by Lee Child
“Fifteen bucks,” the skinny guy said.
I gave him the money and he smiled and gave me the key to the room Kramer had died in. I figured it was an attempt at humor. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind. I figured a room a guy had died in was better than the rooms that rented by the hour.
We walked together down the row and unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was still dank and brown and miserable. The corpse had been hauled away, but other than that it was exactly the same as when I had first seen it.
“It ain’t the George V,” Summer said.
“That’s for damn sure,” I said.
We put our bags on the floor and I put my sergeant’s paperwork on the bed. The counterpane felt slightly damp. I fiddled with the heater under the window until I got some warmth out of it.
“What next?” Summer asked.
“The phone records,” I said. “I’m looking for a call to a 919 area code.”
“That’ll be a local call. Fort Bird is 919 too.”
“Great,” I said. “There’ll be a million local calls.”
I spread the printout on the bed and started looking. There weren’t a million local calls. But there were certainly hundreds. I started at midnight on New Year’s Eve and worked forward from there. I ignored the numbers that had been called more than once from more than one phone. I figured those would be cab companies or clubs or bars. I ignored the numbers that had the same exchange code as Fort Bird. Those would be off-post housing, mainly. Soldiers on duty would have been calling home in the hour after midnight, wishing their spouses and children a happy new year. I concentrated on numbers that stood out. Numbers in other North Carolina cities. In particular I was looking for a number in another city that had been called once only maybe thirty or forty minutes after midnight. That was my target. I went through the printout, patiently, line by line, page by page, looking for it. I was in no hurry. I had all day.
I found it after the third concertina fold. It was listed at twelve thirty-two. Thirty-two minutes after 1989 became 1990. That was right about when I would have expected it. It was a call that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. That was about right too, in terms of duration. It was a solid prospect. I scanned ahead. Checked the next twenty or thirty minutes. There was nothing else there that looked half as good. I went back and put my finger under the number I liked. It was my best bet. Or my only hope.
“Got a pen?” I said.
Summer gave me one from her pocket.
“Got quarters?” I said.
She showed me fifty cents. I wrote the best-bet number on the army memo paper right underneath the D.C. number for the Jefferson Hotel. Passed it to her.
“Call it,” I said. “Find out who answers. You’ll have to go back across the street to the diner. The motel phone is busted.”
She was gone about eight minutes. I spent the time cleaning my teeth. I had a theory: If you can’t get time to sleep, a shower is a good substitute. If you can’t get time to shower, cleaning your teeth is the next best thing.
I left my toothbrush in a glass in the bathroom and Summer came through the door. She brought cold and misty air in with her.
“It was a golf resort outside of Raleigh,” she said.
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“Brubaker,” she said. “That’s where Brubaker was. On vacation.”
“Probably dancing,” I said. “Don’t you think? At half past midnight on New Year’s Eve? The desk clerk probably had to drag him out of the ballroom to the phone. That’s why the call lasted a quarter of an hour. Most of it was waiting time.”
“Who called him?”
There were codes on the printout indicating the location of the originating phone. They meant nothing to me. They were just numbers and letters. But my sergeant had supplied a key for me. On the sheet after the last concertina fold was a list of the codes and the locations they stood for. She had been right. She was better than the day guy. But then, she was an E-5 sergeant and he was an E-4 corporal, and sergeants made the U.S. Army worth serving in.
I checked the code against the key.
“Someone on a pay phone in the Delta barracks,” I said.
“So a Delta guy called his CO,” Summer said. “How does that help us?”
“The timing is suggestive,” I said. “Must have been an urgent matter, right?”
“Who was it?”
“One step at a time,” I said.
“Don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re walling up.”
I said nothing.
“Your mom died, and you’re hurting, and you’re closing in on yourself. But you shouldn’t. You can’t do this alone, Reacher. You can’t live your whole life alone.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I’m only guessing here. I’m holding my breath all the time. One long shot after another. And I don’t want to fall flat on my face. Not right in front of you. You wouldn’t respect me anymore.”
She said nothing.
“I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”
She paused. Then she smiled.
“But you need to get used to that,” I said. “Because it’s going to happen again. Right now, in fact. We’re taking the rest of the day off.”
