Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(67)
“What time is it?” Abby asked.
“Just past twenty after five.”
“I was thinking about that line I told you, about doing something that scares you, every day. Except it’s only twenty past five in the morning, and I’m already on my second thing.”
“This one doesn’t count,” Reacher said. “This one is a walk in the park. Maybe literally. Maybe their landscaping is nice.”
“Also on the subject of twenty past five in the morning, surely the Shevicks won’t be up yet.”
“They might be. I can’t imagine they’re sleeping well at the moment. If I’m wrong and they are sleeping well, you can wake them up. You can call them on your phone when we get there. You can tell them we’re right outside their kitchen window. Tell them not to turn on any lights at the front of the house. An undisturbed visit is what we want.”
They got out of the car and stood for a second in the silence. The night was gray and the air was damp with mist. Still no noise from the trunk. No kicking, no banging, no yelling. Nothing. They hauled the grocery bags off the rear bench and divided them up. Two and two for Reacher, one and one for Abby. Neither one of them overburdened or lopsided. Good to go.
They stepped into the neighbor’s front yard.
Chapter 32
It was too dark to tell whether the landscaping was nice, but by smell and feel and inadvertent physical contact they could tell it was conventionally planted, with the normal kind of stuff in the normal kind of places. At first underfoot was a lawn of tough, springy grass, maybe some new hybrid strain, slick and cold with nighttime damp. Then came a crunchy area, some kind of broken slate or shale, maybe a path, maybe a mulch, and beyond it came spiky and coniferous foundation plantings, that scratched loudly at the grocery bags as they brushed by.
Then came the fold-back section of fence, which judging by the state of the lawn got hauled open and shut at least once every couple of weeks, all season long. Even so, it was stiff and noisy. At one point early in its travel it let out a wood-on-wood sound somewhere between a yelp and a bark and a shriek and a groan. Brief, but loud.
They waited.
No reaction.
No dog.
They squeezed through the gap they had opened, shuffling sideways, groceries leading, groceries following. They walked through the back yard. Up ahead in the gloom was the back fence. Which was also the Shevicks’ back fence. In reverse. A mirror image. Theoretically. If they were in the right place.
“We’re good,” Abby whispered. “This is it. Has to be. Can’t go wrong. Like counting squares on a chessboard.”
Reacher stood up tall on tiptoe and looked over the fence. He saw a gray nighttime view of the back of a ranch house with pale siding and an asphalt roof. The same but different. But the right place. He recognized it by the way part of the lawn met the back wall of the house. It was the spot where the family photographs had been taken. The GI and the girl in the hoop skirt, with raw dirt at their feet, the same couple on a year-old lawn with a baby, the same couple eight years later with eight-year-old Maria Shevick, on grass by then lush and thick. Same patch of lawn. Same length of wall.
The kitchen light was on.
“They’re up,” Reacher said.
Climbing the fence was difficult, because it was in poor condition. The rational approach would have been to bust through it, or kick it down. Which they ruled out on ethical grounds. Instead they spent more than half their climbing energy fighting for equilibrium, trying to keep their weight vertical, not out to the side. They wobbled back and forth like a circus act. They sensed a point beyond which the whole thing would collapse, like a long rotten rippling curtain, maybe the whole width of the yard. Abby went first, and made it, and Reacher passed her the six grocery bags, one at a time, laboriously, hoisting each one high over the fence, and then letting it down as low as he could, the top of the cedar board digging into the crook of his elbow, until it was low enough for her to reach up and safely take.
Then came his turn to climb. He was twice as heavy and three times as clumsy. The fence swayed and yawed a yard one way, then a yard the other. But he got it stabilized and held it steady, and then kind of rolled off, in an inelegant maneuver that left him on his back in a flowerbed, but also left the fence still standing.
They carried the groceries to the kitchen door, and tapped on the glass. Heart attack time, potentially, for the Shevicks, but they survived. There was a little gasping and fluttering of fingers and fanning for breath, and a little embarrassment about bathrobes, but they got over it fast enough. They stared at the grocery sacks with a mixture of emotions on their faces. Shame and lost pride and empty stomachs. Reacher got them to make coffee. Abby packed their refrigerator and stacked their shelves.
Maria Shevick said, “We’re up because we got a call from the hospital. It’s an around-the-clock operation, obviously. We told them they should call anytime, night or day. It’s in our notes, I expect. They called to say they want to do another scan, first thing tomorrow morning. They’re still excited.”
“If we pay,” Aaron Shevick said.
“How much this time?” Reacher asked.
“Eleven thousand.”
“When?”
“We need it by close of business today.”
“I guess you already looked under the sofa cushions.”