I asked, “You making any general progress there?”
No answer.
I asked, “How long does it normally take for your secret weapon to work?”
He said, “It’s usually much faster than this.”
I didn’t answer, and there was more dead air, and some quiet breathing, and then Munro said, “Listen, Reacher, I guess this is hardly worth talking about, because you’re just going to think, well, what else would I say, because we both know I was sent here to cover someone’s ass. But I’m not like that. Never have been.”
“And?”
“From what I know so far, none of our guys killed any women. Not this month, or November, or June. That’s how it looks right now.”
Chapter
29
I put the phone down on Munro, and Deveraux came back into the office immediately. Maybe she had been watching a light on the switchboard. She said, “Well?”
“No quarantine patrols. No one has left Kelham since Munro arrived.”
“He would say that, though, wouldn’t he?”
“And he’s not smelling anything. He thinks the perp is not on the base.”
“Ditto.”
I nodded. Smoke and mirrors. Politics and the real world. Utter confusion. I said, “You want to get lunch?”
She said, “After.”
“After what?”
“You have a problem to deal with. The McKinney cousins are out on the street. They’re waiting for you. And they’ve brought reinforcements.”
Deveraux led me across the corridor to a dim corner room with windows in two walls. The view across Main Street was empty. Nothing happening. But the view north toward the T-junction showed four figures. My two old friends, plus two more similar guys. Dirt, hair, fur, and ink. They were standing around in the wide area where the two roads met, hands in pockets, kicking the dirt, doing nothing at all.
My first reaction was a kind of dumbfounded admiration. A head butt is a serious blow, especially one of mine. To be walking and talking just a few hours later was impressive. My second reaction was annoyance. With myself. I had been too gentle. Too new in town, too reluctant, too proper, too ready to see mitigating circumstances in sheer animal stupidity. I looked at Deveraux and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
She said, “You could apologize and make them go away.”
“What’s my second choice?”
“You could let them hit you first. Then I could arrest them for unprovoked assault. I’d love to get the chance to do that.”
“They won’t hit me at all if you’re there.”
“I’ll stay out of sight.”
“I’m not sure I want to do either thing.”
“One or the other, Reacher. Your choice.”
I stepped out to Main Street like some guy in an old movie. There should have been music playing. I turned right and faced north. I stood still. The four guys saw me. They showed a moment of surprise, and then a moment of warm anticipation. They formed up in a side-to-side line, all four of them strung out west to east, about four feet apart. They all took a step toward me, and then they all stopped and waited. There were two trucks parked on the Kelham road, behind them and to the right. There was the brush-painted pick-up I had seen before, and in front of it was another one just as bad.
I walked on, like a fish toward a net. The sun was about as high as it was going to get in March. The air was warm. I could feel heat on my skin. I could feel the road surface under the soles of my shoes. I put my hands in my pockets. Nothing in there, except most of the roll of quarters I had gotten in the diner. I closed my fist around the paper tube. A ten dollar punch, less what I had spent on the phone.
I walked on and stopped ten feet from the skirmish line. The two guys I had met before were on the left. The silent mastermind was on the outside, and the alpha dog was in second position. Both of them had noses like spoiled eggplants. Both of them had two black eyes. Both of them had crusted blood on their lips. Neither one of them exhibited much in the way of balance or focus. Right of the alpha dog was a guy slightly smaller than the others, and next to him was a big guy in a biker vest.
I looked at the alpha dog and said, “This is your plan?”
He didn’t answer.
I said, “Four guys? Is that all?”
He didn’t answer.
I said, “I was told there were dozens of you.”
No answer.
“But I guess logistics and communications were difficult. So you settled on a lighter force, quickly assembled and rapidly deployed. Which is very up to date, actually. You should go to the Pentagon and sit in on some seminars. You’d feel right at home with their thinking.”
The new guy second from the right was drunk. He had a low level buzz going on. It was oozing from his pores. I could practically smell it. Beer for breakfast. Maybe with chasers. A decade-long diet, judging by the look of him. So he would be slow to react, and then wild and unaimed afterward. No big problem. The new guy with the biker vest was carrying some kind of back pain. Low down, base of his spine. I could tell because he was standing with his pelvis rolled forward, taking the pressure off. Some kind of rupture or strain. A dozen possible causes. He was a country boy. He could have lifted a bale, or fallen off a horse. No major threat. He would defeat himself. One enthusiastic swing, and all kinds of things would tear loose inside. He would hobble away like a cripple. By which time his drunken friend would already be down. And the other two were already in no kind of good shape. The two I knew. The two that knew me. The alpha dog was slightly on my left, and I’m a right-handed fighter. He was practically volunteering.
Overall, an encouraging situation.
I said, “It’s a shame one of you isn’t bigger. Or two or three of you. Or all of you, actually.”
No answer.
I said, “But hey, a plan’s a plan. Did it take long to work out?”
No answer.
I said, “You know what we used to say about plans, up at West Point?”
