“What tells you that?” She points at his cell phone. “That stupid video? What does that show? Sex. That’s all.”
A nasty grin stretches his lips. “You think I’m stupid?” He digs in his back pocket again, removes a folded piece of paper, then shakes it open and tosses it on the table. I lean far enough forward to see what it is. When I do, my stomach flips. Not only because of what it is, but because it means Paul has been in my house before today.
“Is that ‘just sex’?” he asks.
He’s pointing at an intricately embellished piece of calligraphy, one by someone with obvious skill. The letters at the center of the drawing read: Jordan McEwan. Jet gave me that drawing three months ago, shortly after we started sleeping together again. She stares at the scrap of paper without speaking, but then a choked sob escapes her throat.
“Well?” Paul says. “Nothing to say?”
She shakes her head.
“You’ve loved Marshall since middle school. He was always there between us, like a shadow in your heart. Your dream. Your secret life. I guess I hoped you’d outgrow it. But I didn’t know how deep your betrayal went.” Paul’s eyes fix on me with alarming intensity. And yet I see a sort of pity in them, too. “You came home because she summoned you. Didn’t you? Without even a word, I’ll bet. Maybe only a look, right? During one of your visits home to see your dad?”
My God, how close he’s come to the truth. I think back to the department store checkout line, Jet behind me with Kevin, her almost flirting manner. It wasn’t flirting, really, merely a possibility revealed during conversation. An admission of unhappiness in her present state, openness to a different future. An unspoken invitation. That was all it took—
“That’s her magic, man,” Paul says. “It’s effortless. She makes other women seem like girls.”
He’s right.
“I know your plan,” he says to Jet. “Wait till old Duncan died, then let Marshall go back to D.C. You’d let a little time pass, then tell me you think we need some time apart. From there, it’s on to divorce, and you try to get custody, never revealing that you were planning all along to take Kevin to Washington.”
Right again.
“Well, now Duncan’s dead,” Paul declares. “So I guess it’s time to pull the trigger. Pun intended.”
“Paul,” she pleads, “you don’t understand—”
“Shut up! I told you. Don’t speak!” He swallows like he has no saliva in his mouth. Then he yanks out a chair and sits at the table, laying his gun flat before him. I recognize the pistol: it’s a Glock 19, a compact semiauto favored by Special Forces operators. Fifteen rounds in the magazine, enough to kill us seven times over.
“The thing I couldn’t figure,” Paul goes on, “is how you thought you’d get custody. I mean, come on. Pop and his buddies own this town. Judges included. But I wasn’t taking into account what a dumbass I am. I should’ve known you had it worked out. You and your goddamned OCD brain.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, and from the look on her face, Jet doesn’t, either. I feel like we’ve been locked into a cage with a gorilla armed with a pistol. At any moment he might pick it up and shoot us, without our ever knowing exactly why.
“You’re not getting Kevin,” he says flatly. “You know that, right? You’re not taking him from me. Ever.”
“I know that,” she says.
Paul nods forcefully. “So you’ll leave him, then? You’ll abandon Kevin? To be with Marshall?”
“No. I won’t live without Kevin.”
Paul jerks up his free hand and rakes it through his hair like a puzzled eighth grader trying to make sense of algebraic equations on a chalkboard. “The only way you get a life with Kevin is by staying with me.”
“I understand that.”
What is she doing? Trying to defuse the immediate threat by telling him she wants to stay married to him? I’m watching Jet closely for a clue as to what I should do, but she hasn’t even glanced my way.
“That prospect makes you sick, doesn’t it?” Paul says. “Living with me. Sleeping with me.”
“Paul, stop it. Just stop!” Jet sounds like a mother disciplining her child. “You and I need to go home and talk.”
“Home?” he echoes. “I figure you think of here as home now. Don’t you? This is where you get your needs tended to.”
“Paul—”
“Isn’t it?!” he cries, slamming his hand down on the table.
Jet takes her time before answering. “I suppose it has been.” She steps up to the table and lays her hands on the back of an empty chair. “Being with you doesn’t make me sick. But we didn’t get to this place by accident. And you sitting there with that gun doesn’t say much for your confidence in your position.”
“I’ve got my reason for this gun,” he says, staring fixedly at the table. “You lying whore.”
The venom in his voice sends a chill along my arms. We’re missing something, I realize. Whatever is driving this behavior, we don’t know about it. A faint buzzing starts in my brain, and a trickle of adrenaline into my veins. He’s working himself up to killing us. I don’t know why, but that’s what he’s doing. It isn’t the sex on the patio. If Paul were going to shoot us for that, he’d have done it already. I need to warn Jet before he passes the point of no return—
“Take off your clothes,” Paul says, his voice dead and cold.
I’m not sure who he’s talking to until he raises his Glock and points the muzzle at my face. My stomach rolls over.
“You heard me. Strip.” He waves his gun to hurry me along.
Jet is staring at him in confusion. This scene has taken on the dreadful banality of a true-crime show on late-night cable TV. “So you can shoot me and the cops find me naked?” I reply. “Crime of passion? Is that the script?”
“Take ’em off, Marshall.”
“You’ll have to do it after you shoot me. I might as well make you work for it.”
“You too, slut,” he says to Jet. “Get ’em off.”
Her eyes go wide. “I will not. You plan to shoot me, too?”
“Not sure yet. Get ’em off, though. Let’s see that coochie one last time. It’s not like Goose and I haven’t both seen it before.”
Jet’s glare would freeze motor oil. “You’ll never see it again, unless I’m dead.”
A strange smile touches Paul’s mouth, and he nods as though confirming some secret suspicion. “How about you stop acting like the aggrieved party? I’m the victim here.”
“You!” Pride makes her stand taller. “I think most people who know you would say you betrayed yourself—a long time ago. First yourself, then me. We could have had a child years before Kevin, if you’d been man enough to go to the doctor. But no, you’d rather sit in the house drunk, popping pills, whining about how the army screwed you in Iraq. Christ, even your mother knew that.”
Paul recoils like he’s been backhanded by a strong man. Actually, he looks more like he took a knife between the ribs. Shock first, then pain. But as I watch, his pain turns to rage.
“We’re going to the bedroom,” he says quietly. “I’m going to finish this. I’ll have Kevin, and he’ll be safe from you. It could have ended another way . . . but you picked this climax. Let’s go.”
Paul slides back his chair with a grinding screech, then stands and points the Glock at my chest, center mass.
“I’m not walking back there,” I tell him. “You’ll have to shoot me here.”
“Yeah?” He racks the slide on his Glock. “Just remember, I’m not taking anything from you I didn’t give you myself.”
“Paul, don’t!” Jet screams, sensing that he means to shoot.
“Get your clothes off,” he says, “and I’ll wait to fire.”