The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  Goodman was headed to Sin City. For no moral reason, but simply because the place was the last stop before the distant highway, and it was pocked with abandoned lots and long-dead enterprises and windowless cinder block walls. If you wanted to stash a getaway car and transfer to it unmolested, it was about the only game in town.

  He cleared the crossroads and left the respectable neighborhoods behind. Next came a soybean field, and then came a quarter-mile stretch of shoulder with old fourth-hand farm machinery parked on it. All of it was for sale, but most of it had waited so long for a buyer it had rusted solid. Then came more beans, and then came Sin City’s glow in the distance. There were gas stations at each end of the strip, one on the west side of the road and one on the east, both of them as big as stadium parking lots, for the eighteen-wheelers, both of them lit up bright by lights on tall poles, both of them with oil company signs hoisted high enough to see for miles. In between were the diners and the motels and the bars and the convenience stores and the cocktail lounges, all of them variously scattered on both sides of the road at random angles, some of them lit, some of them not, all of them standing alone in parking lots made of crushed stone. Some had survived fifty years, and some had been abandoned to weedy decay long ago.

  Goodman started on the east side of the two-lane. He looped past a diner he patronized from time to time, driving slow and one-handed, using the other on the interior handle for the spotlight mounted on his windshield pillar, checking the parked vehicles. He drove around the back of the diner, past the trash bins, and then onward, circling a cocktail lounge, checking a motel, finding nothing. The gas station at the end of the strip had a couple of fender-bent sedans parked near its lube bays, but neither was bright red, and judging by the grime on their windshields both had been there for a good long spell.

  Goodman waited for passing traffic and then nosed across the road and started again on the west side, at the north end, where the first establishment was a bar made of cinder blocks painted cream about twenty years before. No windows. Just ventilators on the roof, like mushrooms. No red cars anywhere near it. Next place in line was a cocktail lounge, fairly clean, said to be Sin City’s most salubrious. Goodman turned to figure-eight around the front of it, and his pillar spotlight lagged a little, and there it was.

  A bright red import, parked neatly behind the lounge.

  Chapter 6

  Reacher leaned to his right a little, to see past Don McQueen’s head and through the windshield to the road in front, which put his shoulder nominally in Karen Delfuenso’s space. She leaned a corresponding amount to her own right, hard against her door, to preserve her distance. Reacher saw the flat spread of headlight beams, and beyond them nothing but darkness rushing at him, with a lonely pair of red tail lights far away in the distance. The speedometer was showing eighty miles an hour. Fuel was showing three-quarters full. Engine temperature was showing dead-on normal. There was a Stovebolt logo on the airbag cover, which meant the car was a Chevrolet. Total recorded miles were just over forty thousand. Not a new car, but not an old one, either. It was humming along quite happily.

  Reacher settled back in his seat, and Delfuenso tracked his movement. Alan King half turned in the front and said, “My brother was in the army. Peter King. Maybe you knew him.”

  “It’s a very big institution,” Reacher said.

  King smiled, a little sheepish.

  “Sure,” he said. “Dumb comment, I guess.”

  “But a common one. Everyone assumes we all knew each other. I don’t know why. I mean, how many people live where you live?”

  “A million and a half, maybe.”

  “Do you know them all?”

  “I don’t even know my neighbors.”

  “There you go. What branch was your brother in?”

  “He was an artilleryman. He went to the Gulf the first time around.”

  “So did I.”

  “Then maybe you did know him.”

  “We were half a million strong. Everyone went.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Didn’t your brother tell you?”

  “We don’t talk.”

  “It was hot,” Reacher said. “That’s most of what I remember.”

  “What branch were you in?”

  “I was a cop,” Reacher said. “Military Police. Criminal Investigation Division, man and boy.”

  King half shrugged, half nodded, and said nothing more. He faced front again and stared out into the darkness.

  On the shoulder a sign flashed by: Welcome to Iowa.

  Sheriff Goodman aimed his car into the lounge’s rear lot and put his headlights on bright. The parked import was not a Toyota, or a Honda, or a Hyundai, or a Kia. It was a Mazda. A Mazda 6, to be precise. A five-door hatch, but the rear profile was sleek, so it looked pretty much like a regular four-door sedan. It was a late model. It was fire-engine red. It was empty, but not yet dewed over. It hadn’t been parked for long.

