Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “I’ll let you out somewhere,” I said. “Like you never saw me.”

  He moved. Turned sideways on his seat and looked straight at me.

  “Take me home,” he said. “All the way. We’ll give you money. Help you out. We’ll hide you, if you want. My folks will be grateful. I mean, I’m grateful. Believe me. You saved my ass. The cop thing, it was an accident, right? Just an accident. You got unlucky. It was a pressure situation. I can understand that. We’ll keep it quiet.”

  “I don’t need your help,” I said. “I just need to get rid of you.”

  “But I need to get home,” he said. “We’d be helping each other.”

  The highway was four minutes ahead.

  “Where’s home?” I asked.

  “Abbot,” he said.

  “Abbot what?”

  “Abbot, Maine. On the coast. Between Kennebunkport and Portland.”

  “We’re heading in the wrong direction.”

  “You can turn north on the highway.”

  “It’s got to be two hundred miles, minimum.”

  “We’ll give you money. We’ll make it worth your while.”

  “I could let you out near Boston,” I said. “Got to be a bus to Portland.”

  He shook his head, violently, like a seizure.

  “No way,” he said. “I can’t take the bus. I can’t be alone. Not now. I need protection. Those guys might still be out there.”

  “Those guys are dead,” I said. “Like the damn cop.”

  “They might have associates.”

  It was another odd word to use. He looked small and thin and scared. There was a pulse jumping in his neck. He used both hands to pull his hair away from his head and turned toward the windshield to let me see his left ear. It wasn’t there. There was just a hard knob of scar tissue. It looked like a small piece of uncooked pasta. Like a raw tortellini floret.

  “They cut it off and mailed it,” he said. “The first time.”

  “When?”

  “I was fifteen.”

  “Your dad didn’t pay up?”

  “Not quickly enough.”

  I said nothing. Richard Beck just sat there, showing me his scar, shocked and scared and breathing like a machine.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Take me home,” he said. Like he was pleading. “I can’t be alone now.”

  The highway was two minutes ahead.

  “Please,” he said. “Help me.”

  “Shit,” I said, for the third time.

  “Please. We can help each other. You need to hide out.”

  “We can’t keep this van,” I said. “We have to assume the description is on the air all over the state.”

  He stared at me, full of hope. The highway was one minute ahead.

  “We’ll have to find a car,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. There are cars all over the place.”

  There was a big sprawling out-of-town shopping mall nestled south and west of the highway interchange. I could already see it in the distance. There were giant tan buildings with no windows and bright neon signs. There were giant parking lots about half-filled with cars. I pulled in and drove once around the whole place. It was as big as a town. There were people everywhere. They made me nervous. I came around again and headed in past a line of trash containers to the rear of a big department store.

  “Where are we going?” Richard asked.

  “Staff parking,” I said. “Customers are in and out all day long. Unpredictable. But store people are in there for the duration. Safer.”

  He looked at me like he didn’t understand. I headed for a line of eight cars parked head-on against a blank wall. There was an empty slot next to a dull-colored Nissan Maxima about three years old. It would do. It was a pretty anonymous vehicle. The lot was a backwater, quiet and private. I pulled beyond the empty slot and backed up into it. Put the van’s rear doors tight against the wall.

  “Got to hide the busted window,” I said.

  The kid said nothing. I put both empty Colts into my coat pockets and slid out. Tried the Maxima’s doors.

  “Find me some wire,” I said. “Like heavy electrical cable or a coat hanger.”

  “You’re going to steal this car?”

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  “Is that smart?”

  “You’d think so if it was you who’d accidentally shot a cop.”

  The kid looked blank for a second and then came to and scouted around. I emptied the Anacondas and tossed the twelve spent shell cases into a garbage container. The kid came back with a three-foot length of electrical wire from a trash pile. I stripped the insulation with my teeth and made a little hook in the end and shoved it past the rubber sealing strip around the Maxima’s window.

  “You’re the lookout,” I said.

  He stepped away and scanned the lot and I fed the wire down inside the car and jiggled it around and jiggled the door handle until it popped open. I tossed the wire back in the trash and bent down under the steering column and pulled off the plastic shroud. Sorted through the wires in there until I found the two I needed and touched them together. The starter motor whined and the engine turned over and caught and ran steadily. The kid looked suitably impressed.

  “Misspent youth,” I said.

  “Is this smart?” he asked again.

  I nodded. “Smart as we can get. It won’t be missed until six tonight, maybe eight. Whenever the store closes. You’ll be home long before then.”

  He paused with his hand on the passenger door and then kind of shook himself and ducked inside. I racked the driver’s seat back and adjusted the mirror and backed out of the slot. Took it easy through the mall lot. There was a cop car crawling around about a hundred yards away. I parked again in the first place I saw and sat there with the engine running until the cop moved away. Then I hustled for the exit and around the cloverleaf and two minutes later we were heading north on a wide smooth highway at a respectable sixty miles an hour. The car smelled strongly of perfume and there were two boxes of tissues in it. There was some kind of furry bear stuck on the rear window with clear plastic suckers where its paws should have been. There was a Little League glove on the back seat and I could hear an aluminum bat rattling around in the trunk.

