by Lee Child
46
Reacher opened his eyes in a desperate hooded squint and saw Thurman walking toward him. He turned and saw the plant foreman heading in from a different direction. He turned again and saw the giant with the three-foot wrench blocking his path to the gate.
He stood still and waited, blinking, squinting, the muscles around his eyes hurting from clamping so hard. Thurman stopped ten feet away from him and then walked on and came close and took up a position alongside him, nearly shoulder to shoulder, as if they were two old buddies standing together, surveying a happy scene.
Thurman said, “I thought our paths were not going to cross again.”
Reacher said, “I can’t be responsible for what you think.”
“Did you set our police station on fire?”
“You’ve got a human wall all around the town. How could I have gotten through?”
“Why are you here again?”
Reacher paused a beat. Said, “I’m thinking about leaving the state.” Which was permanently true. Then he said, “Before I go, I thought I’d drop by the infirmary and pay my respects to my former opponents. Tell them no hard feelings.”
Thurman said, “I think the hard feelings are all on the other side.”
“Then they can tell me no hard feelings. Clearing the air is always good for a person’s mental well-being.”
“I can’t permit a visit to the infirmary. Not at this hour.”
“You can’t prevent one.”
“I’m asking you to leave the premises.”
“And I’m denying your request.”
“There’s only one patient here at the moment. The others are all home now, on bed rest.”
“Which one is here?”
“Underwood.”
“Which one is Underwood?”
“The senior deputy. You left him in a sorry state.”
“He was sick already.”
“You need to leave now.”
Reacher smiled. “That should be your town motto. It’s all I ever hear. Like New Hampshire, live free or die. It should be Despair, you need to leave now.”
Thurman said, “I’m not joking.”
“You are,” Reacher said. “You’re a fat old man, telling me to leave. That’s pretty funny.”
“I’m not alone here.”
Reacher turned and checked the foreman. He was standing ten feet away, empty hands by his sides, tension in his shoulders. Reacher turned again and glanced at the giant. He was twenty feet away, holding the wrench in his right fist, resting its weight in his left palm.
Reacher said, “You’ve got an office boy and a broken-down old jock with a big spanner. I’m not impressed.”
“Maybe they have guns.”
“They don’t. They’d have them out already. No one waits to pull a gun.”
“They could still do you considerable harm.”
“I doubt it. The first eight you sent didn’t do much.”
“Are you really willing to try?”
“Are you? If it goes the wrong way, then you’re definitely alone with me. And with your conscience. I’m here to visit the sick, and you want to have me beaten up? What kind of a Christian are you?”
“God guides my hand.”
“In the direction you want to go anyway. I’d be more impressed if you picked up a message telling you to sell up and give all your money to the poor and go to Denver to care for the homeless.”
Thurman said nothing.
Reacher said, “I’m going to the infirmary now. You are, too. Your choice whether you walk there or I carry you there in a bucket.”
Thurman’s shoulders slumped in an all-purpose sigh and shrug and he raised a palm to his two guys, one after the other, like he was telling a couple of dogs to stay. Then he set off walking, toward the line of cabins. Reacher walked at his side. They passed the security office, and Thurman’s own office, and the three other offices Reacher had seen before on his tour, the one marked Operations, the one marked Purchasing, the last marked Invoicing. They passed the first white-painted unit and stopped outside the second. Thurman heaved himself up the short flight of steps and opened the door. He went inside and Reacher followed.
It was a real sick bay. White walls, white linoleum floor, the smell of antiseptic, soft nightlights burning. There were sinks with lever taps, and medicine cabinets, and blood pressure cuffs, and sharp disposal cans on the walls. There was a rolling cart with a kidney-shaped steel dish on it. A stethoscope was curled in the dish.
There were four hospital cots. Three were empty, one was occupied, by the big deputy. He looked pretty bad. Pale, inert, listless. He looked smaller than before. His hair looked thinner. His eyes were open, dull and unfocused. His breathing was shallow and irregular. There was a medical chart clipped to the rail at the foot of his bed. Reacher used his thumb and tilted it horizontal and scanned it. Neat handwriting. Professional notations. The guy had a whole lot of things wrong with him. He had fever, fatigue, weakness, breathlessness, headaches, rashes, blisters, sores, chronic nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and signs of complex internal problems. Reacher dropped the chart back into position and asked, “You have a doctor working here?”
Thurman said, “A trained paramedic.”
