by Lee Child
The house and the yard had been maintained to a high standard, too. Reacher was no expert, but he could tell the difference between care and neglect. The yard had no lawn. It was covered with golden gravel, with shrubs and bushes pushing up through the stones. The driveway was paved with small riven slabs that seemed to be the same color as the gravel. The same slabs made a narrower winding walkway to the door. More slabs were set here and there in the gravel, like stepping-stones. The bushes and the shrubs were neatly pruned. Some of them had small flowers on their branches, all closed up for the night against the chill.
The house itself was a low one-story ranch maybe fifty years old. At the right-hand end was a single attached garage and at the left was a T-shaped bump-out that maybe housed the bedrooms, one front, one back. Reacher guessed the kitchen would be next to the garage and the living room would be between the kitchen and the bedrooms. There was a chimney. The siding and the roof tiles were not new, but they had been replaced within living memory and had settled and weathered into pleasant maturity.
A nice house.
An empty house.
It was dark and silent. Some drapes were halfway open, and some were all the way open. No light inside, except a tiny green glow in one window. Probably the kitchen, probably a microwave clock. Apart from that, no sign of life. Nothing. No sound, no subliminal hum, no vibe. Once upon a time Reacher had made his living storming darkened buildings, and more than once it had been a matter of life or death to decide whether they were occupied or not. He had developed a sense, and his sense right then was that Vaughan’s house was empty.
So where was David Robert?
At work, possibly. Maybe they both worked nights. Some couples chose to coordinate their schedules that way. Maybe David Robert was a nurse or a doctor or worked night construction on the Interstates. Maybe he was a journalist or a print worker, involved with newspapers. Maybe he was in the food trade, getting stuff ready for morning markets. Maybe he was a radio DJ, broadcasting through the night on a powerful AM station. Or maybe he was a long-haul trucker or an actor or a musician and was on the road for lengthy spells. Maybe for months at a time. Maybe he was a sailor or an airline pilot.
Maybe he was a state policeman.
Vaughan had asked: Don’t I look married?
No, Reacher thought. You really don’t. Not like some people do.
He found a leafy cross-street and walked back north to Second Street. Vaughan’s truck was still parked where he had left it. The diner’s lights were spilling out all over it. He walked another block and came out on First Street. There was no cloud in the sky. Plenty of moon. To his right there was silvery flatness all the way to Kansas. To his left the Rockies were faintly visible, dim and blue and bulky, with their north-facing snow channels lit up like ghostly blades, impossibly high. The town was still and silent and lonely. Not quite eleven-thirty in the evening, and no one was out and about. No traffic. No activity at all.
Reacher was no kind of an insomniac, but he didn’t feel like sleep. Too early. Too many questions. He walked a block on First Street and then headed south again, toward the diner. He was no kind of a social animal either, but right then he wanted to see people, and he figured the diner was the only place he was going to find any.
He found four. The college-girl waitress, an old guy in a seed cap eating alone at the counter, a middle-aged guy alone in a booth with a spread of tractor catalogs in front of him, and a frightened Hispanic girl alone in a booth with nothing.
Dark, not blonde, Vaughan had said. Sitting around and staring west like she’s waiting for word from Despair.
She was tiny. She was about eighteen or nineteen years old. She had long center-parted jet-black hair that framed a face that had a high forehead and enormous eyes. The eyes were brown and looked like twin pools of terror and tragedy. Under them were a small nose and a small mouth. Reacher guessed she had a pretty smile but didn’t use it often and certainly hadn’t used it for weeks. Her skin was mid-brown and her pose was absolutely still. Her hands were out of sight under the table but Reacher was sure they were clasped together in her lap. She was wearing a blue San Diego Padres warm-up jacket with a blue scoop-neck T-shirt under it. There was nothing on the table in front of her. No plate, no cup. But she hadn’t just arrived. The way she was settled meant she must have been sitting there for ten or fifteen minutes at least. Nobody could have gotten so still any faster.
Reacher stepped to the far side of the register and the college-girl waitress joined him there. Reacher bent his head, at an angle, universal body language for: I want to talk to you quietly. The waitress moved a little closer and bent her own head at a parallel angle, like a co-conspirator.
“That girl,” Reacher said. “Didn’t she order?”
The waitress whispered, “She has no money.”
“Ask her what she wants. I’ll pay for it.” He moved away to a different booth, where he could watch the girl without being obvious about it. He saw the waitress approach her, saw incomprehension on the girl’s face, then doubt, then refusal. The waitress stepped over to Reacher’s booth and whispered, “She says she can’t possibly accept.”
Reacher said, “Go back and tell her there are no strings attached. Tell her I’m not hitting on her. Tell her I don’t even want to talk to her. Tell her I’ve been broke and hungry, too.”
The waitress went back. This time the girl relented. She pointed to a couple of items on the menu. Reacher was sure they were the cheapest choices. The waitress went away to place the order and the girl turned a little in her seat and inclined her head in a courteous little nod, full of dignity, and the corners of her mouth softened like the beginnings of a smile. Then she turned back and went still again.
