by Lee Child
“As often as necessary. Which is most nights, sadly.”
“What happens now?”
“They give me dinner, and they gas up my plane.”
The soldiers climbed back into the front seats and the Humvee turned again and drove a hundred yards to the main cluster of buildings. A fifties army base, one of thousands in the world. Brick, green paint, whitewashed curbs, swept blacktop. Reacher had never been there before. Had never even heard of it. The Humvee parked by a side door that had a sign that said it led to the Officers’ Club. Thurman turned to Reacher and said, “I won’t ask you to join me for dinner. They’ll have set just one place, and it would embarrass them.”
Reacher nodded. He knew how to find food on post. Probably better food than Thurman would be eating in the O Club.
“I’ll be OK,” he said. “And thanks for asking.”
Thurman climbed out and disappeared through the O Club door. The grunts in the front of the Humvee craned around, unsure about what to do next. They were both privates first class, probably stationed permanently in the States. Maybe they had a little Germany time under their belts, but nothing else of significance. No Korea time. No desert time, certainly. They didn’t have the look. Reacher said, “Remember wearing diapers, when you were two years old?”
The driver said, “Sir, not specifically, sir.”
“Back then I was a major in the MPs. So I’m going to take a stroll now, and you don’t need to worry about it. If you want to worry about it, I’ll dig out your CO and we’ll do the brother officer thing, and he’ll OK it and you’ll look stupid. How does that sound?”
The guy wasn’t totally derelict. Not totally dumb. He asked, “Sir, what unit, and where?”
Reacher said, “110th MP. HQ was in Rock Creek, Virginia.”
The guy nodded. “It still is. The 110th is still in business.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Sir, you have a pleasant evening. Chow in the mess until ten, if you’re interested.”
“Thanks, soldier,” Reacher said. He climbed out and the Humvee drove away and left him. He stood still for a moment in the sharp night air and then set out walking to the standalone building. Its original purpose was unclear to him. No reason to have a physically separated building unless it held infectious patients or explosives, and it didn’t look like either a hospital or an armory. Hospitals were bigger and armories were stronger.
He went in the front door and found himself in a small square hallway with stairs ahead of him and doors either side. The upstairs windows had been dark. The lit windows had been on the ground floor. If in doubt, turn left was his motto. So he tried the left-hand door and came up empty. An administrative office, lights blazing, nobody in it. He stepped back to the hallway and tried the right-hand door. Found a medic with the rank of captain at a desk, with Thurman’s jar in front of him. The guy was young for a captain, but medics got promoted fast. They were usually two steps ahead of everyone else.
“Help you?” the guy said.
“I flew in with Thurman. I was curious about his jar.”
“Curious how?”
“Is it what he says it is?”
“Are you authorized to know?”
“I used to be. I was an MP. I did some forensic medicine with Nash Newman, who was probably your ultimate boss back when you were a second lieutenant. Unless he had retired already. He’s probably retired now.”
The guy nodded. “He is retired now. But I heard of him.”
“So are there human remains in the jar?”
“Probably. Almost certainly, in fact.”
“Carbon?”
“No carbon,” the guy said. “In a hot fire all the carbon is driven off as carbon dioxide. What’s left of a person after cremation are oxides of potassium, sodium, iron, calcium, maybe a little magnesium, all inorganic.”
“And that’s what’s in the jar?”
The guy nodded again. “Entirely consistent with burned human flesh and bone.”
“What do you do with it?”
“We send it to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.”
“And what do they do with it?”
“Nothing,” the guy said. “There’s no DNA in it. It’s just soot, basically. The whole thing is an embarrassment, really. But Thurman keeps on showing up. He’s a sentimental old guy. We can’t turn him away, obviously. So we stage a sweet little ceremony and accept whatever he brings. Can’t trash it afterward, either. Wouldn’t be respectful. So we move it off our desks onto Hawaii’s. I imagine they stick it in a closet and forget all about it.”
“I’m sure they do. Does Thurman tell you where it comes from?”