  “Mom’s taxi,” I said.

  The kid didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s probably insured. Probably a solid citizen.”

  “Don’t you feel bad?” he said. “About the cop?”

  I glanced at him. He was thin and pale and crunched up again as far from me as he could get. His hand was resting against the door. His long fingers made him look a little like a musician. I think he wanted to like me, but I didn’t need him to.

  “Shit happens,” I said. “No need to get all worked up about it.”

  “What the hell kind of answer is that?”

  “The only kind. It was minor collateral damage. Means nothing unless it comes back to bite us. Bottom line, we can’t change it, so we move on.”

  He said nothing.

  “Anyway, it was your dad’s fault,” I said.

  “For being rich and having a son?”

  “For hiring lousy bodyguards.”

  He looked away. Said nothing.

  “They were bodyguards, right?”

  He nodded. Said nothing.

  “So don’t you feel bad?” I asked. “About them?”

  “A little,” he said. “I guess. I didn’t know them well.”

  “They were useless,” I said.

  “It happened so fast.”

  “The bad guys were waiting right there,” I said. “A ratty old pickup like that just hanging around in a prissy little college town? What kind of bodyguards don’t notice a thing like that? They never heard of threat assessment?”

  “You saying you noticed?”

  “I noticed.”

  “Not bad for a van driver.”

  “I was in the army. I was
a military cop. I understand bodyguarding. And I understand collateral damage.”

  The kid nodded, uncertainly.

  “You got a name yet?” he asked.

  “Depends,” I said. “I need to understand your point of view. I could be in all kinds of trouble. At least one cop is dead and now I just stole a car.”

  He went quiet again. I matched him, mile for mile. Gave him time to think. We were almost out of Massachusetts.

  “My family appreciates loyalty,” he said. “You did their son a service. And you did them a service. Saved them some money, at least. They’ll show their gratitude. I’m sure the last thing they’ll do is rat you out.”

  “You need to call them?”

  He shook his head. “They’re expecting me. As long as I show up there’s no need to call them.”

  “The cops will call them. They think you’re in big trouble.”

  “They don’t have the number. Nobody does.”

  “The college must have your address. They can find your number.”

  He shook his head again. “The college doesn’t have the address. Nobody does. We’re very careful about stuff like that.”

  I shrugged and kept quiet and drove another mile.

  “So what about you?” I said. “You going to rat me out?”

  I saw him touch his right ear. The one that was still there. It was clearly a completely subconscious gesture.

  “You saved my ass,” he said. “I’m not going to rat you out.”

  “OK,” I said. “My name is Reacher.”

  We spent a few minutes cutting across a tiny corner of Vermont and then struck out north and east across New Hampshire. Settled in for the long, long drive. The adrenaline drained away and the kid got over his state of shock and we both ended up a little down and sleepy. I cracked the window to get some air in and some perfume out. It made the car noisy but it kept me awake. We talked a little. Richard Beck told me he was twenty years old. He was in his junior year. He was majoring in some kind of contemporary art expression thing that sounded a lot like finger painting to me. He wasn’t good at relationships. He was an only child. There was a lot of ambivalence about his family. They were clearly some kind of tight close-knit clan and half of him wanted out and the other half needed to be in. He was clearly very traumatized by the previous kidnap. It made me wonder whether something had been done to him, apart from the ear thing. Maybe something much worse.

  I told him about the army. I laid it on pretty thick about my bodyguarding qualifications. I wanted him to feel he was in good hands, at least temporarily. I drove fast and steady. The Maxima had just been filled. We didn’t need to stop for gas. He didn’t want lunch. I stopped once to use a men’s room. Left the engine running so I wouldn’t have to fiddle with the ignition wires again. Came back to the car and found him inert inside it. We got back on the road and passed by Concord in New Hampshire and headed toward Portland in Maine. Time passed. He got more relaxed, the closer we got to home. But he got quieter, too. Ambivalence.

  We crossed the state line and then about twenty miles short of Portland he squirmed around and checked the view out of the back very carefully and told me to take the next exit. We turned onto a narrow road heading due east toward the Atlantic. It passed under I-95 and then ran more than fifteen miles across granite headlands to the sea. It was the kind of landscape that would have looked great in summer. But it was still cold and raw. There were trees stunted by salt winds and exposed rock outcrops where gales and storm tides had scoured the dirt away. The road twisted and turned like it was trying to fight its way as far east as it could get. I glimpsed the ocean ahead. It was as gray as iron. The road pushed on past inlets to the left and right. I saw small beaches made of gritty sand. Then the road curved left and immediately right and rose up onto a headland shaped like the palm of a hand. The palm narrowed abruptly into a single finger jutting directly out to sea. It was a rock peninsula maybe a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. I could feel the wind buffeting the car. I drove out onto the peninsula and saw a line of bent and stunted evergreen trees that were trying to hide a high granite wall but weren’t quite tall enough or thick enough to succeed. The wall was maybe eight feet tall. It was topped with big coils of razor wire. It had security lights mounted at intervals. It ran laterally all the way across the hundred-yard width of the finger. It canted down suddenly at the ends and ran all the way into the sea, where its massive foundations were built on huge stone blocks. The blocks were mossy with seaweed. There was an iron gate set in the wall, dead-center. It was closed.

