by Child, Lee
“They’re keeping you busy,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Tell me about it.”
“So we’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
“Don’t worry. I called around, after you called me, naturally. Friend of a friend said I should push the boat out. Word is you were a solid guy, for a major.”
Reacher smiled, briefly.
“Well, I always tried to be,” he said. “For a major. Who was the friend of the friend?”
“Some guy worked for you when you worked for old Leon Garber. He said you were a stand-up guy and old Garber always swore by you, which makes you pretty much OK as long as this generation is still in harness.”
“People still remember Garber?”
"Do Yankees fans still remember Joe DiMaggio?”
“I’m seeing Garber’s daughter,” Reacher said.
“I know,” Leighton said. “Word gets around. You’re a lucky guy. Jodie Garber’s a nice lady, from what I recall.”
“You know her?”
Leighton nodded. "I met her on the bases, when I was coming up.”
“I’ll remember you to her.”
Then he lapsed into silence, thinking about Jodie, and Leon. He was going to sell the house Leon had left him, and Jodie was worrying about it.
“Sit down,” Leighton said. “Please.”
There were two upright chairs in front of the desk, tubular metal and canvas, like the things storefront churches threw away a generation ago.
“So how can I help you?” Leighton said, aiming the question at Reacher, looking at Harper.
“She’ll explain,” Reacher said.
She ran through it all from the beginning, summarizing. It took seven or eight minutes. Leighton listened attentively, interrupting her here and there.
“I know about the women,” he said. “We heard.”
She finished with Reacher’s smoke screen theory, the possible Army thefts, and the trail which led from Petrosian’s boys in New York to Bob in New Jersey.
“His name is Bob McGuire,” Leighton said. “Quartermaster sergeant. But he’s not your guy. We’ve had him two months, and he’s too dumb, anyway.”
“We figured that,” Harper said. “Feeling was he could name names, maybe lead us to somebody more likely.”
“A bigger fish?”
Harper nodded. “Somebody doing enough business to make it worth killing witnesses.”
Leighton nodded back.
“Theoretically, there might be such a person,” he said, cautiously.
“You got a name?”
Leighton looked at her and shook his head. Leaned back in his chair and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. Suddenly looked very tired.
“Problem?” Reacher asked.
“How long have you been out?” Leighton asked back, eyes closed.
“About three years, I guess,” Reacher said.
Leighton yawned and stretched and returned to an upright position.
“Things have changed,” he said. “Time marches on, right?”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything,” Leighton said. “Well, this, mainly.” He leaned over and tapped his computer monitor with his nail. It made a glassy ringing thunk, like a bottle. “Smaller Army, easier to organize, more time on our hands. So they computerized us, completely. Makes communication a whole lot easier. Makes it so we all know each other’s business. Makes inventories easier to manage. You want to know how many Willys Jeep tires we got in store, even though we don’t use Willys Jeeps anymore? Give me ten minutes, I can tell you.”
“So?”
“So we keep track of everything, much better than we used to. For instance, we know how many M9 Berettas have ever been delivered, we know how many have ever been legitimately issued, and we know how many we got in store. And if those numbers didn’t add up, we’d be worrying about it, believe me.”
“So do the numbers add up?”
Leighton grinned, briefly. “They do now. That’s for damn sure. Nobody’s stolen an M9 Beretta from the U.S. Army in the last year and a half.”
“So what was Bob McGuire doing two months ago?” Reacher asked.
“Selling out the last of his stockpile. He’d been thieving ten years, at least. A little computer analysis made it obvious. Him, and a couple dozen others in a couple dozen different locations. We put procedures in place to dry up the stealing and we rounded up all the bad guys selling whatever they still had left.”
“All of them?”
“Computer says so. We were leaking weapons like crazy, all kinds of descriptions, couple of dozen locations, so we arrest a couple dozen guys, and the leakage has stopped. McGuire was about the last, maybe second-to-last, I’m not sure.”
“No more weapons theft?”
“Yesterday’s news,” Leighton said. “You’re behind the times.”
There was silence.
“Good job,” Reacher said. “Congratulations.”
“Smaller Army,” Leighton said. “More time on our hands.”
“You got them all?” Harper asked.
Leighton just nodded. “All of them. Big push, worldwide. There weren’t that many. Computers did the trick.”
Silence in the office.
“Well, shit, there goes that theory,” she said.
She stared at the floor. Leighton shook his head, cautiously.
“Maybe not,” he said. “We’ve got a theory of our own.”
She looked up again. “The big fish?”
Leighton nodded. “Right.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s only theoretical, as of now.”
“Theoretical?”
“He’s not active,” Leighton said. “He’s not stealing anything. Like I told you, we identified all the leaks and we plugged them all. Couple dozen guys waiting for trial, all the leak locations accounted for. But the way we picked them up was we sent undercover guys in, to buy the stuff. Entrapment. Bob McGuire, for instance, he sold a couple of Berettas to a couple of lieutenants in a bar.”
"We were just there,” Harper said. "MacStiophan’s, near the New Jersey Turnpike.”
