by Lee Child
She said, “I have to work pretty late.”
“How late?”
“Nine o’clock, maybe.”
“Nine would be fine.”
“Are you paying?”
“Absolutely.”
She paused a beat.
“Like a date?” she asked.
“We might as well,” I said. “There’s only one restaurant in town. We’d probably end up eating together anyway.”
“OK,” she said. “Dinner. Nine o’clock. Thank you.”
Then she said, “Don’t shave, OK?”
I said, “Why not?”
She said, “You look good like that.”
And then she left.
I waited on Janice May Chapman’s front porch, in one of her rocking chairs. Both old ladies watched me from across the street. Deputy Butler showed up just inside his allotted twenty minutes. He was in a car like Pellegrino’s. He left it where Deveraux had left hers, and unfolded himself from the seat, and stepped around to the trunk. He was a tall guy, and well put together, somewhere in his middle thirties. He had long hair for a cop, and a square, solid face. First glance, he wouldn’t be the easiest guy in the world to manage. But maybe not impossible.
He took a black plastic box out of his trunk and walked up Chapman’s driveway toward me. I got out of my chair and held out my hand. Always better to be polite. I said, “Jack Reacher. I’m pleased to meet you.”
He said, “Geezer Butler.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You play bass guitar?”
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”
“Was your dad a Black Sabbath fan?”
“My mom too.”
“Are you?”
He nodded. “I’ve got all their records.”
I led him inside. He stood in the hallway, looking around. I said, “The challenge here is to get her prints and no one else’s.”
“To avoid confusion?” he said.
No, I thought. To avoid a Bravo Company guy lighting up the system. Better safe than sorry.
I said, “Yes, to avoid confusion.”
“The chief said I should start in the bathroom.”
“Good plan,” I said. “Toothbrush, toothpaste, tampon box, personal things like that. Things that were boxed up or wrapped in cellophane in the store. No one else will have touched them.”
I hung back so as not to crowd him, but I watched him pretty carefully. He was extremely competent. He took twenty minutes and got twenty good prints, all small neat ovals, all obviously a woman’s. We agreed that was an adequate sample, and he packed up his gear and gave me a ride back to town.
I got out of Butler’s car outside the Sheriff’s Department and walked south to the hotel, where I stood on the sidewalk and wrestled with a dilemma. I felt I should go buy a new shirt, but I didn’t want Deveraux to feel that dinner was supposed to be more than just dinner. Or in reality I did want her to feel dinner could be more than just dinner, but I didn’t want her to see me wanting it. I didn’t want her to feel pushed into anything, and I didn’t want to appear overeager.
But in the end I decided a shirt was just a shirt, so I hiked across to the other side of Main Street and looked at the stores. Most of them were about to close. It was after five o’clock. I found a men’s outfitters three enterprises south of where I started. It didn’t look promising. In the window was a jacket made from some kind of synthetic denim. It glittered and shone in the lights. It looked like it had been knitted out of atomic waste. But the only other shopping choice was the pharmacy, and I didn’t want to show up at dinner wearing a dollar T. So I went in and looked around.
There was plenty more stuff pieced together from dubious fabrics, but there was plenty of plainer stuff too. There was an old guy behind the counter who seemed happy to let me poke around. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. Like a badge of office. Like a doctor wears a stethoscope. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to understand I was looking for shirts and he either frowned and tutted or beamed and nodded as I moved around from pile to pile, as if I was playing a parlor game, getting warmer and colder in my search.
Eventually I found a white button-down made of heavy cotton. The collar was an eighteen and the sleeves were thirty-seven inches long, which was about my size. I hauled my choice to the counter and asked, “Would this be OK for a job in an office?”
The old guy said, “Yes, sir, it would.”
“Would it impress a person at dinner?”
“I think you’d want something finer, sir. Maybe a pinpoint.”
“So it’s not what you’d call formal?”
“No, sir. Not by a long chalk.”
“OK, I’ll take it.”
It cost me less than the pink shirt from the PX. The old guy wrapped it in brown paper and taped it up into a little parcel. I carried it back across the street. I planned to dump it in my room. I made it into the hotel lobby just in time to see the owner setting off up the stairs in a big hurry. He turned when he heard the door, and he saw it was me and he stopped. He was out of breath. He said, “Your uncle is on the phone again.”
Chapter
39
I took the call alone in the back office, as before. Garber was tentative from the get-go, which made me uneasy. His first question was, “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You?”
“How’s it going down there?”
“Bad,” I said.
“With the sheriff?”
“No, she’s OK.”
“Elizabeth Deveraux, right? We’re having her checked out.”
“How?”
“We’re having a quiet word with the Marine Corps.”
“Why?”
“Maybe we can get you something you can use against her. You might need leverage at some point.”
“Save your effort. She’s not the problem.”
“So what is?”