“What?”
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
No answer. No movement. I unwrapped my hand from around the roll of quarters. I wasn’t going to need them. I took my hands out of my pockets. I said, “The problem with light forces is if things go bad, they go real bad real quick. Look at what happened in Somalia. So you should think very carefully about this choice. You’re at a fork in the road here. You have to decide which way to go. You could wade in, just the four of you, right now. But the next stop after that will be the hospital. That’s a promise. That’s a cast iron guarantee. You’ll get hit harder than you’ve ever been hit before. I’m talking broken bones. I can’t promise brain damage. Looks like someone already beat me to that.”
No response.
I said, “Or you could attempt a tactical withdrawal now, and then you could take your time putting that big force together. You could come back in a couple of days. Dozens of you. You could find your granddaddy’s varmint gun. You could start the painkillers early.”
No response. Nothing verbal, anyway. But shoulders slumped a fraction, and feet started shuffling.
“Good decision,” I said. “Overwhelming force is always better. You really should go to the Pentagon. You could walk them through your reasoning. They’d listen to you. They’re listening to everyone except us.”
The alpha dog said, “We’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
They walked away, trying to be casual about it, trying to salvage some dignity. They climbed into their trucks and made a big show of revving their engines and squealing their tires through tight 180 turns. They drove off west into the forest, toward Memphis, toward the rest of the world. I watched them go, and then I walked back to the Sheriff’s Department.
* * *
Deveraux had seen the whole thing from the window in the dim corner room. Like a silent movie. No dialogue. She said, “You made them
go away. You apologized. I can’t believe it.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I took a rain check. They’re coming back later, dozens of them.”
“Why did you do that?”
“More arrests for you. They’ll look good for your reelection campaign.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You want to get lunch now?”
“I already have a lunch date,” she said.
“Since when?”
“Five minutes ago. Major Duncan Munro called back and asked me to dine with him in the Kelham Officers’ Club.”
Chapter
30
Deveraux left for Kelham in her car and I was left alone on the sidewalk. I walked past the vacant lot to the diner. Lunch, for one. I ordered the cheeseburger again, and then stepped over to the phone by the door and called the Pentagon. Colonel John James Frazer. Senate Liaison. He answered on the first ring. I asked him, “What genius decided to classify that plate number?”
He said, “I can’t tell you that.”
“Whoever, it was a bad mistake. All it did was confirm the car belongs to a Kelham guy. It was practically a public announcement.”
“We had no alternative. We couldn’t put it in the public domain. Journalists would have gotten it five minutes after local law enforcement. We couldn’t allow that.”
“Now it sounds like you’re telling me it belonged to a Bravo Company guy.”
“I’m not telling you anything. But believe me, we had no choice. The consequences would have been catastrophic.”
Something in his voice.
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Because right now you’re making it sound like it was Reed Riley’s own personal vehicle.”
No response.
I asked, “Was it?”
No answer.
“Was it?”
“I can’t confirm or deny,” Frazer said. “And don’t ask again. And don’t use that name again, either. Not on an unsecured line.”
“Does the officer in question have an explanation?”
“I can’t comment on that.”
I said, “This is getting out of control, Frazer. You need to rethink. The cover up is always worse than the crime. You need to stop it now.”
“Negative on that, Reacher. There’s a plan in place, and it will stay in place.”
“Does the plan include an exclusion zone around Kelham? Maybe for journalists especially?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve got circumstantial evidence here of boots on the ground outside of Kelham’s fence. Part of the circumstantial evidence is a corpse. I’m telling you, this thing is out of control now.”
“Who’s the corpse?”
“A scrappy middle-aged guy.”
“A journalist?”
“I don’t know how to recognize a journalist by sight alone. Maybe that’s a skill they teach to the infantry, but they don’t teach it to MPs.”
“No ID on him?”
“We haven’t looked yet. The doctor hasn’t finished with him.”
Frazer said, “There is no exclusion zone around Fort Kelham. That would be a major policy shift.”
“And illegal.”
“Agreed. And stupid. And counterproductive. It isn’t happening. It never has.”
“I think the Marine Corps did it once.”
“When?”
“Within the last twenty years.”
“Well, Marines. They do all kinds of things.”
“You should check it out.”
“How? You think they put it in their official history?”
“Do it obliquely. Look for an officer who got canned overnight with no other explanation. Maybe a colonel.”
* * *
I hung up with Frazer and ate my burger and drank some coffee and then I set out to do what Garber had ordered me to do mid-morning, which was to return to the wreck and destroy the offending license plate. I turned east on the Kelham road and then north on the railroad ties. I passed by the old water tower. Its elephant’s trunk was made from some kind of black rubberized canvas, gone all perished and patchy with age. The whole thing was swaying a little in a soft southerly breeze. I walked on fifty yards and then stepped off the line and headed for where I had seen the half-buried bumper.
The half-buried bumper was gone.
