by Lee Child
Patty said, “No one knows we’re gone.”
“Really?”
“They would have tried to talk us out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“It’s boring up there. Shorty and I want something different.”
“Where do you plan to go?”
“Florida,” she said. “We want to start our own business there.”
“What kind of business?”
“Something on the ocean. Watersports, maybe. Like windsurfer rentals.”
“You would need capital,” Mark said. “To buy the windsurfers.”
Patty looked away, and thought about the suitcase.
Shorty asked, “How long will the phone be out?”
Mark asked back, “What am I, clairvoyant?”
“I mean, usually. On average.”
“They usually fix it in half a day. And the mechanic is a good friend. We’ll ask him to put us first in line. You could be back on the road before dinnertime.”
“What if it takes longer than half a day?”
“Then it just does, I guess. I can’t control it.”
“Honestly, the best thing would be just give us a ride to town. Best for us, and best for you. We’d be out of your hair.”
“But your car would still be here.”
“We would send a tow truck.”
“Would you?”
“From the first place we saw.”
“Could we trust you?”
“I promise I would take care of it.”
“OK, but you have to admit, you haven’t proved a hundred percent reliable about taking care of things so far.”
“I promise we would send a truck.”
“But suppose you didn’t? We’re running a business here. We would be stuck with getting rid of your car. Which might be difficult, because strictly speaking it isn’t ours to get rid of in the first place. There wouldn’t be much we could do without a title. We couldn’t donate it. We couldn’t even sell it for scrap. No doubt pursuing alternatives would cost us time and money. But needs must. We couldn’t have it here forever, dirtying up the place. Nothing personal. A business like ours is all about image and curb appeal. It needs to entice, not repel. A rusty old wreck of a car front and center would send the wrong message. No offense. I’m sure you understand.”
“You could come with us to the tow company,” Shorty said. “You could drive us there first. You could watch us make the arrangements. Like a witness.”
Mark nodded, eyes down, now a little sheepish himself.
“Good answer,” he said. “The truth is we’re a little embarrassed ourselves, at the moment, when it comes to rides to town. The investment in this place was enormous. Three of us sold our cars. We kept Peter’s, to share, because as it happened it was the oldest and therefore the least valuable. It wouldn’t start this morning. Just like yours. Maybe it’s something in the air. But in practical terms, as of right now, I’m afraid we’re all stuck here together.”
—
Reacher ate at the place he had picked out earlier, which served upscale but recognizable dishes in a pleasant room with tablecloths. He had a burger piled high with all kinds of extras, and a slice of apricot pie, with black coffee throughout. Then he set out for the police station. He found it right where Carrington said it would be. The public lobby was tall and tiled and formal. There was a civilian desk worker behind a mahogany reception counter. Reacher gave her his name and told her Carter Carrington had promised he would call ahead and arrange for someone to speak with him. The woman was on the phone even before he got through the first part of Carrington’s name. Clearly she had been warned he was coming.
She asked him to take a seat, but he stood instead, and waited. Not long, as it turned out. Two detectives pushed through a pair of double doors. A man and a woman. Both looked like solid professionals. At first Reacher assumed they weren’t for him. He was expecting a file clerk. But they walked straight toward him, and when they arrived the man said, “Mr. Reacher? I’m Jim Shaw, chief of detectives. I’m very pleased to meet you.”
The chief of detectives. Very pleased. They’ll be plenty cooperative, Carrington had said. He wasn’t kidding. Shaw was a heavy guy in his fifties, maybe five-ten, with a lined Irish face and a shock of red hair. Anyone within a hundred miles of Boston would have made him as a cop. He was like a picture in a book.
“I’m very pleased to meet you too,” Reacher said.
“I’m Detective Brenda Amos,” the woman said. “Happy to help. Anything you need.”
Her accent was from the south. A drawl, but no longer honeyed. It was roughed up by exposure. She was ten years younger than Shaw, maybe five-six, and slender. She had blonde hair and cheekbones and sleepy green eyes that said, don’t mess with me.
“Ma’am, thank you,” he said. “But really, this is no kind of a big deal. I don’t know exactly what Mr. Carrington told you, but all I need is some ancient history. Which probably isn’t there anyway. From eighty years ago. It’s not even a cold case.”
Shaw said, “Mr. Carrington mentioned you were an MP.”
“Long ago.”
“That buys you ten minutes with a computer. That’s all it’s going to take.”
They led him back through thigh-high mahogany gates, to an open area full of plain-clothed people sitting face to face at paired desks. The desks were loaded with phones and flat screens and keyboards and wire baskets of paper. Like any office anywhere, except for a weary air of grime and burden, that made it unmistakably a cop shop. They turned a corner, into a corridor with offices either side. They stopped at the third on the left. It was Amos’s. She ushered Reacher in, and Shaw said goodbye and walked on, as if all appropriate courtesies had been observed, and his job was therefore done. Amos followed Reacher inside and closed the door. The outer structure of the office was old and traditional, but everything in it was sleek and new. Desk, chairs, cabinets, computer.
