Linda Kay Gray was smiling too, it was a treat for her when Parker came home in the middle of the day. She’d heard his car, heard him go into the kitchen … that’s where she was hurrying now.
“Park?”
He was at the table with his back to her, when Linda came around to sit across from him she lost her smile … he looked terrible.
“What’s wrong?”
Parker Gray stared across that table as if he didn’t recognize his wife.
“Park?”
He shook his head.
“Something at work?”
“I …” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been suspended.”
“Good Lord what for?”
“I came down too hard on a man brought in to be questioned about a shooting.”
“What do you mean, came down too hard … you hit him?”
“No. I pushed for his arrest and—”
“They wouldn’t suspend you for—”
“And I got into a shouting match with a couple of our detectives.”
“Over what, arresting that man?”
Parker Gray held up a hand … how could he explain to his wife that their whole life together, their marriage, the success he’s had with the state police, everything has been built on a convoluted conspiracy that grinds on him every night?
“I’ll make some coffee.”
Watching his wife work at the counter Gray felt a strangely powerful impulse to pull out his 9mm and shoot her in the back of the head … then kill himself. Allowing this apocalyptic fantasy to run a course Gray suddenly realized why so many men end everything with a murder-suicide … killing someone, especially someone you love, requires you to take your own life, it’s what a man does when he can’t summon the courage to commit suicide, he forces his own hand. That’s what Paul Milton had been toying with, threatening to shoot his wife and Camel so that, seeing what he’d done, he would have no choice but to kill himself. Except Milton finally found the balls to do it on his own, without the motivation of murdering someone else first. Gray experienced a mixture of relief and regret when he finally put it out of his mind, the idea of shooting Linda in the back of the head.
He’d known all along of course that Milton’s death was a suicide, Gray had to charge Camel to keep him bottled up until McCleany could finish what they’d started at Cul-De-Sac seven years ago. Goddamn McCleany anyway … and goddamn me.
“Take just a minute to drip through,” Linda said as she sat again at the table. “You feel like talking about this now?”
No he would never feel like talking about it.
“Park?”
“What?”
“Is it something else, I mean beside the suspension?” She was thinking, he’s having an affair.
While her husband was thinking, the only way out of this if I don’t want more people to die … I’m going to have to kill myself and then go to hell.