Read Online First Family by David Baldacci - Free Book Online Page B

crying. I guess this wasn’t the first time this had happened. I… I sort of held her, tried to calm her down.”
    “You
sort of
held her?”
    “Okay, I had my arms around her. What the hell was I supposed to do? I was trying to comfort the woman.”
    “Was that when you were lusting in your heart?”
    “Michelle!” he said sharply.
    “Sorry. Okay, you were sort of holding her. Then what?”
    “When she stopped crying and composed herself, she thanked me again. She offered to drive me back to town but I didn’t think that was such a good idea. So I walked for a bit and then grabbed a cab.”
    “That was it?”
    “No, that wasn’t it. She called me. I don’t know exactly how to phrase it; we became acquaintances and then friends. I believe she was really grateful for what I’d done. If someone other than me had found him like that he probably wouldn’t be president right now.”
    “Don’t be too sure. Politicians aren’t exactly known for their morality.”
    “Anyway, I knew the ins and outs of the town pretty well and she picked my brain about it. I think she came to know the workings of D.C. better than her husband did.”
    “And that’s how you got to know Tuck and his family?”
    “Jane invited me to a few functions. I don’t think Dan Cox even remembered me. Or remembered that night. I’m not sure how she explained my presence to him, but he never questioned it. After he was elected president I didn’t really see that much of them anymore, for obvious reasons. Folks like me don’t travel in those circles. And I was out of the Secret Service and out of D.C. by then. But she always sent me a Christmas card. And I kept in touch with Tuck and his family. When we moved here, they were some of the first ones to welcome me back.”
    Michelle looked surprised. “How come you never introduced me to them then?”
    A grin eased across Sean’s face. “Hell, I didn’t want to scare them off.”
    “So here you come to the lady’s rescue one more time.”
    “Like they say, déjà vu all over again.”
    “Yeah? Well, let’s hope we live through it. They almost got me the other night and I’m using up my nine lives at an alarming rate hanging around you.”
    “Yeah, but it’s never dull either.”
    “No, it’s never dull.”

12
    S AM Q UARRY DROVE on rutted roads back to Atlee. The Patriot he’d used to kill Kurt sat on the truck seat next to him. He pulled up in front of his pre–Civil War pile of hand-formed bricks and local stone, as the Alabama dust swirled around the truck’s tires, looking more like simmering heat than dirt fists of the Deep South. He didn’t move for the longest time. He sat there, hands on the wheel, staring at the twenty-ounce Patriot with its firing pin safety mechanism. He finally flicked a thumb across one of its grip pads, trying to shove from his mind what he’d done, by touching the very instrument with which he’d done it.
    He’d nearly crashed the Cessna on the flight back. He’d started shaking uncontrollably right after takeoff. Then at barely two hundred feet up he’d caught some wind shear and his wings had rotated nearly vertical. Later, he figured he’d come a few seconds from losing lift altogether before regaining control and soaring upward as the aircraft claimed its buoyancy.
    He’d always kept Daryl close to him when his son was growing up. The boy had never been too special in the brains department, his father knew, but he loved him anyway. He was loyal, that boy was. Did whatever his daddy told him to. And what he lacked in intellect he more than made up with dogged determination and attention to detail; attributes he shared with his father. Those traits had worked well for him in the Army. He, Kurt, and Carlos had signed up and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning eight combat medals among them and surviving the worst that the enemy could throw at them, including dozens of IEDs.
    Then the trouble had started. Quarry had come down one