT BACK TO WORK TRYING TO WIN A FEW HANDS. MIGUEL GRABBED AN EMPTY SEAT NEXT TO ME." JEFFERSON OPENED HIS EYES. HIS GAZE WAS INTENSE. At first, it was just dollar bets, but we were relaxed and enjoying each other’s company and company, and before long we were egging each other on and our bets started going up. My five dollar bet My five-dollar bet became ten, then twenty, then fifty. I won a few times and watched my stack of chips grow taller. Miguel wasn’t doing so well, so I slid him some chips to keep him going. keep him going.” [Yes, when you end a paragraph of quoted speech without a close quotation mark and then begin the next paragraph with an open quotation mark, the reader is supposed to understand that it is the same speaker. But many readers are confused by this. As throughout this manuscript, I have been suggesting interrupting long speeches with cinematic description ever so often, and I am doing it here at the beginning of the next paragraph, so we can put the close quotation mark at the end of this paragraph.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I WALKED OVER TO THE SINK AND FILLED A PLASTIC CUP WITH WATER. “I don’t know how to explain it, but explain it,” I continued, [as you know, something like the preceding two words are necessary with a new paragraph of the same speaker's speech (unless you rely on the convention of no close quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph and the open quotation mark at the beginning of the ensuing paragraph)] “but I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: confidence—cockiness, honestly. I began to feel like there was no way I could lose, at least on that night. So I got bolder. I bumped up my bets to bumped my bets up to a hundred bucks. I felt nervous about the amount of money I was betting, but a couple of quick wins reassured me and kept me in the game. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I TURNED BACK TO JEFFERSON, DRANK THE WATER, AND LEANED AGAINST THE SINK. By then Miguel then, Miguel was broke again, but he was telling me that this was my lucky night and encouraging me to bet more and more. I felt great. I was having fun. I was getting high from the attention, the winning, the risk, and the booze.” [I broke the paragraph here.] I paused, looked at Jefferson, and tried in vain to keep a smile from melting away. [I got rid of the paragraph break here.] “Then the inevitable Now I needed to tell him the denouement: [Suggested insertion OK? We need to indicate that it is still Frank speaking.] I FELT EMBARRASSED AS I RECALLED WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. “Then the inevitable happened. My luck ran out and out, and I lost a couple of hands—big bets—then a few more hands after that. I should have known better, but I just couldn’t stop. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I GRIMACED. I wanted to feel that high again, to watch my stack of chips grow, to impress Miguel. I told myself to keep riding the confidence bandwagon, and I’d start winning again, so I went to the ATM and got more cash. My stack of chips went up temporarily but quickly shrank lower and lower again until, in one final desperate move, I bet everything I had left. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] By the time I finally stopped myself, I realized I was almost two thousand dollars in the hole. Two grand. Two grand! INSERT: I TURNED AWAY FROM JEFFERSON. Last month I made two I’d earned two grand—my income for the whole month was two month had been two grand!—and here I just here I’d just lost it in lost that amount in a couple of hours at a blackjack table. I felt shell-shocked and disgusted with myself. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I THOUGHT I MIGHT FEEL BETTER AFTER TELLING JEFFERSON WHAT HAPPENED AT THE CASINO. I DIDN'T. We went over to the bar; I needed bar. I needed relief and a chance to get my head back together.” “You had money left after that?” “That’s what credit cards are for, Brian. I ordered a couple of shots of Macallan twelve-year-old scotch twelve-year-old Scotch. If you’re gonna go out, go big.” “You should have just left.” “Of course, and a lot sooner. But I didn’t. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I WALKED OVER TO THE BED AND SAT DOWN. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Miguel answering more texts—who the hell was he texting at that time of the morning?