Читать книгу Jackknife - William W. Johnstone - Страница 21

McCabe was glad to be home. The rest of the run had gone just fine, no problems, after that little fracas a couple of nights earlier at the truck stop. He’d made it on down to Jacksonville, delivered his cargo, and deadheaded back to Fort Worth, something of a rarity in this day and age when every precious drop of fuel had to be used efficiently. Somebody in Transportation up in Kansas City had fouled up, because McCabe wasn’t supposed to pick up another load at the distribution center at Alliance Airport until Monday.

But that was MegaMart’s problem, not McCabe’s. He was just looking forward to spending the Thanksgiving holiday at home for a change, instead of carrying merchandise across the country. Maybe they would even do some shopping. Seemed fair, when you considered that he spent most of his days delivering things for other people to buy.

He’d had his own truck and been an independent for a while after retiring from the military, and he’d liked it. After being part of a group for so long, it felt good to be on his own, responsible for nobody but himself.

Problem was, he wasn’t responsible just for himself. He had a wife and a daughter to take care of, too. And he felt like Terry and Ronnie deserved the best possible life he could give them, since they had spent so many years pretty much taking care of themselves on various military bases around the country, while he was off on the missions that had taken him around the world, to some of the most hellish spots on the face of the earth.

But they’d had it rough sometimes, too. Low pay, endless red tape, frequent moves…Terry and Ronnie had had to deal with most of it alone. They had always come through, though. His guys, he called them because of their masculine nicknames. They didn’t want to be Theresa and Veronica. They preferred Terry and Ronnie.

Not that there was anything remotely masculine about them except their nicknames. At thirty-eight, Terry still had the same earthy, cowgirl-type beauty as the coltish twenty-year-old that McCabe had fallen in love with when he first saw her. She wore her blond hair a little shorter these days, but there was no gray in it and her body was almost as lithe and supple as it had ever been.

Ronnie had inherited her father’s darker looks—and darker moods, if the truth be known—and at sixteen she was turning into a lovely young woman. McCabe had already had to put the fear of God and the Special Forces into a couple of boys that Ronnie had dated. They’d seemed like good kids, so he hadn’t tried to scare them off entirely, but he’d made sure they knew he had been trained to kill with his bare hands, in any number of lethal ways. After Ronnie had gone off with her dates, McCabe and Terry had shared some good laughs at the way the boys’ eyes had widened while he was talking to them.

It was because of the two of them, the two most precious people in the world to him, that he had gone to work for MegaMart. As an independent trucker, he’d had to be on the road too much just to make a living. Terry and Ronnie had spent enough time alone while he was in the military. True, as a driver for MegaMart, he was still gone quite a bit, but at least his schedule wasn’t as erratic and he was usually able to get home several days each week. Sometimes he even managed to be home for four or five days in a row, like now.

He was in the living room of their house in River Oaks, one of Fort Worth’s older suburbs, with his feet up, the newspaper in his lap, and his eyelids getting heavy. It was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Ronnie was out of school today—when McCabe was a kid they had gotten Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after it off from school, but never Wednesday—but she and Terry had been busy all day on some sort of project that was due right after the holiday in Ronnie’s biology class. McCabe was willing to help out, but Terry was better at that sort of stuff. She’d been a teacher herself at one time, although at the elementary level, not high school biology.

McCabe gave up on trying to hold his drowsiness at bay and closed his eyes. They had been shut for only a few moments, though, when Ronnie came into the room and said, “Daddy, we’re going shopping on Friday. You wanna come with?”

McCabe tried not to grimace. Since when did kids who lived in Texas talk like streetwise New Yorkers? Of course, Ronnie had lived in lots of different places, on lots of different bases. It wasn’t like she’d been raised here in Texas. But McCabe, himself a Texan, born, bred, and forever, had heard kids who had lived here all their lives talking the same way.

It was because of all the TV and movies they watched and all the time they spent on the Internet, he supposed. American culture was blending together, with the distinctive pockets of how people in different parts of the country spoke and acted slowly fading away. That was good in its own way, he supposed, but regrettable, too. Like the seasons, the differences in people made for welcome changes.

He opened his eyes and repeated, “Shopping? On Friday? Black Friday? The busiest shopping day of the year?”

Ronnie nodded. “Yeah. We thought we’d go to the grand opening of that new UltraMegaMart.”

McCabe bit back a groan. He saw enough MegaMarts in his line of work. “You and your mother can go and have a great time,” he said. “I think I’ll pass.”

“You sure? It’s supposed to be the biggest MegaMart in the world. It’s as big as a mall all by itself.”

“If you’re trying to convince me, you’re going about it the wrong way,” McCabe said, but he grinned to take any sting out of the words. “Besides, I’ve seen the place. I know how big it is. I even delivered a truckload of stock there a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ronnie said with a grin of her own. “You work for MegaMart. I forgot.”

“Sure you did.”

Ronnie grew more serious. “I need some stuff for my project. You think they’ll have it?”

McCabe didn’t bother asking what sort of “stuff” she needed. If the world’s first UltraMegaMart lived up to all of its hype, it would have what Ronnie needed, whatever that might be.

“Don’t worry about that,” McCabe told her. “I’m sure you’ll find just what you’re looking for.”