Hold Back the Night

by Sean Lynch

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Three unsuspecting women. Two escaped convicts. One shocking night of escalating terror. From acclaimed crime writer and law enforcement veteran Sean Lynch . . .

HOLD BACK THE NIGHT

It begins with a spark. A simple act of carelessness that ignites the autumn grass of the Sierra Nevadas. In minutes, the flames spread. A raging wildfire sweeps down the mountain, engulfing a van from the local prison—giving two chained convicts a chance to escape . . .

Two desperate men. Psychologically disturbed. Extremely dangerous.

In Farnham County live three very different women. Marjorie Guthrie, a wealthy suburban housewife fleeing an abusive marriage; Mary Hernandez, her troubled, rebellious sister; and Leanne Strayer, a young SWAT deputy with a dark past. All three share one thing in common: they are in the wrong place at the wrong time . . .

Today, their worst fears come true. Tonight, the nightmares come home.

 “PERFECTLY CRAFTED . . . RIVETING AND AUTHENTIC.”
—Mark Greaney, #1 New York Times bestselling author on The Fourth Motive

 

Release date: April 27, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

Deputy Leanne Strayer wriggled herself into the least uncomfortable position she could manage without encroaching on the deputies at either side of her. This was no small feat since she was one of ten people crammed into a standard-sized delivery van. It didn’t help her predicament that the van’s other occupants were all male, larger than she was, and everyone including her was clad in urban-pattern fatigues and burdened with at least twenty-five pounds of weapons, armor, and gear.

Adding to her discomfort was the fact that Northern California’s Indian summer was in full swing. The mercury on this late October afternoon had risen well into the nineties. The elevated temperature inside the cramped van, as it jostled over the pothole-strewn country road, was close to intolerable. Beads of sweat formed on Strayer’s face under her ballistic glasses, and her perspiration-soaked uniform stuck to her skin beneath her uniform and body armor.

“We’re in the park,” Sergeant Bennerman announced from the front seat. “One minute to location.”

The eight deputies in the back of the vehicle had no way to verify their sergeant’s claim. The delivery van had no rear or side windows, and a partition separated the front and rear compartments. They checked their weapons a final time, donned their helmets, and prepared to disembark.

Bennerman keyed his transceiver as the van came to a halt. “Tac is ten-twenty-three,” he broadcast.

“Tactical team on scene,” the dispatcher’s aloof voice acknowledged. “Medical and air support standing by.”

“Go!” Bennerman commanded. The rear and side doors opened, and Strayer and her fellow deputies scrambled from the vehicle. Like her teammates, she was instantly relieved to escape the confines of the hot, cramped, van.

Though she’d never been to this particular trailer park before, the landscape that greeted her wasn’t unfamiliar. Strayer grew up in a rural trailer park not unlike the one where she and her Special Weapons and Tactics team now found themselves.

Strayer raced toward the single-wide, recognizing it from photographs shown at the operational briefing earlier that morning. She flicked the selector lever on her Heckler & Koch UMP-40 submachine gun down from Safe to Sustained Fire.

Strayer wasn’t on the entry team today, instead assigned to perimeter duty. It was her job, along with three other deputies, to assume containment positions on the four corners of the trailer while a five-deputy team, led by Sergeant Bennerman, forced entry through the front door.

The S.W.A.T. team was serving a “no-knock” arrest warrant on an armed and extremely dangerous homicide suspect. The likelihood the suspect might resist arrest with a firearm resulted in the deputy district attorney issuing a warrant that didn’t require the arresting deputies to knock on the trailer’s door and announce their presence before entering.

Two days previously, a twenty-nine-year-old fugitive parolee and verified Mexican Mafia gang member named Ernesto Machado walked nonchalantly into a downtown Farnham restaurant. The eatery was affiliated with Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia’s sworn rivals. Once inside, he produced a fully automatic AK-47 from under his jacket and cut loose.

When the brass settled, two people were dead. This included the restaurant’s owner, who was the gunman’s intended target. Seven patrons were also injured, two critically. Security camera footage from inside the restaurant clearly identified Machado, well known to the county’s Gang Task Force, as the shooter. Machado fled the scene in a stolen Toyota sedan and disappeared.