The bed was awful. The mattress dipped in the middle and the sheets were damp. Maybe worse than damp. A place like that, if the room hadn’t been rented since Kramer died, I was pretty sure the bed wouldn’t have been changed either. Kramer had never actually gotten into it, but he had died right on top of it. He had probably leaked all kinds of bodily fluids. Summer didn’t seem to mind. But she hadn’t seen him there, all gray and white and inert.
But then I figured, What do you want for fifteen bucks? And Summer took my mind off the sheets. She distracted me big-time. We were plenty tired, but not too tired. We did well, second time around. The second time is often the best. That’s been my experience. You’re looking forward to it, and you’re not bored with it yet.
Afterward, we slept like babies. The heater finally put some temperature into the room. The sheets warmed up. The traffic sounds on the highway were soothing. Like white noise. We were safe. Nobody would think of looking for us there. Kramer had chosen well. It was a hideaway. We rolled down into the mattress dip together and held each other tight. I ended up thinking it was the best bed I had ever been in.
We woke up much later, very hungry. It was after six o’clock in the evening. Already dark outside the window. The January days were spooling by one after the other, and we weren’t paying much attention to them. We showered and dressed and headed across the street to eat. I took the army phone directory with me.
We went for the most calories for the fewest dollars but still ended up blowing more than eight bucks between us. I got my own back with the coffee. The diner had a bottomless cup policy and I exploited it ruthlessly. Then I camped out near the register and used the phone on the wall. Checked the number in the army book and called Sanchez down at Jackson.
“I hear you’re in the shit,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I said. “You heard anything more about Brubaker?”
“Like what?”
“Like, did they find his car yet?”
“Yes, they did. And it was a long way from Columbia.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Somewhere more than an hour due north of Fort Bird, and maybe east and a little south of Raleigh. How about Smithfield, North Carolina?”
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Just a feeling,” I said. “Had to be close to where I-95 meets U.S. 70. Right on a main drag. Do they think that’s where he was killed?”
“No question about it. Killed right there in his car. Someone shot him from the backseat. The windshield was blown out in front of the driver’s position and what was left of the glass was all covered in blood and brains. And there were s
patters on the steering wheel that hadn’t been smudged. Therefore nobody drove the car after he died. Therefore that’s where he was killed. Right there in his car. Smithfield, North Carolina.”
“Did they find shell cases?”
“No shell cases. No significant trace evidence either, apart from the kind of normal shit they would expect to find.”
“Have they got a narrative theory?”
“It was an industrial unit parking lot. Big place, like a local landmark, with a big lot, busy in the daytime but deserted at night. They think it was a two-car rendezvous. Brubaker gets there first, the second car pulls up alongside, at least two guys get out of it, they get into Brubaker’s car, one in the front and one in the back, they sit a spell, maybe they talk a little, then the guy in the back pulls a gun and shoots. Which by the way is how they figure Brubaker’s watch got busted. They figure he had his left wrist up on the top of the wheel, the way guys do when they’re sitting in their cars. But whatever, he goes down and they drag him out and they put him in the trunk of the other car and they drive him down to Columbia and they leave him there.”
“With dope and money in his pocket.”
“They don’t know where that came from yet.”
“Why didn’t the bad guys move his car?” I said. “Seems kind of dumb to take the body to South Carolina and leave the car where it was.”
“Nobody knows why. Maybe because it’s conspicuous to drive a car full of blood with a blown windshield. Or maybe because bad guys are dumb sometimes.”
“You got notes about what Mrs. Brubaker said about the phone calls he took?”
“After dinner on the fourth?”
“No, earlier,” I said. “On New Year’s Eve. About half an hour after they all held hands and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”
“Maybe. I took some pretty good notes. I could go look.”
“Be quick,” I said. “I’m on a pay phone here.”
I heard the receiver go down on his desk. Heard faint scratchy movement far away in his office. I waited. Put another pair of quarters in the slot. We were already down two bucks on toll calls. Plus twelve for eating and fifteen for the room. We had eighteen dollars left. Out of which I knew for sure I was going to be spending another ten, hopefully pretty soon. I began to wish the army didn’t buy Caprices with big V-8s in them. A little four-cylinder thing like Kramer had rented would have gotten us farther, on eight bucks’ worth of gas.
I heard Sanchez pick up the phone again.
“OK, New Year’s Eve,” he said. “She told me he was dragged out of a dinner dance around twelve-thirty in the morning. She told me she was a little bit aggrieved about it.”
“Did he tell her anything about the call?”