—[as we agreed in our August 20 and 21 email exchanges, this “texting” (no doubt with Starck, who is giving instructions to his prey) must be through untraceable Snapchat, a fact that will come out in what Starck himself says in chapter 35 and in the chapter 36 debriefing that Jefferson does with Frank] while I wondered how I was going to tell Miguel that I’d been courting him all night because I wanted to write a story about his connection to John Looney. [I got rid of the paragraph break here.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I REACHED FOR THE RING ON MY LEFT HAND AND SPUN IT AROUND A FEW TIMES. I was starting to freak out. Real panic was setting in. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have enough cash for the rest of the week, much less to pay bills next month, and I was worried that I might have just scared off Miguel with scared Miguel off with that grand display of losing. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I QUIT PLAYING WITH THE RING, STOOD UP, AND STARTED PACING. After Miguel put his phone down, he tried to console me.” A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the Suiter Park episode “You freak me out sometimes, Frank. This whole night is one giant cluster fuck giant clusterfuck. I’m surprised that you weren’t the one who was killed in the park.” He looked over at me. “You did it, didn’t you? Took him to the park.” I finished the rest of the whiskey in my cup. “Yeah. I did.” Frank jumped [tsk, tsk (this was in the first edition); any action that character Frank does in this novel must be expressed in first person; the name “Frank” must appear only in dialogue, when another character is addressing him or referring to him] Jefferson jumped up and stormed around the room. “Damn it, Frank. This is a new low for you, and I didn’t think that was even possible. Goddamn. Goddamn! You took him to the park where he was killed? What the fuck were you thinking?” He paced back and forth a couple of times, took a couple more deep breaths, then told me to go on. I cleared my throat and continued. “Miguel disappeared for a few minutes to make the arrangements for the sale, so we sale, then we drove across the river again to Suiter Park again. [They hadn't been to Suiter Park before, though they had crossed the river before (to Moline).] This time to Suiter Park. He asked me to wait in the car. He was sure that he’d be back in a few minutes. He said he just needed to hand off the bag and get the cash. Easy. He’d done it a hundred times, he assured me. he assured me.” I could see Jefferson rolling his eyes up in his head, but I just continued, letting it all out. [Inserted sentence OK? (or something similar, so we can avoid the quotation mark trick with the paragraph breaks in the middle of a single long speech); another possibility is to describe Jefferson’s reaction a little more precisely: We readers don’t know it yet, but in chapter 24, we learn that on the previous night (Sunday night), just a few hours earlier than when Frank is telling this story here in this chapter on Monday morning, Jefferson tailed Noah to Suiter Park.] I COULD SEE JEFFERSON ROLL HIS EYES, BUT I JUST CONTINUED. I HAD TO LET IT ALL OUT. “He pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack and left, crossing the old iron truss bridge into the park and disappearing in the darkness and left. There’s an old single-span iron truss bridge across a canal, a tailrace built in the late 1800s for a power plant. [Inserted sentence OK? (this sentence was redundant in chapter 21 but belongs here, when Frank first mentions the bridge. Also, the detail is part of Frank’s effort to delay getting to the really gruesome part of the story.)] OK Miguel crossed that bridge into the park, and he disappeared into the darkness. I waited. And waited. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] JEFFERSON COULDN'T LOOK AT ME. HIS FOOT WAS TAPPNG THE GROUND AS IF HE WANTED TO PUNCH A HOLE THROUGH THE FLOOR. After half an hour, he still hadn’t come back. I was getting worried, wondering what I should do. I finally got a text from him about, I don’t know, half him, about—I don’t know—half an hour after I dropped after I’d dropped him off. He said he’d left something behind; could I behind. Could I grab his backpack and bring it to him? INSERT: HIS TEXT INCLUDED QUICK DIRECTIONS ABOUT HOW TO FIND HIM, TO CROSS THE BRIDGE, AND FOLLOW THE TRAIL TO THE LEFT, THAT I'D FIND HIM JUST AROUND THE FIRST CURVE. I was getting nervous sitting in the car by myself at that time of the morning, so I said yes. He sent another text with directions [We need to make this one single text exchange, the single text of five a.m.] [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] I TOOK A DEEP BREATH AND HELD IT FOR A FEW SECONDS. He continued with directions to cross the bridge and follow the trail to the left, that if I kept walking around the curve I’d curve, I’d find him. That was the last message I got from him.” [Yes, and as I mentioned in our August 20 and 21 email exchanges, we need to deal with the possibility that the cell phone service doesn’t report the physical location of sender and receiver (or that such information is unreliable), since the location information would prove that Frank is not receiving this text from the casino but rather from the Suiter Park parking lot.] DELETE THE PREVIOUS TWO SENTENCES “So that was the five-a.m. text?” Jefferson asked. “That was it. . . .” 