Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  This time Paul hits the window with something hard, and it shatters.

  Jet walks forward and lays her hand on the knob. Then she looks over her shoulder and whispers, “I love you. I never lied about that.”

  “I know. Open it.”

  She pulls the door inward and steps back as though she expects a hail of blows or bullets.

  First I see only the empty doorway. Then Paul moves into it, fills it. If Jet looked haunted when she arrived, Paul looks possessed. Pale and unshaven, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on last night at the hospital. But most unnerving are his eyes, which are so inflamed that the sclera appear bloodred. If he doesn’t have an eye infection, then he’s running on alcohol, adrenaline, and maybe something stronger.

  “Well?” he says in a conversational tone. “Did I interrupt the foreplay or the afterglow?”

  “Neither,” Jet says. “We’re just talking.”

  Paul steps over the threshold. The moment his body displaces air from my kitchen, I realize how wrong it is that I’m here alone with Jet. The fact that I loved her first means nothing. That she loved me first means nothing. They exchanged marital vows, and in this moment, in the eyes of the law and of the world, she belongs to him. As I ponder this, a black semiautomatic pistol swings into view, dangling from his right hand. He could kill me now with a reasonable expectation of being acquitted.

  “Do not speak,” he orders Jet. “Not unless I ask you a question. You’ve forfeited that right.”

  While she gapes at him, he turns his attention to me. “What should I do with you, Marshall? My good friend. Yesterday you denied you were fucking my wife. Today . . .” He waves his gun hand. “Today everybody’s going to tell the truth. Is that understood?”

  When no one answers, he looks at Jet. “I know it was you who hit Pop last night. Not Marshall. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Paul takes a step toward the table, then digs a cell phone from his pocket. “To spare us any awkward denials, I want to play a little video short.”

  The floor shifts beneath my feet. He holds his phone out toward us.

  “Paul, don’t,” Jet pleads.

  “Why not? I’ve watched it all the way from Jackson. A forty-minute loop. I could have whacked off a couple of times if I hadn’t had to drive. Noticed something new every time.”

  The sound of forest insects comes from the phone. Then the screen lights up with the green sweep of my backyard. Even from the kitchen counter, I can see Jet’s naked body sitting astride mine on the patio steamer chair.

  “That didn’t come off Pornhub,” Paul says. “That’s the real deal.”

  Jet is looking at the floor.

  “Watch it, goddamn it!” Paul roars, walking around the extended phone so that he can watch it with her. “At least have the guts to face up to what you did.”

  Jet looks at the screen. Both their backs are to me now, but I’m not stupid enough to think Paul isn’t aware of every move I make.

  The geometry of the kitchen suddenly seems important. There’s ten feet of floor space between the table and the back wall. Jet and Paul occupy that rectangle. The table is six feet long and three feet wide and runs parallel to the back wall. There’s eight feet of space between the table and the island, which is tucked into the U of cabinets and appliances. I’m standing between the table and the island. And Nadine’s pistol—

  “Here we go!” Paul says with false excitement. “First orgasm coming up!”

  “Christ, please stop this,” Jet pleads.

  “Aaaaaand . . . boom!” Paul cries. “Good one!”

  Jet gives him nothing.

  “By my count,” Paul says, “we’ll have thirty-three seconds of rest, then the lady will start again, going for her second pop. Anybody want to wager on how long it takes her to get there? No?”

  “Stop,” Jet implores. “This is pathetic.”

  “Then how could you do it?” he shouts, so loudly that Jet draws back from him. “Huh? I’m waiting!”

  Instead of yielding more ground, Jet stands straight and says, “You ask me that? Like you haven’t screwed a dozen waitresses and assistants since you married me?”

  I knew that Paul had cheated on her, but this revelation shocks me.

  Paul doesn’t blink. “Not like this! I never loved anybody else.”

  Jet shakes her head and looks at him with what must be painful frankness. “You’ve never loved anybody, Paul. Not really. Certainly not me.”

  This stops him for a few seconds. “That’s a lie,” he says finally. “I loved you.”

  “No. You wanted me to love you. There’s a difference.”

  “You don’t know what I feel!” he yells, trying to recapture his initial fury. In this moment Paul looks like a little boy trying to understand a painful world.

