War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

War at Home

Copyright © 2012
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © 2012 by Grandeduc/Dreamstime

Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

First published
in 2005
by St. Martins Press

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

The Smokey Dalton Series in order:

Novels

Dangerous Road

Smoke-Filled Rooms

Thin Walls

Stone Cribs

War At Home

Days of Rage

The Day After (Upcoming)

Short Stories

Guarding Lacey

Family Affair

For Dean with love.

This book is as much yours as mine.

Acknowledgments

Once again, I could not have written this book alone.
I owe a debt of gratitude t
o people
who helped with various parts of the research, from the Malibu Brain Trust to Christine Valada and Carl Skal
a
k
.
Thanks are due also to the staff at the various libraries, from Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, the New Haven Free Public Library, the Harold Washington Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the New York Public Library.
As always, any errors are strictly my own.

Once again, Paul Higginbotham and Steve Braunginn have taken time from their busy lives to review the manuscript.
Thanks, guys.

Kelley Ragland’s insight and understanding of Smokey have made this book much, much stronger.
I’m so glad she’s a part of this project.

Thanks too to all the booksellers who championed this series from the beginning.

Finally, I have to thank my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, whose fertile mind always finds the best solution to the corners I box myself into.

We were bent on revolution right here on earth, right here in America.

—Bill Ayers
,
Fugitive Days

ONE

The blast shoved me backward.
I tumbled down the steps and hit the wall on the third floor with such force that my breath left my body.
I slid down and landed, feet out.

Clouds of dust gathered around me.
I was covered in dirt, bits of door, and blood.

I hadn’t expected this.
Anger, a gun, maybe, but not a bomb.
The air was white with plaster dust.
I was coughing, which hurt my ribs.
I couldn’t see anything ahead of me.
My eyes were dry and chalky, and the inside of my mouth tasted like paint.
I closed it, and my teeth
ground
against chunks of plaster.

The world was eerily quiet.
I couldn’t even hear myself breathe.
T
hen I realized that the concussion had knocked out my hearing.
If someone was crying,
if
someone was calling for help, if someone was coming to the rescue, I couldn’t tell.
I hadn’t realized how much I relied on my hearing until it was gone.

I moved slowly, feeling for problems.
My back felt like someone had slammed it with a two-by-four.
I guess a wall was infinitely more serious than a two-by-four.
My left arm burned.
My chest hurt, but I attributed that to the loss of air.
I could now take shallow breaths, but they were filled with plaster dust.

The coughing continued.
I could feel it digging into my throat and rib
cage, but I couldn’t hear it.
I felt like I was alone in a blizzard, an soundless hot blizzard of white.

A jagged piece of wood stuck out of my thigh.
A small piece.
I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled.
It came out easily, followed by only a little blood.
The wood hadn’t hit anything vital.

I touched my face, felt bits of stuff fall onto my lap, my fingers slick with blood.
But I couldn’t
find
too many wounds.

Maybe the blood wasn’t mine.

I hadn’t been the one closest to the explosion anyway.
I’d just left the third floor.
I was on the fifth or sixth stair, heading to the landing.
The stairs then made a
ninety
-degree turn to the left, and continued upward to the fourth floor.

I’d heard voices discussing unlocking the door, the click of a handle — or maybe the lock itself — and then the explosion.

It had to have been a powerful blast to hit me.
The concussion had gone outward, and I had been protected by distance, and a plaster-and-lath wall.

God knows what would have happened if I had been on the landing.

I’d probably be dead now.

Shouldn’t someone have come up the stairs? Out of the other apartments? Was the building more destroyed than I thought?

I couldn’t tell.

I slowly got to my feet, bracing my hand against the wall.
The wall seemed sturdy, but I couldn’t see it clearly. The dust still swirled, giant clouds of it.
Debris fell near my feet, some of it heavy enough to send vibrations through the floorboards.
It felt strange not to be able to hear the thumps as the wood, the hardware, the whatever it was, landed.

I was in some kind of shock — not thinking as clearly as I could — but I wasn’t sure what that meant.
I wasn’t sure what had happened to the others.

Wouldn’t they have been blown backward like me? Down the stairwell, landing in a pile?