It was nowhere to be seen. It had been dug up and taken away. The hole its lance-like point had made had been filled with earth, which had been stamped down by boot soles and then tamped flat by the backs of shovels.
The boot prints were like nothing I had ever seen in the military. But the shovel marks could have been made by GI entrenching tools. It was difficult to be sure. Couldn’t rule it out, couldn’t rule it in.
I walked on, deeper into the debris field. It had all been tampered with. It had been sifted, and examined, and turned over, and checked, and evaluated. Almost two hundred linear yards. Maybe a thousand individual fragments had been displaced. No doubt ten times as many smaller items had been eyeballed. A wide area. A big task. A lot of work. Slow and painstaking. Six men, I figured. Maybe eight. I pictured them advancing in a line, under effective command, working with great precision.
With military precision.
I walked back the way I had come. I got to the middle of the railroad crossing and saw a car in the east, coming from the direction of Kelham. It was still far away on the straight road. Small to the eye, but not a small car. At first I thought it might be Deveraux coming back after lunch, but it wasn’t. It was a black car, and big, and fast, and smooth. A town car. A limousine. It was right out on the crown of the road, straddling the line, staying well away from the ragged shoulders. It was swaying and wafting and wandering.
I came off the track on the Kelham side and stood in the middle of the road, feet apart, arms out, big and obvious. I let the car get within a hundred yards and then I crossed my arms above my head and waved the universal distress semaphore. I knew the driver would stop. This was 1997, remember. Four and a half years before the new rules. A long time ago. A much less suspicious world.
The car slowed and stopped in front of me. I went to my right, around the hood, down the flank, toward the driver’s window, holding back a little, trying to perfect my angle. I wanted to get a look at the passenger. I figured he would be in the back, on the far side, with the front passenger seat scooted forward for leg room. I knew how these things were done. I had been in town cars before. Once or twice.
The driver’s window came down. I bent forward from the waist. Took a look. The driver was a big fat guy with the kind of belly that forced his knees wide apart. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s cap and a black jacket and a black tie. He had watery eyes. He said, “Can we help you?”
I said, “I’m sorry. My mistake. I thought you were someone else. But thanks anyway for stopping.”
“Sure,” the guy said. “No problem.” His window went back up and I stepped aside and the car drove on.
The passenger had been male, older than me, gray haired, prosperous, in a fine suit made of wool. There had been a leather briefcase on the seat beside him.
He was a lawyer, I thought.
Chapter
31
I was facing east, toward the black part of town, and there were things over there that I wanted to see again, so I set off walking in that direction. The road felt good under my feet. I guessed once upon a time during the glory days of the railroad it had been a simple dirt track, but it had been updated since then, almost certainly in the 1950s, almost certainly on the DoD’s dime. The foundation had been dug down, for armor on flat-bed transporters, and the line had been straightened, because if an army engineer sees a ruled line on a map, then a straight road is what appears on the ground. I had walked on many DoD roads. There are a lot of them, all around the world, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self confidence, when there was nothing we couldn’t o
r wouldn’t do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.
Then I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, talking about want ads in the hamburger place near where we were based. Changes were coming, for sure, but I wasn’t unhappy. That straight road through the low Mississippi forest was helping me. The sun was out, and the air was warm. There were miles behind me, and miles ahead, and plenty of time on the clock. I had no ambitions and very few needs. I would be OK, whatever came next. No choice. I would have to be.
* * *
I made the same turn Deveraux had made in her car, south on the dirt road between the bar ditches and the slave shacks. Toward Emmeline McClatchy’s place. At walking speed I was seeing different things than from the car. Poverty, mostly, and up close. There were patched clothes on lines, washed so thin they were almost transparent. There were no new cars. There were chickens in some of the yards, and goats, and the occasional pig. There were mangy dogs on chains. There were duct tape and baling wire fixes everywhere, to electric lines, to rain gutters, to plumbing outlets. And I was seeing suspicion too, to a degree. There were barefoot children briefly visible, staring at me, their fingers in their mouths, until they were snatched back out of sight by anxious mothers who wouldn’t meet my eye.
I kept on going and passed by Emmeline McClatchy’s place. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see anybody on that stretch of the road. No kids, no adults. Nobody. I passed by the house with the beer signs in the window. I followed the same turns Deveraux had steered me through before, left and right and left, until I found the abandoned work site and its pile of gravel.
The house planned for the lot was small, and its foundation was set at an angle according to ancient practice and wisdom, to take advantage of prevailing breezes and to avoid the full impact of the southwestern sun in the summer. The foundation itself was built of recycled blocks and sand-heavy cement. A sewer pipe and a water line had been roughed in. The corner posts were already weathering. Nothing else had been completed. Money had run out, I supposed.
The gravel in the pile was waiting to be made into concrete, I assumed. Maybe the ground floor of the new place was supposed to be a solid slab, not boards. Maybe there were advantages to doing it that way, perhaps related to termites. I had no idea. I had never built a house. I had never had to consider housing-related issues.
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