Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,79

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.”

“I found a button. From a pair of my pants. It was missing eight years. Maria sewed it back on.”

“It’s still early in the day,” Reacher said. “There are still a lot of hours to go, before the close of business.”

“We were going to skip it this time around,” Aaron said. “After all, what will it tell us? If it’s good news, it will make us happy, of course, but that’s self-indulgence, not medicine. If it’s bad news, we don’t want to know anyway. So we weren’t sure exactly what we would be getting, for our eleven thousand dollars. But then the doctors said they need to know the extent of the progress. They said they need to calibrate a new dosage based on what they find. Either up or down. With a certain amount of timing and precision. They said anything else would be perilous.”

“How do you normally pay them?”

“With a bank wire.”

“Do they take cash?”

“Why?”

“Cash is usually