tragic news as a Norfolk-Southern train loudly lumbered past.
Brazil’s flashlight swept gravel and weeds at the edge of rusty railroad tracks as the last train car loudly rumbled through the dark, hot night. Coagulating blood glistened bright
red in the strong beam, illuminating a dingy washcloth and bloody quarters, pennies, and
dimes that must have come out of pockets when the murdered senator’s pants were pulled
down. Blood and gore clung to kudzu, and there were fragments of skull and brain.
Brazil took a deep breath, looking down dark tracks, the skyline huge and bright.
j^ W Seth had images of his own blood and gore, and savored the imagined reaction of
Chief Wife when she walked into his room and found him on top of his bed, where he sat
up now drinking beer, the . 38 revolver in his lap. He could not take his eyes off the gun,
which was loaded with one Remington +P cartridge. Intermittently, Seth had been
spinning the cylinder for hours as he watched “Friends,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” and other reruns, and tested his luck. It wasn’t good.
So far, out of perhaps a hundred dry runs, he had committed suicide successfully but twice. How could that be possible? Didn’t this go against the law of averages? He
figured the cartridge should have lined up fatally at least twenty times, since it was a five-
shot revolver, and five divided into one hundred was twenty.
He had never been good in math. Seth had never been good in anything, he decided.
Everyone would be better off without him, including his wimpy sons and his
emasculating wife. She’d benefit the most, walking in, finding him slumped over, shot in
the head through a pillow, blood everywhere, finished, end of story. No longer a
problem. No more taking fatso Seth places and being ashamed, while younger men still
looked at her with interested eyes. Seth would show her. Take that.
Let his final chapter haunt her the rest of her big-shot days.
tw He would never go through with it. Hammer was quite sure of this.
Certainly, when she had slid open her vanity drawer and found the . 38 missing, it had
occurred to the top police officer in Charlotte that her depressed, self-destructive spouse
might have a clue as to the gun’s whereabouts. And for what? Self-protection. Hardly.
Seth rarely remembered to set the burglar alarm. He did not like to shoot and had never
carried a gun, not even in Little Rock, when he was a member of the NRA because most
people were. Hammer deduced and worried as she drove.
The fool. Wouldn’t this be his last and greatest revenge? Suicide was a mean and
skulking act, unless one was dying anyway and desired an earlier flight out of pain and
suffering. The vast majority of people killed themselves for payback purposes. Some of
the nastiest notes Hammer had ever read were the last comments of just such people. She
had not much sympathy because there wasn’t a soul she knew who didn’t bump over bad
stretches of life’s highways now and again, struggle over long, lonely miles where it
entered the mind that maybe one should run off the road, be done with it. Hammer was
not exempt. She was well aware of her own spells of destructive eating, drinking, not
exercising, laziness. They happened, and she picked herself up and went on. She always
chose a better lane, and got healthy again. She would not die, because she was
responsible, and people needed her.
She walked into her house, not knowing what she would find. Locking the door, she
reset the alarm. The TV was loud in Seth’s bedroom across from the kitchen. For a
moment, his wife hesitated, tempted to walk back and check, but she couldn’t. Suddenly,
she was afraid. She headed to her own part of the house, her heart filled with dread as
she freshened up in the bathroom. It was late, but she didn’t change into her nightshirt yet
or pour herself a Dewar’s. If he had done it, there would be people all over her property
within minutes. There was no point in getting out of her clothes or smelling like booze.