Jack and Joe

by Diane Capri

  I texted back: “Grounded by NC weather.”

  He immediately replied: “Drive up. Meet you at National.”

  He wanted me to drive almost three hundred miles to DC tonight, in this weather? Not a chance. I typed “No,” and slipped the phone into my pocket. It was a word he didn’t hear often from anyone.

  Half a second later my phone vibrated, which I ignored. It was late. I was tired. I’d accomplished nothing today worth reporting and the Boss already knew that because he knew everything. There was no reason to talk to him.

  The hotel had no room service, but there was a menu on top of the television for delivery from the fast food joint inside the truck stop. I ordered a vegetarian sub with a two-liter bottle of water. They had beer on the menu and a few cheap domestic wines. I ordered a bottle of cabernet. She repeated my room number and said my delivery would arrive soon.

  After that, I unpacked and fired up my laptop, then pressed redial on my phone.

  “Took you long enough to call back.” Gaspar sounded more exhausted than before, but he was probably hamming it up. He had been at the hospital with Marie most of the day, which meant he’d already managed a dozen catnaps. He was a master at that particular skill. He’d told me one thing he’d learned in the Army was how to sleep anywhere.

  “My life is a never-ending party,” I assured him. I glanced around the room. It was clean enough and not unreasonably worn. Utilitarian all the way. No mini-bar. Not even a coffee pot. Styrofoam cups wrapped in plastic. I just hoped there were no bed bugs. “Yeah, I’m living in the lap of luxury here. You don’t know what you’re missing, Zorro.”

  “Tell me about it, then. Take my mind off everything that’s not happening here.”

  “Still no baby?” I looked at my watch. “How long has Marie been in labor?”

  “She wasn’t, I guess. The doctors don’t seem too worried. I think they went out for a round of golf or something.”

  Gaspar was a dedicated family man. He was extremely proud of his four daughters, but totally over the moon about the arrival of his first boy. Not that he ever let on, of course. At least, not to me, and definitely not to the Boss.

  I quickly filled him in on the non-results of my trip to Fort Bird. Anyone who was listening could hear me, too, but I hadn’t learned anything worth protecting.

  “Joe Reacher was married once, huh?” he said. “That’s a bit of news. Possibly, we could get a lead of some sort from the ex-wife although it was a long time ago. She could know something helpful about Jack Reacher, I guess. Maybe a last known address or the name of a friend who did keep in touch?”

  “Since I’m stuck in this hotel room, I’ll see if I can track her down. Maybe we can see her tomorrow, depending on where she’s living now.” I heard three quick raps on the door followed by a female voice announcing the arrival of my gourmet meal. “Be right back.”

  I tossed the phone on the bed, unbolted the door, and collected the paper bags from a young woman who probably had a side job as a dancer at The Lucky Bar. She was about thirty, tall and thin, not particularly pretty. Her makeup had been shoveled on with a trowel. Perhaps her beauty was enhanced by the stage lights around the dancing poles. Her shiny orange raincoat barely reached mid-thigh and, based on the gaping spaces between the coat buttons, she wore nothing underneath but goosebumps.

  We transferred paper bags and cash. She snorted, obviously unimpressed by my three-dollar tip on a four-dollar bottle of wine and three-dollar sandwich. She wrapped her fingers around the money, revealing long fingernails covered in thickly sparkling pink glitter. She shoved her hand into her coat pocket and left without saying a word.

  When I returned to the phone, Gaspar said, “Hang on.”

  He was talking to someone else. Something had happened with Marie a few days ago that worried him. But he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. It wasn’t relevant to our assignment and I didn’t like to pry.

  The disembodied voices reminded me of the soldier at Fort Bird’s exit gate who had handed me the flat manila envelope. I’d set it aside to analyze later and forgotten about it during the harrowing drive. It took me a couple of seconds to find where I’d stuffed it.

  Gaspar came back on the line. “Sorry, Boss Lady. I have to run. Anything else we need to deal with right now?”

