Sniper's Justice (Caje Cole Book 9) by David Healey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

“Don’t that beat all,” Cole said. Mulholland had managed to touch upon duty and a heartstring at the same time. He always had been a smart SOB. Cole hadn’t known that Mulholland had made a career of the military, but he wasn’t all that surprised.

“Are you gonna go?” the boy asked.

“Hell no,” Cole said, but he shoved the letter and invitation into a pocket instead of tossing them into the wood stove.

“You and Danny are going,” Norman Jean announced at suppertime, once she heard the news. Of course, it was Danny rather than Cole who had spilled the beans.

Cole stopped chewing. “What?”

“It will be good for you. Hillbilly, you ain’t hardly been out of these mountains in ten years.” It was just like Norma Jean to call him by his old nickname. “Besides, it will get you out of my hair for a spell. My sister might come down from Baltimore to visit.”

Norma Jean’s uppity sister had moved north and married a steelworker, and Cole got along with her about as well as magpies got along with hawks. Which was to say, not at all.

Cole felt like his wife and grandson were ganging up on him, so he found an excuse after supper to head back out to the workshop, where everyone would leave him the hell alone. If it hadn’t been dark, he would have taken his shotgun and headed into the woods.

But Norma Jean wouldn’t let him be. No more than half an hour passed before she came through the door. Unlike Danny, she never bothered to knock first.

“Can’t you leave a man alone?” Through an unspoken rule, they had long-ago reached an understanding that the house was her domain and the workshop was Cole’s. Both knew to tread lightly in the other’s territory, which made for a long and happy marriage.

“We ain’t done talking about this trip,” Norma Jean said.

“All right. Say your piece, but I ain’t going.”

“You’re only thinking of yourself,” she said. “It will be good for the boy. He’s never been anywhere. It would be good to have some experience before he goes off to college.”

“College?” Cole almost choked on the word. He shook his head. His wife had been pushing for the boy to get a real education, but Cole wasn’t nearly as convinced that it was important.

“Times are changing, you dumb hillbilly. Danny can’t stay on this mountain forever. The world’s a big place and it’s about time he started seeing some of it for himself.”

“The army took care of that for me.”

Norma Jean put her hands on her hips. “The army? You mean those folks who sent you halfway around the world to get shot at? Is that what you would wish on Danny?”

“No,” Cole agreed. Besides, it was all too clear that Danny wasn’t like him.

“You write back and tell them you’re going, and that you are bringing your sixteen-year-old grandson.”

Norma Jean went out and shut the door.

Cole grumped and muttered during the next several days, but Norma Jean ignored him. Gran had spoken, and that was that. Cole knew that he had gotten his marching orders. Sometimes, he thought that General Eisenhower or even MacArthur himself could have learned a thing or two from Norma Jean.

He wrote back to accept the invitation and sure enough, two plane tickets soon arrived in the mail.

The way that Danny had come to live with them was a story in itself, and not an altogether happy one. Shortly after returning from Korea, he and Norma Jean had gotten married. They lived for a time in the small cabin that Cole had built, but when it was clear that a child was coming along, Mrs. Bailey had announced that she was moving into town with a maiden aunt and that the house near the knife workshop was the young couple’s if they wanted it.

“A cabin ain’t no place to raise a baby,” Mrs. Bailey had announced.

Cole liked his cabin just fine, but in the mysterious ways that women often operate, between Norman Jean and Mrs. Bailey, he found himself moved into the modest two-story clapboard farmhouse. He couldn’t even say exactly how it had happened. One of the two upstairs bedrooms had been done over into a baby’s room—a nursery, as Mrs. Bailey proudly called it.

The house was very modest, with just the two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, and a lean-to kitchen off the back. Hollis Bailey’s father had built the place, using fieldstone for the foundation and logs for the floor joists. The house didn’t have a lick of insulation, but worn braided rugs across the painted floorboards kept the worst of the cold at bay through the mountain winters.

Cole and Norma Jean’s daughter, Janey, never had much liked the mountain life. No sooner had she graduated high school than she took up with a group of friends, traveling around to rock concerts and smoking dope. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was what a lot of young people were doing. Their daughter had gone hippie on them. It didn’t seem to bother Norma Jean, who saw Janey as a strong young woman following her own path, but truth be told, it just about broke Cole’s heart when Janey left the mountain. He missed the young girl he had once known who liked to run barefoot through the grass, catching June fireflies. But Janey had gone and grown up.

Then the news came that she’d had a child by some young man she wasn’t married to. Cole had to be talked out of arranging a good ol’ shotgun wedding. Even Norma Jean was not pleased by the situation. Janey promised to come by soon for them to meet their grandson, but the months passed. Whenever she called or wrote, she always seemed to be living in a different place.

It fell to the local sheriff to knock on their door one winter’s night with the news that the car Janey had been riding in was in