The waitress came straight back to Reacher and he asked for coffee. The waitress whispered, “Her check is going to be nine-fifty. Yours will be a dollar and a half.” Reacher peeled a ten and three ones off the roll in his pocket and slid them across the table. The waitress picked them up and thanked him for the tip and asked, “So when were you broke and hungry?”
“Never,” Reacher said. “My whole life I got three squares a day from the army and since then I’ve always had money in my pocket.”
“So you made that up just to make her feel better?”
“Sometimes people need convincing.”
“You’re a nice guy,” the waitress said.
“Not everyone agrees with that.”
“But some do.”
“Do they?”
“I hear things.”
“What things?”
But the girl just smiled at him and walked away.
From a safe distance Reacher watched the Hispanic girl eat a tuna melt sandwich and drink a chocolate milk shake. Good choices, nutritionally. Excellent value for his money. Protein, fats, carbs, some sugar. If she ate like that every day she would weigh two hundred pounds before she was thirty, but in dire need on the road it was wise to load up. After she was finished she dabbed her lips with her napkin and pushed her plate and her glass away and then sat there, just as quiet and still as before. The clock in Reacher’s head hit midnight and the clock on the diner’s wall followed it a minute later. The old guy in the seed cap crept out with a creaking arthritic gait and the tractor salesman gathered his paperwork together and called for another cup of coffee.
The Hispanic girl stayed put. Reacher had seen plenty of people doing what she was doing, in cafés and diners near bus depots and railroad stations. She was staying warm, saving energy, passing time. She was enduring. He watched her profile and figured she was a lot closer to Zeno’s ideal than he was. The unquestioning acceptance of destinies. She looked infinitely composed and patient.
The tractor salesman drained his final cup and gathered his stuff and left. The waitress backed away to a corner and picked up a paperback book. Reacher curled his fist around his mug to keep it warm.
The Hispanic girl stayed put.
Then she moved. She shifted sidewa
ys on her vinyl bench and stood up all in one smooth, delicate motion. She was extremely petite. Not more than five-nothing, not more than ninety-some pounds. Below the T-shirt she was wearing jeans and cheap shoes. She stood still and faced the door and then she turned toward Reacher’s booth. There was nothing in her face. Just fear and shyness and loneliness. She came to some kind of a decision and stepped forward and stood off about a yard and said, “You can talk to me if you really want to.”
Reacher shook his head. “I meant what I said.”
“Thank you for my dinner.” Her voice matched her physique. It was small and delicate. It was lightly accented, but English was probably her primary language. She was from southern California for sure. The Padres were probably her home team.
Reacher asked, “You OK for breakfast tomorrow?”
She was still for a moment while she fought her pride and then she shook her head.
Reacher asked, “Lunch? Dinner tomorrow?”
She shook her head.
“You OK at the motel?”
“That’s why. I paid for three nights. It took all my money.”
“You have to eat.”
The girl said nothing. Reacher thought, Ten bucks a meal is thirty bucks a day, three days makes ninety, plus ten for contingencies or phone calls makes a hundred. He peeled five ATM-fresh twenties off his roll and fanned them on the table. The girl said, “I can’t take your money. I couldn’t pay it back.”
“Pay it forward instead.”
The girl said nothing.
“You know what pay it forward means?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It means years from now you’ll be in a diner somewhere and you’ll see someone who needs a break. So you’ll help them out.”
The girl nodded.
“I could do that,” she said.
“So take the money.”
She stepped closer and picked up the bills.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me. Thank whoever helped me way back. And whoever helped him before that. And so on.”
“Have you ever been to Despair?”
“Four times in the last two days.”
“Did you see anyone there?”
“I saw lots of people.”
She moved closer still and put her slim hips against the end of his table. She hoisted a cheap vinyl purse and propped it on the laminate against her belly and unsnapped the clasp. She dipped her head and her hair fell forward. Her hands were small and brown and had no rings on the fingers or polish on the nails. She rooted around in her bag for a moment and came out with an envelope. It was stiff and nearly square. From a greeting card, probably. She opened the flap and pulled out a photograph. She held it neatly between her thumb and her forefinger and put her little fist on the table and adjusted its position until Reacher could see the picture at a comfortable angle.
“Did you see this man?” she asked.
It was another standard one-hour six-by-four color print. Glossy paper, no border. Shot on Fuji film, Reacher guessed. Back when it had mattered for forensic purposes he had gotten pretty good at recognizing film stock by its color biases. This print had strong greens, which was a Fuji characteristic. Kodak products favored the reds and the warmer tones. The camera had been a decent unit with a proper glass lens. There was plenty of detail. Focus was not quite perfect. The choice of aperture was not inspired. The depth of field was neither shallow nor deep. An old SLR, Reacher thought, therefore bought secondhand or borrowed from an older person. There was no retail market for decent film cameras anymore. Everyone had moved into digital technology. The print in the girl’s hand was clearly recent, but it looked like a much older product. It was a pleasant but unexceptional picture from an old SLR loaded with Fujicolor and wielded by an amateur.
