by Lee Child
That got his attention.
The guy rocked back and shook his head and popped a straight right of his own, which Reacher had expected and was ready for. He leaned left and let the fat fist buzz past his ear. Smarter and faster. Then the guy was all tangled up in the follow-through and could do nothing but step back and crouch and start over. Which he got well into doing.
Until he heard the sound of a motorbike. Which was like the bell at the end of a round to him. Like Pavlov’s dog. He hesitated for a fatal split second.
Reacher hesitated, too. But for a shorter time. Purely because of geometry. He was facing up the street, toward the four-way junction. His eyes flicked up and he saw a bike heading north to south, keeping straight on the main road, passing by, not turning in. He processed that information and deleted it even before the bike was gone, just as soon as its speed and position had made a turn impossible. Whereupon his gaze came straight back to his opponent.
Who was at a geometric disadvantage. He was facing down the street, toward the sea. He had nothing to go on but sound. And the sound was loud and diffuse. Not specific. No spatial cues. Just an echoing roar. So like every other animal on earth with better sight than hearing, the guy yielded to a basic instinct. He started to turn his head to look behind him. Irresistible. Then a split second later the auditory input went unambiguous when the roar got trapped behind buildings, and the guy came to his conclusion and stopped his move and started to turn his head back again.
But by then it was far too late. By then Reacher’s left hook was halfway through its travel. It was scything in, hard and fast, every sinew and ropy muscle in his greyhound’s frame unspooling in perfect coordination, with just one aim in sight: to land that big left fist on the guy’s neck.
Total success. The blow landed right on the boil, crushing it, crushing flesh, compressing bone, and the guy went down like he had run full speed into a clothesline. His legs came out from under him and he thumped more or less horizontally on the concrete, just sprawling, tangled and stunned like a pratfall stunt in a silent movie.
Next obvious move was for Reacher to start kicking him in the head, but he had an audience with feminine sensibilities, so he resisted the temptation. The big guy got his face off the floor and he looked nowhere in particular and said, “That was a sucker punch.”
Reacher nodded. “But you know what they say. Only suckers get sucker punched.”
“We’re going to finish this.”
Reacher looked down. “Looks kind of finished already.”
“Dream on, you little punk.”
“Take an eight count,” Reacher said. “I’ll be back.”
17
Reacher hustled Helen up to her house and then he jogged across the street to his own. He went in the door and ran through to the kitchen and found his father in there, alone.
“Where’s Joe?” Reacher asked.
“Taking a long walk,” his father said.
Reacher stepped out to the backyard. It was a square concrete space, empty except for an old patio table and four chairs, and the empty incinerator. The incinerator was about the size of a big round garbage can. It was made of diagonal steel mesh. It was up on little legs. It was faintly gray with old ash, but it had been emptied and cleaned after its last use. In fact the whole yard had been swept. Marine families. Always meticulous.
Reacher headed back to the hallway. He crouched over the spool of electric cable and unwound six feet of wire and snipped it off with the cutters.
His father asked, “What are you doing?”
“You know what I’m doing, Dad,” Reacher said. “I’m doing what you intended me to do. You didn’t order boots. You ordered exactly what arrived. Last night, after the code book went missing. You thought the news would leak and Joe and I would get picked on as a result. You couldn’t bring us Ka-Bar knives or knuckledusters, so you thought of the next best thing.”
He started to wind the heavy wire around his fist, wrapping one turn after another, the way a boxer binds his hands. He pressed the malleable metal and plastic flat and snug.
His father asked, “So has the news leaked?”
“No,” Reacher said. “This is a previous engagement.”
His father ducked his head out the door and looked down the street. He said, “Can you take that guy?”
“Does the Pope sleep in the woods?”
“He has a friend with him.”
“The more the merrier.”
“There are other kids watching.”
“There always are.”
Reacher started wrapping his other hand.
His father said, “Stay calm, son. Don’t do too much damage. I don’t want this family to go three for three this week, as far as getting in trouble is concerned.”
“He won’t rat me out.”
“I know that. I’m talking about a manslaughter charge.”
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Reacher said. “It won’t go that far.”
“Make sure it doesn’t.”
“But I’m afraid it will have to go a certain distance. A little farther than normal.”
“What are you talking about, son?”
“I’m afraid this time I’m going to have to break some bones.”
“Why?”
“Mom told me to. In a way.”
“What?”
“At the airport,” Reacher said. “She took me aside, remember? She told me she figures this place is driving you and Joe crazy. She told me I had to keep an eye on you and him both. She said it’s up to me.”
“Your mother said that? We can look after ourselves.”
“Yeah? How’s that working out so far?”
“But this kid has nothing to do with anything.”