“Right,” Leighton said. “Our guys bought two M9s out of the trunk of his car, two hundred bucks apiece, which is about a third of what the Army pays for them, by the by. So then we haul McGuire in and we start ripping him apart. We know more or less exactly how many pieces he’s stolen over the years, because of the inventory analysis on the computer, and we figure an average price, and we start looking for where the money has gone. And we find about a half of it, either in bank accounts or in the form of stuff he’s bought.”
“So?” Reacher said.
“So nothing, not right then. But we’re pooling information and the story is pretty much the same everywhere. They’ve all got about a half of their money missing. More or less the exact same proportion everywhere. And these guys are not the smartest guys you’ve ever met, right? They couldn’t hide their money from us. And even if they could, why would they all hide exactly half of it? Why wouldn’t some of them hide all of it, or two thirds, or three quarters? You know, whatever, a different proportion in each case?”
“Enter the theoretical big fish,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Exactly. How else to explain it? It was like a puzzle with a missing piece. We started to figure some kind of a godfather figure, you know, some big guy in the shadows, maybe organizing everything, maybe offering protection in exchange for half the profit.”
“Or half the guns,” Reacher said.
“Right,” Leighton said.
“Somebody running a protection racket,” Harper said. “Like a scam inside a scam.”
“Right,” Leighton said again.
There was a long pause.
“Looks good from our point of view,” Harper said. “Guy like that, he’s smart and capable, and he has to run around taking care of problems in various random locations. Could explain why he’s interest
ed in so many different women. Not because all the women knew him, but because maybe each one of them knew one of his clients.”
“Timing is good for you too,” Leighton said. “If our guy is your guy, he started planning two, three months ago, when he heard his clients were starting to go down.”
Harper sat forward. “What was the volume of business like two, three years ago?”
"Pretty heavy,” Leighton said. "You’re really asking how much these women could have seen, right?”
“Right.”
“They could have seen plenty,” Leighton said.
“So how good is your case?” she asked. “Against Bob McGuire, for instance?”
Leighton shrugged. “Not brilliant. We’ve got him for the two pieces he sold to our guys, of course, but that’s only two pieces. The rest of it is basically circumstantial, and the fact the money doesn’t tie up properly weakens the hell out of it.”
“So eliminating the witnesses before the trials makes sense.”
Leighton nodded. “Makes a hell of a lot of sense, I guess.”
“So who is this guy?”
Leighton rubbed his eyes again. “We have no idea. We don’t even know for sure there is a guy. He’s just a guess right now. Just our theory.”
“Nobody’s saying anything?”
“Not a damn word. We’ve been asking, two months solid. We’ve got two dozen guys, all of them with their mouths shut tight. We figure the big guy’s really put the frighteners on.”
“He’s scary, that’s for sure,” Harper said. “From what we know about him.”
There was silence in Leighton’s office. Just the brittle patter of rain on the windows.
“If he exists,” Leighton said.
“He exists,” Harper said.
Leighton nodded. “We think so too.”
“Well, we need his name, I guess,” Reacher said.
No reply.
“I should go talk to McGuire for you,” Reacher said.
Leighton smiled. “I figured you’d be saying that before long. I was all set to say no, it’s improper. But you know what? I just changed my mind. I just decided to say yes, go ahead. Be my guest.”
THE CELL BLOCK was underground, like it always is in a regional HQ, below a squat brick building with an iron door, standing alone on the other side of the rose bed. Leighton led them over there through the rain, their collars turned up against the damp and their chins ducked down to their chests. Leighton used an old-fashioned bellpull outside the iron door and it opened after a second to reveal a bright hallway with a huge master sergeant standing in it. The sergeant stepped aside and Leighton led them in.
Inside, the walls were made of brick faced with white porcelain glaze. The floors and the ceilings were smooth troweled concrete painted shiny green. Lights were fluorescent tubes behind thick metal grilles. Doors were iron, with square barred openings at the top. There was a cubbyhole office on the right, with a wooden rack of keys on four-inch metal hoops. There was a big desk, piled high with video recorders taping milky-gray flickering images from twelve small monitor screens. The screens showed twelve cells, eleven of them empty and one of them with a humped shape under a blanket on the bed.
“Quiet night at the Hilton,” Reacher said.
Leighton nodded. “Gets worse Saturday nights. But right now McGuire’s our only guest.”
“The video recording is a problem,” Reacher said.
“Always breaking down, though,” Leighton said.
He bent to examine the pictures on the monitors. Braced his hands on the desk. Bent closer. Rolled his right hand until his knuckle touched a switch. The recorders stopped humming and the REC legends disappeared from the corners of the screens.
“See?” he said. “Very unreliable system.”
“It’ll take a couple hours to fix,” the sergeant said. “At least.”
The sergeant was a giant, shiny skin the color of coffee. His uniform jacket was the size of a field tent. Reacher and Harper would have fitted into it together. Maybe Leighton, too. The guy was the exact ideal-issue MP noncom.
“McGuire’s got a visitor, Sergeant,” Leighton said. An off-the-record voice. “Doesn’t need to go in the log.”
