Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Those are Russian names.”

  “You think?”

  “Except Zec. What kind of a name is Zec?”

  “It’s not Zec. It’s the Zec. It’s a word. A word, being used as a name.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Look it up. Read some history books.”

  There was a pause. The sound of writing.

  “You should come in,” Emerson said. “Talk to me face-to-face.”

  “Not yet,” Reacher said. “Do your job and I’ll think about it.”

  “I am doing my job. I’m hunting a fugitive. You killed that girl. Not some guy whose name you claim you heard, as big as a house.”

  “One more thing,” Reacher said. “I think the guy called Chenko also goes by the name of Charlie and is James Barr’s friend.”

  “Why?”

  “The description. Small guy, dark, with black hair that sticks up like a brush.”

  “James Barr has got a Russian friend? Not according to our inquiries.”

  “Like I said, do your job.”

  “We’re doing it. Nobody mentioned a Russian friend.”

  “He sounds American. I think he was involved with what happened on Friday, which means maybe this whole crew was involved.”

  “Involved how?”

  “I don’t know. But I plan to find out. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You’ll be in jail tomorrow.”

  “Like I’m in jail now? Dream on, Emerson.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Close by,” Reacher said. “Sleep well, Detective.”

  He clicked the phone off and put Emerson’s number back in his pocket and took out Helen Rodin’s. Dialed it and moved around the concrete pillar into deep shadow.

  “Yes?” Helen Rodin said.

  “This is Reacher.”

  “Are you OK? The cop is right outside my door now.”

  “Suits me,” Reacher said. “Suits him too, I expect. He’s probably getting forty bucks an hour for the overtime.”

  “They put your face on the six o’clock news. It’s a big story.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Free and clear. Making progress. I saw Charlie. I gave Emerson his plate number. Are you making progress?”

  “Not really. All I’ve got is five random names. No reason I can see why anybody told James Barr to shoot any one of them.”

  “You need Franklin. You need research.”

  “I can’t afford Franklin.”

  “I want you to find that address in Kentucky for me.”

  “Kentucky?”

  “Where James Barr went to shoot.”

  Reacher heard her juggle the phone and flip through paper. Then she came back and read out an address. It meant nothing to Reacher. A road, a town, a state, a zip.

  “What’s Kentucky got to do with anything?” Helen asked.

  Reacher heard a car on the street. Close by, to his left, fat tires rolling slow. He slid around the pillar and looked. A PD prowl car, crawling, lights off. Two cops in the front, craning their necks, looking right, looking left.

  “Got to go,” he said. He clicked the phone off and put it on the ground at the base of the pillar. Emerson’s caller ID would have trapped the number and any cell phone’s physical location could be tracked by the recognition pulse that it sends to the network, once every fifteen seconds, regular as clockwork. So Reacher left the phone in the dirt and headed west, forty feet below the raised roadbed.

  Ten minutes later he was opposite the back of the black glass tower, in the shadows under the highway, facing the vehicle ramp. There was an empty cop car parked on the curb. It looked still and cold. Settled. Like it had been there for a spell. The guy outside Helen’s door, Reacher thought. He crossed the street and walked down the ramp. Into the underground garage. The concrete was all painted dirty white and there were fluorescent tubes blazing every fifteen feet. There were pools of light and pools of darkness. Reacher felt like he was walking out of the wings across a succession of brightly-lit stages. The ceiling was low. There were fat square pillars holding up the building. The service core was in the center. The whole space was cold and silent and about forty yards deep and maybe three times as wide.

  Forty yards deep.

  Just like the new extension on First Street. Reacher stepped over and put his back against the front wall. Walked all the way across to the back wall. Thirty-five paces. He turned like a swimmer at the end of a lap and walked back. Thirty-five paces. He crossed diagonally to the far corner. The garage was dark back there. He threaded between two NBC vans and found the blue Ford Mustang he guessed belonged to Ann Yanni. It was clean and shiny. Recently waxed. It had small windows, because of the convertible top. A raked windshield. Tinted glass.

  He tried the passenger door. Locked. He moved around the hood and tried the driver’s door. The handle moved. Unlocked. He glanced around and opened the door.

  No alarm.

  He reached inside and touched the unlock button. There was a triple thunk as both door locks and the trunk lock unlatched. He closed the driver’s door and stepped back to the trunk. The spare tire was under the floor. Nested inside the wheel were the jack and a length of metal pipe that both worked the jack and undid the wheel nuts. He took the pipe out and closed the trunk. Stepped around to the passenger side and opened the door and got inside the car.

  The interior smelled of perfume and coffee. He opened the glove box and found a stack of road maps and a small leather folder the size of a purse diary. Inside the folder were an insurance slip and an auto registration, both made out to Ms. Janine Lorna Ann Yanni at a local Indiana address. He put the folder away again and closed the glove box. Found the right levers and lowered his seat as far as it would go. He reclined the back all the way, which wasn’t far. Then he moved the whole seat backward to give himself as much legroom as he could get. He untucked his shirt and rested the pipe in his lap and lay back in the seat. Stretched. He had about three hours to wait. He tried to sleep. Sleep when you can was the old army rule.

