Nothing but the Truth by John T. Lescroart

Author:John T. Lescroart
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780451202857
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2001-02-01T23:44:49+00:00

PART THREE

22

In San Francisco, there is summer, which is windy, harsh, and damp, although it rarely rains. And then there is Indian summer, from late August into mid-October, when the days are warm, the skies cloudless, the breezes kind. For the rest of the year, it’s all fog and low clouds near the coast, clearing inland by afternoon, highs in the low sixties and winds from the west at fifteen to twenty.

When Hardy woke up on the Cochrans’ couch at a little after six, it was obvious that Indian summer was over and the rest of the year had kicked in. He sat up stiffly and took a minute getting his bearings—it had been a while since he’d slept on a couch in somebody else’s living room. The dim outlines of morning bled through the venetian blinds, but he somehow knew at once from the quality of the light that the fog had come in. Involuntarily, he sighed.

Ten minutes later he was on the road, lights on in the soup. It was going to be another long day and he needed some fresh clothes and a shower. Erin, of course, had already been up, too, making coffee in the kitchen, and he told her he thought he’d go home, check his messages, clean up, and try to be back with them on Taraval before the kids awoke.

When he turned off Geary onto his block, though, he was struck immediately with a sense of foreboding—he’d lived on this street for most of three decades, and there was a familiarity to it that was deeper than anything rational. Something, this morning, was out of the ordinary. In the fog, he couldn’t see down to the end, where his house was, but it definitely felt wrong. There was a blinking red glow up ahead. He slowed down even further, on alert, equally reluctant and compelled to keep going forward.

Then, gradually emerging from the murk, the definable shapes, images from some horrible dream. Three fire trucks were still parked in the street, hoses trailing from them in the gutters like bloated serpents. A couple of black-and-white police cruisers—the source of the red strobes—their bubbles on. A half-dozen men in uniform were standing on the sidewalk, on his lawn, milling in the wet morning street.

In a daze, trying to keep the rising sense of panic at bay, he parked carefully, pulling straight into the curb. Getting out of his car he was aware of the crackling sounds of radio static and perhaps, of smoldering wood.

He moved forward without any awareness of it, transfixedby the still-smoking ruin that had been his home for over twenty years. The white picket fence had been trampled to bits by the firemen and their equipment. What had been a small, carefully maintained lawn was a mess of mud and charred wood. The front porch wasn’t there at all, and the ruined living room behind it yawned obscenely open in the gray dawn. His chair. The mantel over the fireplace. Their beautiful cherry dining set, destroyed.

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