Good and Valuable Consideration: An Original Short Story by Lee Child & Joseph Finder

Author:Lee Child & Joseph Finder [Child, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780751563498
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

Heller gave Reacher a glance.

Reacher seemed to have an intuition about the fat guy. He knew something was off, somehow. Something was wrong. Funny, Heller’d had the same sort of intuition. Same way he realized pretty quickly that this Reacher guy was really sharp.

The fat man had blurted it out. He was genuinely terrified.

But then he said no more.

The top of the second started. Two balls, a strike, ball three. The Boston pitcher stared in. He didn’t want to give up a lead-off walk.

“Changeup coming,” Reacher said. “Right down the pike.”

The Yankee batter knew it. He smiled like a wolf.

Not a changeup. A full-on fastball. The batter swung as the ball hit the catcher’s glove.

Reacher looked away.

He said, “Maybe this guy’ll tell us what’s going on. With his legs and all.”

“Ya think?” Heller replied.

“Or not,” Reacher said.

“Not unless I want my arms broken, too,” the fat man said.

Full count, and another fastball. Another whiff. One down.

Heller gave the fat guy a searching look. “Haven’t seen you here before, have I?”

“I haven’t been here before, no.”

“But you’re from here.”

From here: very Boston. Bostonians always want to know if you’re one of them or not. You can’t always tell from the accent. But there’s the language. Do you drink soda or “tonic”? Is something a “pisser”? Do you go to a liquor store or a packie? Take a U-turn or “bang a uey”? They’re expert at sussing out fakes and posers. Heller was born outside New York but moved as a teenager to a town north of Boston called Melrose. A working-class place. Heller’s father went to prison and his mother was left with nothing. So Heller could sound Boston if and when he wanted. Or not.

And this guy DeLong was definitely from around here.

DeLong shrugged. “Yeah.”

“You work around here?”

DeLong shrugged again. “Government Center.”

“Don’t like the Irish pub right there?”

“Well, my office is on Cambridge Street.”

DeLong was stingy with the information. For some reason he didn’t want to talk about what he did or where he worked, which was, for Heller, like a blinking neon arrow. That meant he did something sensitive, or classified, or unpleasant. But he had the look of a bureaucrat, a government functionary, and Heller took a guess.

“The good old Saltonstall Building.” One of the office towers in the bleak ghetto of big government buildings at the foot of Beacon Hill. “How’s the asbestos?”

The Saltonstall Building, which held an assortment of state bureaucracies, had been abandoned after it was found to be contaminated with asbestos. They did some renovation and dragged the office workers back in, and some of them were mad as a wasp’s nest that’s been kicked.

“Yeah, that’s gone.”

“Uh-huh.” Heller smiled. A state worker, for sure. He thought of maps of America where the states are resized by population and Rhode Island is twice the size of Wyoming. If you did a map of state employees in the Saltonstall building, the biggest state would be the Department of Revenue.

“So you’re a tax man.”

“Something like that,” DeLong said.

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