by Child, Lee
Reacher kept his back turned. Straining to sense McGuire’s approach. It wasn’t happening.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “You’re going to have to juggle a number of factors.”
“What factors?” McGuire asked, blankly.
“First factor is I’m unofficial, OK?” Reacher said.
“What does that mean?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know,” McGuire said.
Reacher turned around. “It means I’m not an Army cop, I’m not a civilian cop, in fact I’m not anything at all.”
“So?”
“So there’s no comeback on me. No disciplinary procedures, no pension to lose, no nothing.”
“So?”
“So if I leave you walking on crutches and drinking through a straw the rest of your life, there’s nothing anybody can do to me. And we got no witnesses in here.”
“What do you want?”
“Second factor is whatever the big guy says he’ll do to you, I can do worse.”
“What big guy?”
Reacher smiled. McGuire’s hands bunched into fists. Heavy biceps, big shoulders.
“Now it gets sophisticated,” Reacher said. “You need to concentrate real hard on this part. Third factor is, if you give me the guy’s name, he goes away somewhere else, forever. You give me his name, he can’t get to you. Not ever, you understand?”
“What name? What guy?”
“The guy you were paying off with half your take.”
“No such guy.”
Reacher shook his head. “We’re past that stage now, OK? We know there’s such a guy. So don’t make me smack you around before we even get to the important part.”
McGuire tensed up. Breathed hard. Then he quieted down. His body slackened slightly and his eyes narrowed again.
“So concentrate,” Reacher said. “You think that to rat him out puts you in the shit. But you’re wrong. What you need to understand is, you rat him out and actually it makes you safe, the whole rest of your life, because people are looking at him for a bunch of things a whole lot worse than ripping off the Army.”
“What’s he done?” McGuire asked.
Reacher smiled. He wished the video cameras had sound. The guy exists. Leighton would be dancing around the office.
“The FBI thinks he killed four women. You give me his name, they’ll put him away forever. Nobody’s even going to ask him about anything else.”
McGuire was silent. Thinking about it. It wasn’t the speediest process Reacher had ever seen.
“Two more factors,” he said. “You tell me right now, I’ll put in a good word for you. They’ll listen to me, because I used to be one of them. Cops stick together, right? I can get you easy time.”
McGuire said nothing.
“Last factor,” Reacher said gently. “You need to understand, sooner or later you’ll tell me anyway. It’s just a question of timing. Your choice. You can tell me right now, or you can tell me in a half hour, right after I’ve broken your arms and legs and I’m about to snap your spine.”
“He’s a bad guy,” McGuire said.
Reacher nodded. “I’m sure he’s real bad. But you need to prioritize. Whatever he says he’s going to do, that’s theoretical, way off in the future, and like I told you, it isn’t going to happen anyway. But what I’m going to do, it’s going to happen right now. Right here.”
“You ain’t going to do nothing,” McGuire said.
Reacher turned and picked up the wooden stool. Flipped it upside down and held it chest high with his hands around two of the legs. Took a firm backhand grip and bunched his shoulders and pulled steadily. Then he breathed hard and snapped his elbows back and the legs tore away from the rungs. The rungs clattered to the floor. He reversed the stool and held the seat in his left hand and splintered a leg free with his right. Dropped the wreckage and retained the leg. It was about a yard long, the size and weight of a ball bat.
“Now you do the same,” he said.
McGuire tried hard. He turned over his own stool and grasped the legs. His muscles bunched and the tattoos swelled, but he got nowhere with it. He just stood there, holding the stool upside down.
“Too bad,” Reacher said. “I tried to make it fair.”
“He was Special Forces,” McGuire said. “He was in Desert Storm. He’s real tough.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Reacher said. “He resists, the FBI will shoot him down. End of problem.”
McGuire said nothing.
“He won’t know it came from you,” Reacher said. “They’ll make it look like he left some evidence behind. ”
McGuire said nothing. Reacher swung the leg of the stool.