The following day, an informant tipped off a dope detective in the county’s Narcotics Unit that Machado was hiding out in a trailer park in rural Farnham County, smoking meth, and awaiting Mexican Mafia–sanctioned passage south to Mexico. The densely populated park was inhabited by a large number of probationers, parolees, and others hostile to law enforcement and housed many known Hispanic gang members. Any attempts by detectives to confirm Machado’s whereabouts by traditional surveillance methods would certainly have been spotted and resulted in the suspect’s flight.

It was only through the use of an aerial drone with night-vision capability, which captured Machado’s image as he accepted delivery of a pizza, that the informant’s tip was verified. A warrant was subsequently obtained and Bennerman’s squad of S.W.A.T. deputies tasked with serving it.

The experienced S.W.A.T. sergeant elected to have his team surreptitiously enter the Pleasant Pines Trailer Park and approach the suspect’s unit concealed in a commandeered online retailer’s delivery van. Strayer, the only female deputy currently assigned to the Farnham County S.W.A.T. Unit, was a member of Bennerman’s team.

Like all fifteen full-time Special Weapons and Tactics deputies at the Farnham County Sheriff ’s Department, Strayer worked a triad rotation schedule. Each of the three five-operator squads were either on duty, in training, or on their days off. This ensured at least ten S.W.A.T.-trained deputies were available for deployment at all times. Bennerman’s crew happened to be one of the two squads on hand when the order to serve the high-risk warrant came down.

Strayer took her assigned position at the corner of the trailer and lost sight of the entry team as it moved from her field of view. The deputies in front of and behind her, assigned to the other corners, took up their positions to her left and right.

The trailer had once been white with a lateral green stripe, but years of neglect and disrepair left its battered aluminum exterior a dingy gray. The miniature yard was devoid of grass and littered with beer and soda cans, cigarette butts, and discarded fast-food wrappers. The trailer’s four windows, one on each side, were covered with black plastic sheets.

The trailers surrounding Machado’s, like all mobile homes in the park, were situated close to one another with little more than the width of a single-vehicle driveway between lots. The double-wide mobile home directly behind Strayer had a tricycle on its sparse lawn, and the cracked driveway was decorated with multicolored chalk drawings typical of grade-school-aged children.

Strayer heard the sound of metal rending and glass breaking and surmised the entry team had torn off the front door with their breaching tool. Seconds later a pair of earsplitting explosions erupted.

She felt and heard dual concussions as a pair of distraction devices, commonly known as a flashbangs or stun grenades, were detonated inside. She knew the entry team would be rushing into the trailer directly behind the blasts.

She next heard men’s muffled, shouting, voices. Then came a noise she’d hoped she wouldn’t hear; the unmistakable signature of a fully automatic AK-47. Strayer knew the unwelcome sound all too well from her two tours in Afghanistan.

Strayer instinctively took a knee and brought her weapon up from low-ready to her shoulder. The AK-47 was firing steadily, in one long burst, and she knew the trailer’s flimsy construction would be no match for the full-metal-jacket rounds it digested. As if to confirm this, holes began sporadically materializing in the trailer’s exterior walls. Bullets ripped through the thin sheet-metal panels leaving puffs of insulation in their wake.

Strayer dropped to a prone position as bullets exited the suspect’s trailer and sailed overhead. She could hear them impacting the trailer behind her. She scanned to her left and right. To her dismay, she noticed her fellow perimeter deputies hadn’t dropped to the ground. Both were crouching with their weapons shouldered, but still standing.

Seconds after the fully automatic AK-47 opened up, the contrasting reports of multiple AR-15s, the standard-issue weapon of the Farnham County S.W.A.T. team, erupted. The telltale bark of semiautomatic gunfire, in contrast to the fully automatic fire, told Strayer her team was in a firefight. Among the cacophony of dueling weapons, she also detected the report of the .40 caliber submachine gun, like hers, carried by Sergeant Bennerman.

Strayer wasn’t comforted by the knowledge that her fellow deputies were all wearing ceramic body armor rated to withstand the 7.62x39 military cartridge and wielding ballistic shields. There were still plenty of exposed areas on a S.W.A.T. team member’s body not covered by bullet-resistant armor, such as the face and extremities. More than once while deployed, she’d witnessed the serious injury or death of another soldier when an unlucky bullet found its way under, around, or even through the hapless troop’s body armor. In the fierce, close-quarters battle currently unfolding inside the single-wide trailer, the likelihood a bullet might find its way to a deputy’s vulnerable spot was high.

