Anthology.24.Second.Son.2011 by Child Lee

Author:Child, Lee [Child, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Google: GmN6m7S-nOsC
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

REACHER SLEPT BADLY, first dreaming about his grandfather, the ferocious old Frenchman somehow limbless and equipped with four table legs, moving and rearing like a piece of mobile furniture. Then he was woken in the early hours by something stealthy in the back yard, a cat or a rodent or some other kind of scavenger, and then again much later when the new phone rang twice. Too soon for his mother to have arrived in Paris, too late for a report of a fatal accident en route to Tokyo. Something else, obviously, so he ignored it both times. Joe got up at that point, so Reacher took advantage of the solitude and rolled over and slept on, until after nine o’clock, which was late for him.

He found his father and his brother in the kitchen, both of them silent and strained to a degree he found excessive. No question that grandpa Moutier was a nice old guy, but any ninety-year-old was by definition limited in the life expectancy department. No big surprise. The guy had to croak sometime. No one lives for ever. And he had already beaten the odds. The guy was already about twenty years old when the Wright brothers flew, for God’s sake.

Reacher made his own coffee, because he liked it stronger than the rest of his family. He made toast, poured cereal, ate and drank, and still no one had spoken to him. Eventually he asked, ‘What’s up?’

His father’s gaze dipped and swivelled and traversed like an artillery piece, and came to rest on a point on the tabletop about a foot in front of Reacher’s plate. He said, ‘The phone this morning.’

‘Not mom, right?’

‘No, not that.’

‘Then what?’

‘We’re in trouble.’

‘What, all of us?’

‘Me and Joe.’

Reacher asked, ‘Why? What happened?’

But at that point the doorbell rang, so there was no answer. Neither Joe or his father looked like moving, so Reacher got up and headed for the hallway. It was the same delivery guy as the day before. He went through the same ritual. He unpacked a box and retained it and handed Reacher a heavy spool of electric cable. There must have been a hundred yards of it. The spool was the size of a car tyre. The cable was for domestic wiring, like Romex, heavy and stiff, sheathed in grey plastic. The spool had a wirecutter attached to it by a short chain.

Reacher left it on the hallway floor and headed back to the kitchen. He asked, ‘Why do we need electric cable?’

‘We don’t,’ his father said. ‘I ordered boots.’

‘Well, you didn’t get them. You got a spool of wire.’

His father blew out a sigh of frustration. ‘Then someone made a mistake, didn’t they?’

Joe said nothing, which was very unusual. Normally in that kind of a situation he would immediately launch a series of speculative analyses, asking about the nature and format of the order codes, pointing out that numbers can be easily transposed, thinking out loud about how QWERTY keyboards put alphabetically remote

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