  Next to it on both sides were plenty of empty spaces. Behind it was fifty yards of weedy gravel, and then basically nothing all the way to the Denver suburbs seven hundred miles to the west. In front of it was the lounge’s rear door, which was a plain steel rectangle set in a mud-colored stucco wall.

  A good spot. Not overlooked. No witnesses. Goodman pictured the two guys climbing out of the Mazda, shucking their suit coats, stepping across to their new ride, getting in, taking off.

  What new ride?

  No idea.

  Taking off to where?

  Not east or west, because they couldn’t get out of the county east or west without first driving south, back to the crossroads, and no one drives a getaway vehicle back toward the scene of the crime. So they had carried on north, obviously. Because the Interstate was up in that direction, just waiting there for them beyond the dark horizon, like a big anonymous magnet.

  Therefore they were long gone. Either they had gotten out of the county minutes before the local northern roadblock had been set up, or they had gotten through it undetected minutes afterward because at that point the deputies were still looking for a bright red car.

  Goodman’s own fault, and he knew it.

  He got on his radio and told his guys to close down their local roadblocks. He told them exactly why. He told two of them to secure the area behind the cocktail lounge, and he told the rest of them to resume their general duties. He called the highway patrol’s dispatcher, and got no good news. He checked his watch and calculated time and speed and distance, and he breathed in and breathed out, and he put his car in gear, and he set off back to the crime scene again, ready for his appointment with Special Agent Julia Sorenson.

  His fault.

  The two men were out of the state already.

  It was the FBI’s problem now.

  Chapter 7

  Julia Sorenson found the crossroads easily enough, which was not surprising, because her GPS showed it to be the only cartographical singularity for miles around. She made the right turn, as instructed, and she drove west a hundred yards toward a pool of light, and she saw a concrete bunker with a sheriff’s car and a deputy’s cruiser parked right next to it.

  The crime scene, exactly as described.

  She understood the cars better than the bunker. The cars were Crown Vics like her own, but painted up in county colors and fitted with push bars front and rear and light bars on their roofs. The bunker was harder to explain. It was rectangular, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep and ten feet tall. It had a flat concrete roof and no windows. Its door was metal, bowed and scuffed and dented. The whole structure looked old and tired and settled. The concrete itself was worn by wind and weather, spalled and pitted, hollowed out here and there into fist-sized holes. Brown flinty stones had been exposed, some of them smooth, some of them split and shattered.

  She parked behind the deputy’s car and climbed out. She was a tall woman, clearly Scandinavian, handsome rather than pretty, with long ash blonde hair, most of which color was
natural. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She had solid black shoes on her feet, and she had a black pear-shaped shoulder bag which carried all her stuff except her gun, which was in a holster on her left hip, and her ID wallet, which was in her pocket.

  She took out the wallet and flipped it open and walked toward the sheriff. She judged him to be about twenty years older than she was. He was very solid but not tall, like three-quarters of a football player. Not bad for an old guy. He was wearing a winter jacket over his uniform shirt. No gloves, even though the night was cold. They shook hands and stood quiet for a second, facing the concrete bunker, as if wondering where to start.

  “First question,” Sorenson said. “What is this place?”

  Goodman said, “It’s an old pumping station. It brought water up from the aquifer.”

  “Abandoned now?”

  Goodman nodded. “The water table fell. We had to dig a deeper hole. The new pump is about a mile from here.”

  “Is the dead guy still in there?”

  Goodman nodded again. “We waited for you.”

  “Who has been in there so far?”

  “Just me and the doctor.”

  “There’s a lot of blood.”

  “Yes,” Goodman said. “There is.”

  “Did you step in it?”

  “We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.”

  “What did you touch?”

  “Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.”

  Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.

  “There’s a light inside,” Goodman said.

  She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years groundwater had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of groundwater a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.

  She moved on.

  Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.

  The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a gray sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his rib cage.

  He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.

  Sorenson said, “How do you see it, Sheriff?”

  From outside the door Goodman said, “They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.”

  Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.

  She asked, “Do you know who he is?”

  “Never saw him before.”

  “Why did they pull up his shirt?”