The number of bullets piercing the trailer walls from inside the unit and entering the park outside increased dramatically, keeping pace with the volume of gunfire raging within. Strayer heard someone announce, “Shots fired!” over the radio through her earpiece but didn’t immediately recognize the excited voice, and therefore didn’t know if the transmission emanated from a deputy inside or outside the trailer.

The perimeter deputy to Strayer’s left, posted at the opposite rear corner of the trailer, suddenly cried out, fell onto his back, and grabbed his neck with both hands. He’d been struck by one of the bullets that tore through the trailer’s walls.

Strayer instantly rose to a kneeling position. She hesitated, torn between her duty to remain at her post and maintain the perimeter and her instinct to rush to the wounded deputy and render first aid.

Before she could choose, Strayer’s course of action was decided for her. The trailer’s rear window shattered outward and a human body came crashing through. The body belonged to a shirtless, barefoot, man who was howling maniacally and covered in blood.

She instantly recognized Machado, from his long hair and what she could see of the tattoos beneath the smeared blood on his chest and arms. His face and build, despite his macabre appearance, matched the booking photographs shown to the team during the briefing. He was still carrying his AK-47 rifle.

Machado had leapt through the window to escape the deputies inside. He landed headfirst amid a cascade of wood splinters, plastic sheeting, and shattered glass, and rolled to a standing position only a couple of yards from the downed deputy to Strayer’s left. Had he rolled the opposite direction upon landing, he would have faced her. Instead, he loomed over the wounded man lying at his feet.

The injured deputy kept one hand to his neck to stanch the flow of blood and with the other fumbled for the. 45 caliber pistol holstered at his thigh.

Machado lowered his rifle, at point-blank range, to the deputy’s head. The bloodied gunman’s maniacal grin widened, and his finger closed on the trigger.

Strayer brought up her sub-gun’s front sight to Machado’s center of mass, paused her breathing, and squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst of .40 caliber slugs tore into his back.

Machado, anesthetized on methamphetamine and adrenaline and in the throes of the drug-induced state known to law enforcement and emergency medical personnel as excited delirium, merely fell to one knee. He swung his body toward Strayer, his face a mask of berserker fury. At the same time, he attempted to bring his Kalashnikov around to bear on her.

She reacted this time by triggering a six-round burst from her sub-gun, tipping the barrel up ever so slightly at the end of the firing sequence. Like the previous burst, all of her rounds struck Machado. The last two impacted his chin and forehead.

Machado fell forward onto his face and didn’t move. Strayer, per her training, continued to cover him with her Heckler & Koch. Seconds later, Bennerman and the entry team came running out of the trailer. A pair of entry-team deputies immediately began to attend to their wounded comrade, while another handcuffed Machado and began checking his vitals.

Strayer slowly stood up, lowered her weapon, and flicked the selector lever back up to Safe.

“You okay?” Bennerman asked her.

“Yeah,” Strayer said, exhaling.

One of the deputies checking Machado gave Bennerman a thumbs-down. “Injuries inconsistent with life,” he said. “Non-revivable.”

Bennerman looked from Machado’s body to Strayer and shook his head. “Why did it have to be you again?” he said with a grunt.

Strayer met her sergeant’s disdainful expression with an indifferent one. The indifference took effort. Inside, she was seething.

Sirens could be heard in the distance, along with the hum of a helicopter. People slowly began to exit their trailers and take in the scene before them. Most merely stared, but more than a few glared at the heavily armed S.W.A.T. deputies and cursed in Spanish.

“Sarge,” one of the men attending to the wounded deputy called out, “we gotta get Steve to the trauma center.”

“Ambulance is en route,” Bennerman said. “Tell him to hang on.”

A woman’s scream rang out. It was stark and piercing and easily overpowered the sounds of milling bystanders, approaching sirens, and the helicopter above. The scream carried within it a mother’s anguish, and came from the trailer directly behind Machado’s.

The trailer’s door flew open, and a young Hispanic woman emerged. She was wailing and cradling the inert body of a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old. The woman’s hands, and the child’s body, were covered in blood.

