In his place emerged the cold, sociopathic opportunist who had spent three years calculating how to extract four million dollars from his wife’s corpse.
He reached behind his back.
From the waistband of his linen trousers, Mark pulled a black, compact steel frame:
A SIG Sauer P365 nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol.
He did not raise it to my head.
He held it at compressed low-ready, his finger resting along the slide, his thumb sliding the ambidextrous safety down with a sharp, mechanical click:
*CLACK.*
“You shouldn’t have come home unannounced, Elena,” Mark said softly.
His voice had lost all pretense of affection.
It was thirty decibels of pure, un-forgiving asphalt:
“The car was supposed to pick you up at Miami International on Friday.
The brakes were scheduled to fail on the Alligator Alley bridge over the Big Cypress Preserve.
A tragic single-vehicle rollover.
An overseas worker returning home, exhausted, falling asleep at the wheel.”
Mark pointed the muzzle toward the floorboards between my boots:
“Now you’ve made this messy.
Now we have to do it in the house.”
“Mark, what are you doing?!”
Mom whimpered from the bed, her frail body struggling against the cloth restraints, tears cutting clean tracks through the gray grime on her hollow cheeks:
