by Lee Child
The guy on the stool stayed where he was and finished his drink, ostentatiously slowly, rubbing it in. He had the power. He was the man. Except he wasn’t. He was an underling. He was muscle. That was all. Reacher knew how these things worked. He had seen them before. He knew the envelope would go straight to some shadowy figure at the top of the chain, and the guy on the stool would get a cut, like a wage.
The waitress came back and asked if Reacher wanted a third go-round with the Rolling Rock. Reacher said no, and asked, “What happens now?”
“About what?”
“You know about what.”
The woman shrugged, like a secret shame had been exposed, and she said, “We stay in business another week. We don’t get smashed up or burned out.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“A year.”
“Has anything been done about it?”
“Not by me. I like my face the way it is.”
“Me, too,” Reacher said.
She smiled at him.
Reacher said, “The owner could do something. There are laws.”
“Not unless something happens. The cops say they need to see someone beaten. Or worse. Or the place in flames.”
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“Does it matter?”
“Who does he work for?”
She pincered her finger and thumb and pretended to zipper her mouth.
“I like my face the way it is,” she said again. “And I have kids.”
She collected his empty bottle and headed back to her station. The big guy on the stool finished his drink and put his glass on the bar. He didn’t pay, and the barman didn’t ask him to. He stood up and walked to the door, through a channel suddenly clear of people.
Reacher slid out of his chair and followed. First Street was dark, all except for a yellow light on a pole about a block away. The guy from the stool was fifteen feet ahead. Upright and mobile he looked to be about six-two and two-ten. Not small, but smaller than Reacher. Younger, but almost certainly dumber. And less skilled, and less experienced, and more inhibited. Reacher was sure of that. He had yet to meet the man who outranked him in those categories.
He called out, “Hey.”
The guy from the stool stopped and turned around, surprised.
Reacher walked up to him and said, “I think you’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you. I’m sure it was just a mistake. So I want to give you the chance to make it right.”
“Get lost,” the guy said, but he said it without the final few percent of conviction. He wasn’t the total king of the jungle. Not right then and there.
Reacher asked, “How many more calls do you have tonight?”
“Butt out, pal. This ain’t your business.”
“So whose business is it?”
“Get lost,” the guy said again.
“It’s all about free will,” Reacher said. “It’s all about making choices. You want to know what yours are?”
“What?”
“You can tell me his name now, or you can tell me after I break your legs.”
“Whose name?”
“The guy you picked up the money for.”
Reacher watched his eyes. Waited for the decision. There were three possibilities. The guy would run, fight, or talk. He hoped the guy wouldn’t run, because then he would have to run after him, and he hated running. He didn’t expect the guy to talk, because of ego and self-image. Therefore the guy would have to fight. Or try to.
And Reacher was right. The guy fought, or tried to. He lunged forward and swung his left fist downward, like a sweep, as if there was a knife in it. An attempt at a distraction, nothing more. Next would come a big straight right, maybe a little overhand. But Reacher wasn’t about to wait for it. He had learned to fight a long time ago, in hot dusty outposts in the Pacific, and cold damp alleys in Europe, and hardscrabble towns in the South, against resentful local youth and tribal military kids, and then his techniques had been broken down and built back up by the army, and he had learned the golden rule: Get your retaliation in first.
He stepped in close, falling forward, and threw a heavy elbow at the guy’s face. Usually better to target the throat, but Reacher wanted the guy talking afterward, not choking to death on a smashed larynx, so he went for the upper lip, just below the nose, accelerating hard, which would break teeth and bone, which would make the subsequent conversation a little garbled, but at least the guy wouldn’t be struck mute. The blow landed and the guy’s head snapped back and his knees went weak and he sat down on his ass, right there on the sidewalk, eyes all over the place, blood all over his nose and his mouth.
Reacher was a brawler by nature, and a brawler’s dream is to have the other guy on the floor, ready for the winning kick to the head, but he held back, because he wanted a name. He said, “Last chance, my friend.”
The guy from the stool said, “Kubota.”
Garbled. Missing teeth, and blood, and swellings.
Reacher said, “Spell it for me.”
Which the guy did, fast and obedient. Not the king of the jungle anymore. Which Reacher was happy about. Because human legs are hard to break. Big physical efforts are required. He asked, “Where will I find Mr. Kubota?”
And the guy told him.
—
At that point Reacher stopped talking and took a breath and put his head back on the hospital pillow.
I said, “And then what?”
He said, “Enough for tonight. I’m tired.”
“I need to know.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“Did you find Kubota?”
No answer.
I said, “Was there a confrontation?”
No answer.
“Did Kubota shoot you?”
Reacher said nothing. And then the doctor came in. The same woman, with the threads of silver in her hair. She told me she was terminating the interview immediately, on medical grounds. Which was frustrating, but not fatal. I had plenty of valuable data. I left the building with visions of a major score in my head. A protection racket, busted, on my very first day in the department. Priceless. Women have to work twice as hard, to get half the credit.