  “But I do,” Jet says. “Better than anyone alive. And you know it.”

  Paul waves his gun at her. “Here’s what I know. You never loved me. You lied to me from the beginning.”

  “What tells you that?” She points at his cell phone. “That stupid video? What does that show? Sex. That’s all.”

  A nasty grin stretches his lips. “You think I’m stupid?” He digs in his back pocket again, removes a folded piece of paper, then shakes it open and tosses it on the table. I lean far enough forward to see what it is. When I do, my stomach flips. Not only because of what it is, but because it means Paul has been in my house before today.

  “Is that ‘just sex’?” he asks.

  He’s pointing at an intricately embellished piece of calligraphy, one by someone with obvious skill. The letters at the center of the drawing read: Jordan McEwan. Jet gave me that drawing three months ago, shortly after we started sleeping together again. She stares at the scrap of paper without speaking, but then a choked sob escapes her throat.

  “Well?” Paul says. “Nothing to say?”

  She shakes her head.

  “You’ve loved Marshall since middle school. He was always there between us, like a shadow in your heart. Your dream. Your secret life. I guess I hoped you’d outgrow it. But I didn’t know how deep your betrayal went.” Paul’s eyes fix on me with alarming intensity. And yet I see a sort of pity in them, too. “You came home because she summoned you. Didn’t you? Without even a word, I’ll bet. Maybe only a look, right? During one of your visits home to see your dad?”

  My God, how close he’s come to the truth. I think back to the department store checkout line, Jet behind me with Kevin, her almost flirting manner. It wasn’t flirting, really, merely a possibility revealed during conversation. An admission of unhappiness in her present state, openness to a different future. An unspoken invitation. That was all it took—

  “That’s her magic, man,” Paul says. “It’s effortless. She makes other women seem like girls.”

  He’s right.

  “I know your plan,” he says to Jet. “Wait till old Duncan died, then let Marshall go back to D.C. You’d let a little time pass, then tell me you think we need some time apart. From there, it’s on to divorce, and you try to get custody, never revealing that you were planning all along to take Kevin to Washington.”

  Right again.

  “Well, now Duncan’s dead,” Paul declares. “So I guess it’s time to pull the trigger. Pun intended.”

  “Paul,” she pleads, “you don’t understand—”

  “Shut up! I told you. Don’t speak!” He swallows like he has no saliva in his mouth. Then he yanks out a chair and sits at the table, laying his gun flat before him. I recognize the pistol: it’s a Glock 19, a compact semiauto favored by Special Forces operators. Fifteen rounds in the magazine, enough to kill us seven times over.

  “The thing I couldn’t figure,” Paul goes on, “is how you thought you’d get custody. I mean, come on. Pop and his buddies own this town. Judges included. But I wasn’t taking into account what a dumbass I am. I should’ve known you had it worked out. You and your goddamned OCD brain.”

  I
don’t know what he’s talking about, and from the look on her face, Jet doesn’t, either. I feel like we’ve been locked into a cage with a gorilla armed with a pistol. At any moment he might pick it up and shoot us, without our ever knowing exactly why.

  “You’re not getting Kevin,” he says flatly. “You know that, right? You’re not taking him from me. Ever.”

  “I know that,” she says.

  Paul nods forcefully. “So you’ll leave him, then? You’ll abandon Kevin? To be with Marshall?”

  “No. I won’t live without Kevin.”

  Paul jerks up his free hand and rakes it through his hair like a puzzled eighth grader trying to make sense of algebraic equations on a chalkboard. “The only way you get a life with Kevin is by staying with me.”

  “I understand that.”

  What is she doing? Trying to defuse the immediate threat by telling him she wants to stay married to him? I’m watching Jet closely for a clue as to what I should do, but she hasn’t even glanced my way.

  “That prospect makes you sick, doesn’t it?” Paul says. “Living with me. Sleeping with me.”

  “Paul, stop it. Just stop!” Jet sounds like a mother disciplining her child. “You and I need to go home and talk.”

  “Home?” he echoes. “I figure you think of here as home now. Don’t you? This is where you get your needs tended to.”

  “Paul—”

  “Isn’t it?!” he cries, slamming his hand down on the table.

