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.”
With shaking fingers, Jet starts unbuttoning her blouse.
Yet again I sense death near, as I have so many times before. How many guises can it take? The barge in the foggy river with Adam . . . the hooded man with his water jug in the Bienville jail. There were other times, other faces, especially during the first years after my son died, when I took crazy risks on the job. But the memory that haunts me now is that night on the kitchen table in Ramadi, when Paul burst in and killed the men about to cut my throat. And now, defying logic, or perhaps fulfilling it . . . my rescuer has become my executioner.
“Paul, why are you doing this?” I hear myself ask. “You really want to kill me?”
He shakes his head slowly. Yet the words that come from his mouth are “I saved your life, didn’t I, Goose?”
“You did.”
“So all the years you’ve lived since then . . . you got from me. Right?”
“Absolutely.”
“And this is how you repay me?” He points at Jet, whose blouse has slipped to the floor, revealing a flesh-colored bra against her dark skin. “By taking what’s most precious to me?”
“That’s a lie,” she says. “If I were precious to you, our whole lives would have been different.”
She’s the one lying now. The truth is, Paul was never precious to her. Not really. And he knows it. He glances at her for a couple of seconds, then looks back at me. His right forefinger slips inside the trigger guard. Something goes out of his eyes, and my bladder turns to lead.
“Paul, please,” Jet pleads with utter subservience. “I’ll do anything. Let’s go home right now, and I’ll be your wife till