“Is that enough?”
“Usually.”
“For this guy?”
“We’re doing the best we can.”
Reacher stepped alongside the bed and looked down. The guy’s skin was yellow. Jaundice, or the nightlight reflected off the walls. Reacher asked him, “Can you talk?”
Thurman said, “He’s not very coherent. But we’re hoping he’ll get better.”
The big deputy rolled his head from one side to the other. Tried to speak, but got hung up with a dry tongue in a dry mouth. He smacked his lips and breathed hard and started again. He looked straight up at Reacher and his eyes focused and glittered and he said, “The …” And then he paused for breath and blinked and started over, apparently with a new thought. A new subject. He said, haltingly, “You did this to me.”
“Not entirely,” Reacher said.
The guy rolled his head again, away and back, and gasped once, and said, “No, the …” And then he stopped again, fighting for breath, his voice reduced to a meaningless rasp. Thurman grabbed Reacher’s elbow and pulled him back and said, “We need to leave now. We’re tiring him.”
Reacher said, “He needs to be in a proper hospital.”
“That’s the paramedic’s decision. I trust my people. I hire the best talent I can find.”
“Did this guy work with TCE?”
Thurman paused a beat. “What do you know about TCE?”
“A little. It’s a poison.”
“No, it’s a degreaser. It’s a standard industrial product.”
“Whatever. Did this guy work with it?”
“No. And those that do are well protected.”
“So what’s wrong with him?”
“You should know. Like he said, you did this to him.”
“You don’t get symptoms like these from a fistfight.”
“I heard it was more than a fistfight. Do you ever stop to reflect on the damage you cause? Maybe you ruptured something inside of him. His spleen, perhaps.”
Reacher closed his eyes. Saw the barroom again, the dim light, the tense silent people, the air thick with raised dust and the smell of fear and conflict. He stepped in and jabbed hard and caught the guy low down in the side, below the ribs, above the waist, two hundred and fifty pounds of weight punched through the blunt end of a chair leg into nothing but soft tissue. He opened his eyes again and said, “All the more reason to get him checked out properly.”
Thurman nodded. “I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow. If that’s what it takes, so that you can move on with a clear conscience.”
“My conscience is already clear,” Reacher said. “If people leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, what comes at them is their problem
.”
“Even if you overreact?”
“Compared to what? There were six of them. What were they going to do to me? Pat me on the cheek and send me on my way?”
“I don’t know what their intentions were.”
“You do,” Reacher said. “Their intentions were your intentions. They were acting on your instructions.”
“And I was acting on the instructions of a higher authority.”
“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“You should join us. Come the Rapture, you don’t want to be left behind.”
“The Rapture?”
“People like me ascend to heaven. People like you stay here without us.”
“Works for me,” Reacher said. “Bring it on.”
Thurman didn’t answer that. Reacher took a last look at the guy in the bed and then stepped away and walked out the door, down the steps, back to the blazing arena. The foreman and the guy with the wrench stood where they had been before. They hadn’t moved at all. Reacher heard Thurman close the infirmary door and clatter down the steps behind him. He moved on and felt Thurman follow him toward the gate. The guy with the wrench was looking beyond Reacher’s shoulder, at Thurman, waiting for a sign, maybe hoping for a sign, slapping the free end of the wrench against his palm.
Reacher changed direction.
Headed straight for the guy.
He stopped a yard away and stood directly face-to-face and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re in my way.”
The guy glanced in Thurman’s direction and waited. Reacher said, “Have a little self-respect. You don’t owe that old fool anything.”
The guy said, “I don’t?”
“Not a thing,” Reacher said. “None of you does. He owes you. You all should wise up and take over. Organize. Have a revolution. You could lead it.”
The guy said, “I don’t think so.”
Thurman called out, “Are you leaving now, Mr. Reacher?”
“Yes,” Reacher said.
“Are you ever coming back?”
“No,” Reacher lied. “I’m done here.”
“Do I have your word?”
“You heard me.”
The giant glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder again, hope in his eyes. But Thurman must have shaken his head or given some other kind of a negative instruction, because the guy just paused a beat and then stepped aside, one long sideways pace. Reacher walked on, back to the sick deputy’s truck. It was where he had left it, with all its windows intact.
47
From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.
He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.
Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.
She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.
“Whose truck?” she asked.
“The senior deputy’s,” Reacher said. “His name is Underwood. He’s very sick.”
“With what?”