78 pages (sixteen chapters) later (THE SPOILER) With Agent Sparck, in Suiter Park “I told Ramírez to go join you, to borrow money from you and you, and to encourage you to make bigger and bigger bets. I knew he was a lousy gambler, and you’d probably go broke. Then I gave him the drug deal cover story to get you both to Suiter Park.” Suiter Park. Finally, while you were waiting at the parking lot, I disposed of Ramírez here and sent you a regular text from his phone to get you to come to the scene of the crime that the cops would charge you with.” [I inserted the preceding sentence (which you might want to revise) to cover how the single text from “Miguel” (really Starck) to Frank came at five a.m. and to explain how the murder could have happened during that short span between that text and when Frank found Miguel’s body (Martens in chapter 31: “So sometime during those ten or fifteen minutes, someone found Ramírez, hit him in the head, and threw his body in the water? That’s an efficient criminal.” I am suggesting this sentence rather than the one you had in chapter 37, before my suggested revision there (“Jefferson and I believe that Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel, which would mean Miguel was certainly dead when I saw his body floating in the slough”—a problematic sentence in any event, because the syntax implies that Starck sent the last text to Frank rather than to Miguel, which would be absurd)] REPLACE "FINALLY..." WITH "WHILE YOU WERE WAITING IN THE PARKING LOT, I KNOCKED RAMIREZ OUT, SMACKED HIM IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD WITH MY GUN." HE MIMICKED THE ACT OF HITTING MIGUEL WITH WAY TOO MUCH ENTHUSIASM. "AFTER I REMOVED HIS PHONE FROM HIS JACKET, I DUMPED HIM IN THE WATER. AS I WATCHED HIS BODY FLOAT AWAY FROM THE SHORE, I SENT YOU A TEXT FROM HIS PHONE, PRETENDING TO BE HIM." “I underestimated you, Starck. You did all that on the fly? [Please insert a sentence here describing how Frank (his POV) perceives Starck’s reaction to what he just said. Narrator Frank can tell that Starck is doing all this confessing (bragging) because he is very proud of himself. Proud for being a vigilante, dispensing justice to the Looney gang and their deplorable descendants. And, with what Frank just said, proud for being so clever.] I WASN'T LYING. HE COVERED HIS TRACKS WELL. BUT I ALSO HOPED THAT BY FLATTERING HIM, I COULD DRAG THE SCENE OUT A LITTLE LONGER. THE ROPES AROUND MY SHOULDERS HAD A LITTLE SLACK, AND I FIGURED I FINALLY HAD A SHOT AT WORKING THEM THE REST OF THE WAY OFF. What’s your cover story going to be for killing me?” “That’s easy. Suicide. Given your history, you’re not exactly a stable guy. And the police just put you in jail for a night on suspicion of murder. You were depressed and alone, no real connections to anyone, so you caved to the pressure and decided to do yourself in at the spot where you killed Ramírez. [Consider interrupting the speech here with a short sentence of description (some character-revealing gesture or grimace perhaps)—don’t worry about the punctuation; I’ll take care of getting the close and open quotations marks fixed in the edit’s second pass.] HE RUBBED HIS CHIN, AND HIS EYES NARROWED. You have a flair for the dramatic, I think.” 8 pages (two chapters) later (THE SPOILER CONTINUES) Frank summarizes afterward The coroner determined that Miguel had drowned, that the blow to the head had knocked him out but wasn’t fatal. He had been alive when his body was dumped in the water. Could I have saved him that night if I’d pulled his body from the water? the slough? Maybe; maybe not. Maybe, maybe not. Starck’s fingerprints were all over Miguel’s phone. Jefferson and I believed that Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel, which would have meant that Miguel was certainly dead when I saw his body floating in the slough. Miguel’s phone, which essentially confirmed what Starck had boasted to me: that it had been he, not Miguel, who had sent that last text to me. This