Granite Bay, California

Marjorie Guthrie extinguished the first cigarette she’d smoked in over thirteen years on the porch steps of her upscale residence. Her husband Theodore, whom she’d always known as Tad, was due to arrive any minute. He’d texted his wife from the Sacramento airport, as he typically did when returning from a business trip, to let her know his plane had landed and he was on the way home.

She lit a second cigarette, extracted from the first pack of Marlboro Lights she’d purchased in more than thirteen years, with a butane lighter held in trembling hands. It wasn’t fear that added the tremor, but a combination of multiple emotions. A cocktail of feelings seasoned over time and ripened by a final straw.

Anger.

Betrayal.

Loathing.

Resolve.

Marjorie took the smoke into her lungs, mildly surprised it tasted so good after having been a nonsmoker for so long. That many years after quitting, she expected the cigarette to taste unpleasant. She realized, with some irony, that it wasn’t her only expectation during the last thirteen years that turned out wrong.

Her nine-year-old son, Joel, and his five-year-old sister, Jennifer, had been deposited at a friend’s house after school. Marjorie explained to her friend she was experiencing a family emergency, which wasn’t untrue, and would pick them up later that evening. She had a lot to do.

After visiting the pharmacy, she made a trip to the bank. Then she stopped at a gas station to top off the Range Rover’s fuel tank. There, on impulse, she’d purchased the cigarettes.

On the way home, she telephoned her parents, who resided in a modest restored farmhouse in rural Farnham County on the other side of Folsom Lake. They weren’t pleased with what she had to tell them, but understood.

Once back home, she began to pack. Marjorie emptied a plastic bin containing Christmas ornaments and filled it with documents. She took her personal, financial, and medical records, those belonging to the children, the backup hard drive to the family’s desktop computer, and her laptop. Then she packed as many clothes, for both herself and the kids, as she could, along with toiletries and other personal items, into several large suitcases. She’d learned what to pack after the last incident.

The first incident, which had occurred three years prior, was sparked when Tad inadvertently left his work laptop on in his study after returning home from a business trip to Phoenix. Unable to resist the temptation, Marjorie perused the contents while he was in the shower. It didn’t take long for her to discover irrefutable, and graphic, photographic evidence of his affair with a buxom young coworker at the wireless company that employed them both.

The confrontation was explosive. Tad, whom Marjorie had known since they were both undergraduates at UC Davis, couldn’t deny the infidelity. Instead, he chose to blame her.

He berated his wife for being what he called a “nosy, suspicious, bitch,” and rationalized his unfaithful behavior on his sexual needs while away from her on business. She responded to his insulting attempt to hold her accountable for his infidelity by calling him a “disgusting, selfish, pig.”

That’s when he slapped her.

Instantly remorseful, Tad begged for forgiveness and pleaded with Marjorie not to call the police. He tearfully insisted he loved her, and their two young children, and promised to end the affair. He further swore he would never, ever, hit her again. He also pointed out, once again putting accountability for his actions on her, that his arrest would result in their family’s breakup and financial ruin.

Desiring to keep her family together, and at the same time still in love with her husband, Marjorie relented. She chose to believe him because she wanted to. She agreed to forgive and elicited a promise from Tad to resign from his current job, never communicate with his former coworker again, and to attend family counseling with her. He eagerly consented.

She told her friends at the gym, when they inquired about her bruised cheek, that her son had accidentally struck her while playing with one of his toys.

As she sat smoking on her porch and waiting for her husband to arrive home, Marjorie berated herself as weak and gullible to have believed anything that had come out of Tad Guthrie’s mouth.

When Marjorie first met Tad, he was Hollywood handsome, exuded confidence and charm, was fit and tan from being on the water polo team, and hailed from an uber-rich family. Half the girls on campus had been in his bed or were trying to be.

The darkly beautiful Marjorie Hernandez was not impressed by his strategically orchestrated and well-practiced advances, and wasn’t afraid to show it. Which, as it turned out, only piqued his interest and fueled his desire for her.

After weeks of fending him off, she eventually relented and agreed to go out with him. To her surprise, Marjorie found Tad Guthrie seemingly not nearly as shallow as his frat-boy demeanor led others to believe. Or so she thought at the time. Reluctantly, she began to succumb to his charms. So did her younger sister Mary and her parents.