“I think he does,” Reacher said.
“Since when? Did he say something?”
“No,” Reacher said. “But there are other senses apart from hearing. There’s smell, for instance.”
And then he jammed his bulbous gray fists in his pockets and stepped out to the street again.
18
Thirty yards away there was a horseshoe gaggle of maybe ten kids. The audience. They were shifting from foot to foot and vibrating with anticipation. About ten yards closer than that the smelly kid was waiting, with a sidekick in attendance. The smelly kid was on the right, and the sidekick was on the left. The sidekick was about Reacher’s own height, but thick in the shoulders and chest, like a wrestler, and he had a face like a wanted poster, flat and hard and mean. Those shoulders and that face were about ninety percent of the guy’s armory, Reacher figured. The guy was the type that got left alone solely because of his appearance. So probably he didn’t get much practice, and maybe he even believed his own bullshit. So maybe he wasn’t really much of a brawler.
Only one way to find out.
Reacher came in at a fast walk, his hands still in his pockets, on a wide curving trajectory, heading for the sidekick, not slowing at all, not even in the last few strides, the way a glad-handing politician approaches, the way a manic church minister walks up to a person, as if delivering an eager and effusive welcome was his only aim in life. The sidekick got caught up in the body language. He got confused by long social training. His hand even came halfway up, ready to shake.
Without breaking stride Reacher head-butted him full in the face. Left, right, bang. A perfect ten, for style and content, and power and precision. The guy went over backward and before he was a quarter of the way to the floor Reacher was turning toward the smelly kid and his wrapped hands were coming up out of his pockets.
In the movies they would have faced off, long and tense and static, like the O.K. Corral, with taunts and muttered threats, hands away from their sides, up on their toes, maybe circling, narrowed eyes on narrowed eyes, building the suspense. But Reacher didn’t live in the movies. He lived in the real world. Without even a split second’s pause he crashed his left fist into the smelly guy’s side, a vicious low blow, the second beat in a fast rhythm
ic one-two shuffle, where the one had been the head butt. His fist must have weighed north of six pounds at that point, and he put everything he had into it, and the result was that whatever the smelly kid was going to do next, he was going to do it with three busted ribs, which put him at an instant disadvantage, because busted ribs hurt like hell, and any kind of violent physical activity makes them hurt worse. Some folks with busted ribs can’t even bear to sneeze.
In any event the smelly kid didn’t do much of anything with his busted ribs. He just doubled over like a wounded buffalo. So Reacher crowded in and launched a low clubbing right and bust some more ribs on the other side. Easy enough. The heavy cable wrap made his hands like wrecking balls. The only problem was that people don’t always go to the hospital for busted ribs. Especially not Marine families. They just tape them up and gut it out. And Reacher needed the guy in a hospital cot, with his whole concerned family all around him. At least for one evening. So he dragged the guy’s left arm out from its midsection clutch, clamping the guy’s wrist in his own left hand, clumsy because of the wire, and he twisted it through a 180 turn, so the palm was up and the soft side of the elbow was down, and then he smashed his own right fist clean through the joint and the guy howled and screamed and fell to his knees and Reacher put him out of his misery with an uppercut under the jaw.
Game over.
Reacher looked left to right around the silent semicircle of spectators and said, “Next?”
No one moved.
Reacher said, “Anyone?”
No one moved.
“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s all get it straight. From now on, it is what it is.”
And then he turned and walked back to his house.
19
Reacher’s father was waiting in the hallway, a little pale around the eyes. Reacher started unwrapping his hands, and he asked, “Who are you working with on this code book thing?”
His father said, “An Intelligence guy and two MPs.”
“Would you call them and ask them to come over?”
“Why?”
“All part of the plan. Like Mom told me.”
“They should come here?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Right now would be good.” Reacher saw he had the word Georgia stamped backward across one of his knuckles. Must have been where the wire was manufactured. Raised lettering on the insulation. A place he had never been.
His father made the call to the base and Reacher watched the street from a window. He figured with a bit of luck the timing would be perfect. And it was, more or less. Twenty minutes later a staff car pulled up and three men in uniform got out. And immediately an ambulance turned into the street behind them and maneuvered around their parked vehicle and headed on down to the smelly kid’s house. The medics loaded the kid on board, and his mother and what looked like a younger brother rode along as passengers. Reacher figured the kid’s father would head straight for the hospital, on his motorbike, at the end of his watch. Or earlier, depending on what the doctors said.
The Intelligence guy was a major, and the MPs were Warrant Officers. All three of them were in BDUs. All three of them were still standing in the hallway. All three of them had the same expression on their faces: why are we here?