would mean that Miguel was certainly dead when I’d seen his body floating in the slough. [Why this suggested revision and replacement of your text? “Starck actually sent the last text to me, not Miguel” implies that Starck sent the last text to Frank rather than sending it to Miguel (an absurdity), whereas you mean that Starck, not Miguel, sent the last text to Frank—but there are other problems with the original sentence, and I suggested a sentence in chapter 35 that covers this five-a.m. text business, where Starck is bragging about it, as well as his having lured Frank with that text to the scene of the crime that he would get mud on his boots and be conveniently charged with] REVISION IS OK But, I’ll But I’ll never really know. Maybe it didn’t matter. Starck had made it clear that he was hiding in the woods that night. If I had fished out Miguel’s body and had tried to revive him, Starck would have made sure that both of us had ended up dead. [Consider inserting a short paragraph here: “Miguel’s phone also confirmed one more thing. That and Starck’s own phone had a Snapchat account, which explained how Miguel had been “texting” so much during his night with me but the cell service had no record of that. Actually, now I remembered that Starck had bragged about sending Snapchat messages that wouldn’t leave a record.”] I THINK WE COVERED THAT OK EARLIER. 1. The author’s insertion contradicts the earlier part of the sentence (since the action was in only two rooms, finding Frank easily would not have been surprising). In the second pass, I just made the following revision of the sentence (changing simple past tense to past perfect tense): “Most of the action in the casino takes place in two big rooms, so it hadn’t taken long for Miguel to find me.” ↩

The Second-Pass Result
Click to go to the next sample in the series.

The police detective interrogates A loud rap on the table jolted my attention back to the detective in front of me. “Mr. Dodge?” Detective Martens of the Moline Police Department was struggling to get my attention. He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hello?” “Yeah . . .” I responded, slowly looking up at him. “Sorry.” “Welcome back.” Detective Martens tapped a pen repeatedly on the table between us. “As I’ve been trying to explain, the body of Miguel Ramírez was found this morning, floating in the backwaters near Suiter Park. According to his phone records, you were the last person he contacted. He sent you a text message around five a.m.” I opened and closed my eyes a few times, trying to focus, trying to remember. The next chapter, a few pages later (for some of the intervening story, in a separate window, see The interrogation continues) Martens fiddled with his pen. “How long were you at the casino?” “I was there until I got a text from Miguel, so I guess that was around five. He was looking for a ride home and was hoping I was still awake.” Martens put his pen down and straightened up. “How do you know it was five?” “Because you told me earlier that he sent me a text at five a.m.” “Right.” He leaned back, sighed, and stood up. “What did he want?” “He asked for a ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park, at the parking lot near the bridge.” I folded my arms in front of me and rocked back until the front legs of the chair started to elevate, then leaned forward just enough to keep from falling backward. “That seemed like a good time to cut my losses, so I told him I’d come pick him up.” Martens stood up and walked over to a wall, where he picked at a fleck of loose paint. He leaned against the wall and turned back to look at me. “OK, it’s early in the morning now; you’ve been out drinking all night, and you decide to drive from Bettendorf to Moline. Right?” “That’s what I’m saying.” “OK.” He scratched his head. “What happened when you got there?” “Nothing. I couldn’t find him. I got to the parking lot and didn’t see anyone, so I parked and walked around for a few minutes.” “I suppose that’s where you picked up the mud on your boots?” I hadn’t given the detective enough credit. He was a quicker study than I thought. “Yeah. The rain last night was pretty heavy.” I looked down and noticed a couple more clumps of mud on my pants. I made a mental note to brush them off when I got back to my room. “I don’t even remember noticing the mud when I was there.” “So you walked around in the mud. Go on.” “Well, I looked around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer his phone. I eventually gave up and left.” “You just left?” “What else was I going to do?” I leaned forward and rested an elbow on the table, looking