Free Fire - C. J. Box [143]
Instead, he went to work. He had a hammer and a pocketful of nails in the front of his hooded sweatshirt. And a spatula.
As he secured the loose shingles he could see his next-door neighbor, Ed Nedny, come out of his front door and stand on his porch looking pensive. Nedny was a retired town administrator who now spent his time working on his immaculate lawn, tendinghis large and productive garden, keeping up his perfectly well-appointed home, and washing, waxing, and servicing his three vehicles—a vintage Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee, and the black Lincoln Town Car that rarely ventured out of the garage. Joe had seen Nedny the night before when he came home applying Armor All to the whitewall tires of the Town Car under a trouble light. Although his neighbor didn’t stare outrightat Joe, he was there to observe. To comment. To offer neighborly advice. Nedny wore a watch cap and heavy sweater, and drew serenely on his pipe, letting a fragrant cloud of the smoke waft upward toward Joe on the roof as if he sent it there.
Joe tapped a nail into a shingle to set it, then drove it home with two hard blows.
“Hey, Joe,” Ed called.
“Ed.”
“Fixing your roof?”
Joe passed a beat, discarded a sarcastic answer, and said. “Yup.”
Which gave Ed pause as well, and made him look down at his feet for a few long, contemplative moments. Ed, Joe had discerned,liked to be observed while contemplating. Joe didn’t comply.
“You know,” Ed said, finally, “a fellow can’t actually fix T-Lock shingles. It’s like trying to fix a car radio without taking it out of the dash. It just can’t be done properly.”
Joe took in a deep and waited. He dug another nail out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.
“Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try or that you’re washingyour time. I’m not saying that at all,” Ed said, chuckling in the way a master chuckles at a hapless apprentice, Joe thought. The way his mentor-gone-bad Vern Dunnegan used to chuckle at him.
“Then what are you saying?” Joe asked.
“It’s just that you can’t really fix shingles in a little patch and expect them to hold,” Ed said. “The shingles overlap like this,” he held his hands out and placed one on top of another. “You can’t fix a shingle properly without taking the top one off first. And because they overlap, you need to take the one off that. What I’m saying, Joe, is that with T-Lock shingles you’ve got to lay a whole new set of shingles on top or strip the whole roof and start over so they seat properly. You can’t just fix a section. You’ve got to fix it all. If I was you, I’d call your insurance man and have him come out and look at it. That way, you can get got a whole new roof.”
“What if I don’t want a whole new roof?” Joe asked.
Ed shrugged affably, “That’s your call, of course. It’s your roof. I’m not trying to make you do anything. But if you look at the other roofs on the block—at my roof—you’ll see we have a certain standard. None of us have patches where you can see a bunch of nail heads. Plus, it might leak. Then you’ve got ceiling damage. You don’t want that, do you?”
“No,” Joe said defensively.
“Nobody wants that,” Ed said, nothing, puffing. Then lookingup at Joe and squinting through a cloud of smoke, “Are you aware your ladder fell down?”
“Yup,” Joe answered quickly.
“Do you want me to prop the ladder back up so you can come down?”
“That’s not necessary,” Joe said, “I need to clean the gutters first.”
“I was wondering when you were going to get to that,” Ed said.
Joe grunted.
“Are you going to get started on your fence then too?”
“Ed . . .”
“Just trying to help,” Ed said, waving his pipe, “just being neighborly.”
Joe said