No Kill
an excerpt

“The fuck is a doorbuster?”

Rebecca Stone would always remember those as her husband’s last words.

They couldn’t have been, she knew. Clearly, their conversation went on from there. But she remembered him, shirtless in bed, removing the bundles of ads to thin out the paper.

He’d always teased her about buying the Sunday paper three days early. “You’re too busy to shop and too rich to care about sales,” he liked to say.

It was a habit of her mothers that she’d retained into adulthood, and while Rebecca Stone cringed at memories of her teen years spent in ten dollar jeans and K-Mart blazers, there was something about picking up a Sunday paper mid-week that brought her comfort, even if more often than not it was dumped into the recycling bin, unread, a week later.

Which is how Barton Stone ended up sitting in bed on a Saturday morning, reading a paper whose cover date he would not live to see.

“The fuck is a doorbuster?” he asked, absently tossing a JC Penny ad to the floor.

That’s the last thing Rebecca remembered.

She was sure they exchanged grinning banter over the subject, with her explaining the concept of an early-morning sale while he mocked the manufactured urgency the store tried to create.

He was home all day, so Rebecca was positive they must have had other conversations, over their coffee together at the table, a chore-filled weekend afternoon, and their dinner together.

For some reason, however, in Rebecca’s mind, Barton went from asking what the fuck a doorbuster was to driving his car into an unmarked ditch.

Rebecca Stone knew that the phrase she remembered couldn’t possibly have been the last thing her late husband said to her, and they certainly weren’t his last words. Barton Stone’s last word was one word—typed, not spoken. It was in a text message that never got sent, the recipient’s address not yet entered. “Lie,” it said.

Rebecca Stone didn’t know what that meant.