“Iraq, obviously.”
“But what kind of vehicles?”
“Does it matter?”
“I would say so.”
“We don’t get those details.”
Reacher asked, “What was this building originally?”
“A VD clinic,” the medic said.
“You got a phone I could use?”
The guy pointed to a console on his desk.
“Have at it,” he said.
Reacher dialed 411 upside down and got the number for David Robert Vaughan, Fifth Street, Hope, Colorado. He said the number once under his breath to memorize it and then dialed it.
No answer.
He put the phone back in the cradle and asked, “Where’s the mess?”
“Follow your nose,” the medic said. Which was good advice. Reacher walked back to the main cluster and circled until he smelled the aroma of fried food coming out of a powerful extraction vent. The vent came through the wall of a low lean-to addition to a larger square one-story building. The mess kitchen, and the mess. Reacher went in and got a few questioning looks but no direct challenges. He got in line and picked up a cheeseburger the size of a softball, plus fries, plus beans, plus a mug of coffee. The burger was excellent, which was normal for the army. Mess cooks were in savage competition to produce the best patty. The coffee was excellent, too. A unique standardized blend, in Reacher’s opinion the best in the world. He had been drinking it all his life. The fries were fair and the beans were adequate. All in all, probably better than the limp piece of grilled fish the officers were getting.
He took more coffee and sat in an armchair and read the army papers. He figured the two PFCs would come get him when Thurman was ready to leave. They would drive their guests out to the flight line and salute smartly and finish their little show in style, just after midnight. Taxiing, takeoff, the climb, then ninety minutes in the air. That would get them back to Despair by two, which seemed to be the normal schedule. Three hours’ worth of free aviation fuel, plus a free four-hour dinner. Not bad, in exchange for a quarter-full jar of soot. A born-again-Christian American and a businessman was how Thurman had described himself. Whatever kind of a Christian he was, he was a useful businessman. That was for damn sure.
The mess kitchen closed. Reacher finished the papers and dozed. The PFCs never showed. At twelve-ten in the morning Reacher woke up and heard the Piper’s engine in the distance and by the time the sound registered in his mind it was revving hard. By the time he made it outside the little white plane was on the runway. He stood and watched as it lifted off and disappeared into the darkness above.
60
The Humvee came back from the flight line and the two PFCs got out and nodded to Reacher like nothing was wrong. Reacher said, “I was supposed to be on that plane.”
The driver said, “No sir, Mr. Thurman told us you had a one-way ticket tonight. He told us you were heading south from here, on business of your own. He told us you were all done in Colorado.”
Reacher said, “Shit.” He thought back to Thurman, in front of the airplane barn. The deliberate pause. Debate in his face, some kind of a long-range calculus, like he was playing a long game, thinking eight moves ahead.
Fly with me tonight.
I won’t ask you to join me for dinner.
&
nbsp; Reacher shook his head. He was ninety minutes’ flying time from where he needed to be, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with no airplane.
Outwitted by a seventy-year-old preacher.
Dumb.
And tense.
I think they were all stirred up because they’re heading for the end of something.
What, he had no idea.
When, he had no clue.
He checked the map in his head. There were no highways in the Oklahoma panhandle. None at all. Just a thin red tracery of state four-lanes and county two-lanes. He glanced at the Humvee and at the PFCs and said, “You guys want to drive me out to a road?”
“Which road?”
“Any road that gets traffic more than once an hour.”
“You could try 287. That goes south.”
“I need to go north. Back to Colorado. Thurman wasn’t entirely frank with you.”
“287 goes north, too. All the way up to I-70.”
“How far is that?”
“Sir, I believe it’s dead-on two hundred miles.”