When Tad met Hector Hernandez, a retired construction supervisor, and his wife Margaret, a homemaker, he was polite and respectful, despite the fact that the Hernandez family was clearly of a social station far below his own. Marjorie’s younger sister Mary, a sophomore in high school at the time, didn’t attempt to conceal her envy over what she called her older sister’s “totally awesome catch.”

Their romance blossomed. It took Tad, not the most committed of students, an additional two years to obtain his undergraduate degree, the result of too much partying and switching majors multiple times over the course of his college experience. Marjorie decided to stay on campus to be with him after her own graduation. They moved in together, to the dismay of her parents, while Tad finished an undergraduate degree in marketing and she pursued a master’s degree in business administration. He proposed to her on the day they both graduated; him for the first time, her for the second.

Tad’s wedding present to his wife was to quit smoking weed. Hers was to quit smoking cigarettes.

Unlike most newlyweds, money wasn’t a problem for Tad and Marjorie Guthrie. Tad was able to provide his bride a lavish lifestyle through the bounty of his wealthy parents, who’d purchased a deluxe Granite Bay home for the couple as a wedding gift. Tad’s father, a highly successful Sacramento plastic surgeon and commercial landlord, had always ensured his only child had the best of everything.

Today, as she sat in contemplation over cigarettes on her porch steps, Marjorie finally embraced her denial regarding her husband’s true character and accepted the realization his hyper-privileged upbringing had much more to do with his narcissism, lack of ambition, poor discipline, and weak impulse control than she’d originally thought. She considered herself a blind fool for refusing to see Tad Guthrie for who he was long ago. She blamed herself, not him, and the choices she’d made, for her predicament.

Things had been okay up until a few years after the kids came. Tad’s father paid their bills, provided new cars for his son and wife to drive every other year, and funded elaborate family vacations each summer. Marjorie quit her job as a marketing consultant when she became pregnant with Joel and never went back to work, electing to stay home and raise their son. When Jennifer arrived four years later, it only affirmed her decision to relinquish her career for full-time motherhood.

Tad stumbled along, bouncing from firm to firm, spending much of his workweek away on sales junkets and most weekends ignoring his children and playing golf. Joel was six years old, and Jennifer only two, when Marjorie discovered the extramarital affair, forgave him, and moved on.

A little more than two years after that incident came another. Tad, who’d been a heavy drinker in college but tapered off after graduation, began drinking heavily again not long after Marjorie caught him cheating.

Tad’s drinking habit started up again gradually, beginning with single-martini business luncheons, a glass or two of wine with dinner each night, and the occasional overindulgence during weekend golf with his buddies. But it soon escalated into Irish coffee each morning at breakfast, four-martini luncheons, whether he was conducting business or not, at least a bottle of wine every night, and all-day beer benders on weekends.

As Tad’s drinking habit worsened, his moods darkened, he withdrew from his family, his waistline increased, and he became irritable and more argumentative. When Marjorie, who’d always maintained a positive outlook and a very athletic figure, tried to confront her husband about his spiraling alcohol consumption and change in behavior, or nudge him to accompany her to the gym, she was angrily rebuked.

Their arguments became increasingly abusive, with Tad often implying that he never wanted children, and without him she wouldn’t be living in a four-thousand-square-foot home in Granite Bay or enjoying the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom, as if full-time motherhood wasn’t a vocation itself.

Marjorie never reminded Tad, during those heated exchanges, that she held a master’s degree and he only a bachelor’s. Or that without his parents’ generosity he wouldn’t be living in a Granite Bay McMansion, either. He was usually too intoxicated by that point in the argument to listen, anyway.

One afternoon while Marjorie and preschool-aged Jennifer were at a car dealership having her sport utility vehicle serviced, she received a call on her cell phone from an officer with the Granite Bay Police Department. It seemed her husband, tasked with leaving work early to pick up Joel at his elementary school since she was indisposed, had been involved in a traffic collision.

Tad inadvertently ran a red light in his Porsche and broadsided a Subaru driven by another parent who was also picking up a child after school. Fortunately, despite the fact that both cars sustained significant damage, no one was hurt.

Unfortunately, the Subaru’s driver, while exchanging insurance information with Tad, noticed his red, watery, bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, and the heavy odor of an alcoholic beverage on his pungent breath. The police officers she called to the scene noticed, too.

An indignant Tad failed his field sobriety tests. Despite his pleas, and subsequent threats, he was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. He was also charged with child endangerment since his son was in the car. The police officer phoned Marjorie at the car dealership to come to the station and retrieve Joel. Tad would have to remain in custody for at least six hours until he sobered up.