“No. But she said he danced better after it. Like he was all fired up. Like he was on the trail of something. He was all excited.”
“She could tell that from the way he danced?”
“They were married a long time, Reacher. You get to know a person.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, Sanchez. I got to go.”
“Be careful.”
“Always am.”
I hung up and walked back to our table.
“Where now?” Summer said.
“Now we’re going to go see girls take their clothes off,” I said.
It was a short walk across the lot from the greasy spoon to the lounge bar. There were a few cars around, but not many. It was still early. It would be another couple of hours before the crowds really built up. The locals were still home, eating dinner, watching the sports news. Guys from Fort Bird were finishing chow time in the mess, showering, getting changed, hooking up in twos and threes, finding car keys, picking out designated drivers. But I still kept my eye out. I didn’t want to bump into a crowd of Delta people. Not outside in the dark. Time was too precious to waste.
We pulled the door and stepped inside. There was a new face behind the register. Maybe a friend or a relative of the fat guy. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. And we were in BDUs. No unit designations. No indication that we were MPs. So the new face was happy enough to see us. He figured us for a nice little upward tick in his first-hour cash flow. We walked right past him.
The place was less than one-tenth full. It felt very different that way. It felt cold and vast and empty. Like some kind of a factory. Without a press of bodies the music was louder and tinnier than ever. There were whole expanses of vacant floor. Whole acres. Hundreds of unoccupied chairs. There was only one girl performing. She was on the main stage. She was bathed in warm red light, but she looked cold and listless. I saw Summer watching her. Saw her shudder. I had said: So what are you going to do? Go work up at the strip club with Sin? Face-to-face, it wasn’t a very appealing option.
“Why are we here?” she asked.
“For the key to everything,” I said. “My biggest mistake.”
“Which was?”
“Watch,” I said.
I walked around to the dressing room door. Knocked twice. A girl I didn’t know opened up. She kept the door close to her body and stuck her head around. Maybe she was naked.
“I need to see Sin,” I said.
“She’s not here.”
“She is,” I said. “She’s got Christmas to pay for.”
“She’s busy.”
“Ten dollars,” I said. “Ten dollars to talk. No touching.”
The girl disappeared and the door swung shut behind her. I stood out of the way, so the first person Sin would see would be Summer. We waited. And waited. Then the door opened up again and Sin stepped out. She was in a tight sheath dress. It was pink. It sparkled. She was tall on clear plastic heels. I stepped behind her. Got between her and the dressing room door. She turned and saw me. Trapped.
“Couple of questions,” I said. “That’s all.”
She looked better than the last time I had seen her. The bruises on her face were ten days old and were more or less healed up. Her makeup was maybe a little thicker than before. But that was the only sign of her troubles. Her eyes looked vacant. I guessed she had just shot up. Right between her toes. Whatever gets you through the night.
“Ten dollars,” she said.
“Let’s sit,” I said.
We found a table far from a speaker. It was relatively quiet there. I took a ten-spot out of my pocket and held it out. Didn’t let go of it.
“You remember me?” I said.
She nodded.
“Remember that night?” I said.
She nodded again.
“OK, here’s the thing. Who hit you?”
“That soldier,” she said. “The one you were talking to just before.”
twenty-one
I kept tight hold on the ten-dollar bill and took her through it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But none of them knew anything. None of them had any information at all, either firsthand or secondhand. There were no rumors going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room. There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before. Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had been stunned by the blows. She hadn�
�t seen them coming. She sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting hit.
“Tell me again,” I said. “It was the soldier, not the owner.”
She looked at me like I was crazy.
“The owner never hits us,” she said. “We’re his meal ticket.”
I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet table.
“What does it mean?” Summer said.
“Everything,” I said.
“How did you know?”
I shrugged. We were back in Kramer’s motel room, folding stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last time.
“I saw it wrong,” I said. “I guess I started to realize in Paris. When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They were watching people coming out and they were kind of half-prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them, depending. That’s how it was in the bar that night. I walked in, I’m a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for a split second. But they didn’t know me and they didn’t like what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn’t shut me out. He turned toward me. I thought it was just random, but it wasn’t. I thought I was selecting him, but he was selecting me just as much.”
“It had to be random. He didn’t know you.”
“He didn’t know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw them. He’d been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he was looking at.”
“So why turn toward you?”
“It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.”
“Why?”
“Because he wanted to know why I was there.”
“Did you tell him?”
I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”