I climbed up the stairs, keeping one hand on the wall as a brace, the other extended toward but not touching the railing.
I wasn’t sure what the explosion had blown loose.
I reached the top step and swayed just a little; the wooziness hadn’t disappeared.
I made myself breathe, but the air tasted of smoke, and blood.

The landing had been ripped to pieces.
The stairs going to the fourth floor disappeared into the clouds of white.
I wheezed — at least, I think I did — and coughed some more, then I got on my hands and knees, distributing my weight as I crossed the ruined landing, heading for the ruined stairs.

Someone had to see if anyone survived.

It took me a long time — forever — to crawl up those stairs, using what was left of the wall to brace myself.
My hands kept brushing nails and jagged bits of wood. I tried not to put too much weight on my knees — I didn’t want to puncture any more skin.

The dust was as fine as baby powder.
My eyes were finally starting to tear, to work the dirt out.
I still couldn’t breathe very well, and I had never been so dizzy in my life.

Then I reached the fourth floor.

Puffs of debris, like fog, floated in the hallway.
The door itself was gone, blown open, leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

On the opposite side of the hall was an even larger hole. One that seemed to go on forever.
Inside, a fire burned.
No walls remained.
That apartment was mostly gone.

The blast had gone outward, leaving wood and bits of shrapnel in the wall across the hall.

Wood, metal fragments, bone.
My fingers shook as I reached toward the blood-covered whiteness sticking out of the plaster wall. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t get the charred smell of the hall off my tongue.

I made myself look away from the bone fragment, down the dusty and ruined hall.
No one.
Maybe the others had gotten blown into the next apartment.
Maybe they had already gone for help.

But even as I had those thoughts, I knew they were wrong.
Beneath the piles of wood — the shattered plywood door, the bits of plaster from the walls, the ruined tables — were two people.

I crouched and started lifting the debris, one jagged piece at a time, hoping to find them.

Praying that they were alive.

TWO

One month earlier, I sat in the basement of a church.
For the past half year, the church had donated this space to Grace Kirkland’s after-school sessions.
Grace taught the neighborhood children at the local parents’ request.
The after-school program was monitored by my good friend Franklin Grimshaw.
He made certain that every parent paid Grace, either in cash or in kind.
For her part, Grace made certain the children got the sort of education the Chicago Public School System promised but didn’t deliver.

The basement was long and narrow.
It smelled faintly of chalk and damp, and had a chill despite the warmth of the June day.
Sitting in one of the desk
s
designed for children, I felt like a giant.
I had to turn my legs sideways so that I would fit. Grace had already apologized for the lack of adult chairs.

She was a petite woman with ebony skin and a delicate manner that belied the steel inside her.
Somehow she managed to keep a roomful of kids, ages six to sixteen, fascinated for three hours a day.
As far as I was concerned, she had worked miracles
since
she had been running the program.

That afternoon, she had called me down to talk about Jimmy. Jimmy was,
for all intents and purposes, my son.
I hadn’t formally adopted him because that would
have
mean
t
we’d have
had
to go through legal channels
,
and we couldn’t.
We were living in Chicago under false names, trying to stay one step ahead of the Memphis police and the FBI.

Grace leaned against the desk the church provided for her, rested her hands on the surface
,
and crossed her legs at the ankles.
She had fine legs, even though they were half covered by the conservative blue dress she wore.

Grace went to a great deal of trouble to hide her good looks.
When asked, she identified herself as a mother of two boys, not as a teacher.
And she never took credit for the fact that one boy was at Yale on a scholarship and the other was a straight-A high school student who was taking supplemental classes at the University of Chicago.

“I don’t want to sugar-coat this, Bill,” she said, using my alias.
My real name is Smokey Dalton, but most folks around Chicago knew me as Bill Grimshaw, a relative of Franklin Grimshaw.
Everyone thought Jimmy was my natural-born son, something I did not disabuse them of.
I was as proud of him as if I’d raised him from the moment he was born.

Still, I had a feeling this conversation wasn’t going to be easy.
The public school term was over, and Grace was meeting with the parents, trying to see if there was enough support for a summer version of her after-school lessons.
At the same time, she wanted to do a parent-teacher conference, so that we would know how our children were progressing.