  First thing Emerson did was contact the phone company. He confirmed that the number his caller ID had caught was a cell phone. The service contract was written out to a business operating under the name Specialized Services of Indiana. Emerson tasked a first-year detective to track the business and told the phone company to track the phone. Initial progress was mixed. Specialized Services of Indiana dead-ended because it was owned by an offshore trust in Bermuda and had no local address. But the phone company reported that the cell phone was stationary and was showing up on three cells at once, which meant it had to be in the downtown area and would be easy to triangulate.

  Rosemary Barr sweet-talked her way past the Board of Corrections desk on the sixth floor of the hospital and was granted an out-of-hours visit with her brother. But when she got to his room she found he was deeply asleep. Her sweet talk was wasted. She sat for thirty minutes but James didn’t wake up. She watched the monitors. His heartbeat was strong and regular. His breathing was fine. He was still handcuffed and his head was still clamped but his body was perfectly still. She checked his chart, to make sure he was being properly cared for. She saw the doctor’s scribbled note: possible early-onset PA? She had no idea what that meant, and late in the evening she couldn’t find anyone willing to explain it to her.

  The phone company marked the cell phone’s location on a large-scale city map and faxed it to Emerson. Emerson tore it out of the machine and spent five minutes trying to make sense of it. He was expecting to find the three arrows meeting at a hotel, or a bar, or a restaurant. Instead they met on a vacant lot under the raised highway. He had a brief image in his mind of Reacher sleeping rough in a cardboard box. Then he concluded that the phone was abandoned, which was confirmed ten minutes later by the patrol car he sent out to check.

  And then just for formality’s sake he fired up his computer and entered the plate numbers Reacher had given
him. They came back as late-model Cadillac DeVilles, both black, both registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. He wrote dead end on the sheet of paper and dropped it in a file.

  Reacher woke up every time he heard the elevator motors start. The sound whined down the shaft through the cables and the moving cars rumbled. The first three times were false alarms. Just anonymous office people heading home after a long day at work. Every forty minutes or so they came down alone and walked wearily to their cars and drove away. Three times the tang of cold exhaust fumes drifted and three times the garage went quiet again and three times Reacher went back to sleep.

  The fourth time, he stayed awake. He heard the elevator start and checked his watch. Eleven forty-five. Showtime. He waited and heard the elevator doors open. This time, it wasn’t just another lone guy in a suit. It was a big crowd. Eight or ten people. Noisy. It was the whole cast and crew from the NBC affiliate’s eleven o’clock news.

  Reacher pressed himself down in the Mustang’s passenger seat and hid the tire iron underneath the tails of his shirt. It was cold against the skin of his stomach. He stared up at the fabric roof and waited.

  A heavy guy in baggy jeans passed through the darkness within five feet of the Mustang’s front fender. He had a ragged gray beard and was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt under a torn cotton cardigan. Not on-screen talent. Maybe a cameraman. He walked on toward a silver pickup and climbed inside. Then came a man in a sharkskin suit and orange makeup. He had big hair and white teeth. Definitely on-screen talent, maybe weather, maybe sports. He passed by on the Mustang’s other side and got into a white Ford Taurus. Then came three women together, young, casual dress, maybe the studio director and the floor manager and the vision mixer. They squeezed between the Mustang’s trunk and a broadcast van. The car rocked three times as they nudged it. Then they split up and headed for their own separate rides.

  Then came three more people.

  Then came Ann Yanni.

  Reacher didn’t notice her individually until she put her hand on her car’s door handle. She paused and called something out to one of the others. She got an answer, said something else, and then opened the door. She came in butt-first, swiveling and ducking her head. She was wearing old jeans and a new silk blouse. It looked expensive. Reacher guessed she had been on camera, but at an anchor’s desk, visible from the waist up only. Her hair was stiff with spray. She dumped herself in the seat and shut her door. Then she glanced to her right.

  “Keep very quiet,” Reacher said to her. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

  He jabbed the tire iron at her, under his shirt. Half-inch wide, long and straight, it looked plausible. She stared at it in shock. Face-to-face two feet away she looked thinner and older than she looked on the television screen. There were fine lines all around her eyes, full of makeup. But she was very beautiful. She had impossibly perfect features, bold and vivid and larger than life, like most TV people. Her blouse had a formal collar but was open three buttons. Prim and sexy, at the same time.

  “Hands where I can see them,” Reacher said. “In your lap.” He didn’t want her to go for the horn. “Keys on the console.” He didn’t want her to hit the panic button. The new Fords he had driven had a little red button on the remote fob. He assumed it set off an alarm.

  “Just sit tight,” he said. “Nice and quiet. We’ll be OK.”

  He clicked the button on his side and locked the car.

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  “So do I,” he said.

  He kept the tire iron in place and waited. Yanni sat still, hands in her lap, breathing hard, looking more and more scared as all around them her colleagues’ cars started up. Blue haze drifted. People drove away, one by one. No backward glances. The end of a long day.