I went straight back to the station house. Unpaid, but I would have paid them. I found a thick file on Kubota. Lots of leads, lots of hours, but we never had enough to get a warrant. Now we did, big-time. We had gun crime. We had his victim, right there in the hospital. Eyewitness testimony. And possibly even the bullet itself, in a stainless steel dish somewhere.
Solid gold.
The night judge agreed with me. He signed off on a big boilerplate warrant and I put a team together. Plenty of uniforms, cars, heavy weapons, three other detectives, all senior to me, but I was leading them. My case. An unwritten rule.
We executed the warrant at midnight, which was legal-speak for busting down Kubota’s door, and knocking him over, and bouncing his head off the tile a couple of times. We found the guy from the bar in a back room, in a bad way. Like he had been run over by a truck. I had him taken to a different hospital, under guard.
Then the uniforms hauled Kubota away to a holding cell and I and my three detective partners spent most of the rest of the night going through his place like we were looking for a tiny flake of chrome off the world’s smallest needle in the world’s biggest haystack.
His place was a treasure trove.
We found grocery sacks full of unexplained cash, and thirty different bank accounts, and notebooks and ledgers and diaries and maps. It was clear from our first glance the guy was making serious money from a hundred different establishments. According to his notes in the last six months three places had tried to resist, and we called in the dates and matched them to three unexplained arson attacks. We found temporary interruptions in two sets of payments, and when we checked the dates with the city’s hospitals we found one broken leg and one slashed face. We had everything.
Except the gun.
B
ut that made sense, in its way. He had used it, and he had ditched it. Standard practice. It would be in the river, thrown from a bridge. Like his old cell phones, presumably. Pay-as-you-go burners. He had ditched the packaging and the paperwork, but for some dumb reason not the chargers. We found nearly fifty in a drawer.
At dawn I was face to face with him in an interview room. He had a lawyer with him, a slick guy in a suit, but I could tell by the guy’s face he knew a defense was hopeless. On our side it was just me, all alone, but I guessed there was a crowd behind the one-way glass, to watch the mojo working. And it worked very well at first. I like to get a suspect in the habit of saying yes, one confession after the other, so I started with the easy stuff. I went through one bar after another, all the restaurants and diners, and I told him we had the notebooks and the ledgers and the diaries, and the cash and the bank statements, and he admitted them all. Ten minutes after I started we had enough on tape to put him away for a long, long time. But I kept him going, not because we really needed it, but because I wanted him warmed up for the big moment.
Which didn’t happen.
He denied the shooting. He denied meeting Reacher the night before. He said he had been out of town. He denied owning a gun. He said he had never used one. I kept at him until the clock ticked around and my second day in the department officially began. Then my lieutenant came in, fresh from a night’s sleep and a shower, and he told me to quit.
He said, “No harm, no foul. You’ve done great. We have enough. He’s going down for a long time. The goal has been achieved.”
Which was the general opinion in the department. There was no sense of failure. Quite the reverse. The new girl had busted a racket, on her first day on the job. A major score.
But it rankled with me. I didn’t do the work I was supposed to do, and I dug deeper. I knew I would find something, and I did. But not what I was expecting.
The bar owner Reacher had seen was the doctor’s brother-in-law. The woman with silver in her hair. They were family.
I was dizzy with fatigue, which helped, in a way. I made lightning connections a rational mind might have dismissed. Kubota’s thick file, full of failed attempts to win a warrant. The endless quest for more. The need to see someone beaten, or worse. The relentless beep of Reacher’s bedside monitor, too strong for a sick man. His clear eyes and his lucid mind, after opiates said to be strong enough to fell a horse.
I made my third trip to the hospital. Reacher’s room was empty. There were no signs of recent occupation. The woman with silver in her hair swore she had treated no gunshot victims on the night in question. She invited me to check her records. Her records were blank. I sat down with the nurses, one at a time. No one talked.
Then I pictured Reacher, on the night in question, unable to find Kubota because Kubota was out of town. I pictured him heading back to the bar, handing back the money, working out a long-term solution with the owner. I pictured the owner, calling his sister-in-law.
I pictured the Greyhound depot at midnight. A tall figure getting on a bus. The bus rolling out. No bags, no schedule, no plan.
I went back to the station house. I walked in, and they gave me a round of applause.
One thing leads to another, and in Jack Reacher’s case, one warm and aimless August day, a hitched ride in an empty lumber truck led to East Millinocket in Maine, which led in turn to a decent mid-morning meal in a roadside restaurant near the highway, which led to a halting two-wary-guys conversation with the man at the next table, which led to an offered ride further north, to a place called Island Falls. The unspoken but clearly implied cost of the ride was the price of the guy’s coffee and pie, but the establishment was cheap, and Reacher had money in his pocket, and as always he had no particular place to be, so he accepted.
One thing leads to another.
The guy’s car turned out to be a softly-sprung old Chevrolet, lacy with rust, and Island Falls turned out to be a pleasant little place on a lake, way in the north, where Maine sticks out like a thumb up Canada’s ass, with Quebec to the left and New Brunswick to the right. But most of all Island Falls was pretty close to the north end of I-95. Which was tempting. Reacher had a collector’s instinct when it came to places. He knew the south end of I-95 pretty well. More than nineteen hundred miles away, just past downtown Miami. He had been there many times. But he had never seen the north end.
