Only after all that was out of the way would he come home on leave to a great welcome from family and neighbours and friends.
“You got your keys?”
He’d been supping away into the past, and Carrie’s whisper made him jump.
“Yeah. Picked them up from my locker. Think we’ll try around the back.”
A dog barked not far away, answered by another and another. While driving the school bus Jim had glimpsed, or thought he’d glimpsed, a pack of dogs, all shapes and sizes, running together through a burned patch of scrub.
There was a thick-mesh wire fence, chest high, all around the property. Jim walked along the side of the house as quietly as he was able, conscious of his boots crunching through dead grass. There didn’t seem any visible damage. No broken glass, and the shutters were in place across his daughters’ bedroom window. The back door was locked.
He could now see the moonlight dancing off the water in the pool. The level was low, more than two feet below the top, and it was easy to make out bunches of leaves and a couple of larger branches floating in the sullen darkness.
There was a mesh screen over double glass doors, and Jim tugged gently at it. But it was bolted from the inside.
The kitchen and the rear entrance to the house was to the left, and he reached it in half a dozen short strides. Carrie was keeping close behind him.
“Watch the garden,” he said.
The security lock turned easily and Jim pushed the door open.
He stepped into his home for the first time in two years and four weeks, shocked by the instant realization that he wasn’t alone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Tenth.”
“The date?”
“Right. Today’s October 10. We still got five weeks to get all the way into the city and sort things out. Then hike south down to Calico for the fifteenth of the next month.”
Jeff Thomas peered into the mirror, touching his broken nose. “No problem at all, Jed.” He leaned closer, trying to angle the glass to catch the dawn light. “You reckon I look stupid?”
Jed Herne was doing his morning’s exercises, attempting to loosen the night’s tightness from his knees. “No. You might be stupid, but that nose doesn’t make much difference.”
The heavy bruising around the eyes, which had made the journalist look like a querulous owl, was almost gone and the deep gash across the face had healed up, leaving a jagged scar that seamed over the stubbled cheek.
They were in a third-floor apartment in a small residential block to the east of Stockton, California, just off Highway 88, close to the small township of Waterloo.
The door was locked, and the steel safety bolt was slid across.
In one corner of the neat, spare living room stood the two mountain bikes that had enabled Jed and Jeff to make such good progress north and west toward San Francisco.
Finding them had been a big break of sheer good fortune. Six nights earlier they’d encountered a small estate of expensive-looking houses, perched high in the foothills. It was immediately obvious that others had also thought that they looked expensive and had visited them.
Every door and most of the windows were broken, and anything worth stealing was gone. Five out of the block of nine had also been fired.
The most comfortable place to spend the night was the double garage of the end house, and Jed and Jeff had slept there.
Jed had woken first, stretching, looking out past the open door toward the opalescent light of early morning.
At his side there was the already familiar snuffling grunts of Jeff, his nocturnal breathing plagued by his damaged nose.
Jed had let his eyes wander upward.
“Holy shit!”
The scavengers had never lifted their rapacious gaze beyond the walls of the garage and had missed a pair of top-of-the-range mountain bikes. They were neatly slotted away in the shadows of the roof, custom-made Engessers. One gold and one a glittering silver.
There had also been puncture-repair outfits and two sets of spare tires and tubes. With tool kits and everything you might need.