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?”
While Paul stares at me in confusion, I reach across the hardwood with my shoe and slide Max’s pant leg up over the nylon holster. Paul looks disinterested at first. Then his eyes narrow, and he pulls the gun from the holster.
“This is mine,” he mumbles. “My compact Springfield.”
“Did you lend it to him?”
Paul hesitates, then shakes his head. “It was in my desk at home. It was there last night. This morning, too. He . . . he must have stopped on his way into town and grabbed it.”
“If the guy he paid drove him fast enough when he followed you from Jackson, he just had time.”
“This is too crazy, man. This is wack.”
“This is Max. Remember when he asked you to walk over to him so that he could whisper something to you? He tried it twice. Twice. The second time he asked you to go out on the patio. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.”
“No.”
“You know I’m right. To fit his narrative, he needed a contact head shot. A contact wound with your gun. One that would look like suicide.”
“But . . . why kill me first?”
“Seriously? You were the only real threat to him in here. He’d have shot us right after he shot you. But when he talked to the cops, he’d have told it in reverse. I followed Paul out there, worried sick. I heard two shots and busted in. I saw Jet and Marshall dead, and Paul turned the gun on himself before I could stop him.”
Paul blinks like a man struck with a club. “You really think he would have killed us all?”
“It’s the only way he could get custody of Kevin. Last night he tried to talk Jet into leaving you. He had some crazy plan to move you to Atlanta or Dallas, offer you a lot of money. But Jet refused. No threat would make her screw you over like that.” I turn back to her. “Tell him.”
“It’s true,” she says in a ragged voice. “He’d lost his mind. He said he was going to cut you out of his will if you didn’t get out of his way. He tried to rape me last night, I swear to God. That’s why I hit him with the hammer.”
“Don’t talk to me,” Paul says sharply. “Don’t say one damn word.”
Paul looks down at his father again.
What can he be feeling? I spent most of my life believing that my father wished I’d drowned instead of my brother. What can it feel like to know your father would disown you—even kill you—so that he could take your wife and child for his own?
Paul raises his head and turns until he can see Jet. His eyes are filled with what looks like Puritanical judgment. “Pop was right,” he says. “This is your doing. All of it. You poisoned this family with your lies and betrayal. You seduced him. You wanted a kid by him. Then you brought Marshall here to take you away from the lie you made us all live.”
“Paul, listen,” she says in a quavering voice. “I’m not sure who fathered Kevin. Okay? You were with me three times that month. I never saw any DNA test report, and I don’t want to see one. Our job is to make sure our son never questions who his father is. He’s ours, okay? Yours and mine.”
Paul gets slowly to his feet, and for a moment I think she’s gotten through to him. Then he raises his gun and aims at her midsection.
“That’s what you say now. But you’d say anything to get out of this room. You could always talk circles around me. But not tonight. Pop showed you for what you are. A liar. And a whore.”
Jet recoils as though struck. Then she takes a step toward Paul and says, “A whore gets paid for what she gives up. What did you pay me with? I never had a husband. I’ve had two little boys.”
With a long sliding step, I interpose myself