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—
I can’t. No matter what the risk, I have to stop him.
But how? If I startle him, his training might trigger him to whirl and kill me out of reflex. Keenly aware that Jet has done nothing to intervene, I pad past her with my empty hands held out before me.
“Paul?” I almost whisper. “Hey, man . . . you with me?”
No response. How can I break through that death trance? As I ease forward, memories of our time in Iraq return, the weeks I spent with Sierra Bravo in Ramadi. “Yo, brah,” I call softly. “Rangers lead the way, right? Remember?”
Very slowly, like a man with a traumatic brain injury, Paul closes his mouth. Swallows. I crouch beside him, then sit, but I don’t risk touching him.
“Paul? Can you hear me?”
He says nothing, only stares down at his father’s motionless face.
“I want to talk to you, man. Kevin’s still your son, okay? Nobody’s taking him from you. Ever. You hear me?”
“Jet did this,” he whispers. “Jet put us here.”
A bubble of fear rises in my chest, and I sense Jet backing away behind me. “No, man, listen. Max did this. He told you I was Kevin’s father. Remember? He lied. And he lied for a reason. He wanted you to kill me. Jet, too.”
“Why?” Paul asks. “Makes no sense.”
“Oh yes it does. He wanted to raise Kevin. He wanted custody of that boy.”
Paul has yet to even look at me. But he says, “Killing you and Jet wouldn’t get him Kevin.”
“It would if you were dead, too.”
“You’re full of shit, Goose. It was her, man.”
Jet’s got to be petrified. I can’t believe she hasn’t fled the house. “Think, Paul. Max showed you that video of us. Then he told you I was Kevin’s father. With all that rage, he was betting you’d come straight here and shoot us. And you almost did. He pointed you at us like a guided missile. He knew we’d be here, and he sent you to kill us.”
At last Paul looks up with glassy eyes. “How could he know you’d be here?”
“Jet, what brought you here tonight?” I ask over my shoulder.
When she doesn’t reply, I risk a look back. Her face is a finger-painting of tears and smeared mascara. But Nadine’s gun now hangs by her leg.
“What was the first thing you told me when you came in?” I ask.
“Max sent me here,” she says in a shaky voice. “He called from UMC and told me to end it with you. If I didn’t, he’d tell Paul everything.”
“There you go,” I tell Paul. “He pointed you at us, and then he blitzed out of that hospital and followed you here.”
“Why?”
“He was betting that once you killed Jet and me, you’d end up turning your gun on yourself. But if you didn’t, he had to be here to finish the job. That’s why he busted in when he heard your shot. A single shot didn’t make sense to him.”
Paul is shaking his head. “No, man. You’re reaching.”
“Shit. You think Max followed you here because he was worried about you? You know better.”
“But you care about me?” Paul throws out his gun hand and knocks me off my heels. “You’re lying, Goose. You’ve both been lying all along. She wants to take Kevin from me, and you’re helping her.”
“I don’t want Kevin, man. He’s yours. Use your head, damn it. Not your heart.” As I scramble to my feet, a gleam of black at Max’s ankle catches my attention. A flash of memory takes me back two nights, when Max’s jeans rode up and I saw the pistol in his ankle holster. Only on that night the gun was nickel-plated.
“Check his ankle holster!” I tell Paul, pointing.
“What?” he asks dully.
“Max brought two guns. Why? Where’d he get them?”