by Lee Child
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 rhythmic 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 the 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 busted 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 in to 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 back yard, 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 MPs said, “You busted 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?”
“Always.”
“And what’s the last phase of that work?”
“Revising the code books to match the updated plans.”
“What’s the deadline?”
“Theoretically we have to be ready to go at midnight tonight, should the president order it.”
“So maybe somewhere there’s a guy who worked on the codes all through the night. A rear echelon guy who got here about a week ago.”
“I’m sure there is. But we already checked all over the base. That’s the first thing we did.”
“Maybe he worked off post.”
“That would be unauthorized.”
“But it happens.”
“I know. But even if it did in this case, he would have been back on the base hours ago, and the book would have been back in the safe hours ago.”
“Suppose he wore himself out and fell asleep? Suppose he hasn’t gotten up yet? Suppose the code book is still on his kitchen table?”
“Where?”
“Across the street,” Reacher said. “Knock on the door and ask for Helen.”
22
Joe got back from his long walk an hour later and he and his brother and his father headed for the beach and took a swim. The water was warm, the sand was white, and the palms were swaying. They loitered and strolled until the sun dipped low, and then they headed home to the hot little house at the top of the concrete street, where an hour later the new phone rang again and Josie told them that her father had died. Old Laurent Moutier was gone, at the age of ninety, taking with him like everyone does a lifetime of unknown private hopes and dreams and fears and experiences, and leaving behind him like most people do a thin trace of himself in his living descendants. He had never had a clear idea of what would become of his beautiful mop-haired daughter and his two handsome grandsons, nor did he really want one, but like every other twentieth-century male human in Europe he hoped they would live lives of peace, prosperity, and plenty, while simultaneously knowing they almost certainly wouldn’t. So he hoped they would bear their burdens with grace and good humor, and he was comforted in his final moments by the knowledge that so far they always had, and probably always would.
The man was over thirty, Reacher thought, and solid, and hot, obviously. He had sweated through his suit. The woman face to face with him could have been younger, but not by much. She was hot, too, and scared. Or tense, at least. That was clear. The man was too close to her. She didn’t like that. It was nearly half past eight in the evening, and going dark. But not cooling off. A hundred degrees, someone had said. A real heat wave. Wednesday, July 13, 1977, New York City. Reacher would always remember the date. It was his second solo visit.
The man put the palm of his hand flat on the woman’s chest, pressing damp cotton against her skin, the ball of his thumb down in her cleavage. Not a tender gesture. But not an aggressive gesture, either. Neutral, like a doctor. The woman didn’t back off. She just froze in place and glanced around. Without seeing much. New York City, half past eight in the evening, but the street was deserted. It was too hot. Waverly Place, between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square. People would come out later, if at all.
Then the man took his hand off the woman’s chest, and he flicked it downward like he wanted to knock a bee off her hip, and then he whipped it back up in a big roundhouse swing and slapped her full in the face, hard, with enough power for a real crack, but his hand and her face were too damp for pistol-shot acoustics, so the sound came out exactly like the word: slap. The woman’s head was knocked sideways. The sound echoed off the scalding brick.
Reacher said, “Hey.”
The man turned around. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, maybe five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds. His shirt was transparent with sweat.
He said, “Get lost, kid.”
On that night Reacher was three months and sixteen days shy of his seventeenth bi
rthday, but physically he was pretty much all grown up. He was as tall as he was ever going to get, and no sane person would have called him skinny. He was six-five, two-twenty, all muscle. The finished article, more or less. But finished very recently. Brand-new. His teeth were white and even, his eyes were a shade close to navy, his hair had wave and body, his skin was smooth and clear. The scars and the lines and the calluses were yet to come.
The man said, “Right now, kid.”
Reacher said, “Ma’am, you should step away from this guy.”
Which the woman did, backward, one step, two, out of range. The man said, “Do you know who I am?”
Reacher said, “What difference would it make?”
“You’re pissing off the wrong people.”
“People?” Reacher said. “That’s a plural word. Are there more than one of you?”
“You’ll find out.”
Reacher looked around. The street was still deserted.
“When will I find out?” he said. “Not right away, apparently.”
“What kind of smart guy do you think you are?”
Reacher said, “Ma’am, I’m happy to be here alone, if you want to take off running.”
The woman didn’t move. Reacher looked at her.
He said, “Am I misunderstanding something?”
The man said, “Get lost, kid.”
The woman said, “You shouldn’t get involved.”
“I’m not getting involved,” Reacher said. “I’m just standing here in the street.”
The man said, “Go stand in some other street.”
Reacher turned and looked at him and said, “Who died and made you mayor?”
“That’s some mouth, kid. You don’t know who you’re talking to. You’re going to regret that.”
“When the other people get here? Is that what you mean? Because right now it’s just you and me. And I don’t foresee a whole lot of regret in that, not for me, anyway, not unless you’ve got no money.”