Reacher said, “That kid they just took away? You need to go search his house. Which is now empty, by the way. It’s ready and waiting for you.”
The three guys looked at each other. Reacher watched their faces. Clearly none of them had any real desire to nail a good Marine like Stan Reacher. Clearly all of them wanted a happy ending. They were prepared to clutch at straws. They were prepared to go the extra mile, even if that involved taking their cues from some weird thirteen-year-old kid.
One of the MPs asked, “What are we looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” Reacher said. “Eleven inches long, one inch wide, gray in color.”
The three guys stepped out to the street, and Reacher and his father sat down to wait.
20
It was a reasonably short wait, as Reacher had privately predicted. The smelly kid had demonstrated a degree of animal cunning, but he was no kind of a criminal mastermind. That was for damn sure. The three men came back less than ten minutes later with a metal object that had been burned in a fire. It was ashy gray as a result. It was a once-bright alloy fillet eleven inches long and one inch wide, slightly curved across its shorter dimension, with three round appendages spaced along its length.
It was what is left when you burn a regular three-ring binder.
No stiff covers, no pages, no contents, just scorched metal.
Reacher asked, “Where did you find it?”
One of the MPs said, “Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.”
No kind of a criminal mastermind.
The major from Intelligence asked, “Is it the code book?”
Reacher shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s the test answers from the school.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“So why call us?”
“This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.”
“What exactly happened here?”
“It was my brother’s fault,” Reacher said. “In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he had heard us talking. But anyway, he followed Joe up to the school yesterday and stole the answers. To discredit him.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Circumstantially,” Reacher said. “The kid didn’t go to the ballgame. He wasn’t on the bus. So he was in town all day. And Joe washed his hands and took a shower when he got back. Which is unusual for Joe, in the afternoon. He must have felt dirty. And my guess is he felt dirty because he had been smelling that kid’s stink all day, from behind him and around corners.”
“Very circumstantial,” the major said.
“Ask the kid,” Reacher said. “Lean on him, in front of his dad.”
“Then what happened?”
“The kid made up a scenario where Joe memorized the answers and then burned the book. Which would be plausible, for a guy who wanted to cheat on a test. And it was trash night, which was convenient. The plan was the kid would burn the book in his own backyard, and then sneak into ours during the night and dump the metal part in our incinerator, among our ashes, so the evidence would be right there. But we had no ashes. We missed trash night. We had to be up at the airport instead. So the kid had to abort the plan. He just snuck away again. And I heard him. Early hours of the morning. I thought it was a cat or a rat.”
“Any trace evidence?”
“You might find footprints out there,” Reacher said. “The yard was swept at some point, but there’s always dust. Especially after trash night.”
The MPs went away and took a look at the yard, and then they came back with quizzical expressions on their faces, as if to say, the kid could be right.
The Intelligence major got a look on his own face, like I can’t believe I’m about to say this to a thirteen-year-old, and then he asked, “Do you know where the code book is, too?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Not for sure. But I could make a pretty good guess.”
“Where?”
“Help my brother out with the school, and then we’ll talk.”
21
The three Marines came back ninety minutes later. One of the MP
s said, “You bust that kid up pretty good, didn’t you?”
“He’ll live,” Reacher said.
The other MP said, “He confessed. It went down like you figured. How did you know?”
“Logic,” Reacher said. “I knew Joe wouldn’t have done it, so clearly someone else did. It was just a question of who. And how, and why.”
The Intelligence major said, “We squared things away with the school. Your brother is in the clear.” Then the guy smiled. He said, “But there’s one unfortunate consequence.”
“Which is what?”
“They don’t have the answers anymore, so the test has been canceled.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Every silver lining has a cloud.”
“Did you see the questions?”
The major nodded. “Reading, writing, adding, subtracting. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“No general knowledge?”
“No.”
“No baseball?”
“Not even a hint.”
“No statistics?”
“Percentages, maybe, in the math section. Odds and probabilities, that sort of thing.”
“Which are important,” Reacher said. “As in, what are the odds of a Marine officer losing a code book?”
“Low.”
“What are the odds of a good Marine officer like my dad losing a code book?”
“Lower still.”
“So the probability is the book isn’t lost at all. The probability is there’s another explanation. Therefore time spent chasing the notion it’s lost is time wasted. Time spent on other avenues would be more fruitful.”
“What other avenues?”
“When did President Ford take over from President Nixon?”
“Ten days ago.”
“Which must have been when the Joint Chiefs started dusting off all the options. And I’m guessing the only real live one is China. Which is why we got the transfer here. But we’re the combat phase. So a little earlier than us the planners must have been brought in. A week or so ago, maybe. They must have been told to nail everything down double quick. Which is a lot of work, right?”