Ли Чайлд: Blue Moon

It didn’t work out that way. Fisnik ducked through the personnel door in the roll-up gate, and smelled fresh pine, and heard the whine of a saw, and headed to the offices in back, feeling pretty good about things. A minute later he was duct-taped to a wooden chair, and suddenly the pine smelled like coffins, and the saw sounded like agony. First they drilled through his knees with a cordless DeWalt sporting a quarter-inch masonry bit. Then they moved on. He told them nothing, because he had nothing to tell. His silence was taken as a stoic confession. Such was their culture. He garnered a little grudging admiration for his fortitude, but not enough to stop the drill. He died about the same time Reacher and Shevick finally left the bar.

The first half of the mile walk was through left-behind blocks just like the one that housed the bar, but then the view opened out to what might once have been a bunch of ten-acre pastures, until the GIs came home at the end of World War Two, when the pastures were ploughed up and straight rows of small houses were built, all of them single storey, some of them split level, depending on how the pastures had risen and fallen. Seventy years later they had all been re-roofed many times, no two exactly the same, and some had add-ons and bump-outs and new vinyl siding, and some had trimmed lawns and others had wild yards, but otherwise the ghost of mean postwar uniformity still marched through the whole development, with small lots and narrow roads and narrow sidewalks and tight right-angle turns, all scaled to the maximum steering capabilities of 1948 Fords and Chevys and Studebakers and Plymouths.

Reacher and Shevick stopped on the way at a gas station deli counter. They got three chicken salad sandwiches, and three bags of potato chips, and three cans of soda. Reacher carried the bag in his right hand and helped Shevick with his left. They limped and crept through the warren. Shevick’s house turned out to be deep into it, on a cul-de-sac served by a mean turnaround barely wider than the street itself. Like the bulb on the end of an old-style thermometer. The house was on the left, behind a white picket fence that had early roses budding through it. The house was a one-storey ranch, same bones and same square footage as every other house, with an asphalt roof and bright white siding. It looked well cared for, but not recently. The windows were dusty and the lawn was long.

Reacher and Shevick hobbled up a concrete path barely wide enough for the two of them side by side. Shevick took out a key, but before he could get it in the lock the door opened in front of them. A woman stood there. Mrs Shevick, without question. There was an obvious bond between them. She was grey and stooped and newly thin like he was, also about seventy, but her head was up and her eyes were steady. The fires were still burning. She stared at her husband’s face. A scrape on his forehead, a scrape on his cheek, crusted blood on his lip.

‘I fell,’ Shevick said. ‘I tripped on the kerb. I banged my knee. That’s the worst of it. This gentleman was kind enough to help me.’

The woman’s gaze switched to Reacher for a second, uncomprehending, and then back to her husband.

She said, ‘We better get you cleaned up.’

She stood back and Shevick stepped into his hallway.

His wife started to ask him ‘Did you’, but then she stopped, maybe embarrassed in front of a stranger. No doubt she meant to say, did you pay the guy? But some troubles were private.

Shevick said, ‘It’s complicated.’

There was silence for a moment.

Reacher held up the bag from the deli counter.

‘We brought lunch,’ he said. ‘We thought it might be difficult to get out to the store, under the circumstances.’

Mrs Shevick looked at him again, still uncomprehending. And then a little wounded. Abashed. Ashamed.

‘He knows, Maria,’ Shevick said. ‘He was an army detective and he saw right through me.’

‘You told him?’

‘He figured it out. He has extensive training.’

‘What’s complicated?’ she asked. ‘What happened? Who hit you? Was it this man?’

‘What man?’

She looked straight at Reacher.

‘This man with the lunch,’ she said. ‘Is he one of them?’

‘No,’ Shevick said. ‘Absolutely not. He has nothing to do with them.’

‘Then why is he following you? Or escorting you? He’s like a prison guard.’

Shevick started to say ‘When I was’, and then he stopped and changed it to, ‘When I tripped and fell, he was passing by, and he helped me up. Then I found I couldn’t walk, so he helped me along. He isn’t following me. Or escorting me. He’s here because I’m here. You can’t have one without the other. Not right now. Because I hurt my knee. Simple as that.’

‘You said it was complicated, not simple.’

‘We should go inside,’ Shevick said.

His wife stood still for a moment, and then turned and led the way. The house was the same on the inside as it looked from the outside. Old, well cared for, but not recently. The rooms were small and the hallways were narrow. They stopped in the living room, which had a loveseat and two armchairs, and outlets and wires but no TV.

Mrs Shevick said, ‘What’s complicated?’

‘Fisnik didn’t show,’ Shevick said. ‘Normally he’s there all day. But not today. All we got was a phone message to come back at six o’clock.’

‘So where’s the money now?’

‘I still have it.’

‘Where?’

‘In my pocket.’

‘Fisnik is going to say we owe them another thousand dollars.’

‘This gentleman thinks he can’t.’

The woman looked at Reacher again, and then back at her husband, and she said, ‘We should go get you cleaned up.’ Then she looked at Reacher again and pointed towards the kitchen and said, ‘Please put the lunch in the refrigerator.’

Which was more or less empty. Reacher got there and pulled the door and found a well-scrubbed space with nothing much in it, except used-up bottles of stuff that could have been six months old. He put the bag on the middle shelf and went back to the living room to wait. There were family photographs on the walls, grouped and clustered like in a magazine. Senior among them were three ornate frames holding black and white images gone coppery with age. The first showed a literal GI standing in front of the house, with what Reacher guessed was his new bride alongside him. The guy was in a crisp khaki uniform. A private soldier. Probably too young to have fought in World War Two. Probably did a three-year hitch in Germany afterwards. Probably got called up again for Korea. The woman was in a flowery dress that puffed out to calf length. Both of them were smiling. The siding behind them shone in the sun. The dirt at their feet was raw.

The second photograph showed a year-old lawn at their feet, and a baby in their arms. Same smiles, same bright siding. The new father was out of uniform and in a pair of high-waisted miracle-fibre pants and a white shirt with short sleeves. The new mother had swapped out the floral dress for a thin sweater and pedal pushers. The baby was mostly wrapped up in a shawl, except for its face, which looked pale and indistinct.

The third photograph showed the three of them about eight years later. Behind them foundation plantings covered half the siding. The grass at their feet was lush and thick. The guy was eight years less bony, a little thicker in the waist, a little heavier in the shoulders. His hair was slicked back, and he was losing some of it. The woman was prettier than before, but tired, in all the ways women were, in photographs from the 1950s.

The eight-year-old girl standing in front of them was almost certainly Maria Shevick. Something about the shape of her face and the directness of her gaze. She had grown up, they had grown old, they had died, she had inherited their house. That was Reacher’s guess. He was proved right by the next group of pictures. Now in faded Kodak colours, but in the same location. Same patch of lawn. Same length of wall. Some kind of a tradition. The first showed Mrs Shevick maybe twenty years old, next to a much straighter and much leaner Mr Shevick, also about twenty years old, their faces sharp and young and hawkish with shadows, their smiles wide and happy.