Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  I said nothing.

  “This case was like a wave on the beach,” he said. “Like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind.”

  I said nothing.

  “Except it did leave something behind,” he said. “It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we have to address it.”

  He waited for me to speak. I thought about clamming up. Thought about making him do all the work himself. But in the end I just shrugged and gave it up.

  “The brutality complaint,” I said.

  He nodded. “Colonel Willard brought it to our attention. And it’s awkward. Whereas the unauthorized use of the travel warrants can be dismissed as germane to the investigation, the brutality complaint can’t. Because apparently the two civilians were completely unrelated to the business at hand.”

  “I was misinformed,” I said.

  “That doesn’t alter the fact, I’m afraid.”

  “Your witness is dead.”

  “He left a signed affidavit. That stands forever. That’s the same as if he were right there in the courtroom, testifying.”

  I said nothing.

  “It comes down to a simple question of fact,” the colonel said. “A simple yes or no answer, really. Did you do what Carbone alleged?”

  I said nothing.

  The colonel stood up. “You can talk it over with your counsel.”

  I glanced at the captain. Apparently he was my lawyer. The colonel shuffled out and closed the door on us. The captain leaned forward from his chair and shook my hand and told me his name.

  “You should cut the colonel some slack,” he said. “He’s giving you a loophole a mile wide. This whole thing is a charade.”

  “I rocked the boat,” I said. “The army is getting its licks in.”

  “You’re wrong, Reacher. Nobody wants to screw you over this. Willard forced the issue, is all. So we have to go through the motions.”

  “Which are?”

  “All you’ve got to do is deny it. That throws Carbone’s evidence into dispute, and since he’s not around to be cross-examined, your Sixth Amendment right to be confronted by the witness against you kicks in and it guarantees you an automatic dismissal.”

  I sat still.

  “How would it be done?” I said.

  “You sign an affidavit just like Carbone did. His says black, yours says white, the problem goes away.”

  “Official paper?”

  “It’ll take five minutes. We can do it right here. Your corporal can type it and witness it. Dead easy.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the alternative?” I said.

  “You’d be nuts to even think about an alternative.”

  “What would happen?”

  “It would be like pleading guilty.”

  “What would happen?” I said again.

  “With an effective guilty plea? Loss of rank, loss of pay, backdated to the incident. Civilian Affairs wouldn’t let us get away with anything less.”

  I said nothing.

  “You’d be busted back to captain. In the regular MPs, because the 110th wouldn’t want you anymore. That’s the short answer. But you’d be nuts to even think about it. All you have to do is deny it.”

  I sat there and thought about Carbone. Thirty-five years old, sixteen of them in the service. Infantry, Airborne, the Rangers, Delta. Sixteen years of hard time. He had done nothing except try to keep a secret he should never have had to keep. And try to alert his unit to a threat. Nothing much wrong with either of those things. But he was dead. Dead in the woods, dead on a slab. Then I thought about the fat guy at the strip club. I didn’t really care about the farmer. A busted nose was no big deal. But the fat guy was messed up bad. On the other hand, he wasn’t one of North Carolina’s finest citizens. I doubted if the governor was lining him up for a civic award.

  I thought about both of those guys for a long time. Carbone, and the fat man in the parking lot. Then I thought about myself. A major, a star, a hotshot special unit investigator, a go-to guy headed for the top.

  “OK,” I said. “Bring the colonel back in.”

  The captain got up out of his chair and opened the door. Held it for the colonel. Closed it behind him. Sat down again next to me. The colonel shuffled past us and sat down at the desk.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s wrap this thing up. The complaint is baseless, yes?”

  I looked at him. Said nothing.

  “Well?”

  You’re going to do the right thing.

  “The complaint is true,” I said.

  He stared at me.

  “The complaint is accurate,” I said. “In every detail. It went down exactly like Carbone described.”

  “Christ,” the colonel said.