“He said I did it to him.”
“Did you?”
“I gave a sick man a couple of contusions, which I don’t feel great about. But I didn’t give him diarrhea or blisters or sores and I didn’t make his hair fall out.”
“So is it TCE?”
“Thurman said not.”
“You believe him?”
“Not necessarily.”
Vaughan held up a plastic bottle of water.
Reacher said, “I’m not thirsty.”
“Good,” Vaughan said. “This is a sample. Tap water, from my kitchen. I called a friend of a friend of David’s. He knows a guy who works at the state lab in Colorado Springs. He told me to take this in for testing. And to find out how much TCE Thurman actually uses.”
“The tank holds five thousand gallons.”
“But how often does it get used up and refilled?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can we find out?”
“There’s a purchasing office, probably full of paperwork.”
“Can we get in there?”
“Maybe.”
Vaughan said, “Go dump that truck back over the line. I’ll drive you to town. We’ll take a doughnut break.”
So Reacher steered the truck backward into the sand and left it there, keys in. Way behind him he could see a faint red glow on the horizon. Despair was still on fire. He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked forward and crossed the line again and climbed in next to Vaughan.
“You smell of cigarettes,” she said.
“I found one,” he said. “I smoked a half-inch, for old times’ sake.”
“They give you cancer, too.”
“I heard that. You believe it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do, absolutely.”
She took off east, at a moderate speed, one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap. He asked her, “How’s your day going?”
“A gum wrapper blew across the street in front of me. Right there in my headlights. Violation of the anti-littering ordinance. That’s about as exciting as it gets in Hope.”
“Did you call Denver? About Maria?”
She nodded.
“The old man picked her up,” she said. “By the hardware store. He confirmed her name. He knew a lot about her. They talked for half an hour.”
“Half an hour? How? It’s less than a twenty-minute drive.”
“He didn’t let her out in Despair. She wanted to go to the MP base.”
They got to the diner at twenty minutes past midnight. The college-girl waitress was on duty. She smiled when she saw them walk in together, as if some kind of a long-delayed but pleasant inevitability had finally taken place. She looked to be about twenty years old, but she was grinning away like a smug old matchmaker from an ancient village. Reacher felt like there was a secret he wasn’t privy to. He wasn’t sure that Vaughan understood it either.
They sat opposite each other in the back booth. They didn’t order doughnuts. Reacher ordered coffee and Vaughan ordered juice, a blend of three exotic fruits, none of which Reacher had ever encountered before.
“You’re very healthy,” he said.
“I try.”
“Is your husband in the hospital? With cancer, from smoking?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”
Their drinks arrived and they sipp
ed them in silence for a moment and then Reacher asked, “Did the old guy know why Maria wanted to go to the MPs?”
“She didn’t tell him. But it’s a weird destination, isn’t it?”
“Very,” Reacher said. “It’s an active-service forward operating base. Visitors wouldn’t be permitted. Not even if she knew one of the grunts. Not even if one of the grunts was her brother or her sister.”
“Combat MPs use women grunts?”
“Plenty.”
“So maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she was reporting back on duty, after furlough.”
“Then why would she have booked two more nights in the motel and left all her stuff there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was just checking something.”
“She’s too small for a combat MP.”
“They have a minimum size?”
“The army always has had, overall. These days, I’m not sure what it is. But even if she squeezed in, they’d put her somewhere else, covertly.”
“You sure?”
“No question. Plus she was too quiet and timid. She wasn’t military.”
“So what did she want from the MPs? And why isn’t she back yet?”
“Did the old guy actually see her get in?”
“Sure,” Vaughan said. “He waited, like an old-fashioned gentleman.”
“Therefore a better question would be, if they let her in, what did they want from her?”
Vaughan said, “Something to do with espionage.”
Reacher shook his head. “I was wrong about that. They’re not worried about espionage. They’d have the plant buttoned up, east and west, probably with a presence inside, or at least on the gates.”
“So why are they there?”
“They’re guarding the truck route. Which means they’re worried about theft, of something that would need a truck to haul away. Something heavy, too heavy for a regular car.”
“Something too heavy for a small plane, then.”
Reacher nodded. “But that plane is involved somehow. This morning I was barging around and therefore they had to shut down the secret operation for a spell, and tonight the plane didn’t fly. I didn’t hear it, and I found it later, right there in its hangar.”
“You think it only flies when they’ve been working on the military stuff?”