  “This whole area for two hundred miles in either direction is a giant ice slick. I’m in for the night.” I held the curious envelope up toward the light. “With any luck, I’ll find Joe Reacher’s ex-wife and text you an airport nearby wherever she lives for tomorrow. Tell Marie I’m thinking about her.”

  “10-4,” he said, just to be cute. In the Army, 10-4 meant “wrecker requested.” For Civilians and police departments, it usually meant “understood” or “confirmed.” The FBI doesn’t use ten codes because nobody knows what they mean.

  Instantly, my phone vibrated again before I had a chance to do anything. Which meant the Boss had been listening. He knew I held the phone in my hand and couldn’t very well ignore him again. What the hell. “This is FBI Special Agent Kim Otto.”

  “Lovely room.” His voice was quiet, as always. “I can see why you’d rather stay at the luxurious Grand Lodge than follow orders.”

  Could he actually see me? Right this moment? I thought not. As Gaspar often said, he was the Boss, not God. Nothing about this low-budget room suggested high-tech monitoring devices had been installed, although he’d had plenty of time to set up spy cams before I arrived and make sure I was placed in this room if he’d wanted to.

  He also had access to equipment that would permit him to see and hear through the glass from a significant distance. I pulled the heavy drapes closed to block his sightline. I could do nothing about the listening devices if they existed.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Any DC restaurant would be better than my stale sandwich from the truck stop.” I shrugged and ran my fingers through my hair. There was no point to fighting this particular battle. I was letting my stubborn nature get the best of my good judgment. Again. “The roads are closed here. Send a helicopter to pick me up and I can be there in an hour.”

  A beat of silence followed. He’d won. So he capitulated. Typical. I pinched the bridge of my nose with two fingers.

  Sounds of his even breathing traveled across the miles. “Since you’re already there, you might consider doing your job.”

  My heart pounded and my nostrils flared. Colonel Summer didn’t show up. She didn’t answer her phone, either. How’d you want me to interview her? Tarot cards? I clamped my teeth together to keep my smart aleck retort to myself.

  “This is not a secure line,” he said. He’d not been able to deliver another secure cell phone to me since mine was destroyed in Charlotte, which was a blessing of sorts. I didn’t trust him. He knew it. We both knew why. “Your lunch date should have details by now.”

  Major Clifton? Details about what? He didn’t know anything about Jack Reacher that I hadn’t already learned. I didn’t need the Boss to micromanage my investigation.

  “Anything else?” I stretched my neck and rolled my shoulders. The tension that had lodged there during the drive from Fort Bird was still with me.

  “I sent you a file,” he said, after a few more quiet moments. “Read it and contact me on a secure line for instructions.”

  Like finding a secure line to use in this place tonight would be possible. “Is that all?”

  “Not quite,” he said, with perhaps a bit of annoyance in his tone. “The next time I give you a direct order, follow it.”

  When he disconnected, I threw the phone onto the bed so hard it bounced off and landed on the floor and rolled under the mattress. I left it there.

  CHAPTER 9

  I unscrewed the top off the truck stop Cabernet, poured into one of the two Styrofoam cups, and connected my laptop to the secure satellite.

  In my drop box was the new encrypted file, as promised.

  The document was an official final court-martial dispositio
n report to the then Army Chief of Staff from the Judge Advocate General’s office. The fifty-page JAG report was dated June 1990.

  Whole sections of the report were blacked out—redacted, which usually meant those contents were classified.

  Flipping through quickly on the first pass I saw two names I recognized. Lieutenant Eunice Summer and Major Jack Reacher.

  Reading what was not blacked out in the report didn’t take long.

  Lieutenant Summer had been the star witness in unspecified joint courts-martial of three Army officers, names and ranks redacted. Major Reacher had been her superior officer during the underlying investigation, but not mentioned otherwise. The report didn’t specifically say what involvement Reacher had with the case, only that he was Summer’s supervisor. Which could mean anything.