He had no particular place to be.
One thing leads to another.
Getting out of Island Falls was easy enough. He had a cup of coffee in a hut next to a kayak rental slip, and stood in the buggy warmth of the lakeshore and took in the view, and then he turned his back on it all and walked out of town the same way the old Chevy had driven in, back to the highway cloverleaf. He set up on the on-ramp heading north, and waited. Not long, he figured. It was August, it was warm, it was vacation country. The mood was amiable. It was daylight. He was clean. His clothes were only two days old, and his shave was only three. Ideal conditions, overall.
And sure enough, less than ten minutes later an old-model Jeep SUV with New Brunswick plates slowed and stopped. There was a woman at the wheel, and a man next to her, in the passenger seat. They looked to be somewhere in their mid-thirties, clearly outdoor types, ruffled by the wind and tanned by the sun. Heading home, no doubt, after an active vacation. Maybe they had been kayaking. Or camping. Or both. The load space in the rear of the truck was piled up with stuff.
The guy in the passenger seat let his window down, and the woman craned over for a look, too. The guy said, “We’re only going to Fredericton, which isn’t far, I’m afraid. Any good to you?”
Reacher said, “Is that in Canada?”
“Sure is.”
Reacher said, “Then that’s perfect. All I want is to get to the border, and then back again.”
“Got something against Canada?”
“My passport expired.”
The guy nodded. Gone were the days when a person could just stroll in and out of neighboring countries. Then the guy said, “But there’s nothing much to see between here and there. Nothing much to see through the fence, either. You’d be better off staying where you are, surely.”
Reacher said, “I want to see the end of the road.”
The guy said, “That sounds heavy.”
The woman said, “We think of it as the beginning of the road.”
“Good point,” Reacher said.
The guy said, “Hop in the back.” He craned around in his seat and batted stray items aside. Reacher opened the door and slid in and used his hip to finish the job. He closed the door and the woman hit the gas and they took off, cruising easy through the last thirty-some miles of America.
—
The last exit was for a town called Houlton. Or the first exit, Reacher supposed, from the Canadian point of view. Then came a mile or so of hinterland, and a little queuing traffic, and barriers and booths and official signs. Reacher stayed in the Jeep until the last car’s length, and then he said his thanks and his goodbyes and he slipped out, and he stepped ahead and put his foot on the last inch of blacktop, directly under the barrier pole.
The end of the road.
One thing leads to another.
He looped back and crossed to the southbound lanes and set up again thirty yards from the barriers. He wanted to give incoming drivers plenty of time to see him, but not enough time to be already going too fast to stop. Once again he anticipated no kind of a lengthy delay. August, daylight, sunshine, vacation country, warmhearted and relaxed Canadian drivers full of generosity and goodwill. Ten minutes max, he thought, maybe closer to five, and it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that the first car through would be the one.
It wasn’t. But the second car was. Which was more of a minivan, really. But not the kind of thing a soccer mom would be proud of. It was old and grimy, and somewhat battered. Light blue, maybe, when it left the factory, but now colorless, almost, faded by sun and salt. There was a young man at the
wheel, and a young woman beside him in the front, and another young woman in the back. The van had New Brunswick plates, and it was trailing a puff of oil smoke, after pulling away from the customs post.
But Reacher had ridden in worse vehicles.
It slowed and stopped alongside him. The passenger window was already down. The woman in the front said, “We’re headed for Naismith.”
Which was a place Reacher had never heard of. He said, “I’m not sure where that is.”
The guy at the wheel leaned across and said, “The Allagash, man. About an hour west of Route 11. After going north for a bit. It’s a little town. Where you get on the wilderness trail through the forest. It’s a really cool place.”
Reacher said, “North of here?”
The guy said, “Beautiful country, man. You should see those woods. Really primeval. Step off the path, and you could be the first human ever to set foot. I mean, literally. Ten thousand years of undisturbed nature. Since the last Ice Age.”
Reacher said nothing.
The guy said, “Get it while you can, my friend. It won’t be there forever. Climate change is going to take it all down.”
No particular place to be.
Reacher said, “OK, sure, thanks.”
One thing leads to another.
He looped around the rear of the van and the girl in the back slid the door on a rusty track and he climbed in. Behind him in the load space were two big backpacks and one hard-shell suitcase. The seat was some kind of nylon cloth gone greasy with age. He got settled and slid the door closed and the van moved off, puffing smoke again, from the effort.
“Thanks,” Reacher said, for the second time.
The trio introduced themselves. The girl in the back was Helen, and the girl in the front was Suzanne, and the driver was Henry. Henry and Suzanne were a couple. They ran a bicycle store in a place called Moncton. Helen was their friend. The plan was Henry and Suzanne would walk the wilderness trail north from Naismith, to a place called Cripps, which would take four days. Helen would be waiting there with the van to meet them, having spent the same four days doing something else, maybe antiquing in Presque Isle and Caribou.