  “This is it,” Richard Beck said. “This is where I live.”

  The road led straight to the gate. Behind the gate it changed to a long straight driveway. At the end of the driveway was a gray stone house. I could see it there at the end of the finger, right out in the ocean. Right beside the gate was a one-story lodge. Same design and same stone as the house, but much smaller and lower. It shared its foundations with the wall. I slowed and stopped the car in front of the gate.

  “Honk the horn,” Richard Beck said.

  The Maxima had a little bugle shape on the airbag lid. I pressed on it with one finger and the horn beeped politely. I saw a surveillance camera on the gatepost tilt and pan. It was like a little glass eye looking at me. There was a long pause and the lodge door opened. A guy in a dark suit stepped out. Clearly the suit came from a big-and-tall store and was probably the largest size it had ever offered but even so it was very tight in the shoulders and short in the arms for its owner. He was way bigger than me, which put him firmly in the freak category. He was a giant. He walked up close to his side of the gate and stared out. He spent a long time looking at me and a short time looking at the kid. Then he unlocked the gate and pulled it open.

  “Drive straight up to the house,” Richard told me. “Don’t stop here. I don’t like that guy very much.”

  I drove through the gate. Didn’t stop. But I drove slow and looked around. The first thing you do going into a place is to look for your way out. The wall ran all the way into rough water on both sides. It was too high to jump and the razor wire along the top made it impossible to climb. There was a cleared area maybe thirty yards deep behind it. Like no-man’s-land. Or a minefield. The security lights were set to cover all of it. There was no way out except through the gate. The giant was closing it behind us. I could see him in the mirror.

  It was a long drive up to the house. Gray ocean on three sides. The house was a big old pile. Maybe some sea captain’s place from way back when killing whales made people respectable fortunes. It was all stone, with intricate beadings and cornices and folds. All the north-facing surfaces were covered in gray lichen. The rest was spotted with green. It was three stories high. It had a dozen chimneys. The roofline was complex. There were gables all over the place with short gutters and dozens of fat iron pipes to drain the rainwater away. The front door was oak and was banded and studded with iron. The driveway widened into a carriage circle. I followed it around counterclockwise and stopped right in front of the door. The door opened and another guy in a dark suit stepped out. He was about my size, which made him a lot smaller than the guy in the lodge. But I didn’t like him any better. He had a stone face and blank eyes. He opened the Maxima’s passenger door like he had been expecting to see it, which I guessed he was, because the big guy in the lodge would have called ahead.

  “Will you wait here?” Richard asked me.

  He slipped out of the car and walked away into the gloom inside the house and the guy in the suit closed the oak door from the outside and took up station right in front of it. He wasn’t looking at me but I knew I was somewhere in his peripheral vision. I broke the wire connection under the steering column and turned the motor off and waited.

  It was a reasonably long wait, probably close to forty minutes. Without the engine running the car grew cold. It rocked gently in the sea breeze eddying around the house. I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I was facing northeas
t and the air was whipped and clear. I could see the coastline curving in from the left. I could see a faint brown smudge in the air about twenty miles away. Probably pollution coming up out of Portland. The city itself was hidden behind a headland.

  Then the oak door opened again and the guard stepped smartly aside and a woman came out. She was Richard Beck’s mother. No doubt about that. No doubt at all. She had the same slight build and the same pale face. The same long fingers. She was wearing jeans and a heavy fisherman’s sweater. She had windblown hair and was maybe fifty years old. She looked tired and strained. She stopped about six feet from the car, like she was giving me the opportunity to realize it would be more polite if I got out and met her halfway. So I opened the door and slid out. I was stiff and cramped. I stepped forward and she put out her hand. I took it. It was ice cold and full of bones and tendons.

  “My son told me what happened,” she said. Her voice was low and sounded a little husky, like maybe she smoked a lot or had been crying hard. “I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that you helped him.”

  “Is he OK?” I asked.

  She made a face, like she wasn’t sure. “He’s lying down now.”

  I nodded. Let go of her hand. It fell back to her side. There was a short awkward silence.

  “I’m Elizabeth Beck,” she said.

  “Jack Reacher,” I said.

  “My son explained your predicament,” she said.

  It was a nice neutral word. I said nothing in reply.

  “My husband will be home tonight,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  I nodded. There was another awkward pause. I waited.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked.

  She turned and walked back into the hallway. I followed her. I passed through the door and it beeped. I looked again and saw that a metal detector had been installed tight against the inside jamb.

  “Would you mind?” Elizabeth Beck asked. She made a sort of sheepish apologetic gesture toward me and then toward the big ugly guy in the suit. He stepped up and made ready to pat me down.

  “Two guns,” I said. “Empty. In my coat pockets.”

  He pulled them out with the kind of easy practiced moves that suggested he had patted plenty of people down before. He laid them on a side table and squatted and ran his hands up my legs, and then stood and went over my arms, my waist, my chest, my back. He was very thorough, and not very gentle.