  Jet takes her time before answering. “I suppose it has been.” She steps up to the table and lays her hands on the back of an empty chair. “Being with you doesn’t make me sick. But we didn’t get to this place by accident. And you sitting there with that gun doesn’t say much for your confidence in your position.”

  “I’ve got my reason for this gun,” he says, staring fixedly at the table. “You lying whore.”

  The venom in his voice sends a chill along my arms. We’re missing something, I realize. Whatever is driving this behavior, we don’t know about it. A faint buzzing starts in 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 the day you die. I swear to God. For Kevin. Come on. Just leave him standing here and let’s go.”

  Nothing she could have said would have hurt him more. What more powerful proof of her love for me could she give than to offer to martyr herself by living with Paul for the rest of her life? I open my mouth to try to mitigate her words, but the scream that bursts from his throat knocks me back a foot.

  Then he fires.

  Jet’s shriek barely registers against my eardrums. I stagger back, a delayed response to the eruption of flame from the pistol. No bullet hit me—none I’ve felt yet, anyway. At the last instant Paul pulled his aim left, putting a slug through a kitchen cabinet instead of my heart.

  In the ringing aftermath of his shot, he screams once more, then sobs, but he doesn’t lower his weapon. “You liars! If Kevin was his, why didn’t you just leave? Why stay with me and live this goddamn lie? I thought you had more guts than that . . . both of you. Jesus, it’s sick.”

  Jet and I stare at each other in stunned horror. Four words have burned themselves into our brains: If Kevin was his . . .

  Max did this. If Paul just came from UMC, then it was Max who put this poisonous idea into his head. What agony must Paul have endured during his ride here? To believe, even for an hour, that I’m the father of the son he loves above all things?

  “Paul, what did you say?” Jet asks. “About Kevin?”

  “You gonna make me say it? All right. Kevin’s Marshall’s son! I know it now. And I know Mama knew it, too. Goddamn, you’ve been lying for twelve years. I just . . . I thought y’all w
ere better than that. You’ve fucked us all up—Kevin most of all.”

  Jet stands shaking in disbelief. She clearly has no idea how to respond to this. But I do. There’s only one path open to us now—one road to life.

  “Paul, listen,” I say firmly. “As God is my witness, I am not Kevin’s father.”

  His eyes narrow, but Jet’s widen in fear.

  “Why keep lying?” he asks me.

  “I’m not lying. I am not Kevin’s father. But you’re not either. Not his biological father.”

  Paul goes utterly still. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Try to ease back, man. Calm down. I’m not your enemy. The person who screwed up your family is your father. It’s Max, bro. He’s the cause of all this misery.”

  Paul is shaking his head now, almost violently. “What are you talking about?”

  Jet silently begs me not to go on. But I have no choice now. “Paul . . . Max is Kevin’s father.”

  “Oh, God,” Jet gasps, backing away from the table.

  “He raped her,” I say quickly. “Max raped her in 2005. And she never told you about it.”

  Paul’s initial response is one slow blink of the eyes, then another. But after a few seconds, I sense a tectonic shift within him. My words are leaching through years of accreted anger, pain, bewilderment, suspicion. When at last they sink into his mind, something vast and heavy slides into place.

  “Thirteen years ago,” I say as Paul’s face undergoes a terrifying change. “You were passed out in the den. Max drugged her with Xanax and raped her.”

  I cut my eyes at Jet, who’s paralyzed with fear. I can almost read her mind. After so many years of lying, how can our salvation depend on another lie? But it does.

  “Is that true?” Paul asks, looking her square in the face.

  She nods once, her chin quivering.

  Paul closes his eyes, then wobbles on his feet. The Glock hangs loose in his hand, but death is in the room with us, hovering. While Paul is blind, I glance at Jet, who sucks in her lips and nods quickly. Tears are streaming down her face. She gets it. Rape must be the story now. It’s the only narrative that might allow her a life after this—a life with her son—and she knows it. For an insane moment I consider going for my gun, because there’s no telling what Paul might do next. He could kill himself, or us—or us first, then himself. But I don’t think he will. Somehow, he understands that what I just told him—at least Max’s part in it—is the truth. And even if he means to kill himself at some point, Paul won’t leave the son he loves under the power of the man who made his life a tragedy.