Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover by Mike Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

muttered, watching them go, then walked over to me.
    “They’re gonna burn out the Rotary one of these years,” he said. “Hell of a barbecue though. What can I—?”
    He stopped dead, staring.
    I shrugged.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “It’s you!” He grabbed me in a bear hug, the blackened leather gloves ruining my shirt. “I’ll be goddamned! It’s
you
!”

CHAPTER FIVE
    A in’t you never looked in a mirror? Plain as the nose on my face.” He laughed. “Hell, it kind of
is
the nose on my face, right? Not just twins, we’re like
identical
twins.”
    “I don’t know.” Close up our differences seemed stronger—different lines in the face, different hair, different habits of movement. “Didn’t you say you were born two years later?”
    “Yeah, I guess. But anyway I got the records, and the state don’t lie. I mean, not about shit like that. Paper going back twenty, thirty years. Want to see the copies?”
    “Maybe later.”
    “Sure.” Dave drank off half a Rolling Rock and clanked the bottle onto the toolbox by his stool. “You should of told me you were coming.”
    “I travel around,” I said. “Work. I had a job nearby and I thought I’d look you up.”
    “Travel, huh? That accounting business, I figured you sat in an office all day. Keeping the books.”
    “It’s just as boring as you think.”
    His hair was on the long side. I’d been in Kentucky a few years ago, chasing a penny-stock fraudster who liked the horses, and back then every guy in the region seemed to have his head shaved down to stubble. It looked like boot camp. Now the style pendulum was apparently drifting back to the 1970s.
    Besides that: my height, maybe no surprise, but ten or twenty pounds more muscle and most of that in the belly. In the country men carried their weight with pride. When we shook hands, his felt hard and calloused—from manual labor, not the
makiwara
.
    “You ain’t drinking. Want coffee or something?”
    “It’s a little early.” I put my own beer on the workbench. The shop was crowded inside, tools and mysterious engine parts dark with grease cluttering every horizontal surface. That distinctive smell of gasoline and differential lube was cut with an ozone tang—the welding equipment, I assumed. An inexplicable frame of steel pipe sat half assembled on the concrete floor.
    Beyond it, just inside the bay door, a decades-old muscle car gleamed black. Unlike the rest of the garage, a two-foot space was cleared all the way around—no junk, no tools, even the floor swept perfectly clean. The hood was up, with a cloth draped over the side panel and into the engine compartment, so you could lean in without marring the finish.
    Dave saw me looking. “1969 Charger.”
    “You keep it in good shape.”
    “Grandpa’s axe, right? Rebuilt from the pistons out, and more than once.” He smiled, his eyes on the vehicle. “That’s a work of beauty in a world of sin.”
    Through the open doors I could see the clumpy field with the old tractor, between the road and the hill behind Dave’s shop. In daylight it was even clearer the mower had been abandoned halfway into the job: half the field was cut down to turf, and half had wild grass and weeds two feet high.
    Dave seemed to have trouble keeping up with everything except his car.
    “You race it?”
    “On occasion. Dirt track, on the weekends. I told you that, didn’t I? In the letter?”
    “You any good?”
    “Yeah.”
    I waited, but he didn’t say more, just drank the rest of his beer and tossed the bottle toward the back of the shop. It landed in a wooden box of empties, somehow not breaking.
    “Silas?”
    “Yes?”
    “Is that your real name?”
    “Sure it is.” Which wasn’t quite lying. That’s what people called me.
    “Because I asked around. Some of the answers . . .”
    “Around?”
    “You know.” He waved one hand vaguely, then reached over to retrieve another Rock from the stained refrigerator alongside the bench. “Don’t