Free Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover by Mike Cooper Page A

more, then tried to catch it in the other hand. He missed and it flew out of control, bouncing onto the ground inches from my foot.
    “Oops, sorry.” He picked it up. “Hey, Dave, I forgot—might have another job next week. You interested?”
    “What is it?” I said. “Blowing up a dam? Setting the national forest on fire?”
    He laughed like I was kidding. “Construction. Temporary structure for a party or something. Easy.”
    “Maybe.” Dave picked up his bucket. “Give me a call.”
    We walked out to the parking lot. The guard saluted us. “Nice clean job, fellas.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Glad to see everyone coming out what went
in
.”
    “You got that right.”
    At the car, I popped the door locks with the remote. Dave pointed at the trunk. “Can you open that up?”
    I looked at his bucket, with the two sticks of explosive poking out. “No way.”
    “It’s safe enough.”
    “Not for me.” Maybe I’d just seen too many vehicles demolished when I was in the service.
    “Okay, no problem. Listen, we thought we might go out,” he said. “Get a beer. You want to come?”
    “I’ll pass.” I closed the trunk. “Some things to do.”
    “Sure. I’ll go with Brendt, then. He’ll drop me off at the shop later.” Dave hesitated, oddly reticent. “You, uh, you want to come over tomorrow?”
    “Yeah.” I realized it was true, and not just because New York was apparently a no-go-home zone at the moment.
    My brother. I felt a pull.
    “Yeah, I’d like that.”
    “Awesome.” He grinned, grabbed my hand for a moment, then jogged off to Brendt’s car. The other guys were already moving, trucks turning and squealing tires and barreling out to the exit. By the time I got my car started, only one other vehicle was left—probably the guard’s.
    I couldn’t see the top of the rubble pile from here, but a thick plume of smoke rose and bent east with the wind. I wondered what FerroCorp planned to do with the site.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I drove all the way back to Pittsburgh. Coming in on I-376—the Parkway, apparently everyone called it—from the east. Late in the day the sun had finally come out and now it was setting, red and orange behind the city skyline.
    Not
much
of a skyline, compared to back home. But pretty all the same.
    Clay Micro was dark. No surprise, on Saturday night. I got out and walked around again, down to the trestle bridge over the canal, along the road, all the way to the front of the grocery wholesaler and back. Not sure what I was looking for. Some sort of clue about the mystery Nissan that had followed me last night. In the falling dusk I couldn’t see much.
    I didn’t find anything.
    Leaving, I followed the same route I’d taken yesterday. The lacrosse players were gone, but the street was livelier, families home and together on the weekend. I backtracked a block to where the tail had appeared—just another street. They could have been waiting there, or come from anywhere.
    I got some takeout at a Foodland supermarket: something green from the salad bar and a container of rice pilaf. Farther down the highway, across the river, I found another roadside motel. This one had several long-haul rigs in the lot. The desk clerk was incurious, the room shabby, the television small. I ate my solitary dinner, then carried the trash out to a garbage can in the parking lot.
    While I was out there I took another walk, circling the motel for a block in all directions, checking likely surveillance points and routes in and out. It felt like a lonely edge of the city—sparse traffic, a warehouse type of operation down the road one way and some shuttered stores the other. One of the truckers had left his diesel running, light seeping from the sleeping area behind the cab seats. Maybe he had better television in there.
    I finished my paranoid patrol, slipped back inside and brushed my teeth. For a while I sat in the dark, doing nothing. At nine I went to bed.
    The life of an itinerant accountant is far