Hitchhiking had gotten more and more difficult in the ten years since Reacher left the army. Drivers were less generous, more afraid. The West was sometimes better than the East, which helped. Day was always better than night, which didn’t. The Humvee from Fort Shaw let him out at twelve-forty-five, and it was a quarter past one in the morning before he saw his first northbound vehicle, a Ford F150 that didn’t even slow down to take a look. It just blew past. Ten minutes later an old Chevy Blazer did the same thing. Reacher blamed the movies. They made people scared of strangers. Although in reality most movies had the passing strangers messed up by the locals, not the other way around. Weird inbred families that hunted people for sport. But mostly Reacher blamed himself. He knew he was no kind of an attractive roadside proposition. Look at yourself. What do you see? Maria from San Diego was the kind of person that got rides easily. Sweet, small, unthreatening, needy. Vaughan would do OK, too. Hulks six-five in height were a riskier bet.
At ten of two a dark Toyota pick-up at least slowed and took a look before passing by, which was progress of a sort. Five after two, a twenty-year-old Cadillac swept past. It had an out-of-tune motor and a collapsed rear suspension and an old woman low down behind the wheel. White hair, thin neck. What Reacher privately called a Q-tip. Not a likely prospect. Then at a quarter past two an old Suburban heaved into view. In Reacher’s experience new Suburbans were driven by uptight assholes, but old models were plain utilitarian vehicles often driven by plain utilitarian people. Their bulk often implied a kind of no-nonsense self-confidence on the part of their owners. The kind of self-confidence that said strangers weren’t necessarily a problem.
The best hope so far.
Reacher stepped off the shoulder and put one foot in the traffic lane. Cocked his thumb in a way that suggested need, but not desperation.
The Suburban’s brights came on.
It slowed.
It stopped altogether fifteen feet short of where Reacher was standing. A smart move. It gave the guy behind the wheel a chance to look over his potential passenger without the kind of social pressure that face-to-face proximity would imply. Reacher couldn’t see the driver. Too much dazzle from the headlights.
A decision was made. The headlights died back to low beam and the truck rolled forward and stopped again. The window came down. The driver was a fat red-faced man. He was clinging to the wheel like he would fall out of his chair if he didn’t. He said, “Where are you headed?” His voice was slurred.
Reacher said, “North into Colorado. I’m trying to get to a place called Hope.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Me neither, until a few days ago.”
“How far away?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Is it on the way to Denver?”
“It would be a slight detour.”
“Are you an honest man?”
Reacher said, “Usually.”
“Are you a good driver?”
“Not really.”
“Are you drunk?”
Reacher said, “Not even a little bit.”
The guy said, “Well, I am. A lot. So you drive to wherever it is you want to go, keep me out of trouble, let me sleep it off, and then point me toward Denver, OK?”
Reacher said, “Deal.”
Hitchhiking usually carried with it the promise of random personal encounters and conversations made more intense by the certainty that their durations would necessarily be limited. Not this time. The florid guy heaved himself over into the passenger seat and collapsed its back against a worn mechanism and went straight to sleep without another word. He snored and bubbled far back in his throat and he thrashed restlessly. According to the smell of his breath he had been drinking bourbon all evening. A lot of bourbon, probably with bourbon chasers. He was still going to be illegal when he woke up in four hours’ time and pressed on to Denver.
Not Reacher’s problem.
The Suburban was old and worn and grimy. Its total elapsed mileage was displayed in a window below the center of the speedometer in LED figures like a cheap watch. A lot of figures, starting with a two. The motor wasn’t in great shape. It still had power but it had a lot of weight to haul and it didn’t want to go much faster than sixty miles an hour. There was a cell phone on the center console. It was switched off. Reacher glanced at his sleeping passenger and switched it on. It wouldn’t spark up. No charge in the battery. There was a charger plugged into the cigarette lighter. Reacher steered with his knees and traced the free end of the wire and shoved it into a hole on the bottom of the phone. Tried the switch again. The phone came on with a tinkly little tune. The sleeping guy just snored on.
The phone showed no service. The middle of nowhere.
