by Lee Child
He came around and raised the trunk lid all the way.
“Garbage disposal,” he said.
There was a military-issue body bag in the trunk. Heavy black rubber, zipped all along its length. I could see by the way it was folded into the space that it held a small person. A woman, probably.
“Who is it?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“The government bitch,” he said. “Took us long enough, but we got her in the end.”
He leaned in and grabbed his end of the bag. Clamped both corners in his hands. Waited for me. I just stood there, feeling the rain against my neck, listening to it snapping and popping against the rubber.
“Got to catch the tide,” he said. “It’s going to turn.”
I leaned down and took hold of the corners at my end. We glanced at each other to coordinate our efforts and heaved the bag up and out. It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward, and Harley was not strong. We carried it a few steps toward the shore.
“Put it down,” I said.
“Why?”
“I want to see,” I said.
Harley just stood there.
“I don’t think you do,” he said.
“Put it down,” I said again.
He hesitated a second longer and then we squatted together and laid the bag on the rocks. The body settled inside with its back arched upward. I stayed squatted down and duck-walked around to the head. Found the zipper tag and pulled.
“Just look at the face,” Harley said. “That part’s not too bad.”
I looked. It was very bad. She had died in extreme agony. That was clear. Her face was blasted with pain. It was still twisted into the shape of her final ghastly scream.
But it wasn’t Teresa Daniel.
It was Beck’s maid.
CHAPTER 9
I inched the zipper down a little more until I saw the same mutilation I had seen ten years previously. Then I stopped. Turned my head into the rain and closed my eyes. The water on my face felt like tears.
“Let’s get on with it,” Harley said.
I opened my eyes. Stared at the waves. Pulled the zipper back up without looking anymore. Stood slowly and stepped around to the foot of the bag. Harley waited. Then we each grasped our corners and lifted. Carried the burden over the rocks. He led me south and east, way out to a place on the shore where two granite shelves met. There was a steep V-shaped cleft between them. It was half-full of moving water.
“Wait until after the next big wave,” Harley said.
It came booming in and we both ducked our heads away from the spray. The cleft filled to the top and the tide ran up over the rocks and almost reached our shoes. Then it pulled away again and the cleft emptied out. Gravel rattled and drained. The surface of the sea was laced with dull gray foam and pitted by the rain.
“OK, put it down,” Harley said. He was out of breath. “Hold your end.”
We laid the bag down so the head end was hanging out over the granite shelf and into the cleft. The zipper faced upward. The body was on its back. I held both corners at the foot. The rain plastered my hair to my head and ran into my eyes. It stung. Harley squatted and straddled the bag and humped the head end farther out into space. I went with him, inch by inch, small steps on the slippery rocks. The next wave came in and eddied under the bag. It floated it up a little. Harley used the temporary buoyancy to slide it a little farther into the sea. I moved with it. The wave receded. The cleft drained again. The bag drooped down. The rain thrashed against the stiff rubber. It battered our backs. It was deathly cold.
Harley used the next five waves to ease the bag out more and more until it was hanging right down into the cleft. I was left holding empty rubber. Gravity had jammed the body tight up against the top of the bag. Harley waited and looked out to sea and then ducked low and pulled the zipper all the way down. Scrambled back fast and took a corner from me. Held tight. The seventh wave came booming in. We were soaked with its spray. The cleft filled and the bag filled and then the big wave receded and sucked the body right out of the bag. It floated motionless for a split second and then the undertow caught it and took it away. It went straight down, into the depths. I saw long fair hair streaming in the water and pale skin flashing green and gray and then it was gone. The cleft foamed red as it drained.
“Hell of a riptide here,” Harley said.
I said nothing.
“The undertow takes them right out,” he said. “We never had one come back, anyways. It pulls them a mile or two, going down all the way. Then there’s sharks out there, I guess. They cruise the coast here. Plus all kinds of other creatures. You know, crabs, suckerfish, things like that.”
I said nothing.
“Never had one come back,” he said again.
I glanced at him and he smiled at me. His mouth was like a caved-in hole above the goatee. He had rotten yellow stumps for teeth. I glanced away again. The next wave came in. It was only a small one, but when it receded the cleft was washed clean. It was like nothing had happened. Like nothing had ever been there. Harley stood up awkwardly and zipped the empty bag. Pink water sluiced out of it and ran over the rocks. He started rolling it up. I glanced back at the house. Beck was standing in the kitchen doorway, alone, watching us.
We went back toward the house, soaked with rain and salt water. Beck ducked back into the kitchen. We followed him in. Harley hung around on the edge of the room, like he felt he shouldn’t be there.
“She was a federal agent?” I said.
“No question,” Beck said.
His sports bag was on the table, in the center, prominent, like a prosecution exhibit in a courtroom. He zipped it open and rummaged inside.
“Check this out,” he said.
He lifted a bundle onto the table. Something wrapped in a damp dirty oil-stained rag the size of a hand towel. He unfolded it and took out Duffy’s Glock 19.
“This all was hidden in the car we let her use,” he said.
“The Saab?” I said, because I had to say something.
