of what has pulled so many women to him. But what makes me engage with Max today is my need to know what he knows—and what he wants.
I find him standing by my kitchen table with one hand on the back of a chair. “Well, you’re in here,” I tell him. “Let’s hear your pitch.”
He smiles, a poker player holding all the cards he needs to win. “Gratitude’s a rare thing, Marshall. Like loyalty. And to my surprise, you’ve turned out to have neither.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Paul saved your life in Iraq. Everybody knows that. Hell, you wrote a book about it. Yet you come back home, and what do you do? You start fucking your best friend’s wife.”
His words cut right through my meager armor, but I try not to let him see it. “Max, you don’t know what the hell—”
He stops me with an upraised hand. “Spare us both the indignity of denials. I just shot a nice snap of you two hugging out back. Zoomed in real good. These smartphones are amazing.”
So the “deer” that I thought Jet saw at the edge of the woods earlier wasn’t a deer at all. It was Max with his camera phone. “Let’s see it.”
He reaches into his Levi’s and takes out a Samsung Galaxy, then presses a button and holds up the large phone. Though I’m ten feet away, I can see enough to know he’s telling the truth.
“Hugging’s a long way from sex, Max.”
He laughs. “You’ve got a point, Goose. But I also watched you fuck her on the patio yesterday. That scene didn’t leave much doubt about penetration.”
His words drop into my mind like a paralyzing poison.
“Actually,” he says, “it seemed more vice versa, to tell the truth. You made Jet do all the work. Not much of a farmer, are you? Don’t like plowing?”
My feet feel nailed to the floor, but my heartbeat’s accelerating like a train gathering speed. As I stare helplessly, Max drags the chair from beneath the table to the corner by the back window. As he sits, the left leg of his jeans rises enough to reveal a black Velcro ankle holster. The burled handle of what looks like a nickel-plated .380 automatic juts from the holster.
“Keep it copacetic, Marshall,” he says. “Don’t stroke out on me. I could’ve shown Paul that fuck pic yesterday, and I didn’t.”
“You have pictures from yesterday?”
“Well, sure. Got a video. It’s a little blurry, but Jet’s clear enough. That hair, you know? And that dark skin. And that miraculous ass. You’re lying flat, so I don’t have your face, but it’s your house behind her, so it must be your cock she’s riding. I’m sure Paul will make that leap pretty quick.”
We’re dead, I realize, dreading the moment I tell Jet about this meeting. “Did you stop Jet on her way out today?”
“Nope. Let her strut right out of your woods in blissful ignorance. Dumb and full of come.” Max leans forward, sets his elbows on his knees. “Marshall, I’ve known you since you were a baby. I don’t want you buried out by that statue of your brother. That’d be a downer of an ending.”
“What do you want, Max?”
“I’ll tell you in a sec. First, you need to understand the bind I’m in.”
“I’m listening.”
He works his tongue around like a man trying to find a pesky sesame seed from his lunch sandwich. “My wife killed herself, son. That’s a plain fact, and a hard one, but I could’ve lived with it. But she also framed me for murder.”
“Why would Sally do that?”
He ignores the question. “She painted a target on my back, Goose. A big-ass target.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to nail me to the barn wall.”
“Because you were cheating on her?”
“Don’t worry about why. That’s between Sally and me.”
“What do you want from me, Max? Why are you here?”
“Sally wasn’t content just to frame me, Marshall. She left something behind that would ruin me. And my partners.”
Something splashes deep in my mind, like a pebble dropped down a well. “What did she leave?”
“Documents. Files, emails, recordings. Digital stuff. Sally was a hell of a lot sharper than I am about that kind of stuff.”
An image of Sally’s sapphire pendant rises in my mind, and Jet’s theory of the passwords stuck to the back of it. “What’s in these files, Max?”
“Business dealings.” He tilts his head forward. “Poker Club business.”
“Why are you telling me about it?”
He gives me the smile of a magician pulling a coin from my