  “Are you crazy?” the captain said.

  “Probably,” I said. “But Carbone wasn’t a liar. That shouldn’t be the last thing that goes in his record. He deserves better than that. He was in sixteen years.”

  The room went quiet. We all just sat there. They were looking at a lot of paperwork. I was looking at being an MP captain again. No more special unit. But it wasn’t a big surprise. I had seen it coming. I had seen it coming ever since I closed my eyes on the plane and the dominoes started falling, end over end, one after the other.

  “One request,” I said. “I want a two-day suspension included. Starting now.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to go to a funeral. I don’t want to beg my CO for leave.”

  The colonel looked away.

  “Granted,” he said.

  I went back to my quarters and packed my duffel with everything I owned. I cashed a check at the commissary and left fifty-two dollars in an envelope for my sergeant. I mailed fifty back to Franz. I collected the crowbar that Marshall had used from the pathologist and I put it with the one we had on loan from the store. Then I went to the MP motor pool and looked for a vehicle to borrow. I was surprised to see Kramer’s rental still parked there.

  “Nobody told us what to do with it,” the clerk said.

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, you tell me. It was your case.”

  I wanted something inconspicuous, and the little red Ford stood out among all the olive drab and black. But then I realized the situation would be reversed out in the world. Out there, the little red Ford wouldn’t attract a second glance.

  “I’ll take it back now,” I said. “I’m headed to Dulles anyway.”

  There was no paperwork, because it wasn’t an army vehicle.

  I left Fort Bird at twenty past ten in the morning and drove north toward Green Valley. I went much slower than before, because the Ford was a slow car and I was a slow driver, at least compared to Summer. I didn’t stop for lunch. I just kept on going. I arrived at the police station at a quarter past three in the afternoon. I found Detective Clark at his desk in the bullpen. I told him his case was closed. Told him Summer would give him the details. I collected the crowbar he had on loan and drove the ten miles to Sperryville. I squeezed through the narrow alley and parked outside the hardware store. The window had been fixed. The square of plywood was gone. I looped all three crowbars over my forearm and went inside and returned them to the old guy behind the counter. Then I got back in the car and followed the only road out of town, all the way to Washington D.C.

  I took a short counterclockwise loop on the Beltway and went looking for the worst part of town I could find. There was plenty of choice. I picked a four-block square that was mostly crumbling warehouses with narrow alleys between. I found what I wanted in the third alley I checked. I saw an emaciated whore come out a brick doorway. I went in past her and found a guy in a hat. He had what I wanted. It took a minute to get some mutual trust going. But eventually cash money settled our differences, like it always does everywhere. I bought a little reefer, a little speed, and two dime rocks of crack cocaine. I could see the guy in
the hat wasn’t impressed by the quantities. I could see he wrote me off as an amateur.

  Then I drove to Rock Creek, Virginia. I got there just before five o’clock. Parked three hundred yards from 110th Special Unit headquarters, up on a rise, where I could look down over the fence into the parking lot. I picked out Willard’s car with no trouble at all. He had told me all about it. A classic Pontiac GTO. It was right there, near the rear exit. I slumped way down in my seat and kept my eyes wide-open and watched.

  He came out at five-fifteen. Bankers’ hours. He fired up the Pontiac and backed it away from the building. I had my window cracked open for air and even from three hundred yards I could hear the rumble of the pipes. They made a pretty good V-8 sound. I figured it was a sound Summer would have enjoyed. I made a mental note that if I ever won the lottery I should buy her a GTO of her own.

  I fired up the Ford. Willard came out of the lot and turned toward me. I hunkered down and let him go past. Then I waited one thousand, two thousand and U-turned and followed after him. He was an easy tail. With the window down I could have done it by sound alone. He drove fairly slow, big and obvious up ahead, near the crown of the road. I stayed well back and let the drive-time traffic fill his mirrors. He headed east toward the D.C. suburbs. I figured he would have a rental in Arlington or Maclean from his Pentagon days. I hoped it wasn’t an apartment. But I figured it would more likely be a house. With a garage, for the muscle car. Which was good, because a house was easier.