  When the original case terminated with three officer arrests before the courts-martial, Reacher was immediately demoted to Captain and reassigned to Panama.

  Summer assisted in the prosecutions. She continued in her role as Military Police Lieutenant through the “successful resolution of the matter,” whatever that was.

  Also included in the encrypted file was a short memo, unsigned. It stated that three months after the courts-martial was resolved, Lieutenant Summer was promoted to Captain. She was reassigned to Korea to serve directly under General Leon Garber. From earlier reports, I knew Garber was now deceased.

  I unwrapped my dinner and refilled my wine cup and sat on the bed to think. The first bite of the sandwich had me regretting my rash refusal to have dinner with the Boss. There were many things about the nation’s capital that I didn’t care for, but no one could complain about the food. The second sandwich bite was worse than the first. I tossed it into the trash and rooted around in my bag for a protein bar.

  The JAG report confirmed my hunch that the big professional changes Summer and Reacher experienced back then were connected. I munched the protein bar while I chewed the situation thoroughly until I knew three things for sure.

  First, whatever happened at Fort Bird in early 1990 involved serious criminal activity. Nothing less would have resulted in the successful courts-martial of senior officers. Nor would Reacher have been busted or Summer promoted over a case involving enlisted personnel committing minor criminal infractions.

  Second, the criminal activity, if it had become public back then, was clearly serious enough to have been a significant problem for the Army. Which meant that heads higher up the chain of command would have rolled. Maybe even have caused long-range damage to America’s strategic interests abroad.

  Third, because of these factors, the courts-martial were handled internally, confidentially, and swiftly. Prosecuting senior officers was never the Army’s first choice. Such cases were devastating to morale. They also crushed the Army’s reputation and, by spillover suspicion, the reputation of all high-level government agencies.

  Which meant undisputable evidence of significant crimes must have existed against the officers beyond all doubt, not simply beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Which could only mean that the officers confessed. After that, they were probably offered lighter sentences in exchange for silence. Otherwise, there would have been appeals and media attention. Neither of which had happened.

  I refilled my wine glass and leaned back against the headboard.

  How was Reacher involved in all of this? Again, after mulling things over, only three possibilities made any sense: Reacher was involved in committing the crimes, or he’d been the whistleblower, or he’d been a scapegoat. Maybe even all three, depending on the nature of the crimes.

  Given the final disposition of Reacher’s reduction in rank and Summer’s promotion after the senior officers were sentenced, any combination of those three options were plausible.

  Here was the kicker, though.

  The Boss already knew about the 1990 crimes, the prosecutions, and Reacher’s role in them before we were tasked to complete the Reacher file. Any one of the three options should have made Reacher unfit for whatever job the Boss had in mind.

  The Boss had the necessary clearances for access to the full version of the JAG report. Which meant he was familiar with all of the facts of the case. He was older than Reacher and he might even have been aware of the courts-martial as those events occurred, back in 1990.

  And yet, Reacher had not been immediately disqualified. And here I was. Partnered with Gaspar. Building the Reacher file. Tasked to discover his physical, mental, emotional, and financial fitness for a job with a security clearance so high that neither Gaspar nor I had access to the job’s requirements. Looking for leads that could result in locating Reacher.

  What kind of job could that be?

  I’d finished the protein bar. A few more mouthfuls of the pathetic excuse for Cabernet and my body finally felt relaxed. My eyelids were heavy. The noise levels across the street at The Lucky Bar were still too loud, even though the heavy drapes were closed. Still, I might sleep a few hours and let my subconscious work on the problem.

  A moment before I nodded off, I remembered the names of the JAG officers that were visible on the report.

  One of them—the junior JAG—was new to me. Thomas O’Connor.

  The senior JAG on the report had a name I had heard for the first time earlier today. Matthew Clifton.

  Joe Reacher’s West Point classmate.

  Tony Clifton’s brother.

  CHAPTER 10

  Saturday 1:45 AM

  Which came first? The screams or the gunshots? Two of each jerked me awake from wine-induced oblivion. I was still dressed and had not removed my shoes or my gun. I dashed to the window, pushed the drapes aside and looked across the street toward the noise.

