Page 156 of Paranoid

All because of a woman.

God, he’d been a fool.

He’d lied to himself and every damned person who meant anything in his life.

Over the beat of Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun,” he heard a faint noise.

The click of a doorknob being turned?

Odd. Frowning, he cut the playlist and peered into the darkened hallway. “Hello?” he called, feeling like a fool. He was alone. Knew it. But he looked anyway, his cop senses alert. The house was still and he told himself he’d imagined the noise. How could he have heard anything over the haunting lyrics of the song? He hit the play button on his phone and Steven Tyler was singing again, r

ocking out in the small bathroom.

Ned reached for his half-drunk can of Budweiser, which sat on the lid of the toilet tank next to his Glock, the one he’d gotten years before, taken and pocketed in a raid when Ned had been in his late twenties, an unregistered weapon he’d used only once.

Until tonight.

Possibly.

The cat wandered into the bathroom and actually did figure eights between his legs. “Yeah, you’d better go home if you know what’s good for you.”

But the skinny thing probably didn’t have a home other than this place. He liked the cat. Called him or her—who could tell?—Inky. Who would take care of the scrappy cat when he was gone?

Didn’t matter; the animal was a survivor.

He drained his beer in a long swallow, crushed the can, and let it fall to the floor, where he’d laid a drop cloth.

Again he eyed his work in the bathroom and rubbed his jaw. If he actually had the guts to eat a bullet, could he work it so that the blood and brain spatter wouldn’t mar the job?

Oh, hell, why would that matter? Someone’s gonna find your rotting body, with half your head blown off. Do you think they’ll really give a rat’s ass that your grout lines are perfect?

Again he looked at the grizzled man in the mirror, a guy who looked far older than his age. And a goddamned fool to boot.

Perhaps the gun was the coward’s way out.

It could be that he should grow a pair of balls again. It was time to tell the truth. Long past.

He should lay his soul bare.

Deal with the fallout.

Accept the consequences—every last miserable one of them.

His daughter would hate him, and he wouldn’t blame her. She’d carried the burden of thinking she’d killed her own half brother when it was he, Detective Ned Gaston, who had followed his kids to the cannery, stepped inside to the hellish darkness, and drawn his weapon. He, hidden in the shadows and the chaos, had been standing next to Rachel unseen. He’d fired his gun simultaneously with hers. Real bullets and pellets had been fired. He had made certain his gun, the Glock that was now sitting on the tank of his toilet, was never found, while Rachel’s own weapon had been kicked into the chute leading to the river. It was he who had coerced Richard Moretti into signing the death certificate as DOA and letting Luke die. The kid would have given up the ghost anyway. Ned was certain of it then, even if he wasn’t now. But he’d let his daughter deal with that horrendous guilt of taking her brother’s life for all of her adult life. Jesus, God, maybe he should just end it.

It wasn’t as if he’d really intended to kill Luke . . . or had he? Is that what a crumbling marriage had done? Guilt gnawed at his soul. It was more than that. More than a wayward teen rebelling and telling him things like “You’re not my real father.” No, that was an excuse, and when he’d followed the kids to the cannery that night, intent on dragging him home, he was loaded for bear. Because of what he’d discovered, because he knew that Luke . . . holy God, he should never have pulled the trigger; he should have just dressed the kid down and hauled both of them out of there. But fueled by a couple of gin and tonics and the knowledge that his whole life was crumbling, he’d lost his judgment as well as his temper. He’d been out of his mind. The fact that Luke was lying to both his parents and fucking Lila Kostas, Rachel’s friend. Even now, thinking about it, Ned’s hands clenched.

Being Luke Hollander’s stepfather had been holy hell, but still, he should never have pulled his weapon, never fired, never, ever let his daughter take the fall for his crime, an act of passion.

Was it?

Certainly not premeditated.

No, no, no . . .

God, he’d been a fool and a coward. He rubbed the back of his neck and stopped his thoughts from creeping any deeper into that dangerous territory.

The cat meowed and he discovered it had left the bathroom while he’d been considering his options, and the playlist had moved on to a Bon Jovi song, “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Perfect. He was starting to get lost in the lyrics when, with a jolt, it suddenly hit him. The cat shouldn’t be inside. He hadn’t left the door open.