  “Keep very quiet,” Reacher said again, as a reminder. “Then we’ll be OK.”

  Yanni glanced left, glanced right. Tension in her body.

  “Don’t do it,” Reacher said. “Don’t do anything. Or I’ll pull the trigger. Gut shot. Or thigh. You’ll take twenty minutes to bleed out. Lots of pain.”

  “What do you want?” Yanni asked.

  “I want you to be quiet and sit still. Just for a few more minutes.”

  She clamped her teeth and went quiet and sat still. The last car drove away. The white Taurus. The guy with the hair. The weatherman, or the sportscaster. There was tire squeal as he turned and engine noise as he gunned up the ramp. Then those sounds faded out and the garage went completely silent.

  “What do you want?” Yanni asked again. Her voice wobbled. Her eyes were huge. She was trembling. She was thinking rape, murder, torture, dismemberment.

  Reacher turned on the dome light.

  “I want you to win the Pulitzer Prize,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Or the Emmy or whatever it is you guys get.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to listen to a story,” he said.

  “What story?”

  “Watch,” Reacher said.

  He lifted his shirt. Showed her the tire iron resting against his stomach. She stared at it. Or at his shrapnel scar. Or both. He wasn’t sure. He balanced the tire iron in his palm. Held it up in the light.

  “From your trunk,” he said. “Not a gun.”

  He clicked the button on the door and unlocked the car.

  “You’re free to go,” he said. “Whenever you want.”

  She put her hand on the handle.

  “But if you go, I go,” Reacher said. “You won’t see me again. You’ll miss the story. Someone else will get it.”

  “We’ve been running your picture all night,” she said. “And the cops have got Wanted posters all over town. You killed Alexandra Dupree.”

  Reacher shook his head. “Actually I didn’t, and that’s part of the story.”

  “What story?” she said again.

  “Last Friday,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t what it seemed.”

  “I’m going to get out of the car now,” Yanni said.

  “No,” Reacher said. “I’ll get out. I apologize if I upset you. But I need your help and you need mine. So I’ll get out. You lock the doors, start the car, keep your foot on the brake, and open your window an inch. We’ll talk through the window. You can drive off anytime you want.”

  She said nothing. Just stared straight ahead as if she could make him vanish by not looking at him. He opened his door. Slid out and turned and laid the tire iron gently on the seat. Then he closed the door and just stood there. He tucked his shirt in. He heard the thunk of her door locks. She started her engine. Her brake lights flared red. He saw her reach up and switch off the dome light. Her face disappeared into shadow. He heard the transmission move out of Park. Her back-up lights flashed white as she moved the selector through Reverse into Drive. Then her brake lights went out and the engine roared and she drove off in a fast wide circle through the empty garage. Her tires squealed. Grippy rubber on smooth concrete. The squeals echoed. She lined up for the exit ramp and accelerated hard.

  Then she jammed on the brakes.

  The Mustang came to rest with its front wheels on the base of the ramp. Reacher walked toward it, crouching a little so he could see through the small rear window. No cell phone. She was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, hands on the wheel. The brake lights blazed red, so bright they hurt. The exhaust pipes burbled. White fumes kicked backward. Drops of water dripped out and made tiny twin pools on the floor.

  Reacher walked around to her window and stayed three feet away. She buzzed the glass down an inch and a half. He dropped into a crouch so he could see her face.

  “Why do I need your help?” she asked.

  “Because Friday was over too soon for you,” he said. “But you can get it back. There’s another layer. It’s a big story. You’ll win prizes. You’ll get a better job. CNN will beat a path to your door.”

  “You think I’m that ambitious?”

  “I think you’re a journalist.�
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  “What does that mean?”

  “That in the end, journalists like stories. They like the truth.”

  She paused, almost a whole minute. Stared straight ahead. The car ticked and clicked as it warmed up. Reacher could sense the idle speed straining against the brakes. Then he saw her glance down and move her arm and shove the selector into Park. The Mustang rolled back six inches and stopped. Reacher shuffled sideways to stay level with the window. Yanni turned her head and looked straight at him.

  “So tell me the story,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

  He told her the story, and the truth. He sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, so as to appear immobile and unthreatening. He left nothing out. He ran through all the events, all the inferences, all the theories, all the guesses. At the end he just stopped talking and waited for her reaction.

  “Where were you when Sandy was killed?” she asked.

  “Asleep in the motor court.”

  “Alone?”

  “All night. Room eight. I slept very well.”

  “No alibi.”

  “You never have an alibi when you need one. That’s a universal law of nature.”

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  “What do you want me to do?” she said.

  “I want you to research the victims.”

  She paused.

  “We could do that,” she said. “We have researchers.”

  “Not good enough,” Reacher said. “I want you to hire a guy called Franklin. Helen Rodin can tell you about him. She’s in this building, two floors above you.”

  “Why hasn’t she hired this Franklin guy herself?”

  “Because she can’t afford him. You can. I assume you’ve got a budget. A week of Franklin’s time probably costs less than one of your weather guy’s haircuts.”