  “Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.”

  “I agree,” Sorenson said. “It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?”

  “Eight or nine inches, maybe.”

  “Did the eyewitness see a knife?”

  “He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.”

  Sorenson asked, “Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced .22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.”

  “Still loud, in an enclosed space.”

  “Pretty far from anywhere.”

  “Then I don’t know why they didn’t,” Goodman said.

  Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked, “Do you mind if I disturb the body? I want to check for ID.”

  Goodman said, “It’s your case.”

  “Is it?”

  “The perps are out of the state by now.”

  “They are if they went east.”

  “And if they went west, it’s only a matter of time. They got through the roadblocks, apparently.”

  Sorenson said nothing.

  “They switched to another car,” Goodman said.

  “Or cars,” Sorenson said. “They might have split up and traveled separately.”

  Goodman thought about the empty spaces either side of the parked Mazda. Thought about his final APB: Any two men in any kind of vehicle. He said, “I didn’t consider that possibility. I guess I screwed up.”

  Sorenson didn’t reassure him. She just picked her way around the blood and squatted down in the driest patch she could find. She put her left hand out behind her for balance and used her right hand on the corpse. She pressed and patted and searched. There was nothing in the shirt pocket. Nothing in the coat, inside or out. Her gloved fingers turned red with rubbery smears. She tried the pants pockets. Nothing there.

  She called, “Sheriff? You’re going to have to help me here.”

  Goodman picked his way inside, on tiptoe, using long sideways steps, like he was on a ledge a thousand feet up. Sorenson said, “Put your finger in his belt loop. Roll him over. I need to check his back pockets.”

  Goodman squatted opposite her, arm’s length from the body, and hooked a finger in a belt loop. He turned his face away and hauled. The dead guy came up on his hip. Blood squelched and dripped, but slowly, because it was drying and mixing with the grit on the floor to make a paste. Sorenson’s gloved hand darted in like a pickpocket, and she poked and prodded and patted.

  Nothing there.

  “No ID,” she said. “So as of right now, we have ourselves an unidentified victim. Ain’t life grand?”

  Goodman let the guy roll back, flat on the floor.

  Chapter 8

  Jack Reacher was no kind of a legal scholar, but like all working cops he had learned something about the law, mostly its practical, real-world applications, and its tricks and its dodges.

  And he had learned the areas where the law was silent.

  As in: there was no
law that said people who pick up hitchhikers have to tell the truth.

  In fact Reacher had learned that harmless fantasy seemed to be irresistible. He figured it was a large part of the reason why drivers stopped at all. He had ridden with obvious cubicle drones who claimed to be managers, and managers who claimed to be entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who claimed to be successful, and employees who said they owned the company, and nurses who said they were doctors, and doctors who said they were surgeons. People liked to spread their wings a little. They liked to inhabit a different life for an hour or two, testing it, tasting it, trying out their lines, basking in the glow.

  No harm, no foul.

  All part of the fun.

  But Alan King’s lies were different.

  There was no element of self-aggrandizement in what he was saying. The guy wasn’t making himself bigger or better or smarter or sexier. He was telling stupid, trivial, technical lies for no clear reason at all.

  As in: the blue denim shirts. They were not a corporate brand. They were not crisp attractive items with embroidered logos above the pockets. They had never been worn before, or laundered. They were cheap junk from a dollar store, straight from the shelf, straight from the plastic packet. Reacher knew, because they were the kind of shirts he wore himself.

  As in: King claimed they hadn’t stopped in three hours, but the gas gauge was showing three-quarters full. Which implied the Chevy could run twelve hours on a single tank. Which was close to a thousand miles, at highway speeds. Which was impossible.

  And: the water King had given him with Karen Delfuenso’s aspirin was still cold from a refrigerator. Which would be impossible, after three hours in a car with the heater blasting.

  Lies.

  As in: King claimed somewhere in Nebraska as his residence, but then said there were a million and a half people living where he lived. Which was impossible. A million and a half was close to Nebraska’s entire population. Omaha had about four hundred thousand people, and Lincoln had two-fifty. There were only nine U.S. cities with populations of more than a million, and eight of them were either emphatically bigger or smaller than a million and a half. Only Philadelphia was close to that number.