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