“Left or right?” he asked.
“What?” McGuire said.
“Which arm you want me to break first?”
"LaSalle Kruger,” McGuire said. "Supply battalion CO. He’s a colonel.”
25
STEALING THE PHONE was candy from a baby, but the reconnaissance is a bitch. Timing it right was the first priority. You needed to wait for complete darkness, and you wanted to wait for the daytime cop’s final hour. Because the cop is dumber than the Bureau guy, and because somebody’s last hour is always better than somebody else’s first hour. Attention will have waned. Boredom will have set in. His eyes will have glazed and he’ll be thinking ahead to a beer with his buddies or a night in front of the television with his wife. Or however the hell he spends his downtime.
So your window extends to about forty minutes, say seven to seven-forty. You plan it in two halves. First the house, then the surrounding area. You drive back from the airport and you approach on the through road. You drive straight through the junction three streets from her house. You stop at a hikers’ parking area two hundred yards farther north. There’s a wide gravel trail leading east up the slope of Mount Hood. You get out of your car and you turn your back on the trail and you work your way west and north through lightly wooded terrain. You’re about level with your first position, but on the other side of her house, behind it, not in front of it.
The terrain means the houses don’t have big yards. There are slim cultivated strips behind the buildings, then fences, then steep hillside covered in wild brush. You ease through the brush and come out at her fence. Stand motionless in the dark and observe. Drapes are drawn. It’s quiet. You can hear a piano playing, very faintly. The house is built into the hillside, and it’s at right angles to the street. The side is really the front. The porch runs all the way along it. Facing you is a wall dotted with windows. No doors. You ease along the fence and check the other side, which is really the back of the house. No doors there either. So the only ways in are the front door on the porch, and the garage door facing the street. Not ideal, but it’s what you expected. You’ve planned for it. You’ve planned for every contingency.
"OK, COLONEL KRUGER,” Leighton said. "We’re on your ass now.”
They were back in the duty office, damp from the jog through the nighttime rain, high with elation, flushed with cold air and success. Handshakes had been exchanged, high fives had been smacked, Harper had laughed and hugged Reacher. Now Leighton was scrolling through a menu on his computer screen, and Reacher and Harper were sitting side by side in front of his desk on the old upright chairs, breathing hard. Harper was still smiling, basking in relief and triumph.
“Loved that business with the stool,” she said. “We watched the whole thing on the video screen.”
Reacher shrugged.
“I cheated,” he said. “I chose the right stool, is all. I figured visiting time, that sergeant sits on the one by the door, wriggles around a little because he’s bored. Guy that size, the joints were sure to be cracked. The thing practically fell apart.”
“But it looked real good.”
“That was the plan. First rule is to look real good.”
“OK, he’s in the personnel listings,” Leighton said. "LaSalle Kruger, bird colonel, right there.”
>
He tapped the screen with his nail. It made the same glassy thunk they’d heard before. Like a bottle.
“Has he been in trouble?” Reacher asked.
“Can’t tell, yet,” Leighton said. “You think he’ll have an MP record?”
“Something happened,” Reacher said. “Special Forces in Desert Storm, and now he’s working supply? What’s that about?”
Leighton nodded. “It needs explaining. Could be disciplinary, I guess.”
He exited the personnel listings and clicked on another menu. Then he paused.
“This will take all night,” he said.
Reacher smiled. “You mean you don’t want us to see anything.”
Leighton smiled back. “Right first time, pal. You can smack the prisoners around as much as you want, but you can’t look at the computer stuff. You know how it is.”
“I sure do,” Reacher said.
Leighton waited.
“That inventory thing about the jeep tires?” Harper said suddenly. “Could you trace some missing camouflage paint in there?”
“Maybe,” Leighton said. “Theoretically, I guess.”
“Eleven women on his list, look for about three hundred gallons,” she said. “If you could put Kruger together with the paint, that would do it for me.”
Leighton nodded.
