A small bespectacled man in his fifties named Bill heard Christian yelling and ran out of his house. He saw the shooter reloading his revolver, ran up to him, and tried to push the pistol out of his hand.
Bill’s actions were heroic, but the shooter was stronger. He shoved Bill aside and raised the pistol.
As Bill yelled, “Don’t! Don’t do it!” the gunman shot Christian in the head.
Later, Marc was overheard bragging in a bar that he had executed the hit for two hundred dollars.
Reports of Christian’s death were all over the evening news, along with footage of his blood on the street. Dawn watched, and then turned to me and said, “Don, I want to go there.”
I said, “No, sweetheart. You don’t want to go there now.”
But she was determined to go. So I drove her to Norfolk and found the intersection. We saw the bloodstains, the bullet holes in the road, and the chalk marks the police had drawn. Dawn even got down on her knees and touched the dried blood. Then she said, “I want to ask the neighbors if any of them saw this.”
We found seven eyewitnesses. One of them told us, “Stuff like this happens around here all the time. It used to be a nice neighborhood, but the gangs have moved in.” When we met Bill, the man who tried to save Christian’s life, Dawn hugged him and told him he was an angel.
A week or so later, we attended what would have been Christian’s graduation ceremony from Old Dominion University. Governor Mark Warner of Virginia called out Christian’s name, walked over to where we were sitting, and handed Dawn her son’s diploma. Christian had graduated with honors.
All of us who had known and loved him were devastated.
As Dawn was going through Christian’s things, she found his diary. In it he described in detail how he was trying to turn his life around. He wrote about his discussions with the police and about the drug dealers he’d turned in. One of them was named Marc. In the last entry, Christian wrote, Marc is going to have me killed.
He knew.
Tremendous anger mixed with guilt burned inside me. I kept thinking to myself that I was the one who had convinced Christian to talk to the police and turn in the drug dealers.
I felt that I had to track Marc down and kill him. It didn’t take me long to locate his address in Virginia Beach, where he was living with his two young daughters.
I didn’t want to harm his girls but I had no problem ending the life of the scumbag drug-dealing murderer who’d killed Dawn’s son. After watching Marc’s house and tracking his movements, I came up with three options for taking him out:
I’d knock on the door, ID him, and shoot him with my .45—twice in the chest, once in the head, the Mozambique drill.
I’d take him out from across the street with a long shot from my M4.
When I was sure that his daughters weren’t home, I’d blow up his house with explosives.
I settled on the first option and had an alibi all worked out. But Dawn knew me well enough to intuit what I was about to do and asked me not to. She said, “I don’t want his daughters to grow up as orphans.”
She’d been following Marc’s case in court. Once, when she was at the courthouse, she’d passed Marc on her way up the stairs. He turned and looked at her with a smirk, as if to say, Yeah, I had your son killed, and no one’s gonna touch me.
I asked her to stop going. Marc was eventually arrested and served a jail term for another crime.
But the incident left terrible emotional scars on all of us.
A couple months later, Dawn and I traveled to Hawaii. While we were there we met an actor from Baywatch who told us that a huge storm was blowing into the northern shore, and it was attracting surfers from all over the world. He explained that it was a weather phenomenon that happened every six or seven years and suggested that we go surfing with him.
I said, “Thanks, but I’m not a surfer.”
He said, “That’s okay, dude. I’ve got this big board with me. And since you’re an athlete, you’ll be fine.”
Dawn didn’t want me to go, but I couldn’t back down from a challenge. As soon as I got in the water, I started to realize that I’d made a mistake. The waves were immense, and the undertow was powerful.
Wearing a leash that connected my foot to the board, I paddled half an hour until I was almost half a mile out, past the surf zone where most of the waves were breaking.
I was so far out, I couldn’t see Dawn, who was nervously pacing the beach, hoping I didn’t hurt myself badly.
Exhausted by the long paddle against the current, I lay on the long board and watched the expert surfers—many of whom were Hawaiian—surf the pipeline the half mile into shore.