Threshold
Page 25
“He was your son,” Grace said. “Your son.”
She was shaking her head. “No son of mine . . .” She trailed off.
“So you bought off his lover,” Grace said.
Mickey jumped in. “That’s why you wanted to pull the plug on him, wasn’t it? And why you were so angry when Grace woke him up. You didn’t want him awake. You didn’t want him around at all.”
“I wanted him dead,” she screamed. Her face was bright red. A thin line of spittle had escaped her mouth. “Dead,” she screeched again. “I wanted that disgusting creature dead and in hell with the rest of them.”
She threw the sun hat to the ground and stalked off. Ten seconds later the sound of a slamming door boomed through the yard.
Mickey threw an arm around Grace’s shoulders. “That went well,” he said with a hint of a grin. “Still up for lunch?”
She shook her head and looped her arm around his waist.
“Me neither,” Mickey said.
“I used to fish down here when I was a kid,” Mickey said. “Those days there were actually fish in here.”
“What kind?”
“Mostly perch,” Mickey said. “Maybe a sea bass, once in a while.”
They were seated side by side on a pair of granite boulders, beneath the Yale Street Bridge. The tide was all the way in. The river was black and slack, and no matter how hard they tried to change the subject, the conversation kept coming back to Joseph.
“I don’t understand people like her,” Grace said. “How could she have so much hate for her own flesh and blood?”
“That’s the kind of thing you need to know going in,” Mickey said. “You need to vet these people you work with. You need to know everything there is to know about them. Keep the surprises to a minimum.”
“You volunteering?” Grace asked.
He looked over to see if she was kidding. She wasn’t.
“Maybe,” he said. “I could at least show you how to go about it.”
“There’s a bunch of things you could show me.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2004 Skye Moody
G.M. Ford is the author of eight other novels in the Leo Waterman series—Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?, Cast in Stone, The Bum’s Rush, Slow Burn, Last Ditch, The Deader the Better, Thicker Than Water, and Chump Change. He has also penned the Frank Corso mystery series and the stand-alone thriller Nameless Night. He has been nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Lefty awards, among others. He lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.