“And dates,” she said. “Find out if he was off duty when the women were killed. And match the locations, I guess. Confirm there were thefts where the women served. Prove they saw something.”
Leighton looked across at her. “The Army is going to just love me, right? Kruger’s our guy, and I’m busting my ass all night so we can give him away to the Bureau.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But the jurisdiction issue is clear, isn’t it? Homicide beats theft.”
Leighton nodded, suddenly somber.
“Like scissors beats paper,” he said.
YOU’VE SEEN ENOUGH of the house. Standing there in the dark staring at it and listening to her play the damn piano isn’t going to change anything. So you step away from the fence and duck into the brush and work your way east and south, back toward the car. You get there and dust yourself off and slide in and start it up and head back down through the crossroads. Part two of your task ahead, and you’ve got about twenty minutes to complete it in. You drive on. There’s a small shopping center two miles west of the junction, left-hand side of the road. An old-fashioned one-story mall, shaped like a squared-off letter C. A supermarket in the middle like a keystone, small single-unit stores spreading either side of it. Some of them are boarded up and empty. You pull into the parking lot at the far end and you nose along the fire lane, looking. You find exactly what you want, three stores past the supermarket. It’s nothing you didn’t expect to find, but still you clench your fist and bang it on the rim of the steering wheel. You smile to yourself.
Then you turn the car around and idle back through the lot, checking it out, and your smile dies. You don’t like it. You don’t like it at all. It’s completely overlooked. Every storefront has a direct view. It’s badly lit now, but you’re thinking about daylight. So you drive around behind the arm of the C, and your smile comes back again. There’s a single row of overspill parking back there, facing plain painted delivery doors in the back walls of the stores. No windows. You stop the car and look around. A complete circle. This is your place. No doubt about it. It’s perfect.
Then you drive back into the main lot and you park up alongside a small group of other vehicles. You kill the motor and wait. You watch the through road. You wait and watch ten minutes, and then you see the Bureau Buick heading by, not fast, not slow, reporting for duty.
“Have a nice night,” you whisper.
Then you start your car again and wind around the parking lot and drive off in the opposite direction.
LEIGHTON RECOMMENDED A motel a mile down Route 1 toward Trenton. He said it was where the prisoners’ visitors stayed, it was cheap, it was clean, it was the only place for miles around and he knew the phone number. Harper drove, and they found it easily enough. It looked fine from the outside, and it had plenty of vacancies.
“Number twelve is a nice double,” the desk clerk said.
Harper nodded.
“OK, we’ll take it,” she said.
“We will?” Reacher said. “A double?”
“Talk about it later,” she said.
She paid cash and the desk guy handed over a key.
“Number twelve,” he said again. “Down the row a piece.”
Reacher walked through the rain, and Harper brought the car. She parked it in front of the cabin and found Reacher waiting at the door.
“What?” she said. “It’s not like we’re going to sleep, is it? We’re just waiting for Leighton to call. May as well do that in here as in the car.”
He just shrugged and waited for her to unlock the door. She opened up and went inside. He followed.
“I’m too excited to sleep, anyway,” she said.
It was a standard motel room, familiar and comforting. It was overheated and the rain was loud on the roof. There were two chairs and a table at the far end of the room by a window. Reacher walked through and sat in the right-hand chair. Put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. Kept very still. Harper moved around, restlessly.
“We’ve got him, you know that?” she said.
Reacher said nothing.
“I should call Blake, give him the good news,” Harper said.
Reacher shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Let Leighton finish up. Quantico gets involved at this point, they’ll pull him off. He’s only a captain. They’ll haul in some two-star asshole, and he’ll never get near the facts for the bullshit. Leave it with Leighton, let him get the glory.”
She was in the bathroom, looking at the rack of towels and the bottles of shampoo and the packets of soap. She came out and took her jacket off. Reacher looked away.
“It’s perfectly safe,” she said. “I’m wearing a bra.”
Reacher said nothing.
