“Thanks,” I said.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“You can tell me about the hotel,” I said. “I need a room, but there was nobody home.”
The waitress half-turned and I followed her gaze to the old couple settled in at their table for four. They were still reading. The waitress said, “They usually sit a spell in here, and then they go back. That would be the best time to catch them.”
Then she went away and left me to it. I ate slowly and enjoyed every bite. The old couple sat still and read. The woman turned a page every couple of minutes. Much less often the guy made a big loud production out of snapping the spine of his paper and refolding it ready for the next section. He was studying it intently. He was practically reading the print off it.
Later the waitress came back and picked up my plate and offered me dessert. She said she had great pies. I said, “I’m going to take a walk. I’ll look in again on my way back and if those two are still here, then I’ll stop in for pie. I guess there’s no hurrying them.”
“Not usually,” the waitress said.
I paid for the burger and the coffee and added a tip that didn’t compare to a roomful of hungry Rangers, but it was enough to make her smile a little. Then I headed back to the street. The night was turning cold and there was a little mist in the air. I turned right and strolled past the vacant lot and the Sheriff’s Department building. Pellegrino’s car was parked outside and there was a glow in one window suggesting an interior room was occupied. I kept on going and came to the T where we had turned. To the left was the way Pellegrino had brought me in, through the forest. To the right that road continued east into the darkness. Presumably it crossed the railroad line and then led onward through the wrong side of town to Kelham. Garber had described it as a dirt track, which it might have been once. Now it was a standard rural road, with a stony surface bound with tar. It was dead straight and unlit. There were deep ditches either side of it. There was a thin moon in the sky, and a little light to see by. I turned right and walked on into the gloom.
Chapter
10
Two minutes and two hundred yards later I found the railroad track. First came the warning sign on the shoulder of the road, two diagonal arms bolted together at ninety degrees, one marked RAILROAD and the other marked CROSSING. There were red lights attached to the pole and somewhere beyond it there would be an electric bell in a box. Twenty yards farther on the ditches either side of the road ended abruptly, and the track itself was up on a hump, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, two parallel rails running not very level and not completely straight north and south, looking old and worn and short on maintenance. The gravel bed was lumpy and compacted and matted with weeds. I stood on a tie between the rails and looked first one way and then the other. Twenty yards to the north, on the left, was the shadowy bulk of an old ruined water tower, still with a wide soft hose like an elephant’s trunk, which once must have been connected to Carter Crossing’s freshwater spring, and which once must have stood ready to replenish the greedy steam locomotives that halted there.
I turned a full 360 in the dark. There was absolute stillness and silence everywhere. I could smell charcoal on the night air, maybe from where the blue car had burned the trees to the north. I could smell barbecue faintly in the east, where I guessed the rest of the township was, on the wrong side of the tracks. But I could see only darkness in that direction. Just the suggestion of a hole through the woods, where the road ran, and then nothing more.
I turned back the way I had come, the hard road under my feet, thinking about pie, and I saw headlights in the distance. A large car or a small truck, coming straight at me, moving slow. At one point it looked ready to make the turn into Main Street, and then it seemed to change its mind. Maybe it had picked me up in its beams. It straightened again and kept on coming. I kept on walking. It was a blunt-nosed pick-up truck. It dipped and wallowed over the humps in the road. Its lights rose and fell in the mist. I could hear a low wet burble from a worn V-8 motor.
It came over into the wrong lane and stopped twenty feet from me and idled. I couldn’t see who was in it. Too much glare. I walked on. I wasn’t about to step into the weeds, and the shoulder was narrow anyway, because of the ditch on my right, so I held my course, which was going to take me close to the driver’s door. The driver saw me coming, and when I was ten feet out he dropped his window and put his left wrist on the door and his left elbow in my path. By that point there was enough light spill to make him out. He was a civilian, white, heavy, wearing a T-shirt with the sleeve rolled above a thick arm covered in fur and ink. He had long hair that hadn’t been washed for a week or more.
Three choices.
First, stop and chat.
Second, step into the weeds between the pavement and the ditch, and pass him by.
Third, break his arm.
I chose the first option. I stopped. But I didn’t chat. Not immediately. I just stood there.
There was a second man in the passenger seat. Same type of a guy. Fur, ink, hair, dirt, grease. But not identical. A cousin, maybe, not a brother. Both men looked right at me, with the kind of smug, low-wattage insolence some kinds of strangers get in some kinds of bars. I looked right back at them. I’m not that kind of stranger.
The driver said, “Who are you and where are you going?”
I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.
The driver said, “I asked you a question.”
I thought: two questions, actually. But I said nothing. I didn’t want to have to hit the guy. Not with my hands. I’m no hygiene freak, but even so, with a guy like that, I would feel the need to wash up afterward, extensively, with good soap, especially if there was pie in my future. So I planned on kicking him instead. I saw the moves in my head: he opens his door, he steps out, he comes around the door toward me, and then he goes down, puking and retching and clutching his groin.