He nodded. “In the well where the spare tire is. Under the trunk floor.” He laid the Glock on the table. Took the two spare magazines out of the rag and laid them next to the gun. Then he put the bent bradawl next to them, and the sharpened chisel. And Angel Doll’s keyring.
I couldn’t breathe.
“The bradawl is a lock pick, I guess,” Beck said.
“How does this prove she was federal?” I asked.
He picked up the Glock again and turned it around and pointed to the right-hand side of the slide.
“Serial number,” he said. “We checked with Glock in Austria. By computer. We have access to that kind of thing. This particular gun was sold to the United States government about a year ago. Part of a big order for the law enforcement agencies, 17s for the male agents and 19s for the women. So that’s how we know she was federal.”
I stared at the serial number. “Did she deny it?”
He nodded. “Of course she did. She said she just found it. Gave us a big song and dance. She blamed you, actually. Said it was your stuff. But then, they always deny it, don’t they? They’re trained to, I guess.”
I looked away. Stared through the window at the sea. Why had she picked it all up? Why hadn’t she just left it there? Was it some kind of a housekeeping instinct? She didn’t want it to get wet? Or what?
“You look upset,” Beck said.
And how did she even find it? Why would she even be looking?
“You look upset,” he said again.
I was beyond upset. She had died in agony. And I had done it to her. She probably thought she was doing me a favor. By keeping my stuff dry. By keeping it from rusting. She was just a dumb naive kid from Ireland, trying to help me out. And I had killed her, as surely as if I had stood there and butchered her myself.
“I’m responsible for security,” I said. “I should have suspected her.”
“You’re responsible only since last night,” Beck said. “
So don’t beat yourself up over it. You haven’t even got your feet under the table yet. It was Duke who should have made her.”
“But I never would have suspected her,” I said. “I thought she was just the maid.”
“Hey, me too,” he said. “Duke, also.”
I looked away again. Stared at the sea. It was gray and heaving. I didn’t really understand. She found it. But why would she hide it so well?
“This is the clincher,” Beck said.
I looked back in time to see him lifting a pair of shoes out of the bag. They were big square clunky items, black, the shoes she had been wearing every single time I had seen her.
“Look at this,” he said.
He turned the right shoe over and pulled a pin out of the heel with his fingernails. Then he swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up. He shook it. A small black plastic rectangle clattered out on the table. It landed facedown. He turned it over.
It was a wireless e-mail device, exactly identical to my own.
He passed me the shoe. I took it. Stared at it, blankly. It was a woman’s size six. Made for a small foot. But it had a wide bulbous toe, and therefore a wide thick heel to balance it visually. Some kind of a clumsy fashion statement. The heel had a rectangular cavity carved out of it. Identical to mine. It had been done neatly. It had been done with patience. But not by a machine. It showed the same faint tool marks that mine did. I pictured some guy in a lab somewhere, a line of shoes on a bench in front of him, the smell of new leather, a small arc of woodcarving tools laid out in front of him, curls and slivers of rubber accumulating on the floor around him as he labored. Most government work is surprisingly low-tech. It’s not all exploding ballpoint pens and cameras built into watches. A trip to the mall to buy a commercial e-mail device and a pair of plain shoes is about as cutting-edge as most of it gets.
“What are you thinking?” Beck asked.
I was thinking about how I was feeling. I was on a roller-coaster. She was still dead, but I hadn’t killed her anymore. The government computers had killed her again. So I was relieved, personally. But I was more than a little angry, too. Like, what the hell was Duffy doing? What the hell was she playing at? It was an absolute rule of procedure that you never put two or more people undercover in the same location unless they’re aware of each other. That was absolutely basic. She had told me about Teresa Daniel. So why the hell hadn’t she told me about this other woman?
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“The battery is dead,” he said. He was holding the device in both hands. Using both thumbs on it, like a video game. “It doesn’t work, anyway.”
He passed it to me. I put the shoe down and took it from him. Pressed the familiar power button. But the screen stayed dead.
“How long was she here?” I asked.
“Eight weeks,” Beck said. “It’s hard for us to keep domestic staff. It’s lonely here. And there’s Paulie, you know. And Duke wasn’t a very hospitable guy, either.”
“I guess eight weeks would be a long time for a battery to last.”
“What would be their procedure now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was never federal.”
“In general,” he said. “You must have seen stuff like this.”
I shrugged.
“I guess they’d have expected it,” I said. “Communications are always the first things to get screwed up. She drops off the radar, they wouldn’t worry right away. They’d have no choice but to leave her in the field. I mean, they can’t contact her to order her home, can they? So I guess they would trust her to get the battery charged up again, as soon as she could.” I turned the unit on its edge and pointed to the little socket on the bottom. “Looks like it needs a cell phone charger, something like that.”
“Would they send people after her?”
“Eventually,” I said. “I guess.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”
“We plan to deny she was ever here. Deny we ever saw her. There’s no evidence she was ever here.”
“You better clean her room real good,” I said. “There’ll be fingerprints and hair and DNA all over the place.”