  Absolute bedlam had erupted around The Lucky Bar. Men ran from inside and the knotted crowd outside was scattering like a rack of billiard balls.

  Two more gunshots blasted out from the bar.

  I drew my weapon and picked up my phone and dialed 911 on my way out of the room. When the operator asked, “What is your emergency?” I reported gunshots fired and two or more ambulances required. The operator said she would dispatch teams immediately.

  Next, I called Major Clifton. His men were more than likely patrons in The Lucky Bar. He’d want to know trouble had started and local law enforcement would need the help. He didn’t pick up his cell and I left a message while I was still on the move.

  I entered the stairwell next to the elevator and hopped down the stairs two at a time. At the bottom, the exterior emergency door would have dumped me outside too far from the bar. Instead, I powered through the wall-to-wall crowd in the lobby, which had grown by at least a hundred people in the hours since I’d elbowed my way through in the opposite direction.

  Surely there was a limit to how many people could be stuffed into this room. Fire codes, at the very least, were certainly being violated. This group was now frighteningly chaotic, too. The din encouraged my pounding wine headache to ratchet up a few dozen decibels.

  Scanning the jammed lobby as I plowed my way to the front entrance, I saw no guns drawn or injured victims inside this building. Which meant all of the shooting, screaming, and damage was happening across the road.

  The second I stepped through the Grand Lodge exit into the frigid night, sleet peppered my skin relentlessly. I slid my feet along the icy sidewalk like a novice skater, unable to run or even hustle. Simply staying upright and balanced was challenge enough.

  Patrons continued to flood from the exit at The Lucky Bar. It seemed like five hundred people had crowded into the place, and now all of them were climbing over each other to get out. Given the ice-sculpture garden the parking lot had become, most of the fleeing patrons were heading for the hotel, with a few members of the hotel crowd fighting the tide on their way to the club to help.

  Predictably, the combination of alcohol consumption and icy pavement proved only slightly less treacherous for the panicked strip club refugees than the firefight had. All across the pi
tilessly rock-hard, ice-glazed sheet gleaming from the bar to the hotel across the highway, arms and legs pin-wheeled madly, bodies were upended, bones broke with sickeningly loud pops and snaps, all to the hellish accompaniment of wailing screams from figures writhing in agony on the ice.

  I’d have stopped to help, but the continuing shooting inside was the top priority.

  By the time I’d shuffle-weaved my way across the road through the carnage and approached the bar’s entrance, I’d heard at least six more shots from inside. The music got louder the closer I slid. Ten yards away from the entrance, the wall of booze and stale cigarette smoke was still billowing out like an invisible, disgusting force field.

  Until the locals arrived, it appeared that I was the only cop on the scene, and I had nothing remotely close to the muscle and firepower the situation required.

  A wild-eyed man stood with his back glued to the wall just outside the open door, clearly too petrified to move. As I slid across the gaping doorway to him, the wall of booze-and-cigarette stench nearly knocked me over. Pounding music made quiet talk impossible, so I moved as close to him as I could get and leaned in to be heard.

  “What’s going on in there?” I shouted.

  “Some crazy dude had a fight with one of the girls. He started shooting. The owner and the bouncer shot back.” He shook his head rapidly from side to side. “It’s chaos, man. People screaming, bleeding. Girls crying. I was in the back and I ran out, but then the ice—”

  “The shooter. What’s the shooter’s name, do you know?”

  He shook his head rapidly again. “Never saw him before in my life.”

  “Who’s in charge here? The owner, the manager—you know his name?”

  “Owner’s Alvin. Him and kid, Junior, the bouncer, they been running The Lucky for years.” He ran a hand hard over his head, and his feet started to slide out from beneath him on the ice. He slapped his palm onto the wall again as if it might glue him upright. He kept his feet. “They usually take care of things pretty good,” he said, “but this dude’s some kind of whack-job.”