Fear morphs into panic on Jet’s face. But something in Paul’s posture changed during Max’s last words.
“You’re forgetting one other thing,” Max says. “The only thing that really matters. In seven months, Kevin turns thirteen. Then he gets to decide who he lives with. And I took care of that a long time ago.”
I can’t bear to look at Jet while she realizes what this means for her future. Max’s been coaching Kevin’s teams since the boy’s first season of T-ball, guiding him into what’s now a perpetual spotlight of hero worship, even at twelve. Max owns and drives the luxury RV that ferries Kevin’s traveling baseball team all over the Southeast. But what must Paul think of this picture Max is painting? Where does he fit into it?
“All right, outside,” Paul says gruffly, walking toward his father.
Max reaches for the doorknob. “About damn time. I’ll tell you how I see—”
“Max?” Jet calls.
He’s still grinning when he turns, and his chest blooms scarlet before I hear the first gunshot. Staccato concussions send me reeling against the wall. Jet has snatched up my pistol from the floor. She fires four times, and at least three rounds plow through Max’s upper body, spinning him wildly and dropping him on the floor by the back wall.
“What the fuck!” Paul shouts, whipping up his pistol and aiming at Jet. “You killed him!”
“Yes!” she shrieks, the gun shaking in her hands. “He’s a liar! He can’t do that to me!”
“Paul, don’t shoot her,” I beg, stepping in front of Jet and throwing up my hands. “We don’t know what happened.”
He shakes his head in stunned fury. “I saw what happened! She killed him to shut him up. She was scared he’d tell me more.”
“I don’t think so,” I say quickly, staring at Max, who lies faceup at his son’s feet. “He pushed her past her limit, man, saying he’d take Kevin away. But it’s more than that . . .” The truth comes to me as I watch Max convulsing on the floor. “He was going to kill you. If you’d gone out on that patio, you’d be dead now.”
Paul’s face tightens in confusion, but he looks down at his father. “What are you saying?”
Max lurches up off the floor and gasps, then claws the air as though trying to pull himself to his feet. Watching him fight for life, I realize there’s no other possible reason he could be here.
“He came here to get Kevin,” I explain. “And for him to get Kevin, you and Jet had to die.”
A grating rattle issues from Max’s throat, then fades into a gurgle.
“He’s trying to talk,” Paul says. He drops to his knees and takes his father by the shoulders. “Can you hear me? Pop?”
A wet wheeze is Max’s only answer, but his eyes are wide with urgency. I don’t want Max Matheson voicing one more word. That bastard has the persuasive powers of Satan. But I can’t very well finish him off while his son kneels over him with a pistol.
Max is shivering. Watching him bleed out, I remember how cocksure he was in this very room only two nights ago. Why couldn’t I see then that he’d come not to protect his son’s marriage, but to warn a rival away from the woman who held him in thrall?
“Did you kill Mom?” Paul asks, leaning low over his father’s face.
Of all the things he could have asked . . . it’s his mother that dominates Paul’s thoughts now. Maybe he’s already written Jet out of his life forever.
Max’s head jerks up, falls back. “Shot . . . shot herself,” he chokes out. “Cuh-couldn’t believe it.”
“What about Jet? Tell me the truth. Did you force her?”
Almost any father would lie at this point, even if the lie would damn him in the eyes of his son. Because a lie would give his son a second chance at life. But Max has always lived for himself alone. Glancing left, I see terror in Jet’s face. She jumps as Paul slaps his father’s face to bring him around.
“Nuh,” Max groans, a guttural monosyllable. “She gave it to me. We made that boy, her and me . . . that beautiful boy.”
Paul swallows something sour, but he holds his place, unflinching, fighting to get the truth.
“I had to,” Max croaks. “Had uh . . . do what you couldn’t. Carry on the line. Don’t blame me for that . . . or her. She loved me, you damn fool. Now you . . . gone and ruined it. You’ve took that boy’s real daddy from him.”
“Do you know what you’re saying?” Paul asks in a cracked voice.
Max’s eyes go wide, but instead of fear they hold inchoate fury. “Goddamn,” he rages. “This isn’t right. He’s the son you never were to me. And now . . . this.”
After looking down in silence for several seconds, Paul lifts his right hand from the floor and covers his father’s mouth with it. Then he closes Max’s nose between his thumb and forefinger. Max’s shoulders jerk up off the floor again, but Paul keeps his head pinned against the wood. Paul’s body appears relaxed, even as Max’s legs kick wildly. Only in his arm do I see the force being applied. So tight is Paul’s grip that Max can’t even gasp. His eyes bulge in pain and terror, as if they’ll burst from their sockets. His face darkens to purple, and his midsection bounces off the floor like he’s copulating with an invisible woman—once, twice, and again. Then his back slams against the hardwood and stays there.
Still, Paul doesn’t let go.
I look back at Jet, who’s probably watching someone die for the first time. There’s pain in her face, but behind that, a savage satisfaction, and perhaps also gratitude that her husband is finishing what she started. Maybe murder will bind them more deeply than love ever did.
After what seems an interminable delay, Paul releases his grip. No one moves. We don’t even look at one another.
Max is dead.
Chapter 53
Whatever shape Paul was in before Max died, he’s barely coherent now. He sits in a pool of his father’s blood, hunched over, looking down at the bruised, motionless face. In the span of two days both his mother and father have perished, but that’s not the worst of it. Today Paul lost his wife and son as well. And not in the way of a man who loses his family in a car crash. He’s lost not only his future with them, but also the past. Every moment he ever spent with Jet and Kevin has been ripped away, tainted, invalidated by the knowledge that his wife loved his childhood friend and his son was sired by his father. Paul still has his gun in his hand. It hangs limp against the bloody hardwood floor, but I’ve seen Paul shoot in combat. He could put a bullet through both our heads in a second and a half.
“Paul?” I say, surprising myself.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even lift his head. Jet looks as though she wants to comfort him, and in fact starts toward him, but something makes her pull up short. There’s something brittle in the air, a sense that in this moment Paul is capable of anything, from murder to self-destruction. To touch him now would be like touching a wolf after a kill.
You just don’t do it.
Jet turns, and her eyes find mine across eight feet of space. Where two days ago an arc of pleasure and anticipation would have passed between us, now there’s only mutual awareness of all that’s been lost. We’re like hurricane survivors staring at each other through the ruins of our house.
Below my line of focus I see movement. Paul has lifted his pistol into his lap. He’s staring at it more like a child than a military vet, an innocent who picked up a strange machine, unaware that death awaits in the steel tube. As I watch with increasing apprehension, Paul turns the gun until he’s looking down its barrel. His finger isn’t inside the trigger guard, but he seems hypnotized by the black hole. What does he see in it? A tunnel out of hell? An escape from unbearable pain? Is his suffering so all-consuming that oblivion offers the only peace?
As I watch him, half-hypnotized myself, Paul opens his mouth like a baby waiting to be fed. For a terrible fraction of time I consider simply standing here and witnessing what I know must be coming. His finger will enter the guard and compress the trigger, beginning the irrevocable pull—