  It was a house. It was on a rural street in the no-man’s-land north of Arlington. Plenty of trees, most of them bare, some of them evergreen. The lots were irregular. The driveways were long and curved. The plantings were messy. The street should have had a sign: Divorced or single male middle-income government workers only. It was that kind of a place. Not totally ideal, but a lot better than a straight suburban tract with side-by-side front yards full of frolicking kids and anxious mothers.

  I drove on by and parked a mile away. Sat and waited for the darkness.

  I waited until seven o’clock and I walked. There was low cloud and mist. No starlight. No moon. I was in woodland-pattern BDUs. I was as invisible as the Pentagon could make me. I figured at seven the place would still be mostly empty. I figured a lot of middle-income government workers would have ambitions to become high-income government workers, so they would stay at their desks, trying to impress whoever needed impressing. I used the street that ran parallel to the back of Willard’s street and found two messy yards next to each other. Neither house was lit. I walked down the first driveway and kept on going around the dark bulk of the house and straight through the backyard. I stood still. No dogs barked. I turned and tracked along the boundary fences until I was looking at Willard’s own backyard. It was full of dead hummocked grass. There was a rusted-out barbecue grill abandoned in the middle of the lawn. In army terms the place was not standing tall and squared away. It was a mess.

  I bent a fence post until I had room to slip past it. Walked straight through Willard’s yard and around his garage to his front door. There was no porch light. The view from the street was half-open, half-obscured. Not perfect. But not bad. I put my elbow on the bell. Heard it sound inside. There was a short pause and then I heard footsteps. I stood back. Willard opened the door. No delay at all. Maybe he was expecting Chinese food. Or a pizza.

  I punched him in the chest to move him backward. Stepped in after him and closed the door behind me with my foot. It was a dismal house. The air was stale. Willard was clutching the stair post, gasping for breath. I hit him in the face and knocked him down. He came up on his hands and knees and I kicked him hard in the ass and kept on kicking until he took the hint and started crawling toward the kitchen as fast as he could. He got himself in there and kind of rolled over and sat on the floor with his back hard up against a cabinet. There was fear in his face, for sure, but confusion too. Like he couldn’t believe I was doing this. Like he was thinking: This is about a disciplinary complaint? His bureaucratic calculus couldn’t compute it.

  “Did you hear about Vassell and Coomer?” I asked him.

  He nodded, fast and scared.

  “Remember Lieutenant Summer?” I asked him.

  He nodded again.

  “She pointed something out to me,” I said. “Kind of obvious, but she said they would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t ignored you.”

  He just stared at me.

  “It made me think,” I said. “What exactly was I ignoring?”

  He said nothing.

  “I misjudged you,” I said. “I apologize. Because I thought I was ignoring a busybody careerist asshole. I thought I was ignoring some kind of a prissy nervous idiot corporate manager who thought he knew better. But I wasn’t. I was ignoring something else entirely.”

  He stared up at me.

  “You didn’t feel embarrassed about Kramer,” I said. “You didn’t feel sensitive about me harassing Vassell and Coomer. You weren’t speaking for the army when you wanted Carbone written up as a training accident. You were doing the job you were put there to do. Someone wanted three homicides covered up, and you were put there to do it for them. You were participating in a deliberate cover-up, Willard. That’s what you were doing. That’s what I was ignoring. I mean, what the hell else were you doing, ordering me not to investigate a homicide? It was a cover-up, and it was planned, and it was structured, and it was decided well in advance. It was decided on the second day of January, when Garber was moved out and you were moved in. You were put in there so that what they were planning to do on the fourth could be controlled. No other reason.”

  He said nothing.

  “I thought they wanted an incompetent in there, so that nature would take its course. But they went one better than that. They put a friend in there.”

