Blue Moon

THIRTY-TWO

It was too dark to tell whether the landscaping was nice, but by smell and feel and inadvertent physical contact they could tell it was conventionally planted, with the normal kinds of stuff in the normal kinds of places. At first underfoot was a lawn of tough, springy grass, maybe some new hybrid strain, slick and cold with night-time damp. Then came a crunchy area, some kind of broken slate or shale, maybe a path, maybe a mulch, and beyond it came spiky and coniferous foundation plantings, that scratched loudly at the grocery bags as they brushed by.

Then came the fold-back section of fence, which judging by the state of the lawn got hauled open and shut at least once every couple of weeks, all season long. Even so, it was stiff and noisy. At one point early 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 grey night-time 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 manoeuvre 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 any time, 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 the quickest thing to rustle up, when time is running short.’

‘From where?’

‘Every day presents different opportunities. Worst case scenario, we could sell their car. Maybe up at the Ford dealer. I heard their used lot needs inventory.’

‘Yes, they take cash,’ Shevick said. ‘Like a casino. They have a line of tellers behind bulletproof glass.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Good to know.’

He stepped out to the darkened hallway, and lined up at a distance with a front window. He looked out to the street. The Lincoln was still there. The same one. Big and black, now dewed over and inert. Two vague shapes in it. Heads and shoulders, slumped down in the gloom. Guns under their arms, no doubt. Wallets in their pockets, almost certainly. Probably stuffed with cash, if they were anything like their opposite number from Tirana. Probably hundreds of dollars. But probably not eleven thousand.

He stepped back to the kitchen. Maria Shevick gave him a cup of coffee. His first of the day. She asked them to stay for breakfast. She would fix it. They could all eat together, like a party. Reacher wanted to say no. The food was for the old folks themselves, not random guests. Plus he wanted to get out of there before the sun came up. While it was still dark. It was likely to be a busy day. There was a lot to do. But the breakfast idea seemed to mean something to the Shevicks, and Abby was OK with it, so he said yes. Much later he wondered exactly how much different the day would have turned out, if he hadn’t. But he didn’t think about it for long. Spilled milk. Wasted energy. Move on.

Maria Shevick grilled bacon and fried eggs and made toast and brewed a second pot of coffee. Aaron tottered in with the stool from their bedroom dressing table, to make a fourth seat. Maria was right. In the end the meal turned into a party. Like a secret in the dark. Abby told a joke about a guy with cancer. For a beat it could have gone either way. But her performer’s instinct was sure and true. After a second of silence Aaron and Maria burst out laughing, hard, their shoulders heaving, on and on, some kind of pent-up relief coming out, some kind of catharsis. Maria slapped her hand on the table, so hard her coffee spilled, and Aaron drummed his feet on the floor, so hard he hurt his knee again.

Reacher watched the sun come up. The sky went grey, then gold. The yard outside the window took shape. Vague forms loomed out of the dark. The fence. The distant hump of the back-to-back neighbour’s asphalt roof.

‘Who lives there?’ he asked. ‘Whose yard did we walk through?’

‘Actually it’s the woman who told us about Fisnik,’ Aaron said. ‘She told us the story about the other neighbour’s nephew’s wife’s cousin borrowing money from a gangster in a bar. I have a feeling she went to see him herself, a little later. She got her car fixed all of a sudden. No other visible means of support.’

Maria made a third pot of coffee. Reacher thought, what the hell. The sun was already over the horizon. He stayed in his seat and drank his share. Then somehow the conversation came back to money, and suddenly everyone seemed to hear the same clock ticking. The close of business, getting nearer.

‘Except cash is good all night long,’ Reacher said. ‘Right? The close of business thing is about the bank wires only. As long as they have a teller open, we’re good until the moment they put her on the gurney.’

‘From where?’ Aaron said again. ‘Eleven thousand is a lot of sofa cushions.’

‘Hope for the best,’ Reacher said.

He and Abby left the way they had come, this time with empty hands, and in the late dawn light, therefore faster, but not much easier. The fence was still difficult. The fold-back section was still stiff and noisy.

Their car was gone.