No major difficulty.
He said, “Do you speak English?”
I said nothing.
The guy in the passenger seat said, “Maybe he’s a Mexican.”
The driver asked me, “Are you a Mexican?”
I didn’t answer.
The driver said, “He doesn’t look like a Mexican. He’s too big.”
Which was true in a general sense, although I had heard of a guy from Mexico called José Calderón Torres, who had stood seven feet six and a quarter inches, which was more than a foot taller than me. And I remembered a Mexican guy called José Garces from the LA Olympics, who had cleaned-and-jerked more than four hundred and twenty pounds, which was probably what the two guys in the truck weighed both together.
The driver asked, “Are you coming in from Kelham?”
There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base, Garber had said. People are always tribal, when it comes right down to it. Maybe these guys had known Janice May Chapman. Maybe they couldn’t understand why she had dated soldiers, and not them. Maybe they had never looked in a mirror.
I said nothing. But I didn’t walk on. I didn’t want the truck loose behind me. Not in a lonely spot, not on a dark country road. I just stood there, looking directly at the two guys, at their faces, first one, then the other, with nothing much in my own face except frankness and skepticism and a little amusement. It’s a look that usually works. It usually provokes something, out of a certain type of person.
It provoked the passenger first.
He wound his window down and reared up through it, almost all the way out to his waist, twisting and leaning so he could face me directly across the hood of the truck. He held on to the pillar with one hand and moved the other through a fast violent arc, like he was cracking a whip or throwing something at me. He said, “We’re talking to you, asshole.”
I said nothing.
He said, “Is there a reason I don’t get out of this truck and kick your
butt?”
I said, “Two hundred and six reasons.”
He said, “What?”
“That’s how many bones you got in your body. I could break them all before you put a glove on me.”
Which got his buddy going. His instinct was to stick up for his friend and face down a challenge. He leaned further out his own window and said, “You think?”
I said, “Often all day long. It’s a good habit to have.” Which shut the guy up, while he tried to piece together what I meant. He went back over our conversation in his head. His lips were moving.
I said, “Let’s all go about our legitimate business and leave each other alone. Where are you guys staying?”
Now I was asking the questions, and they weren’t answering.
I said, “It looked to me like you were about to turn into Main Street. Is that your way home?”
No answer.
I said, “What, you’re homeless?”
The driver said, “We got a place.”
“Where?”
“A mile past Main Street.”
“So go there. Watch TV, drink beer. Don’t worry about me.”
“Are you from Kelham?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not from Kelham.”
The two guys went quiet and kind of deflated themselves, like parade balloons, back through their windows, back into the cab, back into their seats. I heard the truck’s transmission engage, and then it took off backward, fast, and then it slewed and lurched through a 180 turn, with dust coming up and tire squeal, and then it drove away and braked hard and turned into Main Street. Then it was lost to sight behind the dark bulk of the Sheriff’s Department. I breathed out and started walking again. No damage done. The best fights are the ones you don’t have, a wise man once said to me. It was not advice I always followed, but on that occasion I was pleased to walk away with clean hands, both literally and figuratively.
Then I saw another car coming toward me. It did the same thing the truck had done. It went to turn, and then it paused and straightened and headed in my direction. It was a cop car. I could tell by the shape and the size, and I could make out the silhouette of a light bar on the roof. At first I thought it was Pellegrino out on patrol, but when the car got closer it killed its lights and I saw a woman behind the wheel, and Mississippi suddenly got a lot more interesting.
Chapter
11
The car came over into the wrong lane and stopped alongside me. It was an old Chevy Caprice police cruiser painted up in the Carter County Sheriff’s Department colors. The woman behind the wheel had an unruly mass of dark hair, somewhere between wavy and curly, tied back in an approximate ponytail. Her face was pale and flawless. She was low in the seat, which meant either she was short or the seat was caved in by long years of use. I decided the seat must be caved in, because her arms looked long and the set of her shoulders didn’t suggest a short person. I pegged her at somewhere in her middle thirties, old enough to show some mileage, young enough to still find some amusement in the world. She was smiling slightly, and the smile was reaching her eyes, which were big and dark and liquid and seemed to have some kind of a glow in them. Although that might have been a reflection from the Chevy’s instrument panel.
She wound down her window and looked straight at me, first my face, then a careful up-and-down, side-to-side appraisal all the way from my shoes to my hair, with nothing but frankness in her gaze. I stepped in closer to give her a better look, and to take a better look. She was more than flawless. She was spectacular. She had a revolver in a holster on her right hip, and next to it was a shotgun stuffed muzzle-down in a scabbard mounted between the seats. There was a big radio slung under the dash on the passenger side, and a microphone on a curly wire in a clip near the steering wheel. The car was old and worn, almost certainly bought secondhand from a richer municipality.
She said, “You’re the guy Pellegrino brought in.”
Her voice was quiet but clear, warm but not soft, and her accent sounded local.