“We are,” I said. “Or you are. Or whoever. The army, I mean. They’re patrolling outside of Kelham’s fence and shooting people.”
“That’s categorically impossible.”
“I’ve seen the blood. And the car wreck has been sanitized.”
“That can’t be happening.”
“It is happening. And you need to stop it happening. Because right now you’ve got a big problem, but you’re going to turn it into World War Three.”
“You must be mistaken.”
“There are two guys beat up and one guy dead down here. I’m not mistaken.”
“Dead?”
“As in no longer alive.”
“How?”
“He bled out through a gunshot wound to the thigh. There was a half-assed attempt to patch it up with a GI field dressing. And I found a NATO shell case at the scene.”
“That’s not us. I would know.”
“Would you?” I said. “Or would I? You’re up there guessing and I’m down here looking.”
“It’s not legal.”
“Tell me about it. Worst case, it’s a policy decision. Best case, someone’s gone rogue. You need to find out which and get it stopped.”
“How?” Garber said. “You want me to walk up to a random selection of senior officers and accuse them of an egregious breach of the law? Maybe the worst ever in American military history? I’d be locked up before lunch and court-martialed the next morning.”
I paused. Breathed. Asked, “Are there names I shouldn’t say on an open line?”
Garber said, “There are names you shouldn’t even know.”
“This whole thing is drifting out of control. It’s going from bad to worse. I’ve seen three lawyers heading in and out of Kelham. Someone needs to make a decision. The officer in question needs to be pulled out and redeployed. Right now.”
“That’s not going to happen. Not as long as Kosovo is important. This guy could stop a war singlehanded and all by himself.”
“He’s one of four hundred me
n, for Christ’s sake.”
“Not according to the political ad campaigns two years from now. Think about it. He’s going to be the Lone Ranger.”
“He’s going to be locked up in Leavenworth.”
“Munro doesn’t think so. He says the officer in question is likely innocent.”
“Then we should act like it. We should stop with the lawyers and we should stop patrolling outside the fence.”
“We’re not patrolling outside the fence.”
I gave up. “Anything else?”
“One thing,” Garber said. “I have to do this. I hope you understand.”
“Try me.”
“You got a postcard from your brother.”
“Where?”
“At your office.”
“And you read it?”
“An army officer has no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“Is that in the regulations too? Along with the hairstyles?”
“You need to explain the message to me.”
“Why? What does it say?”
“The picture on the front is downtown Atlanta. The card was mailed from the Atlanta airport eleven days ago. The text reads: Heading to a town called Margrave, south of here, business, but heard a story Blind Blake died there, will let you know. Then it’s signed Joe, his name.”
“I know my brother’s name.”
“What does the message mean?”
“It’s a personal note.”
“I’m ordering you to explain it to me. I apologize, but I have to do this.”
“You went to elementary school. You can read.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means what it says. He’s heading south of Atlanta to a town called Margrave.”
“Who was Blind Blake?”
“A guitar player, from way back. Blues music. One of the first legends.”
“Why would Joe make a point of informing you about that?”
“Shared interest.”
“What does Joe mean when he says he will let you know?”
“He means what he says.”
“Let you know about what?”
“About the Blind Blake legend, of course. About whether he died there.”
“Why does it matter where this man died?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a thing. Like collecting baseball cards.”
“So this is really about baseball cards?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Is this a code for something else?”
“A code? Why the hell would it be a code?”
Garber said, “You called his office today.”
“You know about that?”
“There’s a reporting mechanism in place.”
“That kid? The girl in his office?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details. But I need to know why you called him.”
“He’s my brother.”
“But why now? Were you going to ask him something?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask him how he’s doing. Purely social.”
“Why now? Did something at Kelham provoke the inquiry?”
“This is none of your business.”
“Everything is my business. Help me out here, Reacher.”
I said, “Two black women were killed here before Janice May Chapman. Did you even know that? Because that’s something you should be bearing in mind, if you’re thinking about political campaigns. We ignored them and then our heads exploded when a white woman got killed.”
“How does this relate to Joe?”
“I met the second victim’s brother. Made me think about family. That’s all it was.”
“Did Joe tell you anything about money from Kosovo?”
“I didn’t get him. He was out of the office. He was in Georgia.”
“Atlanta again? Or Margrave?”
“I have no idea. Georgia is a big state.”
“OK,” Garber said. “I apologize for the intrusion.”
I asked, “Who exactly is worried about money from Kosovo?”
He said, “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
I hung up with Garber and breathed in and out for a spell, and then I carried my new shirt upstairs and left it on my bed. I started to think about dinner with Elizabeth Deveraux. Three hours to go, and only one more thing to do beforehand.