right at Martens. “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I didn’t know much about him. We had just met, right?” I threw my hands up, sighed, then slid back in the chair. “I figured something else came up and he got a ride from someone else. Maybe that Cody guy. I didn’t see any point to sticking around, especially once it started to rain.” “Where did you go after you left the park?” “I was wet and tired by that point, so I drove back across the river to my motel.” “And that’s the whole night?” Martens glanced down at my hands. I slid my left hand over my right to hide the scrapes on my knuckles. Keep cool, I told myself. No need to volunteer what he doesn’t ask about. “Yeah. That was my night.” Martens walked back toward me, placed his hands on the table, and leaned forward. “I still don’t understand. Why do you suppose Ramírez contacted you for a ride at that hour?” “I’m not sure. He’s not from the area, right? So he probably doesn’t know many people here. Maybe he thought of me because we had just been hanging out a couple of hours earlier.” “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The last time you saw him alive was around two a.m. when the Locked Down closed. Then you got a text from him three hours later. What do you suppose he did in those three hours? Where did he go?” “I have no idea. I thought he was heading back to his apartment, with Cody. How he got from there to Suiter Park, I don’t know.” 49 pages (nine chapters) later The FBI agent interrogates “When was the last time you talked to Ramírez?” “We said goodbye sometime before two in the morning, when he left the Locked Down Tavern. He left with a guy named Cody—that was the guy with the iPhone from the Crooked Spine who I mentioned to the Moline cops—and I went to a casino.” I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. The expression on his face didn’t change. “That was the last time I talked to Miguel.” “But he also sent you a text message a little while later, right?” “The last time we talked was at the Locked Down, but yes, he sent me a text around five. . . .” A couple of pages later “And you didn’t talk to Ramírez again.” “No.” “What about that text message. What did he want?” “A ride home. He said he was at Suiter Park and wondered if I would give him a ride home. That’s all.” “Is that when you got mud on your boots?” he asked as he glanced over to the corner of my room. Shit. I still hadn’t cleaned them. “Like I told the Moline cops, I went to Suiter Park to pick up Miguel, but when I got there, I didn’t see anyone. I got out and walked around the parking lot, to see if I could find him. I didn’t, and when I tried to call him, he didn’t answer his phone, so I left.” “That’s what you told the Moline police. You are sure that there was nothing else in that message from Ramírez?” “Yes.” 43 pages (seven chapters) later A flashback “What are you going to do now?” Miguel asked. “I’m not sure. I’m not ready to call it a night. I may run over to a casino for a while—maybe the Blackhawk—since that’s about all there is to do this time of night.” “How long you gonna be in town?” “I paid for a week at the motel where I’m staying, so I’ll be here at least that long.” “Let me give you my number. We can hang out again before you go.” He stood up and faced me. “Maybe tomorrow?” “Sounds good to me.” We exchanged numbers, and I called a taxi for them. A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the casino episode “I did OK at the table for a while, winning about as much as I was losing, but I still wasn’t getting tired, just increasingly bored. I thought about giving up and going back to my room until I felt a tap on my shoulder.” ****** “Looks like you aren’t broke yet,” I heard Miguel say. I turned around and smiled. “I thought you were done for the night. How’s Cody?” “Crashed on the couch after calling me a bitch a couple more times.” He smiled, then looked away. “I didn’t see any reason to sit around and watch him sleep, so I thought I’d come down here and see how you’re doing. See if you needed some advice on how to win at these games.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. ****** “Let me guess: This is another one of those details you didn’t feel a need to tell the cops about.” “Yeah. I left out that bit.” “That’s not very smart, Frank. The casinos have cameras everywhere—fucking everywhere. Someone’s gonna go check the tapes and see you with Ramírez at the casino, and it’s not gonna look good for you. You think you look suspicious now, just wait ’til someone sees you on tape at the casino with Ramírez.” “Yeah, yeah, I know. I was hoping that by the time the cops figured out that Miguel met me at the casino, the real killer would have been caught.” “Everything you hold back is slowing us down. You want to get out of this mess or not?” Jefferson grimaced and turned away. He was losing patience, something he never had in abundance anyway. “Of course, I do.