Amos said, “How can I help you?”
He said, “I’m looking for the surname Reacher, in old police reports from the 1920s and 30s and 40s.”
“Relatives of yours?”
“My grandparents and my father. Carrington thinks they dodged the census because they had federal warrants.”
“This is a municipal department. We don’t have access to federal records.”
“They might have started small. Most people do.”
Amos pulled the keyboard close and started tapping away. She asked, “Were there any alternative spellings?”
He said, “I don’t think so.”
“First names?”
“James, Elizabeth, and Stan.”
“Jim, Jimmy, Jamie, Liz, Lizzie, Beth?”
“I don’t know what they called each other. I never met them.”
“Was Stan short for Stanley?”
“I never saw that. It was always just Stan.”
“Any known aliases?”
“Not known to me.”
She typed some more, and clicked, and waited.
She didn’t speak.
He said, “I’m guessing you were an MP too.”
“What gave me away?”
“First your accent. It’s the sound of the U.S. Army. Mostly southern, but a little mixed up. Plus most civilian cops ask about what we did and how we did it. Because they’re professionally curious. But you aren’t. Most likely because you already know.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“How long have you been out?”
“Six years,” she said. “You?”
“Longer than that.”
“What unit?”
“The 110th, mostly.”
“Nice,” she said. “Who was the CO when you were there?”
“I was,” he said.
“And now you’re retired and into genealogy.”
“I saw a road sign,” he said. “That’s all. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.”
She looked back at the screen.
“We
have a hit,” she said. “From seventy-five years ago.”
Chapter 8
Brenda Amos clicked twice and typed in a passcode. Then she clicked again and leaned forward and read out loud. She said, “Late one September evening in 1943 a youth was found unconscious on the sidewalk of a downtown Laconia street. He had been beaten up. He was identified as a local twenty-year-old, already known to the police department as a loudmouth and a bully, but untouchable, because he was the son of the local rich guy. Therefore I guess there would have been much private celebration inside the department, but obviously for the sake of appearances they had to open an investigation. They had to go through the motions. It says here they went house to house the next day, not expecting to get much. But actually they got a lot. They got an old lady who had seen the whole thing through binoculars. The victim started an altercation with two other youths, clearly expecting to win, but the way it turned out he got his butt kicked instead.”
Reacher said, “Why was the old lady using binoculars late in the evening?”
“It says here she was a birdwatcher. She was interested in nighttime migration and continuous flight. She said she could make out the shapes against the sky.”
Reacher said nothing.
Amos said, “She identified one of the two other youths as a fellow member of a local birdwatching club.”
Reacher said, “My dad was a birdwatcher.”
Amos nodded. “The old lady identified him as a local youth personally known to her, name of Stan Reacher, then just sixteen years old.”
“Was she sure? I think he was only fifteen in September of 1943.”
“She seems to be sure about the name. I guess she could have been wrong about the age. She was watching from an apartment window above a grocery store, looking directly down the street toward a good-sized patch of night sky in the east. She saw Stan Reacher with an unidentified friend about the same age. They were walking toward her, away from the center of downtown. They passed through a pool of light from a street lamp, which allowed her to be confident in her identification. Then walking toward them in the other direction she saw the twenty-year-old. He also passed through a pool of light. The three youths all met face to face in the gloom between two lamps, which was unfortunate, but there was enough spill and scatter for her to see what was going on. She said it was like watching shadow puppets. It made their physical gestures more emphatic. The two smaller boys were still facing her. The bigger boy had his back to her. He seemed to be demanding something. Then threatening. One of the smaller boys ran away, possibly timid or scared. The other smaller boy stayed where he was, and then suddenly he punched the bigger boy in the face.”
Reacher nodded. Personally he called it getting your retaliation in first. Surprise was always a good thing. A wise man never counted all the way to three.
Amos said, “The old lady testified the smaller kid kept on hitting the bigger kid until the bigger kid fell down, whereupon the smaller kid kicked him repeatedly in the head and the ribs, and then the bigger kid struggled up and tried to run, but the smaller kid caught him and tripped him up, right in the next pool of light, which was apparently quite bright, which meant the old lady had no trouble seeing the smaller kid kicking the bigger kid a whole lot more. Then he quit just as suddenly as he had started, and he collected his timid pal, and they walked away together like nothing had happened. The old lady made contemporaneous notes on a piece of paper, plus a diagram, all of which she gave to the visiting officers the following day.”
“Good witness,” Reacher said. “I bet the DA loved her. What happened next?”
Amos scrolled and read.
“Nothing happened next,” she said. “The case went nowhere.”
“Why not?”
“Limited manpower. The draft for World War Two had started a couple of years before. The police department was operating with a skeleton staff.”