Reacher took off his coat and his jacket. Folded them and left them on the sergeant’s chair. The sergeant took a hoop of keys off the wooden board and moved to the inside door. Unlocked it and swung it back. Reacher stepped through and the sergeant closed the door and locked it again behind him. Pointed to the head of a staircase.
“After you,” he said.
The staircase was built of bricks, rounded at the nose of each stair. The walls either side were the same white glaze. There was a metal handrail, bolted through to the wall every twelve inches. Another locked door at the bottom. Then a corridor, then another locked door. Then a lobby, with three locked doors to three blocks of cells. The sergeant unlocked the middle door. Flipped a switch and fluorescent light stuttered and flooded a bright white area forty feet by twenty. There was an access zone the length of the block and about a third of its depth. The rest of the space was divided into four cells delineated by heavy iron bars. The bars were thickly covered in shiny white enamel paint. The cells were about ten feet wide, maybe twelve deep. Each cell had a video camera opposite, mounted high on the wall. Three of the cells were empty, with their gates folded back. The fourth was locked closed. It held McGuire. He was struggling awake, sitting up, surprised by the light.
“Visitor for you,” the sergeant called.
There were two tall wooden stools in the corner of the access zone nearest the exit door. The sergeant carried the nearer one over and placed it in front of McGuire’s cell. Walked back and sat on the other. Reacher ignored the stool and stood with his hands behind his back, gazing silently through the bars. McGuire was pushing his blanket aside and swinging his feet to the floor. He was wearing an olive undershirt and olive shorts. He was a big guy. More than six feet tall, more than two hundred pounds, more than thirty-five years old. Heavily muscled, a thick neck, big arms, big legs. Thinning hair cropped close, small eyes, a couple of tattoos. Reacher stood absolutely still, watching him, saying nothing.
“Hell are you?” McGuire said. His voice matched his bulk. It was deep, and the words were half swallowed by a heavy chest. Reacher made no reply. It was a technique he had perfected half a lifetime ago. Just stand absolutely still, don’t blink, say nothing. Wait for them to run through the possibilities. Not a buddy. Not a lawyer. Who, then? Wait for them to start worrying.
“Hell are you?” McGuire said again.
Reacher walked away. He stepped over to where the master sergeant was sitting and bent to whisper in his ear. The giant’s eyebrows came up. You sure? Reacher whispered again. The guy nodded and stood up and handed Reacher the hoop of keys. Went out through the door and closed it behind him. Reacher hung the keys on the knob and walked back to McGuire’s cell. McGuire was staring through the bars at him.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I want you to look at me,” Reacher replied.
“What?”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing,” McGuire said.
“You blind?”
“No, I ain’t blind.”
“Then you’re a liar,” Reacher said. “You don’t see nothing.”
“I see some guy,” McGuire said.
“You see some guy bigger than you who had all kinds of special training while you spent your time shuffling paper in some piece-of-shit quartermaster’s stores.”
“So?”
"So nothing. Just something to bear in mind for later, is all.”
“What’s later?”
“You’ll find out,” Reacher said.
“What do you want?”
“I want proof.”
“Of what?”
“Of exactly how dumb a piece of shit like you really is.”
McGuire paused. His eyes narrowed, pushed into deep furrows by his brow.
“Easy for you to talk like that,” he said. “Standing six feet away from these bars.”
Reacher took an exaggerated pace forward.
“Now I’m two feet from the bars,” he said. “And you’re still a dumb piece of shit.”
McGuire took a step forward, too. He was a foot inside the cell, holding a bar in each fist. A level gaze in his eyes. Reacher stepped forward again.
“Now I’m a foot from the bars, same as you,” he said. “And you’re still a dumb piece of shit.”
McGuire’s right hand came off the bar and closed into a fist and his whole arm rammed straight out like a piston. It was headed for Reacher’s throat. Reacher caught the wrist and swayed and whipped the fist past his head and rocked his weight back and hauled McGuire tight up against the inside of the bars. Twisted the wrist palm-out and walked left and bent the arm back against the elbow joint.
“See how dumb you are?” he said. “I keep on walking, I break your arm.”
McGuire was gasping against the pressure. Reacher smiled briefly and dropped the wrist. McGuire stared at him and hauled his arm back inside, rolling the shoulder, testing the damage.
“What do you want?” he said again.
“Want me to open the cell gate?”
“What?”
“Keys are right over there. You want the gate open, even things up a little?”
McGuire’s eyes narrowed a little more. He nodded. “Yeah, open the damn gate.”
Reacher stepped away and lifted the hoop of keys off the knob of the exit door. Shuffled through them and found the right one. He’d handled plenty of cell keys. He could pick one out blindfolded. He stepped back and unlocked the gate. Swung it open. McGuire stood still. Reacher walked away and put the hoop of keys back on the doorknob. Stood facing the door, his back to the cell.
“Sit down,” he called. “I left the stool there for you.”
He sensed McGuire coming out of the cell. Heard his bare feet on the concrete floor. Heard them stop.
“What do you want?” McGuire said again.