When Tad phoned home six hours later, a furious Marjorie refused to come and get him. He showed up twenty minutes after the call, by way of an Uber, since his badly damaged Porsche had been towed from the crash scene.

He first tried to minimize the significance of the crash and arrest, then explain, rationalize, and finally, to half-heartedly apologize. According to Tad, the real blame for the incident rested with the other driver, “a total bitch,” and Granite Bay’s, “stupid, nit-picking, hall monitor, cops.”

All Marjorie said to her husband in reply was that she was sleeping in the guest room, but it was enough to send Tad into a rage. He forcefully grabbed her by the arm as she walked away. When she tried to pull her arm from his grasp, he backhanded her.

Marjorie took the kids and drove to her parents’ home an hour away in Farnham County. Tad called multiple times each day and pleaded with her to return. She ignored his calls and consulted with a friend’s husband who was a divorce attorney.

Five days after his arrest, Tad ignored her demand not to show up at her parents’ home. Her mother let him in.

Tad implored his wife to hear him out. He insisted the slap was an “accident,” which was at least partially her fault, since it had occurred in the heat of an argument. As a result, he argued, he hadn’t really broken his earlier promise never to strike her again. He swore he’d quit drinking and was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and assured her that his father’s high-powered attorney was handling the criminal charges against him.

He tearfully begged Marjorie for another chance. Her resolve was further whittled away by her mother, eavesdropping from another room. She interjected herself, and insisted to her daughter that a husband saying he was sorry could make up for putting his hands on his wife in anger and shouldn’t necessarily be cause for breaking up a marriage. Marjorie demanded Tad leave, but told him she’d think about what he’d said. She also agreed to take his calls.

By the end of the week Tad’s barrage of telephone pleas, her mother’s entreaties, and Marjorie’s own doubt and guilt wore down her resistance. Against her better judgment, she and the kids returned home.

Tad made good on his promise to remain sober and continued to attend AA meetings. Their marriage counseling also continued. Her father-in-law’s attorney got the drunk driving charge against Tad reduced to reckless driving, a civil settlement was reached with the Subaru’s driver, and the child-endangerment charge was dropped. Over the course of the following year, things gradually returned to some semblance of what had once been normal in the Guthrie household.

Tad switched companies again, and without alcohol seemed less discontented with his career. He spent more time at home on weekends, and at least made a pretense of parenting. Marjorie convinced herself that her spouse had made real changes, was hopeful about his progress and the progress of their marriage, and consoled herself with the notion that the unfaithful and violent behaviors he’d previously exhibited were a product of the booze and not inherent in his character. She hadn’t forgotten what Tad had done, but she’d come to a sort of peace with it. She loved her children, enjoyed her lifestyle, and accepted her husband for who she convinced herself he was. It seemed to be enough.

Until a week ago.

It was the day before Tad was to fly to Salt Lake City for a sales conference, and Marjorie began to fall ill. The illness began with a fever, and then severe cramps. Tad offered to stay home and help care for the kids while she recovered from what they both assumed was a bout of the flu, but she insisted he go on the business trip. She didn’t want him to jeopardize his new job. The flu bug had been making the rounds at the elementary school Jennifer and Joel attended, both had already been through it during the previous month, and Marjorie believed she would likely be over the ailment before her husband returned at week’s end.

Instead, Marjorie’s symptoms worsened. Her fever intensified, and in addition to cramps she developed joint aches, a burning sensation while urinating, and discovered she was emitting a milky, odorous, vaginal discharge. She made an appointment to see the doctor the following day and provided blood and urine samples to facilitate a battery of tests. Three days later, on the morning of the day Tad was scheduled to return home from his business trip, her doctor’s office phoned with the results.

The taste of Marjorie’s second cigarette soured. She looked at her hands and noticed they were no longer trembling.

Tad’s car pulled into the driveway, the engine switched off, and he got out. Instead of greeting him with a hug, his wife ground out her smoke, stood, gave him a disgusted look, turned her back to him, and walked through the open front door into the house.

“What’s wrong?” Tad said, with no attempt to hide his exasperation. “Where are the kids?” His wife ignored his questions as he followed her.

“What’re you so pissed off about?” he sai