“Why hadn’t the twenty-year-old been drafted?”
“Rich daddy.”
“I don’t get it,” Reacher said. “How much manpower would they need? They had an eyewitness. Arresting a fifteen-year-old boy isn’t difficult. They wouldn’t need a SWAT team.”
“They had no ID on the assailant, and no manpower to go dig one up.”
“You said the old lady knew him from the birdwatching club.”
“The unknown friend was the fighter. Stan Reacher was the one who ran away.”
—
They gave Patty and Shorty a cup of coffee, and they sent them on their way, back to room ten. Mark watched them go, until they were halfway to the barn, until they looked like people who weren’t coming back. Whereupon he turned around and said, “OK, plug the phone back in.”
Steven did so, and Mark said, “Now show me the problem with the door.”
“The problem is not with the door,” Robert said. “It’s with our reaction time.”
They crossed an inner hallway and opened a back parlor door. The room beyond it was small by comparison, but still a decent size. It was painted flat black. The window was boarded over. All four walls were covered with flat screen televisions. There was a swivel chair in the center of the room, boxed in by four low benches pushed together, loaded with keyboards and joysticks. Like a command center. Patty and Shorty were on the screens, live pictures, past the barn now, walking away from one bunch of hidden cameras, toward another, some focused tight and head-on, others set wider, with the strolling couple tiny in the distance.
Robert stepped over a bench and sat down in the chair. He clicked a mouse and the screens changed to a dim night-vision shot.
He said, “This is a recording from three o’clock this morning.”
The picture was hyped up and misty because of the night-vision enhancements, but it was clearly of room ten’s queen-sized bed, which clearly had two sleeping people in it. It was the camera in the smoke detector, wide enough to be called a fisheye.
“Except she wasn’t asleep,” Robert said. “Afterward I figured she slept about four hours, and then she woke up. But she didn’t move at all. Not a muscle. She gave absolutely no sign. By that point I was kind of laying back, frankly, taking it easy, because the last four hours had been pretty boring. Plus at that point as far as I knew she was still asleep. But actually she was lying there thinking. About something that must have made her mad. Because, watch.”
On the screens the scene stayed the same, and then it changed, fast, with no warning at all, when Patty suddenly flipped the covers aside and slid out of bed, controlled, neat, decisive, exasperated.
Robert said, “By the time I sat up and got my finger near the unlock button, she had already tried the door once. I guess she wanted air. I had to make a decision. I decided to leave it locked, because it felt more consistent. I left it locked until Peter went up there to fix the car. I unlocked it then because I figured one of them would want to come out to talk to him.”
“OK,” Mark said.
Robert clicked the mouse again and the screens changed to a daylight shot from a different angle. Patty and Shorty were sitting side by side on room ten’s unmade bed.
“This took place while we were eating breakfast,” Robert said.
“I was on duty,” Steven said. “Watch what happens.”
Robert pressed play. There was audio. Shorty was deflecting attention from his own shortcomings by ranting on about mechanics getting call-out charges. He was saying, “Which is basically like getting paid for still being alive. It’s not like that when you grow potatoes, let me tell you.”
Robert paused the recording.
Steven asked, “Now what happens next?”
Mark said, “I sincerely hope Patty points out the two trades are massively dissimilar in the economic sense.”
Peter said, “I sincerely hope Patty punches him in the face and tells him to shut up.”
“Neither one,” Steven said. “She gets exasperated again.”
Robert pressed play again. Patty got up suddenly, bouncing
the bed, and she said, “I’m going out for some air.”
Steven said, “She’s really abrupt and jumpy. Right there she was zero to sixty in one-point-one seconds. I counted the video frames. I couldn’t get to the button in time. Then I saw Shorty was going to give it a go, so I unlocked it late. I thought if he got it open, where she couldn’t, she would somehow blame herself more than the door.”
“Is there a fix for this?” Mark asked.
“Forewarned is forearmed. I guess we need to concentrate harder.”
“I guess we’ll have to. We don’t want to spook them too soon.”
“How long before we make the final decision?”
Mark paused a long moment.
Then he said, “Make the final decision now, if you like.”
“Really?”
“Why wait? I think we’ve seen enough. They’re as good as we could ever hope to get. They’re from nowhere and no one knows they’re gone. I think we’re ready.”
“I vote yes,” Steven said.
“Me too,” Robert said.
“Me three,” Peter said. “They’re perfect.”
Robert clicked back to the live feed and they saw Patty and Shorty in their lawn chairs, on the boardwalk under their window, catching the wan rays of the afternoon sun.
“Unanimous,” Mark said. “All for one and one for all. Send the e-mail.”
The screens changed again, to a webmail page peppered with translations in foreign alphabets. Robert typed four words.
“OK?” he asked.
“Send it.”
He did.
The message said: Room Ten Is Occupied.