“What?” she asked. “Something’s on your mind.”
“It is?”
She nodded. “Sure it is. I can tell. I’m a woman. I’m intuitive.”
He looked straight at her. “Truth is I don’t especially want to be alone in a room with you and a bed.”
She smiled, happily, mischievously. “Tempted?”
“I’m only human.”
“So am I,” she said. “If I can control myself, I’m sure you can.”
He said nothing.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said.
“Christ,” he muttered.
IT’S A STANDARD motel room, like a thousand you’ve seen coast to coast. Doorway, bathroom on the right, closet on the left, queen bed, dresser, table and two chairs. Old television, ice bucket, awful pictures on the wall. You hang your coat in the closet, but you keep your gloves on. No need to leave fingerprints all over the place. No real possibility of them ever finding the room, but you’ve built your whole life on being careful. The only time you take your gloves off is when you’re washing, and motel bathrooms are safe enough. You check out at eleven, and by twelve a maid is spraying cleaner all over every surface and wiping everything with a wet cloth. Nobody ever found a meaningful fingerprint in a motel bathroom.
You walk through the room and you sit in the left-hand chair. You lean back, you close your eyes, and you start to think. Tomorrow. It has to be tomorrow. You plan the timing by working backward. You need dark before you can get out. That’s the fundamental consideration. That drives everything else. But you want the daytime cop to find her. You accept that’s just a whim on your part, but hey, if you can’t brighten things up with a little whimsy, what kind of life is that? So you need to be out after dark, but before the cop’s last bathroom break. That specifies a pretty exact time, somewhere between six and six-thirty. Call it five-forty, for a margin. No, call
it five-thirty, because you really need to be back in position to see the cop’s face.
OK, five-thirty. Twilight, not really dark, but it’s acceptable. The longest time you spent in any of the previous places was twenty-two minutes. In principle this one won’t be any longer, but you’re going to allow a full half hour. So you need to be inside and started by five. Then you think it through from her point of view, and it’s pretty clear you need to be making the phone call at about two o’clock.
So, check out of this dump before eleven, you’re over there before twelve, you wait and watch, you make the call at two. It’s decided. You open your eyes and stand up. Undress and use the bathroom. Pull back the covers and slide into bed, wearing nothing but your gloves.
HARPER CAME OUT of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel. Her face was scrubbed and her hair was wet. Under the weight of the water, it hung down past her waist. Without makeup, her face looked vulnerable. Cornflower-blue eyes, white teeth, cheekbones, skin. She looked about fourteen, except she was more than six feet tall. And that kind of height made a standard-issue motel towel seriously deficient in terms of length.
“I think I better call Blake,” she said. “I should really check in.”
“Don’t tell him anything,” Reacher said. “I mean it, things will spin out of control.”
She nodded. “I’ll just tell him we’re close.”
He shook his head. “Vaguer than that, OK? Just say we’re seeing some guy tomorrow who might have something connected.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said. She sat down at the mirror. The towel rode up. She started looking at her hair.
“Can you get my phone out of my pocketbook for me?” she called.
He walked to the bed and slipped his hand into her bag. Things in there released faint fragrance as they moved. He found the phone and slipped it out and carried it over to her.
“Be real vague, OK?” he said again.
She nodded and opened the phone.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“I guess I’ll shower too.”
She smiled. “Enjoy. I won’t come in, I promise.”
He went into the bathroom and closed the door. Harper’s clothes were hanging from the hook on the back. All of them. The underwear was white and lacy. He thought about setting the shower icy cold, but decided to rely on willpower alone. So he set it hot and stripped off his clothes. Dumped them in a pile on the floor. Took the folding toothbrush from his jacket pocket and cleaned his teeth with plain water. Then he stood under the shower and washed with the same soap and shampoo Harper had used. He stood for a long time, trying to relax. Then he gave it up and turned the handle to cold. He held it there, gasping. One minute. Two. Then he shut it off and groped for a towel.