Chapter
40
I came out of the front of the hotel and looped back through the dog-leg alley between the pharmacy and the hardware store and came out the other end between the loan office and Brannan’s bar. Where Janice May Chapman’s body had been found. The sand pile was still there, dry and crusted and powdery and a little redistributed by the breeze. I stepped around it and checked activity on the one-sided street. Not much was going on. Some of the bars were closed, because the base was closed. No point in opening without customers. A simple economic calculation.
But Brannan’s bar was open. Defiantly optimistic, or maybe just maintaining some longstanding tradition. I went in and found nobody there except two similar guys fussing with stuff in the drinks well. They looked like brothers. Middle thirties, maybe two years apart, like Joe and me. Wise to the ways of the world, which was going to give me the advantage. Their place was like a thousand base-town bars I had seen before, a complex boxed-in machine designed to turn boredom into cash. It was a decent size. I guessed it had been a small restaurant in the past, but small restaurants make big bars. The decor was maybe a little better than most. There were travel posters on the walls, of the world’s great cities photographed at night. No local stuff, which was smart. If you’re stuck for six months in the back of beyond, you don’t want to be reminded of it at every turn.
“Got coffee?” I asked.
They said no, which didn’t surprise me very much.
I said, “My name is Jack Reacher and I’m an MP with a dinner date coming up.”
They didn’t follow.
I said, “Which means that usually I’d have time to hang around all night and weasel stuff out of you in the normal course of conversation, but I don’t have time for that on this occasion, so we’ll have to rely on a straightforward question-and-answer session, OK?”
They got the message. Base-town bar owners worry about MPs. Easiest thing in the world to put a particular establishment on a local no-go list, for a week, or a month. Or forever. They introduced themselves as Jonathan and Hunter Brannan, brothers, inheritors of a business started by their grandmother back in the railroad days. She had sold tea and fancy cakes, and she had made a nice living. Their father had switched to alcohol when the trains stopped and the army arrived. They were a nice enough pair of guys. And realistic. They ran the best bar in town, so they couldn’t deny they saw everybody from time to time.
“Janice Chapman came here,” I said. “The woman who got killed.”
They agreed that yes, she did. No evasion. Everyone comes to Brannan’s.
I asked, “With the same guy every recent time?”
They agreed that yes, that was the case.
I asked, “Who was he?”
Hunter Brannan said, “His name was Reed. Don’t know much about him apart from that. But he was a big dog. You can always tell, by the way the others react.”
“Was he a regular customer?”
“They all are.”
“Was he in here that night?”
“That’s a tough question. This place is usually packed.”
“Try to remember.”
“I would say he was. For the early part of the evening, at least. I don’t recall seeing him later.”
“What car does he drive?”
“Some old thing. Blue, I think.”
I asked, “How long has he been coming here?”
“A year or so, I guess. But he’s one of the in-and-out guys.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’ve got a couple of squads over there. They go somewhere, and
then they come back. A month on, a month off.”
“Did you see him with previous girlfriends?”
Jonathan Brannan said, “A guy like that, he always has arm candy.”
“Who in particular?”
“Whoever was the prettiest. Whoever was willing to put out, I guess.”
“Black or white?”
“Both. He’s pretty much an equal opportunities type of guy.”
“Remember any names?”
“No,” Hunter Brannan said. “But I remember feeling pretty jealous a couple of times.”
I went back to the hotel. Two hours until dinner. I spent the first hour taking a nap, because I was tired, and because I was figuring I wouldn’t be sleeping again too soon. Hoping I wouldn’t be, anyway. Hope springs eternal. I woke myself up at eight o’clock and unpacked my new shirt. I brushed my teeth with water and chewed some gum. Then I took a long hot shower, plenty of soap, plenty of shampoo.
I put on my new shirt and rolled the sleeves level with my elbows. The shirt was tight across the shoulders, so I left the top two buttons undone. I tucked the tails into my pants and put my shoes on and shined them one at a time against the backs of my calves.
I checked the mirror.
I looked exactly like a guy who wants to get laid. Which I was. There was nothing to be done about it.
I dumped my old shirts in the trash can and left my room and went down the stairs and stepped out to the darkness of the street. A voice from the shadows behind me said, “Hello again, soldier boy.”
Chapter
41
Ahead of me across the street were three pick-up trucks parked at the curb. Two that I recognized, and one that I didn’t. All the doors were open. Legs were dangling. Cigarettes were glowing. Smoke was drifting. I stepped left and half-turned and saw the alpha dog. The McKinney cousin. His face was still a mess. He was standing under one of the hotel’s busted lamps. His arms were down by his sides, and his hands were away from his hips, and his thumbs were away from his fingers. He was all fired up and ready.
Across the street five guys slipped out of the pick-up trucks. They started toward me. I saw the beta dog, and the beer-for-breakfast guy, and the biker with the bad back, and two guys I hadn’t seen before, each of them looking like the other four. Same region, same family, or both.