Black Rain: A Thriller by Graham Brown Read Free Book Online

be to theirs. And so even though McCarter had turned them down initially, Danielle had convinced Moore that they needed to go after him again. Now here he was.
    “I know about your wife,” she said, finally. “For what it’s worth, I know how you feel.”
    “Do you,” he said, giving her that look, the one thatsaid he’d heard those words from so many people and most of them had no idea.
    “My father died when I was twenty,” she explained. “Lung cancer from smoking two packs a day. He was sick for a year and a half before he passed and my mother didn’t deal with it very well, so I left school to come home and help.”
    McCarter’s face softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … Were you close?”
    That was a question, she thought. One she’d asked herself a thousand times. “Yes and no. More so when I was younger. I think he wanted boys, but instead he got stuck with just me. By the time I was ten, I knew how to throw a spiral and hit a fastball. On my twelfth birthday we changed the oil in the family car. But once I hit fifteen he kind of couldn’t pretend anymore. I was wearing makeup and dying my hair … and dating. We didn’t do too much after that. At least until I came back to take care of him.”
    McCarter nodded. “I’m sure he appreciated that.”
    She shook her head. “Actually, he considered me a quitter for letting his sickness affect me. For walking away from a scholarship, missing out on a year of academics. It made him furious, especially as he was too weak to force me to go back.”
    As she spoke, the sting of that day hit her again. To her father,
quitter
was the worst thing you could call someone. Failing was one thing, quitting was a disgrace. It had always been his most bitter attack.
    “He probably just—”
    She put a hand on his arm to stop him. “He had a lot of misplaced anger,” she explained. “But he had a rightto be angry, even if it was directed in the wrong way. And you and I have a right to be sad … and also to go on.”
    McCarter took a sip of his drink. “You know, one counselor told me to accept it. Accept aging, accept dying, even embrace it, he said. That seemed like a bunch of defeatist crap to me. So I said, to hell with that, but I still have this sense of purposelessness. You’re young, you have different goals and drives. But when you get to be my age you’ll realize you do everything in life for the people you love. For your spouse and kids. Now the kids are grown, they don’t need you anymore, they kind of pat you on the head when you offer advice or try to help. And your partner is gone and you …”
    He looked more directly at her. “And you can do anything you want to.
Anything
. But there doesn’t seem to be any point to it. You’re suddenly afraid to die and at the same time acutely aware of your own mortality. But instead of prodding you to live, it just sucks the joy out of life and you’re not really living anymore anyway.”
    Danielle nodded. She remembered going back to school and finishing a double major in two and a half years just to prove she wasn’t a quitter, charging forward on autopilot, keeping herself so busy that she couldn’t think about her loss. And then, after graduating, she’d gone in a different direction, entering a profession totally unrelated to all that she’d learned. “You just have to keep looking,” she said. “You’ll find something. And in the meantime you can help me.”
    McCarter laughed and then looked at her with a sort of astonishment in his eyes at what she’d said. “How old are you again?”
    “Older than I look,” she replied. “And younger than I feel.”
    Laughing lightly, McCarter agreed. “I know how that goes.”
    As the bartender returned with her drink, McCarter held up his glass. “To the expedition,” he offered. “May we
go on
and find the truth.”
    They clinked glasses and Danielle thought to herself,
he will never know the truth, but perhaps he will find what he