The Corps — maybe. After he was healed up completely. He would go find a doctor to do all the therapy and bandage changing and drain pulling that the folks in Washington were worried about. Or perhaps he should go back to the cops. Maybe that. He would have to think about it some more. But now he felt so good, almost euphoric. It was hard to envision himself back on the street dealing with the would-be Freeman McNallys, all the lazy losers who thought that everyone should hold still while they carved off a chunk without earning it.
He was tired so he reclined the seat and closed his eyes. The important thing was that he was going back to the front porch. Spring would come eventually, then the summer with its muggy heat. He would sit in the swing and watch his grandmother string beans and shuck corn for canning. Maybe go to the ballpark on hot summer evenings. Paint the house for her — that was what he would do. He thought about the paint, the smell of it with the heat on his back. It would be very good. And there would be plenty of time — all the time he would ever need. With these images in his mind he dozed off.
He awoke on the descent into Chicago. The plane to Evansville was a four-engine turboprop which entered the clouds as it left O’Hare and stayed in them until it was on final approach into the Evansville airport. Harrison was glued to the window looking at the Ohio River looping by the downtown and the streets and neighborhoods all neatly, perfectly square. He saw the high school he had graduated from and he saw the minor league ballpark where he had sold hot dogs all those summers growing up.
He took a cab from the airport.
The little house looked exactly the same. The swing was put away for the winter and the leaves were bare, but the grass had been mowed just before the cold stopped all growth. The house still needed painting. And the soffit under the eaves — he would fix those rotten places too.
The doctor had told him not to lift anything, so he had the cabbie put the bags on the porch. Then he tried the door. Unlocked.
He stepped in.
“Grandmom! It’s me, Harrison.”
“Who?”
Her voice came floating down the hallway from the kitchen.
He walked that way. He saw her before he got to the kitchen door. She was old and small and her hair was white. She didn’t move too quickly anymore, but he thought he had never seen a more beautiful woman.
“Oh, Harrison! What a wonderful surprise! You’re home!”
“Yeah, Grandmom. I’m home.”
He took her gently in his arms.
A Biography of Stephen Coonts
Stephen Coonts is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-eight thriller, suspense, and nonfiction titles, including the blockbuster techno-thriller The Intruders (1994).
Born in 1946, Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. His father, Gilbert, was a lawyer and his mother, Violet, was a schoolteacher and painter. He attended college at West Virginia University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1968. Following graduation, he joined the Navy and moved to Pensacola, Florida, to begin flight training at the age of twenty-two. He was stationed on the USS Enterprise for two combat cruises in the final years of the Vietnam War and flew an A-6 Intruder attack plane, an aircraft featured in many of his early novels. After completing a tour aboard the USS Nimitz, Coonts left active duty with an honorable discharge in 1977, having achieved the rank of lieutenant.
Coonts then moved to Colorado and worked as a taxi driver and police officer before enrolling in law school at the University of Colorado. He practiced law throughout his thirties while still enjoying his greatest hobby: aviation. In 1986, he published his highly successful debut, The Flight of the Intruder, which spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Coonts’s debut borrows heavily from his own experiences as a combat pilot, and the novel is rich in the technical details of aviation and warfare. Nine of Coonts’s subsequent thrillers star pilot Jake Grafton, the hero of The Flight of the Intruder, beginning with Final Flight (1988). Many of them have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Through the course of the books Jake Grafton flies combat missions in the Gulf War and later becomes a CIA agent. He matches up against Soviet spies, terrorists, and, in Under Siege (1990), Colombian drug lords. In The Intruders (1994), Coonts delivers a sequel to his wildly popular debut, returning to Grafton’s last missions as a pilot in the Vietnam War.
Aside from the Jake Grafton books, Coonts has penned a number of successful series and stand-alone titles. Many of his recent novels feature Tommy Carmellini, a Jake Grafton protégé. Coonts has also branched out into science fiction with Saucer (2002), and has cowritten a series of high-tech espionage thrillers starting with Deep Black (2003). His nonfiction writing includes The Cannibal Queen (1992), a travelogue of Coonts’s summer spent crisscrossing the continental U.S. in a WWII-era biplane, often with his teenage son David as a companion.
Coonts currently lives in Colorado. He has four children: Rachel, his oldest child, works as a paralegal; Lara, his second oldest, is married and has two kids of her own; David, a software engineer with Lockheed Martin, is now married with three children; and Tyler, Coonts’s youngest son, who works for a marketing firm in Las Vegas. Coonts still resides part-time in West Virginia on Deer Creek Farm, where he does much of his writing.