He took the print from the girl and held it between his own thumb and forefinger. The bright greens in the photograph were in a background expanse of grass and a foreground expanse of T-shirt. The grass looked watered and forced and manicured and was probably in a city park somewhere. The T-shirt was a cheap cotton product being worn by a thin guy of about nineteen or twenty. The camera was looking up at him, as if the photograph was being taken by a much shorter person. The guy was posing quite formally and awkwardly. There was no spontaneity in his stance. Maybe repeated fumbles with the camera’s controls had required him to hold his position a little too long. His smile was genuine but a little frozen. He had white teeth in a brown face. He looked young, and friendly, and amiable, and fun to be around, and completely harmless.
Not thin, exactly.
He looked lean and wiry.
Not short, not tall. About average, in terms of height.
He looked to be about five feet eight.
He looked to weigh about a hundred and forty pounds.
He was Hispanic, but as much Mayan or Aztec as Spanish. There was plenty of pure Indian blood in him. That was for sure. He had shiny black hair, not brushed, a little tousled, neither long nor short. Maybe an inch and a half or two inches, with a clear tendency to wave.
He had prominent cheekbones.
He was casually dressed, and casually turned out.
He hadn’t shaved.
His chin and his upper lip were rough with black stubble.
His cheeks and his throat, not so much.
Young.
Not much more than a boy.
The girl asked, “Did you see him?”
Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes.”
“Maria.”
“What’s his name?”
“Raphael Ramirez.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty.”
“Did you take this picture?”
“Yes.”
“In a park in San Diego?”
“Yes.”
“With your dad’s camera?”
“My uncle’s,” the girl said. “How did you know?”
Reacher didn’t answer. He looked again at Raphael Ramirez in the photograph. Maria’s boyfriend. Twenty years old. Five-eight, one-forty. The build. The hair, the cheekbones, the stubble.
The girl asked, “Did you see him?”
Reacher shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t see him.”
34
The girl left the diner. Reacher watched her go. He thought that an offer to walk her back to the motel might be misinterpreted, as if he was after something more for his hundred bucks than a feel-good glow. And she was in no kind of danger, anyway. Hope seemed to be a safe enough place. Unlikely to be packs of malefactors roaming the streets, mainly because nobody was roaming the streets. It was the middle of the night in a quiet, decent place in the middle of nowhere. So Reacher let her walk away and sat alone in his booth and roused the college girl from her book and had her bring him more coffee.
“You’ll never sleep,” she said.
“How often does Officer Vaughan swing by during the night?” he asked.
The girl smiled the same smile she had used before, right after she said I hear things.
“At least once,” she said, and smiled again.
He said, “She’s married.”
She said, “I know.” She took the flask away and headed back to her book and left him with a steaming mug. He dipped his head and inhaled the smell. When he looked up again he saw Vaughan’s cruiser glide by outside. She slowed, as if she was noting that her truck was back. But she didn’t stop. She slid right by the diner’s window and drove on down Second Street.
Reacher left the diner at one o’clock in the morning and walked back to the motel. The moon was still out. The town was still quiet. The motel office had a low light burning. The rooms were all dark. He sat down in the plastic lawn chair outside his door and stretched his legs straight out and put his hands behind his head and listened to the silence, eyes
wide open, staring into the moonlight.
It didn’t work. He didn’t relax.
You’ll never sleep, the waitress had said.
But not because of the coffee, he thought.
He got up again and walked away. Straight back to the diner. There were no customers. The waitress was reading her book. Reacher stepped straight to the register and took Vaughan’s truck keys off the counter. The waitress looked up but didn’t speak. Reacher stepped back to the door and caught it before it closed. Headed out across the sidewalk to the truck. Unlocked it, got in, started it up. Five minutes later he thumped over the line and was back in Despair.
The first twelve miles of empty road were predictably quiet. The town was quiet, too. Reacher slowed at the gas station and coasted down to twenty miles an hour and took a good look around. Main Street was deserted and silent. No cars on the streets, nobody on the sidewalks. The police station was dark. The rooming house was dark. The bar was closed up and shuttered. The hotel was just a blank façade, with a closed street door and a dozen dark windows. The church was empty and silent. The green grounding strap from the lightning rod was stained gray by the moonlight.
He drove on until the street petered out into half-colonized scrubland. He pulled a wide circle on the packed sand and stopped and idled with the whole town laid out north of him. It was lit up silver by the moon. It was just crouching there, silent and deserted and insignificant in the vastness.
He threaded his way back to Main Street. Turned left and headed onward, west, toward the metal plant.
The plant was shut down and dark. The wall around it glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. The personnel gate was closed. The acres of parking were deserted. Reacher followed the wall and steered the truck left and right until its weak low beams picked up the Tahoes’ tracks. He followed their giant figure 8, all the way around the plant and the residential compound. The plantings were black and massive. The windsocks hung limp in the air. The plant’s vehicle gate was shut. Reacher drove slowly past it and then bumped up across the truck road and drove another quarter-turn through the dirt and stopped where the figure 8’s two loops met, in the throat between the plant’s metal wall and the residential compound’s fieldstone wall. He shut off his lights and shut down the engine and rolled down the windows and waited.