Third Degree by Greg Iles

from the blast in the confined space. Her left cheek hurt badly, but she didn’t think she’d been hit by a bullet. The pain was in her skin. Warren must have aimed just to the right of her ear. She wanted to slap him, but she didn’t dare risk it.
    “That shut you up,” he said, his eyes like blue ice. “And don’t think the police will come running because of that shot. Not even the Elfmans heard it, and they’re the closest to us. Now, pick up that computer and hand it to me.”
    She blinked away tears of impotent rage. “No.”
    He stepped forward and laid the hot barrel flush against her forehead. She jerked away from the scalding steel and stared back at the man she had slept with for more than a decade and saw no one she recognized. She bent at the waist, picked up the Sony, and handed it to him.
    “What now?”
    Warren smiled like a wolf at cornered prey. “Let’s see what you’re hiding.”
     
     
    Danny McDavitt turned his pickup truck east off of Highway 24 and rolled into Avalon. He drove as fast as he could without drawing attention to himself. In this neighborhood, in this truck, everyone would assume he was coming to cut someone’s grass or to fix a faucet.
    Danny had been to a few parties in these palatial houses. Some moneyed folk in Athens Point didn’t mind mixing with the common people, and he had actually been making some pretty good money himself for the past year. He’d sold two songs before March, but that was chicken feed compared to what he was making on his oil deals with John Dixon. The geologist had invited Danny to buy into a couple of wildcats he felt good about, and one had come in with twelve feet of pay. At $60-a-barrel oil, even Danny’s one-eighth interest was worth real money. But the timing was bad, maritally speaking. That oil well—plus the four others they were working over now—was the main reason Starlette wanted to stay married to him.
    Danny turned left onto Lyonesse Drive and slowed down. The Shields house was a big Colonial set well back from the road on a wooded lot. If the garage door was shut, he wouldn’t be able to tell a thing. But three seconds later, Danny saw Laurel’s midnight blue Acura parked behind her husband’s gray Volvo, which stood halfway out of the open garage.
    They’re both at home,
he thought.
In the middle of the day.
    He knew from experience that this almost never happened. For one thing, Laurel should still be at the school. For another, Dr. Shields didn’t usually get home until after his evening rounds, unless his kids had an athletic event scheduled. Danny could hardly believe that he’d coached soccer with Warren Shields only last year, but he had. Their daughters were the same age, and since Danny had been teaching Shields to fly, the doctor had suggested that they coach a team together. All in all, the experience had been good, but Danny had discovered that Warren Shields approached everything with deadly seriousness, even soccer for five- and six-year-old girls.
    Danny drove to the end of Lyonesse, then executed a three-point turn and rode back by the house. Nothing had changed, of course. He felt like a high school boy cruising past the home of a girl he had a crush on. As a teenager he’d swing past a girl’s house five or six times a night, just on the off chance of catching a glimpse of her. Stupid, and yet as primal as the mating rituals of Cro-Magnon man.
    “Jesus,” he muttered, pulling to the curb. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
    Laurel’s message had been too vague.
Warren knows.
How about a little detail with that, lady? Warren knows
what,
exactly? Did he know that his wife had recently had an affair? Or did he know she’d had an affair with Danny McDavitt? Danny had to assume the latter; otherwise, why would she warn him to get out of town? And to take his son with him? That was the worrisome part. Why the hell would Laurel think Michael was at risk? Maybe she knew Danny wouldn’t leave town