“She was recommended to us,” he said. “We don’t advertise in the paper or anything. Some guys we know in Boston put her in touch.”
He glanced at me. I thought: Some guys in Boston begging for a plea bargain, helping the government any which way they could. I nodded.
“Tricky,” I said. “Because what does that say about them?”
He nodded back sourly. He agreed with me. He knew what I was saying. He picked up the big bunch of keys from where they were lying next to the chisel.
“I think these are Angel Doll’s,” he said.
I said nothing.
“So it’s a three-way nightmare,” he said. “We can tie Doll to the Hartford crew, and we can tie our Boston friends to the feds. Now we can tie Doll to the feds, too. Because he gave his keys to the undercover bitch. Which means the Hartford crew must be in bed with the feds as well. Doll’s dead, thanks to Duke, but I’ve still got Hartford, Boston, and the government on my back. I’m going to need you, Reacher.”
I glanced at Harley. He was looking out the window at the rain.
“Was it just Doll?” I asked.
Beck nodded. “I’ve been through all of that. I’m satisfied. It was just Doll. The rest are solid. They’re still with me. They were very apologetic about Doll.”
“OK,” I said.
There was silence for a long moment. Then Beck rewrapped my stash in its rag and dumped it back in his bag. He threw the dead e-mail device in after it and piled the maid’s shoes on top. They looked sad and empty and forlorn.
“I’ve learned one thing,” he said. “I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.”
I bet my life on it right there and then. I kept my own shoes on. I got back up to Duke’s room and checked his closet. There were four pairs in there. Nothing I would have picked out for myself in a store, but they looked reasonable and they were close to the right size. But I left them there. To show up so soon in different shoes would raise a red flag. And if I was going to ditch mine, I was going to ditch them properly. No point leaving them in my room for casual inspection. I would have to get them out of the house. And there was no easy way of doing that right then. Not after the scene in the kitchen. I couldn’t just walk downstairs with them in my hands. What was I supposed to say? What, these? Oh, they’re the shoes I was wearing when I arrived. I’m just going out to throw them in the ocean. Like I was suddenly bored with them? So I kept them on.
And I still needed them, anyway. I was tempted, but I wasn’t ready to cut Duffy out. Not just yet. I locked myself in Duke’s bathroom and took the e-mail device out. It was an eerie feeling. I hit power and the screen came up with a message: We need to meet. I hit reply and sent: You bet your ass we do. Then I turned the unit off and nailed it back into my heel and went down to the kitchen again.
“Go with Harley,” Beck told me. “You need to bring the Saab back.”
The cook wasn’t there. The counters were neat and clean. They had been scrubbed. The stove was cold. It felt like there should be a Closed sign hanging on the door.
“What about lunch?” I said.
“You hungry?”
I thought back to the way the sea had swelled the bag and claimed the body. Saw the hair under the water, fluid and infinitely fine. Saw the blood rinsing away, pink and diluted. I wasn’t hungry.
“Starving,” I said.
Beck smiled sheepishly. “You’re one cold son of a bitch, Reacher.”
“I’ve seen dead people before. I expect to see them again.”
He nodded. “The cook is off duty. Eat out, OK?”
“I don’t have any money.”
He put his hand in his pants pocket and came out with a wad of bills. S
tarted to count them out and then just shrugged and gave it up and handed the whole lot to me. It must have been close to a thousand dollars.
“Walking-around money,” he said. “We’ll do the salary thing later.”
I put the cash in my pocket.
“Harley is waiting in the car,” he said.
I went outside and pulled my coat collar up. The wind was easing. The rain was reverting to vertical. The Lincoln was still there at the corner of the house. The trunk lid was closed. Harley was drumming his thumbs on the wheel. I slid into the passenger seat and buzzed it backward to get some legroom. He fired up the engine and set the wipers going and took off. We had to wait while Paulie unchained the gate. Harley fiddled with the heater and set it on high. Our clothes were wet and the windows were steaming up. Paulie was slow. Harley started drumming again.
“You two work for the same guy?” I asked him.
“Me and Paulie?” he said. “Sure.”
“Who is he?”
“Beck didn’t tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“Then I won’t either, I guess.”
“Hard for me to do my job without information,” I said.
“That’s your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”
He gave me his yellow gappy smile again. I figured if I hit him hard enough my fist would take out all the little stumps and end up somewhere in the back of his scrawny throat. But I didn’t hit him. Paulie got the chain loose and swung the gate back. Harley took off immediately and squeezed through with about an inch of clearance on each side. I settled back in my seat. Harley clicked the headlights on and accelerated hard and rooster tails of spray kicked up behind us. We drove west, because there was no choice for the first twelve miles. Then we turned north on Route One, away from where Elizabeth Beck had taken me, away from Old Orchard Beach and Saco, toward Portland. I had no view of anything because the weather was so dismal. I could barely see the tail lights on the traffic ahead of us. Harley didn’t speak. Just rocked back and forth in the driver’s seat and drummed his thumbs on the wheel and drove. He wasn’t a smooth driver. He was always either on the gas or the brake. We sped up, slowed down, sped up, slowed down. It was a long twenty miles.