  He said nothing.

  “You should have refused,” I said. “If you had refused, they wouldn’t have gone ahead with it and Carbone and Brubaker would still be alive.”

  He said nothing.

  “You killed them, Willard. Just as much as they did.”

  I crouched down next to him. He scrabbled on the floor and pressed backward against the cupboard behind him. He had defeat in his eyes. But he gave it one last shot.

  “You can’t prove anything,” he said.

  Now I said nothing.

  “Maybe it was just incompetence,” he said. “You thought about that? How are you going to prove the intention?”

  I said nothing. His eyes went hard.

  “You’re not dealing with idiots,” he said. “There’s no proof anywhere.”

  I took Franz’s Beretta out of my pocket. The one I had brought out of the Mojave. I hadn’t lost it. It had ridden all the way with me from California. That was why I had checked my luggage, just that one time. They won’t let you carry guns inside the cabin. Not without paperwork.

  “This piece is listed as destroyed,” I said. “It doesn’t officially exist anymore.”

  He stared at it.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You can’t prove anything.”

  “You’re not dealing with an idiot either,” I said.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “It was an order. From the top. We’re in the army. We obey orders.”

  I shook my head. “That excuse never worked for any soldier anywhere.”

  “It was an order,” he said again.

  “From who?”

  He just closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know exactly who it was. And I know I can’t get to him. Not where he is. But I can get to you. You can be my messenger.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “You won’t do it,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you refuse?”

  “I couldn’t refuse. It was time to choose up sides. Don’t you see? We’re all going to have to do that.”

  I nodded. “I guess we are.”

  “Be smart now,” he said. “Please.”
<
br />   “I thought you were one bad apple,” I said. “But the whole barrel is bad. The good apples are the rare ones.”

  He stared at me.

  “You ruined it for me,” I said. “You and your rotten friends.”

  “Ruined what?”

  “Everything.”

  I stood up. Stepped back. Clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire.

  He stared at me.

  “Good-bye, Colonel Willard,” I said.

  I put the gun to my temple. He stared at me.

  “Just kidding,” I said.

  Then I shot him through the center of the forehead.

  It was a typical nine-millimeter full metal jacket through and through. It put the back of his skull into the cupboard behind him and left it there with a lot of smashed china. I stuffed the reefer and the speed and the crack cocaine in his pockets, along with a symbolic roll of dollar bills. Then I walked out the back door and away through his yard. I slipped through the fence and through the lot behind his and walked back to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat and opened my duffel and changed my boots. Took off the pair that had been ruined in the Mojave and put on a better pair. Then I drove west, toward Dulles. Into the Hertz return bays. Car rental bosses aren’t dumb. They know people get cars messy. They know they accumulate all kinds of crap inside. So they position big garbage cans near the return bays in the hope that renters will do the decent thing and clear some of the crap out themselves. That way they save on wages. Cut out even a minute a car, and staff costs drop a lot over a whole year. I put my old boots in one can, and the Beretta in another. As many cars as Hertz rented at Dulles in a day, those cans were headed for the crusher on a regular basis.

  I walked all the way to the terminal. I didn’t feel like taking the bus. I showed my military ID and used my checkbook and bought a one-way ticket to Paris, on the same Air France red-eye Joe had taken back when the world was different.

  I got to the Avenue Rapp at eight in the morning. Joe told me the cars were coming at ten. So I shaved and showered in the guest bathroom and found my mother’s ironing board and pressed my Class A uniform very carefully. I found polish in a cupboard and shined my shoes. Then I dressed. I put my full array of medals on, all four rows. I followed the Correct Order of Wear regulations and the Wear of Full Size Medals regulations. Each one hung down neatly over the ribbon in the row below. I used a cloth and cleaned them. I cleaned my other badges too, including my major’s oak leaves, one last time. Then I went into the white-painted living room to wait.