The road narrowed from four lanes to two. Reacher drove on. Five miles ahead he could see a pair of red tail lights. Small lights, set low, widely spaced. Moving north a little slower than the Suburban. The speed differential was maybe five miles an hour, which meant it took sixty whole minutes to close the gap. The lights were on a U-Haul truck. It was cruising at about fifty-five. When Reacher came up behind it, it sped up to a steady sixty. Reacher pulled out and tried to pass, but the Suburban wouldn’t accelerate. It bogged down at about sixty-two, which would have put Reacher on the wrong side of the road for a long, long time. Maybe forever. So he eased off and tucked in behind the truck and battled the frustration of having to drive just a little slower than he wanted to. The cell phone was still showing no service. There was nothing to see behind. Nothing to see to the sides. The world was dark and empty. Thirty feet ahead, the U-Haul’s back panel was lit up bright by the Suburban’s headlights. It was like a rolling billboard. An advertisement. It had a picture of three trucks parked side by side at an angle: small, medium, and large. Each was shown in U-Haul’s distinctive orange and white colors. Each had U-Haul painted on its front. Each promised an automatic transmission, a gentle ride, a low deck, air conditioning, and cloth seats. A price of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents was advertised in large figures. Reacher eased the Suburban closer to check the fine print. The bargain price was for in-town use of a small truck for one day, mileage extra, subject to contract terms. Reacher eased off again and fell back.
U-Haul.
You haul. We don’t. Independence, self-reliance, initiative.
In general Reacher didn’t care for the corruption of written language. U for you, EZ for easy, hi for high, lo for low. He had spent many years in school learning to read and spell and he wanted to feel that there had been some point to it. But he couldn’t get too worked up about U-Haul. What was the alternative? Self-Drive Trucks? Too clunky. Too generic. No kind of a catchy business name. He followed thirty feet behind the bright rolling billboard and the triple U-Haul logos blurred together and filled his field of view.
U for you.
Then he thought: You for U.
You did this to me.
To assume makes an ass out of u and me.
He checked the phone again.
No signal. They were in the middle of the Comanche National Grassland. Like being way out at sea. The closest cell tower was probably in Lamar, which was about an hour ahead.
The drunk guy slept noisily and Reacher followed the wallowing U-Haul truck for sixty solid minutes. Lamar showed up ahead as a faint glow on the horizon. Probably not more than a couple of streetlights, but in contrast to the black grassland all around it felt like a destination. There was a small municipal airfield to the west. And there was cell coverage. Reacher glanced down and saw two bars showing on the phone’s signal strength meter. He dialed Vaughan’s home number from memory.
No answer.
He clicked off and dialed information. Asked for the Hope PD. Let the phone company connect him. He figured his sleeping passenger could spring for the convenience. He heard the ring tone and then there was a click and more ring tone. Automatic call forwarding, he guessed. The Hope PD building wasn’t manned at night. Vaughan had mentioned a day guy, but no night guy. Incoming calls would be rerouted out straight to the nighttime prowl car. To a cell provided by the department, or to a personal cell. Ten nights out of fourteen it would be Vaughan answering. But not tonight. She was off duty. It would be another officer out there chasing gum wrappers. Maybe a deputy.
A voice in his ear said, “Hope PD.”
Reacher said, “I need to talk to Officer Vaughan.”
The guy in the passenger seat stirred, but didn’t wake up.
The voice in Reacher’s ear said, “Officer Vaughan is off duty tonight.”
Reacher said, “I know. But I need her cell number.”
“I can’t give that to you.”
“Then call it yourself and ask her to call me back on this number.”
“I might wake her.”
“You won’t.”
Silence.
Reacher said, “This is important. And be quick. I’ll be heading out of range in a minute.”
He clicked off. The town of Lamar loomed up ahead. Low dark buildings, a tall water tower, a lit-up gas station. The U-Haul pulled off for fuel. Reacher checked the Suburban’s gauge. Half-full. A big tank. But a thirsty motor and many miles to go. He followed the U-Haul to the pumps. Unplugged the phone. It showed decent battery and marginal reception. He put it in his shirt pocket.