I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
She said, “You’re Reacher, right?”
I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
She said, “I’m Elizabeth Deveraux. I’m the sheriff here.”
I said, “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
She paused a beat and said, “Did you eat dinner yet?”
I nodded.
“But not dessert,” I said. “As a matter of fact I’m heading back to the diner for pie right now.”
“Do you usually take a walk between courses?”
“I was waiting out the hotel people. They didn’t seem in much of a hurry.”
“Is that where you’re staying tonight? The hotel?”
“I’m hoping to.”
“You’re not staying with the friend you came to find?”
“I haven’t found him yet.” She nodded in turn.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Find me in the diner. Five minutes, OK?”
There was authority but no menace in her voice. No agenda. Just the kind of easy command I guessed came from being first a sheriff’s daughter and then a sheriff herself.
“OK,” I said. “Five minutes.”
She wound up her window again and reversed away and turned around, in a slower version of the same maneuver the two guys in the truck had used. She switched her headlights back on and drove away. I saw her brake lights flare red and she turned into Main Street. I followed on foot, in the weeds, between the pavement and the ditch.
* * *
I got to the diner well inside the five minutes I had been given and found Elizabeth Deveraux’s cruiser parked at the curb outside. She herself was at the same table I had used. The old couple from the hotel had finally decamped. The place was empty apart from Deveraux and the waitress.
I went in and Deveraux said nothing specific but used one foot under the table to shove the facing chair out a little. An invitation. Almost a command. The waitress got the message. She didn’t try to seat me elsewhere. Clearly Deveraux had already ordered. I asked the waitress for a slice of her best pie and another cup of coffee. She went through to the kitchen and silence claimed the room.
Up close and personal I was prepared to concede that Elizabeth Deveraux was a seriously good looking woman. Truly beautiful. Out of the car she was relatively tall, and her hair was amazing. There must have been five pounds of it in her ponytail alone. She had all the right parts in all the right proportions. She looked great in her uniform. But then, I liked women in uniform, possibly because I had known very few of the other kind. But best of all was her mouth. And her eyes. Together they put a kind of wry, amused animation into her face, as if whatever happened to her she would stay cool and calm and collected through it all, and then she would find some quality in it to make her smile. There was still light in her eyes. Not just a reflection from the Caprice’s speedometer.
She said, “Pellegrino told me you’ve been in the army.”
I paused a beat. Undercover work is all about lying, and I hadn’t minded lying to Pellegrino. But for some unknown reason I found myself not wanting to lie to Deveraux. So I said, “Six weeks ago I was in the army,” which was technically true.
“What branch?”
“I was with an outfit called the 110th, mostly,” I said. Also true.
“Infantry?”
“It was a special unit. Combined operations, basically.” Which was true, technically.
“Who’s your local friend?”
“A guy called Hayder,” I said. An outright invention.
Deveraux said, “He must have been infantry. Kelham is all infantry.”
I nodded.
“The 75th Ranger Regiment,” I said.
“Was he an instructor?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded. “They’re the only ones who are here long enough to want to stick around afterward.”
I said nothing.
She said, “I’ve never heard
of him.”
“Then maybe he moved on again.”
“When might he have done that?”
“I’m not sure. How long have you been sheriff?”
“Two years,” she said. “Long enough to get to know the locals, anyway.”
“Pellegrino said you’d been here all your life. I mean, as far as getting to know the locals is concerned.”
“Not true,” she said. “I haven’t been here all my life. I was here as a kid, and I’m here now. But there were years in between.”
There was something wistful about her tone. There were years in between. I asked her, “How did you spend those years?”
“I had a rich uncle,” she said. “I toured the world at his expense.”
And at that point I suspected I was in trouble. At that point I suspected my mission was about to fail. Because I had heard that answer before.
Chapter
12
The waitress brought out Elizabeth Deveraux’s main course and my dessert both together. Deveraux had ordered the same thing I had eaten, the fat cheeseburger and the squirrel’s nest of fries. My pie was peach and the slice I got was about half the size of a Major League home plate. It was bigger than the dish it was in. My coffee was in a tall stoneware mug. Deveraux had plain water in a chipped glass.
It’s easier to let a pie go cold than a cheeseburger, so I figured I had a chance to talk while Deveraux had no choice but to eat and listen and comment briefly. So I said, “Pellegrino told me you guys are real busy.”
Deveraux chewed and nodded.
I said, “A wrecked car and a dead woman.”
She nodded again and chased an errant pearl of mayonnaise back into her mouth with the tip of her little finger. An elegant gesture, for an inelegant act. She had short nails, nicely trimmed and polished. She had slender hands, a little tanned and sinewy. Good skin. No rings. None at all. Especially not on her left ring finger.
I asked, “Any progress on any of that?”
She swallowed and smiled and held her hand up like a traffic cop. Stop. Wait. She said, “Give me a minute, OK? No more talking.”
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