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath—something I’d taught him—and turned back to me. “Of course, you do, even if you don’t act like it.” He rubbed his forehead. “Tell me what happened when Ramírez got to the casino.” “Most of the action in the casino takes place in two big rooms, so it hadn’t taken long for Miguel to find me. He told me that casino security had hassled him when he showed up.” Jefferson was listening, but his eyes were still closed. “It had cooled down outside, so he’d changed into a purple hoodie, a college sweatshirt emblazoned with the words South Texas College on the front and a big picture of a jaguar on the back. Security wouldn’t let him in until he flipped the hoodie off his head.” “Casinos are picky about things like that,” Jefferson said. “As they should be, I guess. I was still camped out at the blackjack table when Miguel showed up. After our quick hellos, I turned around and got back to work, trying to win a few hands. Miguel grabbed an empty seat next to me.” Jefferson opened his eyes. His gaze was intense. “At first, it was just dollar bets, but we were relaxed and enjoying each other’s company, and before long we were egging each other on and our bets started going up. My five-dollar bet became ten, then twenty, then fifty. I won a few times and watched my stack of chips grow taller. Miguel wasn’t doing so well, so I slid him some chips to keep him going.” I walked over to the sink and filled a plastic cup with water. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I continued, “but I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: confidence—cockiness, honestly. I began to feel like there was no way I could lose, at least on that night. So I got bolder. I bumped my bets up to a hundred bucks. I felt nervous about the amount of money I was betting, but a couple of quick wins reassured me and kept me in the game.” I turned back to Jefferson, drank the water, and leaned against the sink. “By then Miguel was broke again, but he was telling me that this was my lucky night and encouraging me to bet more and more. I felt great. I was having fun. I was getting high from the attention, the winning, the risk, and the booze.” I paused, looked at Jefferson, and tried in vain to keep a smile from melting away. I felt embarrassed as I recalled what happened next. “Then the inevitable happened. My luck ran out, and I lost a couple of hands—big bets—then a few more hands after that. I should have known better, but I just couldn’t stop.” I grimaced. “I wanted to feel that high again, to watch my stack of chips grow, to impress Miguel. I told myself to keep riding the confidence bandwagon, and I’d start winning again, so I went to the ATM and got more cash. My stack of chips went up temporarily but quickly shrank lower and lower again until, in one final desperate move, I bet everything I had left. By the time I finally stopped myself, I realized I was almost two thousand dollars in the hole. Two grand!” I turned away from Jefferson. “Last month I’d earned two grand—my income for the whole month was two grand!—and here I’d just lost that amount in a couple of hours at a blackjack table. I felt shell-shocked and disgusted with myself.” I’d thought I might feel better after telling Jefferson what happened at the casino. I didn’t. “We went over to the bar. I needed relief and a chance to get my head back together.” “You had money left after that?” “That’s what credit cards are for, Brian. I ordered a couple of shots of Macallan twelve-year-old Scotch. If you’re gonna go out, go big.” “You should have just left.” “Of course, and a lot sooner. But I didn’t.” I walked over to the bed and sat down. “We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Miguel answering more texts—who the hell was he texting at that time of the morning?—while I wondered how I was going to tell Miguel that I’d been courting him all night because I wanted to write a story about his connection to John Looney.” I reached for the ring on my left hand and spun it around a few times. “I was starting to freak out. Real panic was setting in. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have enough cash for the rest of the week, much less to pay bills next month, and I was worried that I might have just scared Miguel off with that grand display of losing.” I quit playing with the ring, stood up, and started pacing. “After Miguel put his phone down, he tried to console me.” A few pages (the next chapter) later With friend Brian Jefferson, recounting the Suiter Park episode “You freak me out sometimes, Frank. This whole night is one giant clusterfuck. I’m surprised that you weren’t the one who was killed in the park.” He looked over at me. “You did it, didn’t you? Took him to the park.” I finished the rest of the whiskey in my cup. “Yeah. I did.” Jefferson jumped up and stormed around the room. “Damn it, Frank. This is a new low for you, and I didn’t think that was even possible. Goddamn! You took him to the park where he was killed? What the fuck were you thinking?” He paced back and forth a couple of times, took a couple more deep breaths, then told me to go on. I cleared my throat and continued. “Miguel disappeared for a few minutes to make the arrangements for the sale, then we drove across the river again. This time to Suiter Park. He asked me to wait in the car. He was sure that he’d be back in a few minutes. He said he just needed to hand off the bag and get the cash. Easy. He’d done it a hundred times, he assured me.” I could see Jefferson roll his eyes, but I just continued. I had to let it all out. “He pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack and left. There’s an old single-span iron truss bridge across a canal, a tailrace built in the late 1800s for a power plant. Miguel crossed that bridge into the park, and he disappeared into the darkness. I waited. And waited.” Jefferson couldn’t look at me. His foot was tapping the ground as if he wanted to punch a hole through the floor. “After half an hour, he still hadn’t come back. I was getting worried, wondering what I should do. I finally got a text from him about—I don’t know—half an hour after I’d dropped him off. He said he’d left something behind. Could I grab his backpack and bring it to him? His text included quick directions about how to find him, to cross the bridge and follow the trail to the left, that I’d find him just around the first curve. I was getting nervous sitting in the car by myself at that time of the morning, so I said yes.” I took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. “So that was the five a.m. text?” Jefferson asked. “That was it. . . .” 78 pages (sixteen chapters) later (THE SPOILER) With Agent Sparck, in Suiter Park “I told Ramírez to go join you, to borrow money from you, and to encourage you to make bigger and bigger bets. I knew he was a lousy gambler, and you’d probably go broke. Then I gave him the drug deal cover story to get you both to Suiter Park. While you were waiting in the parking lot, I knocked Ramírez out, smacked him in the back of the head with my gun.” He mimicked the act of hitting Miguel with way too much enthusiasm. “After I removed his phone from his jacket, I dumped him in the water. As I watched his body float away from the shore, I sent you a text from his phone, pretending to be him.” “I underestimated you, Starck. You did all that on the fly?” I wasn’t lying. He’d covered his tracks well. But I hoped that by flattering him, I could drag the scene out a little longer. The ropes around my shoulders had a little slack, and I figured I finally had a shot at working them the rest of the way off. “What’s your cover story going to be for killing me?” “That’s easy. Suicide. Given your history, you’re not exactly a stable guy. And the police just put you in jail for a night on suspicion of murder. You were depressed and alone, no real connections to anyone, so you caved to the pressure and decided to do yourself in at the spot where you killed Ramírez.” He rubbed his chin, and his eyes narrowed. “You have a flair for the dramatic, I think.” 8 pages (two chapters) later (THE SPOILER CONTINUES) Frank summarizes afterward The coroner determined that Miguel had drowned, that the blow to the head had knocked him out but wasn’t fatal. He had been alive when his body was dumped in the water. Could I have saved him that night if I’d pulled his body from the slough? Maybe, maybe not. Starck’s fingerprints were all over Miguel’s phone, which essentially confirmed what Starck had boasted to me: that it had been he, not Miguel, who had sent that last text to me. This would mean that Miguel was certainly dead when I’d seen his body floating in the slough. But I’ll never really know. Maybe it didn’t matter. Starck had made it clear that he was hiding in the woods that night. If I had fished out Miguel’s body and had tried to revive him, Starck would have made sure that both of us had ended up dead.